26. Doing the work
Sept 12, 2025
Earlier in these essays, I wrote about the limited way we use the word “work.” People ask, “Are you working?” when what they mean is, “Are you employed?” I was in Europe this summer, traveling with new friends, some Americans and some European. We talked about how in the United States, the first thing people ask is “What do you do?” In Europe, apparently, this is not the case (I’m sure this varies in the US and in Europe). It struck me that this habit of first inquiring about employment when meeting someone implies that what I do in my job tells the world something important about me. In other words, knowing what type of job someone has provides some useful meaning about the kind of person they are. In truth, that is only one small thing about someone. There are so many other things I’d like to know as I’m meeting a person, to get to know them. “Work” is defined as activity involving effort to achieve a purpose.” Employment is only one of the things in our lives that fit that description. So, I thought, can we make a small shift to our language and our habits towards recognizing these other components of ourselves?
I propose we develop adjectives to use in front of the word “work” so that we convey more than employment. There are ways that we use the word “work” in our culture to encompass areas beyond employment, for example, going to therapy or otherwise increasing self-awareness is called “working” on yourself, exercise is called “working” out, and even my meditation app thanks me for “doing the work” of setting time aside each day to practice mindfulness. I want to take this expansion even further.
Here are some potential terms: My first idea is living-on work. This is work that provides us with financial resources to live on. So, when someone asks, “what do you do for work?” We’d respond, “Do you mean living-on work? I work as an accountant for the county.” Then, we could also make space for calling work. A calling is defined as “a strong urge toward a particular way of life or career; a vocation.” There are some people who say their living-on work is their calling – and good for them! But that is not always the case, so let’s stop assuming that and make a new term for it. Here’s an example sentence, “My living-on job is pharmaceutical tech, but my calling is tending to my garden.” In our language, we have often demoted our calling work to “hobby,” which is strange! I think our hobbies say more about us than living-on jobs do.
Here are a few more categories. Caregiving work may be part of our lives as we care for our children, our parents, or others. Using this term provides the opportunity for caregivers to be recognized for their work; now we have phrases like “stay-at-home mom” which do not fully convey the caregiving aspect. We can also have contributing work, or maybe community work to refer to work that gives back to others. We may have spiritual work, body work (to keep our bodies strong), and creative work. Perhaps caretaking work to describe efforts to take care of our space and environment, like cleaning the house, taking the car for maintenance, doing laundry. My final category idea is connecting work, which I’ll start talking more about again next week. All of these are efforts to achieve a purpose.
Opening up our language to capture this whole range of options provides a more complete story of how we spend our time and our attention. As a bonus, the more types of work we identify as part of our lives, the richer and more resilient we will be. When I left my job, I felt unmoored for a bit. Many retired people say the same, as do caregivers who are no longer in that role. If our lives are built around multiple types of work, if one of them ends, it will not be as devasting. It may naturally be seen more as an opportunity than a loss, as a time to shift focus to other areas of work. Have I missed any? Do these categories describe all of the things that take your attention?
