Work

the problem is that the overwhelming majority of workers across the world don’t get a great deal of satisfaction out of their jobs. In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate fro... See more

At its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead, inanimate matter.

many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal over-abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-profligate of all species, work so hard.

The closest thing to a universal definition of “work”—one that hunter-gatherers, pinstriped derivatives traders, calloused subsistence farmers, and anyone else would agree on—is that it involves purposefully expending energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end.

Cities quickly became crucibles of inequality, a process that was accelerated by the fact that within cities people were not bound together by the same intimate kinship and social ties that were characteristic of small rural communities. As a result, people living in cities increasingly began to bind their social identity ever more tightly to the w... See more

Many researchers interested in understanding our cognitive evolution have focused their efforts on revealing whether our closest primate relatives and other obviously smart creatures like whales and dolphins are capable of purposeful behavior in the same way that humans are. Being purposeful requires an intuitive grasp of causality, the ability to ... See more

But it is the points where these two pathways converge that are most important in terms of making sense of our contemporary relationship with work. The first of these points of convergence comes when humans mastered fire possibly as long as a million years ago. In learning how to outsource some of their energy needs to flames, they acquired the gif... See more

The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety—there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity.

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because th... See more