Prof. Chris Raffensperger
Professor of History and Chair of the Department
Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities
Director, Ermarth Institute for the Public Humanities
Medieval Europe, Russia, Ukraine
This week’s subject has been the topic of numerous adages such as; “No one on their deathbed said, ‘I wish I would have worked more’.” Or “If you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I think both of these are crap for different reasons, but we’ll get to that. Only you can decide whether you want to prioritize work as your main goal in life or merely have a job to feed yourself. But as someone who has tried it both ways, I humbly offer my thoughts on the subject.
Working fresh out of college was awesome. I found a job that I enjoyed working in sales, and I threw myself into it. I worked a lot and made good money. After a while, however, that “a lot” was too much and it affected my mental and physical health. So, I stopped and took a step back and tried a new career.
In graduate school, I treated it like a job but with reasonable boundaries and I succeeded in both school/work life and home life. But when I got my first academic job, it was back to work all the time mode. A colleague at the University of Nebraska told me, “You’re going to lose your homelife if you keep working like this.” I cavalierly assured him that my wife was fine, but the very next week we had a “talk” about me working so much. Since that time, and especially since the birth of my kids, I have tried to work less and prioritize home life more. I prefer it that way and wish that I had been better at boundaries in the past.
So, to return to the anecdotes above. Even if you love what you do, it will still, at least sometimes, be work. Days when everything goes wrong, people are terrible, or something just sucks, then it’s work. But the heart of the adage is that you should choose something to do that makes you feel fulfilled. But, and this is an extremely important "but", that does not have to be a job!
Over the course of your lives you will change jobs and careers numerous times. Your liberal arts education is supposed to make you able to think and problem-solve so that you can be nimble, not to get you one job that you will keep forever. So, over your decades of life, a (singular) job will not be a constant. What will? Your life. Your family. Your friends. And really, what you love. Find something you love and make that an integral part of your life. If you can do that, and what you love may change too, it doesn’t matter what work you do or how you feel about it, there is love in your life and a reason to keep going. That is the message of the other adage – what you will miss on your deathbed is not a job, but what you love. Work is simply a means to an end.
Prof. Ross Jackson
Associate Professor of Business & Economics
Program Director, Master of Science in Analytics
Management
Determining the proper place for work in one’s life is challenging. Because such a determination is personal, there is no general answer available, simply individual selections along a spectrum. I would contend that any determination is both idiosyncratic and unstable. The aspect of it being idiosyncratic doesn’t require much examination. People are different. Jobs are different. As these differences collide, people will come to different assessments as to just how central work should be in one’s life. At the two extremes, one can either work-to-live or live-to-work. Most people end up navigating life somewhere between these two extremes.
It is the instability of a particular positioning in response to this question that I find most intriguing. That there are individual differences in temperament, ideology, and employment is true, but so obvious as to be uninteresting. It is the potential for one to evolve in the prioritization of work over time that is to me worthy of exploration. Along the Wittenberg Way, students are encouraged to discern their calling. Whereas there can be overlap, if not singularity, between one’s calling and one’s profession, there does not have to be. What one is called to do, may not be what one is able to do for a living. It is important both to discern one’s calling, and to also figure out how one is going to make a living.
Philosophically, one can view the live-to-work/work-to-live dichotomy as a version of the means/end split. Viewing work as the means to end (i.e., work-to-live), is a limited investment and is transactional. Pay becomes central. One will do what they are paid to do. Viewing work as an end (live-to-work), changes the focus. When one lives-to-work, work becomes a source of identity and a means of expression; the pay is incidental.
As I age, the more I see that each stage of life is beautifully conflicted. When one is young, there are a thousand things to do and no money with which to do them. When one is old, one frequently has more money, but less desire to do things. When one is young, one has a great deal of energy, but very little power. When one is old, one has a great deal of power, and very little energy to enact it. The crux of the issue is that when one starts to work, one is less adroit at it and therefore commands less compensation and enjoys the work less. When one has gained expertise, one is paid more, needs to work less, but enjoys the work itself more.
Will you tend towards working-to-live or living-to-work? It’s hard to say. I have done both, and have regretted neither. I can’t know which will be best for you. I do know that it would likely be beneficial if you knew which one you were doing and you kept tabs on the degree to which you were finding your life fulfilled. Knowing both will enable you to experiment and ensure that it is producing a result with which you can live. Wherever along the spectrum you situate yourself, you will both work and live. If done well, both will be joyful.
