What is work?

While doing The Workview exercise in the Designing Your Life book I made a profound personal realization. It was triggered by the question: What is work? I answered:

“Through work we participate in the human enterprise to run societies. Humans have demand for security, food, shelter, information, medical treatments, leisure, etc. We fulfill these demands by specialization. To do this we organize in various groups, from governments, companies or - increasing through the internet - individual contributors. Through our work we contribute to making our society run. Money is the way to capture the value we create and use it for our individual demands.”

It may sound strange, but I never saw the underlying logic and ethic of work this clearly. Work is primarily about others and only then about us as individuals. It is grounded in the fact, that we all depend primarily on other people to live our lives. That’s why we do our part, observe what is demanded by society, and do our best to add value. Only then, hopefully, we can design our work in a way that is exciting and rewarding for ourselves.