What is Real Work?
I was originally going to write about fake work. Then i realized that was the wrong question because one first needs to know what real work is.
So, is there such a thing as real work? Let’s start by the general definition of work. Work is the set of intentional behaviors and actions that produce predictable and reliable changes in the environment. Put simply it’s what we do to get what we need and want. [1]
To produce durable changes a system cannot act randomly. Results can happen by accident a few times, but they can’t reliably happen by accident.
Work exists as the dependable structure to maintain and advance societal capability and knowledge. Enabling advancements to accumulate and become the foundations on which further progress is based. which is what we need to get more of what we need and want.
The consequences of all the work our predecessors put in are obviously visible. Otherwise we wouldn’t have succeeded in solving our survival needs. And we wouldn’t be able to increasingly get more of what we want consistently. [2]
Back to the main question. All work has feedback loops that reinforce behavior through reward. Otherwise we wouldn’t engage repeatedly.
But some activity feels productive without producing change. Since ineffective action can feel as productive and rewarding as effective action, there must be a kind of work that is not really work.
I noticed as actions that should intuitively be the precursors of what we want to do get measured the metric becomes more important than the actual output. which makes actions get increasingly decoupled from actual output. So why do we keep engaging?
My guess is the unknowledgeable man’s idea of a profession creates expectations not grounded in reality. Expectations of how working and getting results should feel. So one gets settled in the actions that evoque feelings of accomplishment with the least effort. The trouble then becomes making a distinction between satisfaction and production.
This creates incentive problems down the line. Encouraging work that is self abstracting and useless. work that produces nothing of real value. But these patterns we see in work are the reflection of our psychological and biological patterns. So i’d like to examine some them.
Starting from where we allocate attention. The impression is that we give attention to a lot of things. To see why that is not true we must differentiate reaction and attention.
mistaking responsiveness for attention is easy because it is normal to mistake noticing for attention. But noticing something is a reflexive reaction to a stimuli that stands out. Attention is a deliberate focus to increase awareness and passive monitoring does not count.
Noticing what our minds and environments propose us passively as they come does not imply depth or examination. Same goes for absorbing the contents of the environment and responding to its prompts. But looking at something doesn’t imply becoming aware. Just as thinking about something does not always mean giving attention to it.
In fact thinking is reactionary more often than not. Your mind produces content to make you feel like stimuli were addressed so you can feel better. And that’s the trick. you feel you’ve solved a problem by thinking about it. Until the same thought cycles back.
Rationalizations give you justifications, explanations and stories to patch those thoughts. And since they don’t come back it has produced one of the results of thinking! resolution. But that’s momentary. They will come back stronger and you’ll optimize your rationalization ability to become more effective at patching. This feels like work because it’s tiring and time consuming. But it still won’t produce results. [3]
The loop closes by mistaking attention for thinking and thinking for reasoning. Some may get the impression they have reasoned about a topic just because they gave it attention. That’s because thinking produces content and content seems like knowledge. But real reasoning produces new knowledge, questions, arguments, consequences and decisions.
In practice those actions make us feel like we are being attentive. We’re just performing the motions of what we think attention should look like. But they don’t necessarily produce the products of attention or reasoning.
Real reasoning is exploratory which requires one to be curious. Because curiosity implies space for unexpected surprises. It requires confrontation of the unknown and opennes to being wrong. Real curiosity can be unsettling and intimidating.
But paying attention to the questions i used to ask i noticed they were not really open ended. I usually wanted to hear the answer i had conceived in advance. Which means I wasn’t confronting reality. Because I wasn’t really putting things into question.
What I was really asking for was confirmation and validaton. I asked questions to which I knew the right answer. I didn’t take the risk of being wrong and I looked smart for knowing the answer. A safe bet that rewards the performance of curiosity, rather than inquiring reality.
The less authentically curious you are the less you want to know how things really are. This translates in less hunger for learning and truth because it is unsafe. The only defence is communication. Let me explain.
Often who is articulate can give off an air of expertise, which could imply knowledge. Knowledge in the various domains approximates truth the closest. Since being articulate signals proficiency then intuition says being articulate is what one should optimize. Taking this further being proficient at language allows you to generate plausible sounding ideas that don’t need to be true. I am effectively describing a sophist, and the corollaries of this practice were already exposed at the time of their refutation.
After inauthentic attention, reasoning and curiosity we can move on to what performed learning looks like. It commonly comes as the consequence of trading mental sweating for convenience. Real learning is hard and frustrating, you don’t understand things on the first read, you must practice a lot. If one gets overwhelmed by this fatigue or incompetence he may be tempted to take a shortcut.
There is some content, some courses that are entertainment with the pretense of being education. you can absorb a lot and you can talk about the topic. You may feel like you are actually learning because you remember what was said. But parrotting does not imply understanding.
Going deeper on infotainment. you are not practicing, you are watching. You’re spectating. You look at other people doing what you would like to do and get the satisfaction from watching instead of doing. Projecting yourself on them enough because it gives the same satisfaction as the reward.
that happens in productivity porn, people seeling you tools that are really work about work, motivational content, optimization. this usually falls into premature optimization. When you’re working on something to feel like you are doing sophisticated work you should optimize the workflow of your workflow. because you have actually practiced nothing as soon as you apply your "knowledge" to reality the illusion collapses and you realize you were in the incompetent but confident part of the dunning kruger curve.
the most dangeorous kind is performing the motions to signal productivity to ourselves, the second is performing the motions that signal productivity to others. usually because of some metric others measure or find impressive. But optimizing senseless metrics is a stupid game where you win stupid prizes. talking too much about doing is how this can manifest. feels good without being productive. working on processes that should not exist becomes the surrogate for doing real work.
One of the most genuine ways that manifests is infinite preparation. one never feels ready so he learns infinitely to reach some perfect condition. when work loops on itself such that you produce nothing, real work degrades to fake work. you’re only setting things up, infinitely.
For example while bureocracies are needed on some level, as they grow the bias to overcomplicate things eventually turns processes into rube-goldberg machines. because as bureocracy grows it decouples from actual production. the loop turns its outputs in its inputs The only reason to continue is to keep up the story, justifications, presentation. if those were stripped away then i suspect the perceived value would shrink significantly.
In fact the market for feeling productive is much much bigger than we think. I may go as far as saying that the market for feeling productive is a lot bigger than the market for being productive. For this reason i have become wary of the content i consume and the tools i use. once you know what fake work looks like you can’t unsee it. [4]
In essence. we can’t trust what feels like work to us and what doesn’t. effort feels like work, investment, sunk cost, but effort is not necessarily effective or well placed. or directed so jthere must be some actions that feel like work and give the same satisfaction and rewards of work without being productive. when tools become the workflow instead of disappearing into the workkflow.
it starts with good intentions and ends in dishonesty. that happens when you’re moving through the motions. you’re fundamentally not doing things authentically.
stupid metrics twist incentives, generating cognitive distortions such as self deception, that are reinforced by telling stories, justifications, vanity metrics and other superfluous things. It incentivizes effort, but not it being correctly directed. It is a self abstracting loop that doesn’t doesn’t produce real world consequences other than making you stuck.
To understand what real work is one must see where Value is found [Mini essay]. work is the gate keeper of what you want, economic value, objective, want the results but don’t want to do the work, convenience, help, we don’t know how to get what we want, we don’t want to do the work, we don’t like the work, too hard, too time consuming, can’t get what they want, you don’t know what you want, find new things to want, hard, unknown, both, less value in pleasurable jobs, known or easier, work is the gate keeper of what you want, bottleneck, scarcity
real work is what is what is necessary for a system to create output that has or will have real value and impact in the environment. which means that in a company there is work that produces outcomes and work that loops on itself, if that can be cut without affecting the ability to produce then it was fake work, so real work is what is necessary. But i think it leans on a more fundamental drive. real work is what is aimed at things that should exist [hard to define]
the thing is that things that should exist change overtime. so once it gained purpose because what is produdec actually gets consumed it became real work. so it is tied to economics and culture. which means it follows similar dynamics. it changes overtime. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet. which makes it hard to pin down exactly. but i think the space of things we do is defined enough to be meaningfully useful.
But I think there is something deeper that most people overlook. it is the precursor to technology and progress. it is the natural buildout of an artificial layer over nature. The properties of this layer is fundamentally understandable, malleable and controllable. when we say change the world we mean the human fabric of reality, not physical reality itself. laws of physics are not controllable, just used. but laws oof human structure can be controlled.
the human drive to abstract is akin to the technologist impulse. to observe, abstract, build tools so that abstraction becomes ownable, controllable and understandable, building the fonudations so you can abstract another layer above and repeat.
all we create is technology. all we do is technology. to see that we must disect the meaning of the word. of course it stands fundamentally low in the stack of meaning of what we do. and now technology is reserved to tools that use the laws of physics to do what we want (makes physics do what we want) so we can get more of what we want on demand. [5]
but on the philosophical level we want(or want to feel) something so we do or take something that does that. so the impulse to abstract is just the novice doing what he feels is most right. it is the technologist impulse. it is only out of initial ignorance that one neters the loop of moving through the motions.
so real work is that which changes the world. referring to the human layer that we lay on nature. because man can’t change the laws of physics.
that is where real work should be directed.
art, skill, craft. then application of knowledge for practical, industrial and mechanical arts. teks to fabricate, systematic treatment. knowledge of how to make things. way of doing. and originally it included al technical arts, wether or not they required tools.
it has to have real meaning to us, that is the differentiator that makes a subset of real work suitable for us. usually one should pay close attention to what comes easy to oyu but is hard for others. what doesn’t feel like work, or more precisely what feels like play to you but work to others. that is what you should do. what you do for yourself only. [6]
Notes
[1] By environment I mean the physical world, culture, and your mind.
[2] Referring to the developed world.
[3] I don’t mean to imply that if something doesn’t work then what produced it was not real work.
[3] gounded in reality i mean feedback loops tied to reality, not looping abstractions.
[4] in facts for this reason i moved back to the bare basics in terms of note taking, work processes, learning, etc... it really boils down to books, writing and conversations.
[5] in fact our bodies are incredible pieces of technology. I like to think of skills as the set of neural circuits tuned to serve a specific purpose, now isn’t that a tool? it’s not as obvious to see as for example our own hands. it is a piece of nature that we get to modify so we can use it for our means. even though our brain is trained more than built.
[6] [most of the time] of course there will always be parts of the work we do that we won’t enjoy, which will feel like work, that’s normal and you should oush through. you should pay attention when everything starts feeling heavy to the point that you can’t enjoy any of it. that is sometimes burnout which happens when things stall or don’t work there you probably need either a pause and or change. or maybe you should change what you work on completely.