The Importance of Meaningful Work

We often imagine physical exertion to be an aspect of our lives separate from our creative pursuits. There is a time of day for writing, painting, knitting, and a time of day for lifting weights, or running, or playing sports. Barring unusual circumstances, these facets of life very rarely meet: I think this is a shame. Those rare activities that combine both creativity and physical exertion are some of the most satisfying and meaningful pastimes, because they offer a chance to use the whole of our being rather than only fragments. Engaged in hobbies like gardening or woodworking, we enter a kind of harmony between mind and body greater than any physical or mental activity alone.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt argues for distinct notions of labour and work. Labour comprises those activities that we do in order to survive, including everything from feeding ourselves to making money. It is generally unsatisfying and involves little of our own agency. Work, on the other hand, is creative and self-driven. The products of work, such as books, pieces of art or music, and decorative architecture, comprise what Arendt calls “the human artifice”, a body of creative endeavor that sets Humanity apart from animals. Critically, both kinds of activity involve toil or physical exertion, but only work sets toil to fulfilling ends.

Arendt’s labour/work distinction explains why we find basic chores so dull but activities like camping or remodeling our homes so satisfying; we contribute in some small way to authentically human action, using not only the strength of our limbs but our uniquely human capacity to invent and create. 

What specific activities fall under these criteria? Hobbies like drawing and creative writing lack the element of toil which Arendt believes to be so important. I recognise that some indisputably toilsome activities, like woodworking and gardening, are difficult to carry out in St Andrews. I therefore propose a synthetic approach: activities we may not otherwise put physical effort into, like writing, can be combined with low levels of exertion such as standing or walking. On an anecdotal level, I find my writing is much more fluent when I am at a standing desk, or taking brief walks every couple of hundred words. 

Many famous writers and artists were great aficionados of matching mental and bodily exertion. Van Gogh’s wandering around the hills of Arles comprised a rough formula of kilometers walked to sunflowers painted. Dickens, Hemingway, and Woolf all wrote standing up, and Kafka couldn’t put pen to paper before he’d exhausted himself on walks around Prague. There is perhaps more wisdom than we realize in associating exercise with creativity, at least as these characters demonstrate.

How might a more holistic conception of physical exertion and creativity inform our politics? This may sound ridiculous, but if we accept that meaningful work involves both, we ought to consider by what means individuals are ensured opportunities to do so. Humankind was made neither for the cubicle nor the coal mine. Instead, political life should ensure that we can employ both our physical and mental capacities to their fullest extent on projects in which we have a genuine interest. This notion of fulfillment seems to be missing from much of Twenty-First Century political thinking, but one we might do well to consider. 

As university students, we tend to compartmentalize our activities, such that exercise is kept apart from mental effort and vice versa. In fact, these elements of our lives complement each other very well, as Arendt articulates and Van Gogh demonstrates. Activities that require both full physical and mental exertion are not only satisfying to a greater degree than their parts alone, but are also an essential part of living well.

Image from Wikimedia Commons