Finding meaning in life and in work

Before you continue reading the rest of this blog, let me ask you a few questions:

            What is your most vivid memory? 

            What is your dream?

            What do you think about the future?

These questions were ones posed by the creators of the new opera "We are the lucky ones", which had its world premiere in Amsterdam last month. After interviewing seventy Europeans who are now in their seventies and eighties, Philip Venables, Nina Segal, and Ted Huffman wove together their life experiences to tell a multigenerational story of surviving a genocide, world war, reconstruction, climate change, and technological innovation. What the title of the opera suggests is that in their eyes, the narrators were lucky enough to witness a wrecked world reborn bigger and better, only to see the seeds of its future decline planted in their lifetimes and not knowing how it will all end. Crystalizing many decades of personal history into critical memories gave these survivors a clearer perspective on what they found both meaningful and not in their lives.

American life histories
By coincidence, I watched this opera a few days after a research seminar presented at Utrecht University by Hans Joachim Voth. His paper, "American life histories", had a similar premise of sifting through the life narratives of more than fourteen hundred Americans in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Strikingly, what Voth and his coauthors found was that the single most important part of the lives of those interviewed was work, not money, not family, not religion. And that meaningfulness was not in the income earned from their labor, but in their contribution to society and a sense of mastery of their craft. 

What economists and policymakers tend to gloss over in their estimations of a country's well-being is that work does more than pay the bills and allow for more consumption. Having a sense of purpose, whether it be building a bridge for a community, handling chores with care, or honing a skill set day after day after day, is at least as important as the compensation for the labor and time. In other words, work has intrinsic value in showing what we are capable of and how we are embedded in our societies. As David Brooks commented in his opinion piece on living one's best life, feeling competent at what we do, no matter how trivial the task, allows us to live a better life and makes one's effort be its own reward.

Educational attainment
I have written about how I get joy from teaching, but the other part of my role, doing research, also provides me with meaning in surprising ways. For a current project looking at the relationship between superstition and fertility in Japan, I have been entering data on educational attainment of women starting in the late nineteenth century. While data entry is fairly monotonous work, as I was scrolling down and transcribing columns of statistics, I started to cry. The relatively few women going to secondary school and even fewer in university during the Japan's early industrialization made me think of all the women who were denied an opportunity to learn. I remembered hearing my mother recount how her parents did not think it was necessary for her to continue her studies because she was a woman, and that the money was better spent on her brothers instead. She persevered without their support and went on to university, later instilling in me a deep sense of the value of education.

Thinking about her, about the situation she shared with many of her generation and even still today, added an unexpected personal nuance to my research. Here was work that I found moving, satisfying, and intrinsically meaningful, and I am lucky to be doing it. Do you feel the same about your own life and work?