A few years ago, a friend was talking to me about his experience working in kitchens. He was telling me that making food is a highly stressful and labor-intensive job. He walks into work and is told that they need a hundred pounds of guacamole prepared by the end of the day. People were coming to eat, and they wanted guacamole with their chips. Of course, the avocados and limes and all the other ingredients were supplied ahead of time, but the raw ingredients themselves are not guacamole. The guac had to be made; avocados had to be mashed, and vegetables diced. I saw the distress in his eyes when he said this. “If I don’t make it, it’s not going to get made.” The stress and labor that constitutes the job of making food is a result of the fact that there is a separation between the raw ingredients and the prepared food. This separation will exist until it is bridged. At the time, I had thought that there was something really deep in this little scenario. Some kind of great metaphor for life. I write this to elaborate on that intuition.
In a way, this essay is about that separation that exists between avocados and guacamole. More generally, this essay is about ‘freedom.’ This word is used in many contexts to mean many things. In this context, Freedom is the separation between the things that exist, and the things that do not. Allow me to say it in a few other ways:
Freedom is what separates avocados and guacamole
Freedom is the ability to bring into existence the things that don’t exist
Freedom is the fact that nothing we want is ever given to us
Freedom is the material out of which our life is made. We are perpetually in a state of separation. You understand the existing world by relating it to another world which does not exist; a world which is at a distance from this one1. But you introduce this separation in order to refuse it. You recognize a world that does not exist in order to make it exist. This is what makes the word ‘freedom’ somewhat inadequate for the thing I am talking about. This thing has a reverse side, your life is also made of ‘necessity.’
Think back to the story of my friend the cook. He walks into work and is told that they need a hundred pounds of guacamole. This need is brought into the world by the people who desire guacamole. These people don’t need guacamole, they simply want it to dip their chips. But the freely chosen desire for guacamole creates a real necessity. Because guacamole is wanted, it will be necessary to mash avocados and dice vegetables. Otherwise, how will it happen?
I want to stress this because I think it generalizes to almost every part of your life. You were born into this world with no identity, no possessions, no understanding, and then suddenly you began to develop needs. You are in need of food and then shelter and the needs grow greater and greater into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You are born and then you begin continuously creating needs. None of these things are given to you. These are things you want and are therefore required to make. To start with, you are cared for by others. Other people work to fulfill your needs. The primary reason why child-rearing is considered hard is because one person must do work to satisfy their own as well as another human’s needs. So it is important to realize that with any individual, the work required to satisfy their needs exists and thus the proper amount of work must be done by somebody, somehow. Otherwise, how will it happen?
The relation between freedom and necessity, between values and work, desires and effort might be loose and abstract in most people’s minds. The main goal of this essay is to make this relation more concrete. They are two sides of the same coin. Freedom is your choice of necessity. Necessity is the manifestation of a freely chosen desire. Wanting things, and doing the work to make them. In reality, the two cannot be separated, like a coin, it must exist with both of its sides; heads and tails. You can think abstractly about either side, but in the real world there is no such thing as a coin with only heads or only tails.
It is important to keep the right idea of how things work if you want them to work well. Money in particular is important to understand because it colors almost every desire we have and all the work we do. What is money? It was first invented as a way to facilitate trade. If I have several gallons of milk, and I want furniture, I can go find a carpenter and see if he needs the milk which I know how to make. If he doesn’t like milk then I am out of luck. In theory, money is supposed to solve this. I can find anyone who wants milk and take money in exchange. This money is now a universal measure of work done or value produced that I can convert into any other kind of appropriate form of value. So we understand that money is an abstraction of value produced, which means that there is a value which someone wants, and work which someone has done to produce it. Money is earned by making things that someone wants, and money is spent on getting things that someone has made. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of all the edge cases. My claim is merely that this idea of money makes some intuitive sense. This is roughly how money works.
Confusingly, many jobs distort this view of money through the guarantee of an hourly wage or an annual salary. You spend forty hours a week and, using this fact alone, calculate that you have produced some amount of value. But money isn’t actually made by spending hours appearing to be productive at a desk. More directly, money is made by doing work to fulfill a desire someone wants. Somebody wants a thing that doesn’t exist. You do work to make that thing exist. Money is nothing more than a record-keeping mechanism that keeps track of how much value has been made and exchanged. Using this record-keeping mechanism, by doing work for someone else, another person might be willing to do work for you2. When you are at work, you can almost imagine that the efforts you are making are being put into your own goals. If you want a new pair of shoes, but you work at a warehouse moving pallets, then by moving pallets you are essentially stitching together the leather that makes up your shoes. The real value is in work. Atoms rearranged. Entropy reduced. The point is that the wages are just an abstraction, a correlation between value produced and time worked. You do not really get paid for the time you’ve worked. It is important to keep the proper causes in mind and to not replace them with naive correlations. Without work, there is no real correlation between money and hours.
Throughout this essay, I am using the word ‘work’ a lot. In physics, the idea of work is understood as the product of a force applied to an object and the distance traveled by the object in some direction. Work measures how much energy is used in pushing some object across a distance. I think this is a useful idea. We are free, which means we are separated – at a distance – from the world that we want. Some world in which you have more leisure time, or in which you are less hungry, or in which you have guacamole. There is some distance between the world you exist in now and the world you want to be in. The distance between the two worlds must be bridged by some force in the right direction. This is essentially what work measures, the amount of energy that must be spent to traverse some distance3. By applying your life-force, your efforts and literal energy into shaping some aspect of the world in an appropriate direction, you can close the distance between the worlds that were once separate. In fact, nothing ever changes unless work gets done.
I think we can get some further insight from talking about the notion of direction that is intrinsic to the idea of work. Work gets done in some direction. If your goal is to push a ball 20 feet north, and you apply a force to it directed northeast, then although you might be using all your energy to push the ball, only a fraction of your energy is doing productive work, because some of your energy is being misdirected in moving the ball eastward.
Simple enough idea. But what happens when you don’t know exactly where your goal is? In which direction do you apply force? Some of our most pressing needs suffer from this uncertainty. “What is my purpose?” “What will make me happy?” “What is the most time-efficient way to make money?” We might have some extremely general sense of which direction to go in, but for the most part we operate on an “I’ll know it when I see it” basis. This problem is particularly impossible to overcome because we live in a world in which our intentions are separated from our actions, which are again separated from the consequences of our actions. It is very difficult to predict which actions will make the needle move in the right direction, because we do not know with certainty what moves the needle nor what the right direction is. This difficulty can be encapsulated in the notion of risk.
To summarize, I am making a claim that humans find themselves in a condition of freedom. To be human is to be free, to be free is to be at a distance. We are, at one and the same time, the creation of a distance and the refusal of this distance. In other words, the basic fabric of human existence, freedom, is the creation of a desire, and the necessity to work. Through the lens of physics, the idea of work as a closing of distances equips us with concrete ideas of force, energy and direction. The uncertainty inherent in many of our goals, because we do not know exactly how or where we will find the object of our desires, brings in the risk that we might be using our energy in the wrong directions. So not only are we condemned to do work in order to satisfy our desires, we are also condemned to take risks.
We are condemned to expose ourselves to the possibility of wasted effort, wasted energy. This is admittedly a very distressing fact. I want to emphasize the irreducibility of this risk. If you are doing work, you must necessarily do work in some direction. There is no way to know with certainty that this direction is a productive direction. In response to the distress from this uncertainty, people turn to large operations and institutions that claim to offer some security and insurance against this risk. In particular, large employers or well-established figures of authority. The people who construct these institutions create jobs and how-to-guides for people who do not want to manage their own risk. People feel comforted by a contractual employment in which they are told that by doing some specified work, they will make some fixed salary. But in reality, the full risk exists. The work you are offered a salary for is still work done in some direction which might end up producing something no one wants, so no value is made by it–wasted energy. The huge corporation might be pushing its workers to make something that less and less people want (e.g. a gas-car manufacturer in a world trending toward electrified cars). If the work done produces something of no value, then no value has been created that might support the contract.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But what matters is that each person understands that the total amount of risk is conserved, it is only that it’s been rearranged amongst the different people involved. The risk is managed by someone else, who is making the choice of which direction to apply your life-force, as well as many other people’s life-force. But this person has no privileged knowledge which would allow them to totally eliminate this risk. The combination of both magnitude of force and direction results in productive value IF the direction was correct and the magnitude of the force was enough. The fact that work must always be done in a direction means that risk exists as an absolute in any activity. Someone, somewhere, must accept the risk, and make a choice of direction.
THE WAY YOU THINK IS A PRODUCT OF YOUR WORK
All that I’ve discussed so far can be easily interpreted as a discussion of commonplace material goods. The physics analogy fits well in these areas. Avocados and guacamole, your chubby body and your lean body, your presence at home and your vacation on the other side of the world. All of these have direct physical interpretations of the work needed to get from one to the other. But our values and the things we want are much more diverse than these. Higher up in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we find a description of the fact that we also have a need of identity, a need to understand the world, to have an idea of what is true and good and beautiful. When we are born, we are nobody and we know nothing. We are naturally at a distance from any and all beliefs and at a distance from any kind of self-understanding. If you desire to understand yourself, or to know the world, it will be necessary to do work.
We get many of our facts, our perspectives, and our values from other people. A priest, a professor, a parent, an expert. We lean on these people to give us the ideas that will bring us closer to understanding our self and knowing things about the world. What gives these people authority? What makes their statements true? A statement is true when it describes reality. Authority is legitimate when the author has experienced reality and done the work to describe it. “They know what they’re talking about..” is only true when the speaker has crossed the distance from not-knowing towards knowing. This ‘crossing the distance’ is synonymous with work. You looked at the world, saw certain things and from these observations you made a statement. There is work both in observing and in describing. And there is also a wrong direction to do this work in; wrong things to observe and wrong ways to describe.
From the above analysis I conclude that a mentor can only help with one of the two parts of the work required to make knowledge and values. They can offer you a statement. A mentor might tell you “Follow these ten rules to live forever” or “Eat vegetables, and don’t eat candy to be healthy.” These statements are just hypotheses. They are a suggestion of a direction along which to observe the world. The validity of the hypothesis is dependent on the results of the experiment. The experiment, in this case, is a life lived in a certain way. The mentor’s saying it does not make it true. It is the alignment of the mentor’s statement with reality that makes it true. This means that you must have your own intuition of reality. You must make your own observations and examine whether or not the description aligns.
A worldview is a framework. You are born separate from any worldview, and must therefore do work in order to construct one. People can offer you a blueprint, mentor you through a construction of a worldview, but they cannot give you a worldview. Like a good fitness plan, it is not enough to simply read over it. It is a template that must be filled with human energy in order to realize it. The fitness plan tells you to run three miles a day, push around some iron weights, eat some amount of calories, and it promises that you will be fit. This plan is useless without the work that makes it your own. The exact same thing can be said about any framework for a worldview. This essay as well is a rational fitness plan. I am laying out a series of sentences that YOU must fill with your intuitions and your observations of the world in order for its value to come into existence.
Your worldview is a huge construction of intuitions that you’ve related and tied together throughout your life. It is like a skyscraper, and must therefore have a foundation in the ground of reality. These grounding, most basic, intuitions of reality can come from no one but you. In any value, idea, or aesthetic judgment, (i.e. the things that make up your identity) you must do the work of developing an intuition of reality and the world. Using all your own intuitions, you can arrange them and relate them to construct a sensible structure that helps you understand the world at large– other people, sociopolitical, economic, spiritual, and technical issues. The material out of which you construct a worldview are intuitions that can come from none other than your own observations of reality. People can tell you how to arrange these intuitions (which is what this whole essay is trying to do), but it is up to you to bring forth your intuitions and see if they fit in the arrangement that's been suggested, and whether or not the structure that’s being suggested has a foundation in reality.
CONCLUSION
“When Socrates says, “I know that I know nothing,” this modesty is by the same token the most radical affirmation of man because it supposes that everything is to be known.”
-J.P. Sartre
At the moment of birth, you are radically nothing. Everything begins with this terrible truth. You have no possessions, no system of thought, no purpose; it is all non-existent. This is also to say that you are radically free. To not have anything means that everything is to be made. To make exist is to work. So it happens that being free means you must do work. We cannot simply assert the existence of good things. The universe will not rearrange its atoms in the shape of our dreams. Work is what gives them their reality. These are the cold and indifferent facts of our existence.
This essay started as a blank document. I’ve spent an absurd amount of energy and time writing it. Re-writing each paragraph, rearranging it seventeen different ways, taking long walks meditating on it. Easily a few hundred hours have been spent. For each paragraph written I have scrapped another. I’ve poured so much life-force into it and still I am not really sure what I’m saying or why I’ve burdened myself with the need to do this work. I’ve kept confronting the agonizing fact that it doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve spent working on this, that hours and brute force don’t guarantee good writing. The obvious question follows: what does? There is a lot of force being applied to this essay in order to make some value exist. But I do not know clearly what that value is, or if I have worked in the right direction to get to it. There’s a truth I feel needs to be more present in people’s mind, and I have set out to make it so. In doing so, I’ve accepted the risk that I might not have really written what I was trying to say, and also that the value I’m trying to reveal is not really worth the life-force I’ve spent on it.
I only mention this because I think it works as a metaphor for every endeavor. This blend of nothingness, separation from a goal, uncertainty, the need for effort and direction make up the agonies of being human. At the same time, it is an empowering risk to take. You have the capacity to make a thing exist, to yank it out of the purgatory of non-existence and to breathe life into it. And it is only because of work that such a thing is possible. We live in a world with many other people who have already made many things, and who continue to make things without our own involvement. Because it was not your own life-force that did the work, the fact might be obscured that, nonetheless, “everything around you that you call 'life' was made up by people who were no smarter than you.”4 When something doesn’t exist, only work can make it exist. This is exactly what my friend the cook realized. He was in direct confrontation with the fact that the universe doesn’t budge on its own. “If I don’t make it, it’s not going to get made.”
I write this essay just to come to a very simple conclusion that many people surely have already been in touch with. If you want something, you have to work for it. But how well do you understand this truth? I am doing the work to map out a curved line for thought; a path along which to re-discover a very basic fact in order to feel how deeply this truth is true. It takes work to develop an intuition that understands these things well, it is not just given to you.
Metrics in math. The notion of is-not implies the possibility of distance, in which you quantify the is-not-ness
Alternative: Using this record-keeping mechanism, by making valuable things exist for someone else, another person might be willing to make something exist which is valuable to you.
Undertone: things do happen on their own. But they happen in the direction of entropy. Of dissolution and chaos. Humans naturally seek order. Therefore, the work they deem productive is in the opposite direction of the automatic flow of things
Steve Jobs famously said this
Good read... I challenge you to rethink your binary assessment of either working in the right direction or working in the wrong direction. When the target is unknown, any direction work is done in is useful in that it allows us to discover parts of the map we didn't know existed before doing the work. No matter what you are looking for, getting familiar with the map that surrounds the work you do can hardly hurt. You are bound to either discover that you think you're working in the right direction, or that you think you're working in the wrong direction. Either way, the work isn't lost, because the knowledge gained lives on... at least until dementia kicks in, then you're toast.