What does it mean to love your job?

A common wisdom becoming mundane

It is very common wisdom in our times that one ought to love one’s job. The wisdom has also managed to become mundane. It turns out that it is often useful to worry about common wisdom precisely when it becomes mundane.

Love is not a category in the domain of the objective. It may have correlates in that domain, but I do not think a measurement—or a collection of measurements—exhausts an instance of love. It signifies a relation between subjects. Whatever else is said about the relation, that is its fundamental unit.

So to love one’s job, in this sense, would mean infusing it with a subject—a personality. The claim sounds strange when applied to work, although we do this readily elsewhere. A vessel has a name. A musician speaks about an instrument almost as if it could answer. A familiar tool has habits that its user learns to accommodate.

Our ancestors infused necessary work with rituals. Their brushes and caves, swords and horses, words and books had personalities. One way to read this is as an attempt to negotiate with something whose behavior could not be exhausted by an inventory of parts.

Only someone who understands nature can negotiate with her. And perhaps there is a kind of understanding that requires love.

The unknown acquires a face

All of the above is too volatile for a modern mind to rely on—and rightly so. The borders of categories in the subjective domain are nowhere near as distinct as we expect in the objective domain. A personality attributed to a tool can be a fruitful way of attending, or a way of hiding what the tool actually does.

But the underlying thought can be translated into more distinct categories. The way we perceive something affects what we do about it. Facing the unknown in a job with care may change what we notice and therefore what we attempt.

We often try to reduce someone’s potential within a job to measurements in an objective domain. What if part of that potential lies in the person’s way of encountering what the measurements have not yet captured? An attachment to the work might preserve attention through ambiguity. A relationship to the instrument might make small departures in its behavior worth noticing.

This is what alarms me about the mundaneness of the instruction to love one’s job. The words survive, but their depth can disappear. They become advice about satisfaction, while the more difficult question concerns the character of our attention.

A message sent three hundred years ago

There are times when, after a particularly laborious stretch of work—physical, mental, or both—I feel a need for meaning. Sometimes I put on headphones and play a message sent three hundred years ago: Pachelbel’s Canon and Gigue in D.

The music changes the way the work sits in a life. I could name the elements of the piece or describe the changes it produces in me, but neither account would replace the encounter. Something has been carried between people through time, and I can participate in it without exhausting what it is.

That brings the question of work back to the question of naming. We can distinguish the task, measure its results, and account for its costs. We can also ask what kind of relation makes it worth returning to. The second question is no less serious because its boundaries are harder to draw.

Perhaps to love a job is to allow the unknown within it to become something more than an obstacle. It becomes a presence to which one can attend—and with which one can keep negotiating.