Work, or perish…really?
Let me talk to you about work.
It is the thing you do from the moment you wake until the moment you sleep. Even on your day off, it haunts you — the emails you haven’t sent, the tasks you’ve deferred, the promotion you’re chasing, the retirement you’re building toward. For most of human history, work was not something you chose. It was something you did to survive. You planted. You harvested. You built. You repaired. You cooked. You cleaned. You carried. If you stopped working, you and your family went hungry. That was the oldest law: work or perish.
Strip it down. What is work, really?
At its biological base, work is the expenditure of energy toward a goal. The ant works. The beaver works. The lioness works. Every living thing exerts itself to secure food, shelter, and the continuation of its kind. Humans are no different. We are working animals before we are thinking animals, spiritual animals, or political animals. The body must eat. The body must be sheltered. The body must provide for the young. That is the first and most irreducible layer of work. It is not optional. It is the price of being alive.
The Dignity of Work
But work has never been only about survival. From the earliest human communities, work carried a second layer: meaning. The person who built the hut, who wove the cloth, who forged the blade, who delivered the child — that person was not merely surviving. They were contributing. They were necessary. The community depended on their skill, their labour, their presence. This is the dignity of work: the knowledge that you are useful, that your hands produce something of value, that your absence would be felt.
The old ones understood this. The blacksmith was not just a metalworker. He was a custodian of fire and iron, a figure of ritual significance. The market woman was not just a trader. She was a node in a network of exchange that held the community together. The farmer was not just a food producer. He was a steward of the soil, in conversation with the seasons, the rain, and the ancestors. Work was not separated from identity. It was identity in motion. You were what you did, and what you did mattered.
The Specialization of Work
Then came the fragmentation. As societies grew more complex, work splintered into ever-narrower specialties. The village blacksmith became the metallurgist, the welder, the aerospace engineer. The market woman became the supply chain manager, the retail strategist, the e-commerce entrepreneur. The farmer became the agronomist, the geneticist, the commodity trader. This specialization produced extraordinary advances — longer lives, deeper knowledge, technologies that would seem like magic to the ancestors. But it also produced something else: the loss of the whole.
The specialized worker no longer sees the full arc of their labour. They perform one task in a long chain of tasks. They may never meet the person who benefits from their work, or the person who is harmed by it. The software engineer who writes code for a financial algorithm does not see the family displaced by the market shift that code enables. The factory worker who assembles a component for a machine does not know where the machine will be used, or what it will do, or who will profit from it. This is the alienation Marx described: the worker becomes a fragment of a process they cannot see, serving ends they did not choose.
The Weaponization of Work
And here the shadow deepens. Work has been weaponized. The colonial labourer was not paid for his work. He was compensated just enough to survive, while the value of his labour flowed outward, to the metropole, to the shareholders, to the empire.
This weaponization did not end with colonialism. It evolved. The modern economy runs on a quiet, relentless message: your worth equals your productivity. The hustle culture, the gig economy, the side-hustle gospel — all of it teaches that you must always be working, always be optimizing, always be monetizing. Rest is rebranded as laziness. Presence is rebranded as inefficiency. The person who pauses to breathe, to think, to be with their children, is made to feel guilty. The machine does not stop. Why should you?
This is the trap of the eagle we spoke of weeks ago: climbing for a crown that keeps receding, exhausting yourself for a reward that never arrives. Work, when weaponized, becomes a cage. Not the work itself — the necessity of labour, the dignity of skill — but the story that your value is measured by your output. That story is a lie. And it is killing people.
The Irrelevance of Work
Now we must ask the most uncomfortable question. Is there a point at which work ceases to matter?
Yes. And that point is closer than we think. The philosopher who spends a lifetime contemplating truth may produce nothing the market values. Is her work irrelevant? The mystic who sits in silence for decades may never write a book, build a building, or earn a salary. Is his work irrelevant? The grandmother who can no longer labour but who holds the family together with her presence — is she irrelevant? The dying person, in their final days, does not ask for a spreadsheet. They ask for a hand to hold. In that moment, work is utterly irrelevant. What remains is presence. Love. Memory. The soil that will soon receive them.
This is not an argument against work. It is an argument against the worship of work. Work is a tool. It is not a god. It can feed you, clothe you, give you purpose and dignity and a place in the community. But it cannot love you. It cannot remember you after you are gone. It cannot pour libation for you or speak your name to the generations that follow. Only people can do that. Only presence can do that.
The Sovereign Approach
The self-possessed mind works without worshipping work. It brings skill, dedication, and integrity to its labour — because the work is worth doing, and because the community depends on it. But it also knows when to stop. It knows that rest is not a reward for productivity. Rest is a right. It is the pause between the notes that makes the music. It is the silence in which the next idea can rise.
The ancestors understood this rhythm. They worked hard — the land demanded it, the seasons demanded it. But they also rested. They feasted. They danced. They poured libation and told stories and sat in the quiet with nothing to prove. They did not measure a life by the size of the harvest alone. They measured it by the health of the community, the laughter of the children, the continuity of the lineage. Work was a part of life. It was not the whole of life.
So I ask you today: What is your relationship with work? Is it a tool you wield, or a master you serve? Do you work to live, or do you live to work? And when the work is done — when the project ends, when the title is retired, when the body can no longer produce — what will remain of you?
And the second question: Where have you absorbed the lie that your worth equals your output? Where did you learn it — from a parent, a teacher, a boss, a culture that never stops demanding more? And what would it take to unlearn it?
Work is a fire. It can warm your home or burn it to the ground. The difference is not the flame. It is the hands that tend it. The ancestors knew when to feed the fire — and when to let it rest. The hearth is still warm. The work can wait. Sit down. You are already enough.
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I. Ras Gad Shangox owned and operated a Taxi in Toronto for 28 years before 2016 when he sold his plate and became licensed as a delivery truck driver. His series “Pocket Wisdom for Sovereign Minds” was born of his curiousity about the relationship between individual words and their impact on human consciousness and behaviour.
