Work affects happiness. It is unavoidable given the number of hours spent working during life. Understanding the relationship between work and thriving can help make work contribute to our well-being rather than detract.

I always wanted to work. As a child, I offered to mow a neighbor’s lawn even before I was big enough to effectively to push a lawn mower. I couldn’t finish the job, but she paid me something anyway. I started babysitting as soon as I could convince people I was old enough. I wanted a summer job as a teenager and was disappointed because I spent the summers in a rural area with no practical job opportunities.

I didn’t understand why work seemed important at the time. Part, of course, was the desire to make money. But I didn’t have a great urge to spend it. I generally saved what I earned. I used my babysitting money to invest in the stock market.

But why would I want to work when the alternative was play? Wouldn’t playing be better than working? In retrospect, my early desire to work came from wanting to feel useful, valued, and independent. Most people have an innate desire to be productive, which is at the heart of work. It is in our nature, part of our psychology. It is probably necessary for survival. You didn’t eat if you weren’t somehow motivated to do the work of hunting and gathering. Play and leisure are good but don’t meet as many human needs as work.

The drive to be productive may be the primary impetus for working. However, the relationship between work and thriving is far richer and more complex. Once, the connection between work and living was simple and obvious. Today, many factors, such as huge increases in human productivity and the rise of business enterprises, often obscure the many benefits of work.

Defining Work

Work is any activity, mental or physical, that is productive, useful, and yields benefits for someone. It could benefit just ourselves. Or it could help our family, community, or humanity. Often, work is paid. But there are many examples of meaningful work without pay. Regardless of compensation, work should be valued by someone, even if only ourselves. Daily routines such as cooking and cleaning are work because they are necessary for maintaining a healthy life.

I separate work from what is done primarily for fun, such as hobbies, entertainment, and leisure activities, even if some of that may be useful.

Work has a powerful impact on well-being because it checks the box for several critical conditions for thriving. Thriving requires meeting basic needs, helping others, and building character. Work allows us to accomplish those objectives. It may be possible to thrive without working. Some have sufficient resources that make traditional work unnecessary. But finding a substitute activity that contributes so much to happiness is hard.

Meeting Basic Needs

At a fundamental level, work is what we do to meet basic needs for material well-being. We need to feed, cloth, and house ourselves and those we are responsible for. For much of human existence, work consisted of the essentials for survival. We worked not because we chose to but because we had to. Thriving is impossible without eating.

Activities necessary for living produce positive feelings for many. Often, this is a sense of purpose. If we did not feel some emotional reward from the activities for survival, we would not have been successful as a species. Even if the work is unpleasant, there is pride and satisfaction in caring for ourselves and our loved ones. Even at this basic and simplistic level, having a purpose in life is essential to happiness. A lack of purpose is a common symptom of a depressed and unhappy person.

Work meets another basic human need: the need for social interaction. We are social animals and need others for companionship, social connection, recognition, etc. Work is often done in a complex social environment, providing many types of social intercourse. For many, it is their primary social life. It can be an antidote to social problems such as loneliness.

Many of my deepest and most valued relationships have been with people I connected with through work. Work provided exposure to many people in varied situations. Because most work requires interactions with co-workers and customers, it is a rich environment where even introverts must participate. Changes in the workplace, such as remote work, threaten these social interactions, but I suspect that trends will reverse because of the importance of work for social interactions.

The Best Interests of Others

Thriving involves helping others. Work is the primary way most people do that. Being a useful member of society often means working because that is how we produce what is valuable to ourselves and others. Work helps fulfill our pro-social desires. It adds more meaning to life and leads to greater satisfaction, beyond the benefits of meeting basic survival needs.

Humans have a long history of helping each other. Sharing or bartering the fruits of one’s labor is common in most simple societies. It is likely a fundamental part of our hunter-and-gatherer past. That aspect of work expanded as people became more productive and moved to a market economy where we could produce surpluses that could be sold or traded to others. Commerce with others near and far was for mutual benefit. By making what others wanted, we could also help ourselves by receiving what others produced.

Work is much more complicated today than it has been for millennia. For much of human history, commerce was with people we knew. The positive feelings from exchanges with others occurred more naturally when direct personal contact was involved. It was easier for work to feel meaningful.

An impediment to having work feel meaningful today is the frequent long chain of steps between what we do and the people who benefit from our work. We may never know the person who benefits from our work. It can be hard to see how our work is valuable to someone else. That may be a psychological loss. To illustrate, farmer’s markets and artists’ fairs are popular and well-attended. The meaning derived from the direct connection between producers and consumers is so prized that producers willingly make less and are less efficient in exchange for the experience.

With some thought and effort, it is possible to feel work is meaningful despite the complexity of modern supply chains. Every organization, whether for-profit, nonprofit, or government, has customers who benefit from what the organization produces. It has helped me derive more satisfaction from work by understanding how the organization creates value for those receiving its goods or services. With that understanding, I felt less like a cog in a machine. It helps to feel I have a necessary, though perhaps small, part in making someone’s life better. It makes me feel part of something bigger than myself.

A more simplistic approach to feeling work is valuable is realizing that a paycheck indicates that work is beneficial. A standard business definition of value is what a customer recognizes and is willing to pay for. As long as someone is willing to pay me for what I do, I am likely doing something good for someone. It may be hard to see the ultimate customer, but I can see the immediate results of my work. If people are happy with my work and continue paying me, then it is easier to feel my work is meaningful and worthwhile.

Getting paid, though, is a low bar to determine if work is valuable to society. It is a good start and a baseline. But have meaningful work consistent with thriving, it is important to consider what the organization produces. Many organizations produce little or no benefit. Some harm people rather than help them. And there are some where people differ on whether a product or service is good for the customer.

Just because someone is willing to pay for something does not mean it is good. We must acknowledge that many people will pay for things and services that are not good for them. The fentanyl dealer is getting paid for his services. But it would be hard to argue that their actions are good for anyone. It helps to ask the question: Is the result of my work ultimately improving the lives of others? If not, perhaps you would be happier working someplace else.

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether what you are doing is good for society or not. Experience and wisdom may be necessary to reach a conclusion. Bad intentions are easy to spot and avoid. Good intentions, like many aspects of life, are not enough. I worked hard for something I thought was good but later realized I was making the situation worse. It seemed like a good idea then, but it was not. Here, we need the courage to change directions, perhaps jobs, to better align our values with the results of our daily work.

I believe most work is meaningful, and most organizations help society. It is a mistake to be too narrow in judging what work is meaningful, important, and valued. People differ in what is valuable to them. Some are simply differences in taste, such as in clothing or food. Others may be lifestyle choices. I may prefer reading for entertainment when someone else prefers a video game. In these cases, it is not a good or bad issue. It is just typical differences in personal preferences that can all lead to a happy life.

It is critical to recognize that much valuable work in unpaid. A paycheck is a crude measure of value to society. Much important work is unpaid. Society needs many things. Those producing what society needs should feel their work has meaning regardless of pay or status. There are many opportunities for valued work that people can be proud of.

There is a common misconception that working for a for-profit company somehow does less good than working for a non-profit. This attitude can negatively affect work choices and opportunities to do good for others. For too long in my career I avoided working in the private sector because I didn’t fully understand the good business can do.

It is not uncommon to see or hear comments denigrating the work of businesses and lauding those who start a non-profit or work for one. In both worlds, some organizations provide great value to society; others are ineffective and wasteful and produce poor or bad results. Non-profits can suffer from good intentions and laudable goals but an inability to deliver solutions. There is no doubt and unassailable evidence that capitalism, for-profit companies, and market economies have done more to improve people’s lives than any other social invention. In choosing what organization to work for, or whether to start your own, consider the organization’s results rather than whether it is run for profit.

Character and Virtue

Good character and virtues are essential to thriving. These take time to develop and require experience. Work provides an environment where virtues and character can be learned and practiced.

At work people can develop the core virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. This can start with exposure to virtue and vice. It is one thing to understand virtue and vice conceptually. Seeing it in practice is something else entirely.

I learned many valuable lessons related to character at work. I had the good fortune of working with good people with exemplary characters. Watching them, I learned what virtues such as wisdom and justice mean when applied to real problems. It is a powerful learning experience to see someone make a difficult decision, perhaps contrary to your opinion, that turns out to be correct and wise.

There is much to learn from those lacking virtue and good character. I was also fortunate to work with people who were bad examples. Sometimes, it is important to learn what not to do and how not to behave. Work allows you to observe behaviors and see the consequences, good and bad. You can chart your path accordingly.

Work gives people practice being the person they want to be. Practice is necessary to make vitue a habit. For example, it is easy to aspire to be courageous. Yet until you face a situation where you can be brave, you don’t know if you have courage. You may start out being cautiously courageous. With experience, that skill develops to where courage can become a reliable virtue.

Work often tests character. There are daily opportunities to act virtuously. You may pass or fail the tests. I have done both many times. My behavior at work revealed to me character strengths and weaknesses. Either way, it helped me learn. That experience adds to the wisdom necessary to do better next time. I learned what to do and what not to do. I can’t imagine how I would have gotten those learning experiences without work.

Essential knowledge and skills for living well are often gained through adversity. As mentioned in other essays, there is value in adversity. It is an unfortunate fact of life. Work can give us many challenges. These can include working with difficult people, learning new things, accepting responsibility, experiencing stress, and doing what we fear. For me and many others, work provides an abundance of adversity. Adversity accelerates learning and development. It can be intensely uncomfortable and simultaneously exhilarating.

My best jobs, the ones that I look back on with good memories and pride, were the ones with the most significant challenges and adversity. In several instances, I chose a challenging and scary path. I wondered at the time whether that was wise. In retrospect, it changed me because I learned what I was capable of, what I was good at but didn’t know, and what I should best leave for others more skilled than me. I have the peace of mind knowing I gave it my best. I avoided the regret of wondering what might have happened if I had faced my fear instead of taking the safe path. I don’t advocate taking foolish risks and impossible challenges. But recognize that adversity can be good and shouldn’t be avoided.

The last major benefit of work is the positive feeling of doing something you are good at. My experience is that people are happiest at work when they can align much of their work with their natural skills and abilities. We tend to like what we are naturally good at. This is not always easy because most work requires many skills and activities. We often have to do tasks we don’t like and aren’t naturally good at, so we can do what we excel at. There is a trade-off between sticking with what you are good at, developing new skills, and finding new strengths. Success in my jobs came from making the most of my strengths and figuring out how to get at least a passing grade in areas where I was weak.

Some are lucky to find the perfect combination of what they like doing, what suits their skills, abilities, and personality, and what society finds valuable. It is beautiful when it happens, and we should all seek that. But the reality is much messier. Things do not always match up the way we want. But if we know our strengths and weaknesses, we can be better at pursuing a career that fits us.

Getting the Most from Work

Here is a quick summary of how to get the most happiness from working:

• Get a job. Work is far better than leisure or idleness for leading a fulfilling life.
• Choose work that is meaningful and fits with your values. Work should feel useful and valued. Paid or not, high status or low, useful work matters and is worth doing.
• Consider how your work affects others. Avoid the temptation of work that makes you better off but doesn’t benefit others. Seek to be at peace with what you do for a living.
• Use work to practice virtues and develop character. Work is a rich environment for learning and becoming a better person.
• Challenge yourself. You can grow rapidly if you see the value in challenges and adversity and take advantage of those opportunities.
• Use your natural talents. We tend to do better and be happier when doing what we are good at.