“The Devil makes work for idle hands” was a vey popular saying when I was growing up (I am WASP). I used to dismiss it as old-fashioned nonsense. Then I started managing people! Boy was I wrong,
The finding about flow is the tell. Csikszentmihalyi sees flow when challenge meets skill—a contest. Work isn't meaningful because it's work; it's meaningful because it posts a score.
That reframes your two loose threads. The 1965–95 leisure never turned into Mozart because leisure has no scoreboard—the competitive drive idles, and idling looks like screen time. And the male suicide effect you cite isn't incidental: male status evolved as mate-value competition, and a job is where that gets settled. Pull the arena and you don't get a relaxed man, you get a drive with nowhere to go.
What worries me more than anomie: the drive doesn't go quiet—it reroutes to zero-sum arenas that build nothing. Gambling, the gym, ranked games. Not so much lost meaning as meaning sent somewhere worse.
There’s a lot of romantization on work. You don’t spend most of your time in your job at a flow state, but doing meaningless, boring and unnecessary tasks.
It’s not work as we understand today (9-5 corporate job) that gives you purpose, but the struggle, which can be found in many other ways.
What most people desire is to have full control of their time and to get ride of all the bullshit that follows work: endless meetings, office politics, fake corporate speech and so on.
And let’s be honest, if work was anything fullfilling, you wouldn’t be writing books and on Substack but clocking in a 9-5 spreadsheet job somewhere.
Your framing of work and leisure is too binary. There is a hierarchy of work on a societal scale but also within every specific role. Most people would have an immediate answer for which parts of their job they enjoy and which they don't. I don't think they to free themselves completely from work, but they do want to choose more engaging or meaningful work. Taking this to its logical conclusion you do end up with the much mocked commune where everyone is a poet and nobody collects the bins. But the general idea of choice still resonates strongly - many people will feel this flow state in leisure such as in the examples.you use, sport, video games, theatre. It's a question of choice and leisure is not always idle.
We earn a living solving problems for other people, using a combination of physics and politics (solving physical-world problems and human-nature problems). Solving problems for others enables us to have others solve problems for us.
It doesn't bode well when there are no problems for us to solve for others; only the problems we create for ourselves (and possibly others).
People tend to forget that finding meaning through is largely the result of Protestantism and its beliefs that work is giving glory to God. I have a strong feeling that it's one of the reasons why Protestantism is losing ground to Catholicism, especially as tech and AI advances.
I’m pretty sure it’s Protestants going woke with Suicidal Empathy that is causing them to lose believers. Especially on the pro-life, pro-family issues.
This reminds me of one of my favorite anonymous quotes of truth about men with idle/leisure time: “when left to his own devices, man creates new vices.”
I can already see potential complaints about work being non-fulfilling, particularly from Paul and Daniel below. I don't agree. Work is in and of itself an inherent value, and I've found that both in school and out in the "real world," it puts a focus on things that actually allows greater productivity in downtime. I will say that I've pushed extensively in my own work to minimize meetings as a way to look busy and instead of people "talking about doing work," free up more time for people to do work. This has not always been successful, but I have found ways to move things in that direction. I consider it my own little contribution to the rightness of things. I have found little successes in that space to be both fulfilling and also valuable to work within our company. Others have noticed as well.
I think there’s more to the paradox than that although work provides us with some of life’s greatest experiences—much more than leisure activities—we tend to say we’d rather work less and have more leisure. We also don’t seem able to work just for the sake of those great experiences. Work always has some ostensible purpose—even if it’s a hobby like learning the violin or making crossword puzzles—without which we don’t do the work. It may be true that “it’s the journey, not the destination”; nevertheless, it seems that without some destination, there will be no journey. The means cannot be made the end.
Furthermore, human beings are mostly “negative feedback engines.” We were built to respond to problems and crises. Even idealistic goals are framed as responses to problems: end poverty, cure cancer. Elon Musk doesn’t propose his goal of colonizing Mars in a positive way—for the adventure or the glory of the achievement—but as insurance against the wiping out of humanity.
This makes evolutionary sense: surviving the struggle for existence in our evolutionary past was a matter of responding to problems. But the flip side is that when all the problems are solved, we aren’t good at finding things to do. Thus, as humanity has become richer over the past few centuries and our direst problems have been increasingly solved, we face the even greater paradox of *too much flourishing*. Namely, as the stakes of our work have been lowered, so has its meaning.
Some people conclude from all this that people were happier in the days when life was more precarious. I doubt that is true, but I do think they were less prone to worry about whether their lives were meaningful.
Retirement disabused of any illusion of an inner Mozart just biding his time. Reality is ‘no job - no need to get out of bed today (or even this month)’.
“The Devil makes work for idle hands” was a vey popular saying when I was growing up (I am WASP). I used to dismiss it as old-fashioned nonsense. Then I started managing people! Boy was I wrong,
especially when it pertains to men.
The finding about flow is the tell. Csikszentmihalyi sees flow when challenge meets skill—a contest. Work isn't meaningful because it's work; it's meaningful because it posts a score.
That reframes your two loose threads. The 1965–95 leisure never turned into Mozart because leisure has no scoreboard—the competitive drive idles, and idling looks like screen time. And the male suicide effect you cite isn't incidental: male status evolved as mate-value competition, and a job is where that gets settled. Pull the arena and you don't get a relaxed man, you get a drive with nowhere to go.
What worries me more than anomie: the drive doesn't go quiet—it reroutes to zero-sum arenas that build nothing. Gambling, the gym, ranked games. Not so much lost meaning as meaning sent somewhere worse.
There’s a lot of romantization on work. You don’t spend most of your time in your job at a flow state, but doing meaningless, boring and unnecessary tasks.
It’s not work as we understand today (9-5 corporate job) that gives you purpose, but the struggle, which can be found in many other ways.
What most people desire is to have full control of their time and to get ride of all the bullshit that follows work: endless meetings, office politics, fake corporate speech and so on.
And let’s be honest, if work was anything fullfilling, you wouldn’t be writing books and on Substack but clocking in a 9-5 spreadsheet job somewhere.
Your framing of work and leisure is too binary. There is a hierarchy of work on a societal scale but also within every specific role. Most people would have an immediate answer for which parts of their job they enjoy and which they don't. I don't think they to free themselves completely from work, but they do want to choose more engaging or meaningful work. Taking this to its logical conclusion you do end up with the much mocked commune where everyone is a poet and nobody collects the bins. But the general idea of choice still resonates strongly - many people will feel this flow state in leisure such as in the examples.you use, sport, video games, theatre. It's a question of choice and leisure is not always idle.
Brilliant. We all need to hear this🖤
We earn a living solving problems for other people, using a combination of physics and politics (solving physical-world problems and human-nature problems). Solving problems for others enables us to have others solve problems for us.
It doesn't bode well when there are no problems for us to solve for others; only the problems we create for ourselves (and possibly others).
Thank you for this Rob. It should be required reading for all school children.
Now I must get back to work trying to accurately pronounce Csikszentmihalyi.
People tend to forget that finding meaning through is largely the result of Protestantism and its beliefs that work is giving glory to God. I have a strong feeling that it's one of the reasons why Protestantism is losing ground to Catholicism, especially as tech and AI advances.
I’m pretty sure it’s Protestants going woke with Suicidal Empathy that is causing them to lose believers. Especially on the pro-life, pro-family issues.
This reminds me of one of my favorite anonymous quotes of truth about men with idle/leisure time: “when left to his own devices, man creates new vices.”
Speaking of work, may I recommend an idea: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I can already see potential complaints about work being non-fulfilling, particularly from Paul and Daniel below. I don't agree. Work is in and of itself an inherent value, and I've found that both in school and out in the "real world," it puts a focus on things that actually allows greater productivity in downtime. I will say that I've pushed extensively in my own work to minimize meetings as a way to look busy and instead of people "talking about doing work," free up more time for people to do work. This has not always been successful, but I have found ways to move things in that direction. I consider it my own little contribution to the rightness of things. I have found little successes in that space to be both fulfilling and also valuable to work within our company. Others have noticed as well.
Great post, I agree with every word.
I think there’s more to the paradox than that although work provides us with some of life’s greatest experiences—much more than leisure activities—we tend to say we’d rather work less and have more leisure. We also don’t seem able to work just for the sake of those great experiences. Work always has some ostensible purpose—even if it’s a hobby like learning the violin or making crossword puzzles—without which we don’t do the work. It may be true that “it’s the journey, not the destination”; nevertheless, it seems that without some destination, there will be no journey. The means cannot be made the end.
Furthermore, human beings are mostly “negative feedback engines.” We were built to respond to problems and crises. Even idealistic goals are framed as responses to problems: end poverty, cure cancer. Elon Musk doesn’t propose his goal of colonizing Mars in a positive way—for the adventure or the glory of the achievement—but as insurance against the wiping out of humanity.
This makes evolutionary sense: surviving the struggle for existence in our evolutionary past was a matter of responding to problems. But the flip side is that when all the problems are solved, we aren’t good at finding things to do. Thus, as humanity has become richer over the past few centuries and our direst problems have been increasingly solved, we face the even greater paradox of *too much flourishing*. Namely, as the stakes of our work have been lowered, so has its meaning.
Some people conclude from all this that people were happier in the days when life was more precarious. I doubt that is true, but I do think they were less prone to worry about whether their lives were meaningful.
Retirement disabused of any illusion of an inner Mozart just biding his time. Reality is ‘no job - no need to get out of bed today (or even this month)’.