Meaning: who you are when work changes
What work gives beyond money, what happens when it goes, and what you want to keep doing yourself.
A course for people whose work is changing or may go, and for those thinking about retirement. You will learn what research says about losing a job and retiring and what in philosophy works for an ordinary life, and be able to decide what to keep for yourself. We do not promise an answer to what it is all for, and if the emptiness stays, it is worth talking to a professional.
So far there is only this table of contents. Lessons appear one at a time, and we promise no dates. Feed of new lessons (Atom)
16 lessons, 4 parts
Part 1 What work gives beyond money
The paycheck is easy to see, and people usually notice the rest once it is gone.
- coming soon
Five things besides the paycheck
What Marie Jahoda called the latent functions of employment, and how to see which of them your own job holds up.
- coming soon
Marienthal: a village without work
An Austrian village whose factory had closed: why free time turned out to be a “tragic gift,” and the days fell apart.
- coming soon
Pointless jobs
How many jobs really are pointless, why the estimates differ so much, and what happens to people who feel that way about their own.
- coming soon
A calling and its price
Job, career or calling: how a calling binds you, what it costs, and how to reshape a job around yourself.
Part 2 When a role ends
What is known about job loss and retirement, without comfort and without scare stories.
- coming soon
What losing a job does
What losing a job does to mental health and to satisfaction with life, and why the old level does not always come back.
- coming soon
Who I am without my profession
How people leave a role their sense of self rested on, and what is different when it is taken not by a boss but by a machine.
- coming soon
Retirement: a step out or a drop
The reviews disagree: retirement is often good for mental health, the picture for physical health is disputed, and much depends on whether you chose to go.
- coming soon
Money without work
Keynes foresaw a 15-hour week, and cash with no strings has since been tried: what those trials say about a world without work, and what they do not.
Part 3 What philosophy can offer
A few thoughts that work in an ordinary life, and along the way some quotes their supposed authors never said.
- coming soon
Aristotle: happiness as activity
Eudaimonia in Aristotle is something you do, not something you feel, and how another writer’s fine line got stuck to him.
- coming soon
Frankl without the fake quote
What Frankl’s book really says, what does not carry over into an ordinary life, and why the line about stimulus and response is held not to be his.
- coming soon
Arendt: labor, work, action
The three kinds of activity in Hannah Arendt: which of them a machine takes over, and which by her reasoning cannot be handed off.
Part 4 What you do yourself
We think doing a thing yourself is worthwhile even when a machine does it better: that is our stance, and here it meets practice.
- coming soon
Why play if the machine is stronger
Go players did not quit when the machine passed them, and began to play better and more freshly: what that means for your own work, and what it does not.
- coming soon
What to keep for yourself
How to separate what you do for the result from what you do for its own sake, and why different people’s lists do not match.
- coming soon
A routine with no boss
How to get time, people and a shared purpose from other sources, and why volunteering replaces them only in part.
- coming soon
When the emptiness does not lift
How a question about meaning differs from depression, why philosophy and courses will not handle the second, and when to see a professional.
- coming soon
A look ahead: if there is less work
Nobody knows how much work will shrink: which scenarios are possible, and what to prepare without waiting for the answer.