How Should a Person Live?
A basic overview
There are four basic types of activity in life:
Play / Pleasure
Biological needs
Subsistence work
Meaningful activity
The first two categories are self-explanatory, but what is subsistence work and meaningful activity?
Subsistence work is activity that is most common to our daily lives — working to earn an income, grocery shopping, managing household chores, filing taxes. This kind of work is usually monotonous, repetitive, boring and devoid of creativity.
What is meaningful activity? This is activity that excites you, challenges you, immerses you, elevates you. Meaningful activity satisfies our creative impulses and, in its best moments, enlarges us — intellectually, morally, spiritually.
These four types of activity are often intertwined. For some people, subsistence work can be incredibly meaningful, and they would do the work even if they didn’t get paid. This is true not only for some teachers, artists and scientists, but even some businessmen, bankers and others.
Our biological need for sex can (obviously) be playful and meaningful. Playtime can also be meaningful, but it can also take on a subsistence character, as when a professional athlete loses interest in the game and is playing only in order to earn a living.
Most importantly, what can start out as meaningful activity, like being a teacher or a lover, can gradually turn into subsistence work. We can slip into passive routines, with our roles becoming something we endure rather than something that nourishes us.
The same can be true for anything we were once passionate about — engineering, theology, law, fitness, medicine, music, etc. All of life’s activities can be transformed into subsistence work if we’re not careful.
With the four parts of life now described, we can construct a scale of values to help us best direct the use of our time. How we organize our life determines whether we live shallowly or deeply.
The Scale of Human Values
“It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” (Seneca)
For the categories of ‘play / pleasure’ and ‘biological needs’ (which include eating and sleeping), the general rule is that these should be enjoyed at a reasonable minimum, and only a modicum over and above what is recreational or therapeutic. Of course, what is a ‘reasonable minimum’ will differ with temperament, circumstance, age and other factors.
We all know how an excessive pursuit of pleasure or play can be harmful. There's a point for everyone when play and pleasure stops being therapeutic and starts to become self-deteriorating.
Of the four domains of human activity, only meaningful activity is endlessly rewarding. It's the only kind of activity we cannot do enough of. A person can never learn too much, create too much or love too much. In fact, the more one does those things, the more one is deepened, elevated and transformed.
It's through meaningful activity that a person is perfected.
“That’s great in theory Omar, but subsistence work takes up all my time! How do I deal with this?”
The obvious rule is that one should minimize subsistence work and maximize meaningful activity. So let’s say you’re currently working a job that's filled with subsistence work. You have four choices:
Take proactive steps to make the job duties more meaningful (creative) by innovating on the role or talking to your boss.
Find ways to finish the subsistence portions of your work faster so you can spend more of the shift doing meaningful activity.
Find a new job with a better subsistence-to-meaning ratio.
Work for yourself.
There's a fifth option that I see peddled among self-help gurus, life coaches and even many well-meaning people, and it has to do with reframing your relationship with subsistence work. The claim is that while subsistence work might not be inherently meaningful, it can be approached in ways that support personal growth.
I've explained in detail elsewhere that this is a very damaging lie. In fact, this may be the lie on which the greatest number of lives have been wasted. The lie on which the most human potential has been sacrificed.
Subsistence work can have important benefits — you may gain technical skills or provide for a family — but never fool yourself into thinking that the benefits will outweigh the internal deterioration. The longer a person sacrifices large portions of their life to subsistence work, the more they will suffer a cascade of profoundly corrosive consequences.
The aim isn't to escape subsistence entirely — but to ensure that the balance of our days leans toward what perfects us, not what withers us.
*In articulating the scale of values, I am much indebted to the writings of Mortimer J. Adler.
Hope it's okay to share a longer reflection. This is a great piece and it really got me thinking.
Meaning, subjectifying experience, this is the purpose of life and the pinnacle of human potential, or at least the one that is most absent in our [post]modern experience.
The ratio of subsistence work to meaningful work is skewed today. The shame, the true shame, is that there has been an exile of play and community from subsistence activities. We have so much distance from the biological now that the subsistence has become abstract and objectified. As that distance increases, we become more objectified by the subsistence activity. That is our alienation.
My favorite experience during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns when I was living in Chicago was cooking dinner with my wife every night. And even today, I find that hand-washing dishes on my lunch break is a meditative relief from the onslaught of high-cortisol meetings. The reason, I think, is that there is intention, community, or reprieve through these types of subsistence activities from the other areas of life that have taken more than their fair share.
I remember playing games with my mother when I would join her grocery shopping. Still this was subsistence work for my mother, but for me it was part play. While a few towers of soda marketing displays crashed, or cereal boxes found themselves in new locations, the experience was that of adventure. And by the time we arrived at the checkout lane, we played a game of guessing the total cost, where play and subsistence intersected -- a skill I am proud to still possess! As for meaning, I even had a linguistic eureka moment at a supermarket when and where I realized my literacy.
It is impossible to synchronize all four areas of life into one all of the time, but the more we can find those intersections, the more reprieve we can find from subsistence's alienation. The more we can incorporate our whole self, our soul, into all that we do, the less damaging that subsistence work can be. But, as you suggested, we need to be cautious of those who tell us to become what we are doing to find meaning, or become purely motivated by building new skills. We are then conditioned to believe that we are not enough, rather than recognizing that the subsistence work itself is not enough.
In secondary school, I always said that "school stifles learning." And when I began working full time, I thought that "work stifles productivity." Now, I think that it's alienation that stifles humanity.
"All of life’s activities can be transformed into subsistence work if we’re not careful." 100% - There's more to this even. We have been programmed into trying to extract economic value from all endeavors. Everyone must have a side hustle that is monetized, or else the activity is frivolous. I have found this in myself plenty. I start an activity and it is meaningful for a blip. Then, fairly quickly, I'm absorbed in social media approval seeking and trying to make it a business, which just as quickly leeches the joy out of the activity.