Having the autonomy to do my work always meant a lot to me.
But it didn’t come easily to realize it. I bounced from job to job after college, mainly because I wasn’t willing to give up on certain conditions that I unconsciously knew I needed to do meaningful work. Also, and maybe more importantly, I was definitely NOT down for doing busy work -but I didn’t know back then how to say no without creating conflict.
Somehow, it was thanks to these frustrating job experiences that I devoted myself to understanding what it takes to do meaningful work -after all, how does one know what meaningful work is if one doesn’t know what matters the most and is worth doing?
Well, what meaningful work is will depend on the domain and on the person doing it. But I can tell you this much: your meaningful work is only as good as the time and effort you put into it. You must constantly show up to it, whatever it takes.
So, what does it take to do meaningful work?
First, it takes constraining yourself to freedom.
What means to be free depends on the context in which we use it. But independently of its meaning, we usually think that “freedom” comes from a moment of rupture, dramatic or drastic change, where you become “free”. Ending or beginning a relationship, quitting or getting a job, selling or buying a house, moving to a different city, etc.
You may think “now I can finally do meaningful work!” -well… no.
As author George Dyer puts it, “films and books urge us to think that there will come certain moments in our lives when, if we can make some grand, once-in-a-lifetime gesture of relinquishment, or of standing up for a certain principle, then we will be liberated, free. [But] there is no escaping the everyday. It actually takes a daily effort to be free. To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed.”
The real question is not to be free from what, but to be free for what.
Make no mistake, doing meaningful work requires doing boring, hard-lifting work. It also takes time, so you will need all the minutes and drops of energy you can spare to dedicate to it. That means freedom to continuously prepare yourself for it: learn and practice the craft, collect the data, hone the skills, do the networking, gather the resources, develop the expertise, find the stakeholders, or whatever is needed.
I argued elsewhere why time is our most precious resource, so you must guarantee the freedom to decide how you spend it. You can always decide to go to that party, procrastinate, keep doing busy work, or just be lazy -do whatever you want. Honestly, nobody cares if you don’t do meaningful work. So, it is up to you to make the daily and conscious decision to dedicate your time to do it.
Secondly, it takes balancing autonomy-dependence.
For a person to be autonomous, they need to be part of systems that allow them to dedicate resources to certain activities -such as time, energy, money, knowledge, and so on.
As the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin explained, “the more autonomy will develop, the more multiple dependencies will develop. The more my computer will allow me to have an autonomous thought, the more it will depend on electricity, networks, sociological and material constraints.”
Without dependence, even having a nice and relaxing hot bath would take us a lot of time away: taking water from the river, lighting the fire to heat the water, putting the water on a bathtub-like recipient, and finally taking the bath. Now imagine that, on top of it, we also had to grow our own food, or generate our own electricity. If so, dedicating a large part of our days to work would be practically unfeasible. So, depending on systems like the water supply, heating apparatus, supermarkets, and energy infrastructures, doesn’t seem so bad at all -once it allows us to be autonomous in doing our work.
These systems can be more nuanced than that, depending on the scale we decide to look at. If you work in an office, for example, you probably depend upon the work of several of your colleagues to do your work: you need someone else to find the clients, close the sales, advertise the products and services, do the accounting, mop the floor, take the trash out, transfer the money of your paycheck to your account, and so on.
However, my point is that, when it comes to meaningful work, we need to learn how to navigate our environment well enough that allow us to be autonomous, choosing carefully what we will depend on. For some, keeping a daily job will be the smart move; for others, dedicating 100% of their time to meaningful work could be the only way to go.
The Choice/Chance Mechanism
Basically, as Gruber pointed out, meaningful work depends on how we reorganize our resources. So, the “freedom for what” is our autonomy, and the “constraints” are our dependences.
As I explained before, our freedom is negotiated on a daily basis, balancing the autonomy-dependence relationship so that we can dedicate ourselves to what matters the most to us. In other words, we choose to change (or not) according to the opportunities we have, where every change will always be a trade-off (“Do I want to give up X for Y?”).
Obviously, not every change is easy and/or for the better. What’s more, some changes are unavoidable and there is no choice -such as war, pandemic, natural disasters, etc. In these cases, we can only act according to what can be done at the moment and find somewhat limited “opportunities” to keep going.
Faced with changes that allow us to choose, such as new technological developments, we can choose to embrace and/or avoid the change. However, it may be that at some point it will no longer be possible to avoid it, and then we can only adapt to it – hence Change by Choice/Chance.
Our world changes only when individuals shift to living with a new set of values, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions. For those who insist on clinging to traditional ways of looking at the world, change will continue to come so fast and in such unexpected forms that the future will no longer be a desirable place.
In a different metaphor, George Land explains this mechanism:
“The tree, for example, as it matures, slows down its quantitative growth and changes to qualitative growth. It enters into a new relationship with its neighbors, becoming an integrated part of a complex and interdependent ecosystem. It goes from independent, getting bigger, to interdependent, sharing, connecting, and developing deeper relationships. Unfortunately, most individuals and organizations don’t respond to this naturally or successfully change”.
Embracing change is not simply about “adapting to an environment”, but rather the continuing improvement in the capacity to grow and to build ever more connections in more varied environments. “The most powerful forces driving change come from the future”, he explains, “so change is not only constant, but change has a direction; it is pulled to the future”.
In other words, we must not be pushed by the past, but be pulled to a new kind of future. Gruber called it purpose: only reorganizing your resources isn’t enough; if you aren’t being pulled to a somewhat desirable future vision, meaningful work cannot be done.
Therefore, if you want to do meaningful work, know what questions you are trying to answer and be ready to free yourself from certain dependencies in order to guarantee the best deal of autonomy to do meaningful work.
How have you been balancing your autonomy-dependence relationship?
How can you reorganize your resources to dedicate more time to meaningful work?