What is your work now?

TWO EMAILS LAND in my inbox in succession, lining up as if they mean to work together. The first, from Sabrina Hersi Issa, calls out that the Trump administration’s assault on government is also a war on work. On the work of truth-telling, on the work of making sense of things, on the work of order and care and safety. The second comes from Liz Neeley, who notes that the proposed cuts—really, that’s too light a word, these are eviscerations—to the NIH and USAID, among others, amount to a death knell for thousands of jobs, not only within government but in the universities and other institutions who depend on government support.

This all comes on the heels of a boom in so-called AI, an industry whose overwhelming and oft stated purpose is to automate people out of jobs; and after years of round after round after round of layoffs, all handled with a studied carelessness that is designed to instill a deep sense of precarity. Whether or not most of those jobs are truly gone forever is no where near as likely as the oligarchs want us to think it is; but the alternative—that a great number of jobs are rapidly being deskilled, diminished, and demoralized—is even more dispiriting.

Issa references former Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s assertion that “we are not at war, we are at work.” Baron was claiming that if journalists presume themselves to be at war, they may abandon the principles that make journalism what it is; that a wartime mentality would subvert the very principles that undergird the work. I think this imagines journalism to be a fragile, very small kind of work; a work that cannot stand up to the pressure of tyrants and criminals, of billionaires and wannabe despots. A work that cannot recognize that there are times one must take cover, and times one must fight back. It likewise seems to preclude others launching a war on the work itself, and the necessity of a response. But a subject of war is at war, like it or not. As Issa says, and as Neeley capably demonstrates, “Whether or not we choose to accept it, the war has come to work.”

I’m wary of wartime analogies. We’re awash in them—the war on drugs, the war on terror. War too often seems a shorthand for something unwinnable and wasteful, something that directs a ton of bodies and money in profligate, haphazard, and bloody ways. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of “war” as we’re going to get. But these metaphors are the tools of the people who wage the war. What of the people who are subject to it?

What’s under assault right now isn’t jobs. A great many jobs are being extinguished, and each lost job is a measure of misery for many people. But the greater heartbreak is the loss of work—the separation from meaningful, changeful work, and from the impacts of that work, from the world that comes into being when our work is oriented towards the living. It’s telling that so many of the jobs currently under attack are those of technology people performing civil service: these are people who chose work that was less glamorous, and less remunerative, than the standard tech path, but also more purposeful, more likely to actually deliver on tech’s otherwise empty promise of a better world. The message is clear: you will work for the needs of capital, or you will work not at all. That means it’s not enough to simply get the jobs back; we have to fight for the work, too.

When talking to people about their work, one question I often ask is, “what is your work now?” Not what is your job or career, but what is your work. Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us. This is the work that rarely shows up on a job description but we can never let go of, the work we yearn for even when we’re tired, the work we grieve when we’re cleaved from it.

This isn’t to ask what’s on the to-do list. Tasks and chores are sometimes in support of our work, sometimes at odds with it, sometimes simply the daily rhythm of being a body. This is to take a moment to look up from the ground, to peer out at that little bit of horizon you can just make out between buildings, to think about where you want your next steps to take you. It’s to do the daring and life-giving work of imagining change, to have the audacity to believe that the way things are is not the way things must be.

Maybe your work is to make sense of what’s happening, to gather up the millions of breaking news headlines into something that helps beleaguered bodies and minds better understand the moment. Maybe it’s to be a listener, the person others can come to when they need to share their fears and grief, to have those fears held and acknowledged instead of dismissed. Maybe it’s to organize, to create the containers for people to come together and imagine different worlds, and then to begin to define the steps to get there. Maybe it’s to refuse the nihilism and despair that the warmongers want you to feel, to cultivate a sense of peace that everyone around you can draw from. Maybe it’s to do your art, art that gives you life and life to everyone who encounters it, art that keeps us going on the darkest of days.

Maybe your work is simply to refuse to do what you’re told.

I find that asking what is my work now? is a kind of bracing, steadying move, like leaning into the walking stick I forgot was in my hand. It won’t take all my weight, but it gives me some connection to the ground, some extra power in these sometimes tired legs, the energy I need to look up. Because the to-do list will still be there no matter what, and you do need to respond to that email, and someone has to get to the grocery store if dinner is going to happen. But what keeps you going isn’t all that. What keeps you going is knowing what you’re good at, knowing what you have to give, and then giving it all you’ve got. Some days, that may seem like nothing much; but millions of small steps, one after another, can cover a lot of ground. And if you look around, you’ll see you aren’t the only one moving towards a better future. Lots of us are right there with you. And we’ve all got our work to do.