How to Do the Work That Matters (When Most of It Doesn't)

Finding Our Humanity in an Age of Constant Busyness

I just got off a call with an old friend who, like a lot of people right now, feels completely underwater. Spread too thin by too many commitments and burdened by chronic stress, he spends most days rushing from one activity to the next, trying to keep up with the increasing demands on his time.

It’s not going well.

Photo by Gary Tou on Unsplash

We didn’t talk long, because he—God love him—had another appointment.

I felt for the guy. He seems to feel like the only way to get ahead is to pile on more things, which makes sense and is certainly something I’ve done. When nothing’s working, just do more. Throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. Maybe nothing, maybe something. The only way to find out is to try.

Unfortunately, when you do this, what tends to happen is that you just confuse yourself and everyone around you. People don’t know what to expect, because you seem so capable of doing it all and never ask for help.

Meanwhile, you feel like no matter what you do, it’s not enough, and more is always demanded. So you just don’t stop. You can’t, really. Can’t stop moving, can’t stop working, can’t stop doing it all—which leaves a person feeling not just exhausted but a little depressed and sometimes downright resentful. Why, after all, is everything so difficult for you and seemingly so easy for others?

I’d like to submit that it’s not, that most of us are in the same boat, and the best thing we can do is not further scatter our attention with mindless busywork.

Don’t do more. Take a beat, figure out what you are uniquely suited to do, and focus on that until you become exceptional at it.

This, I think, is the antidote to our current age of distraction and hyperactivity. We must pay attention, slow down, and learn to do a few things well.

It’s a risk, of course, especially when an abundance of obligations calls to you, but it’s a risk worth taking. All this incessant running around and trying a hundred things at once is not helping any of us. If anything, it’s wearing us down, causing more stress than we realize and sapping our creative energy.

It’s no surprise that we turn to tools like AI to help us solve everyday problems at work and home. We just don’t have enough time to live, so we need the machines to do it for us.

Soon, I think we’ll see more jobs replaced by these fast-thinking, fast-moving computers. And why not? Perhaps, in a way, this a good thing—because we never should have been trying to do so much in the first place.

Here’s my theory. I believe work, at least as we’ve known it for the past hundred years or so, is ending. Soon, it will become optional. Sure, you’ll have a job, but it won’t be anything like the workaday life most people find themselves in now.

In the future, your work will be something you do for a few hours a day at most, something to keep you occupied, to abate boredom and combat ennui. It’ll be a way to kill time.

If you’re lucky, it’ll be something you do that cannot be replicated by a machine—a craft, a trade, some vocation you are uniquely suited for that gives your life meaning and purpose.

And it is this second category I want to talk about now.

The Search for Vocation

At a fundamental level, work is something we humans need. Not in the “I need to pay bills” sense but in the “I need to do something with this burden of existence so I might as well build a desk, paint a picture, or tell jokes” sense.

Work tells you that you exist for a reason, even if it’s one you made up. It’s the accumulation of tasks you do in a day that are worth doing.

And in that sense, I think we will be doing work for the rest of our lives. So it does not benefit us to busy ourselves with too many pointless tasks. If we’re going to be working for the rest of our lives, why not pick something that is worth a lifetime?

The human mind does not multitask well. You can’t have a hundred purposes. That’s confusing and frustrating.

If your work, then, is defined by a long list of things you need to do, that work is meaningless. The mind needs something simple and clear to hold onto, a singular message it can tell itself over and over again: “This is why we’re doing this.”

Consider writing a book, which is, in fact, a complex project with a long list of tasks and deadlines associated with it—write this sentence, rewrite that one, reread that paragraph, finish the chapter, start a new one, read that research paper, email your editor, and so on—all of which may very well need to be done in a short time, perhaps even a day.

But when you ask an author what they’re working on, what do they say? They tell you what the book’s about: “I’m writing about the role of African Americans in the Civil War.” Or: “I want to write about the changing nature of relationships and dating in a post-pandemic world.”

They simplify it for you, and for themselves, so they can focus. There is some central purpose to the work, an organizing principle that allows everything to make sense. So it goes, I believe, with a human life.

Yes, we need things to do, whether those tasks include building a piece of furniture, getting your hands dirty in a garden, or solving complex problems—but the best kind of work is the kind that has some greater meaning behind it, something that tells you what you’re doing matters.

Which brings me back to the topic of vocation.

In my mind, vocation is the intersection of three distinct areas:

• your natural talents and gifts (all that “stuff” that makes you who you are);

• your lifelong passions and curiosities (the pursuits you’ve spent most of your life interested in and fascinated about); and

• what the world needs from you.

If I had to put it into a formula, it would look like this:

Unique talent + passion and curiosity + the needs of the world = vocation

Personally, I have spent a good chunk of my life focusing on that last piece. Many of us do. We become what we think others want.

The more I did this, though, the less I felt like there was much of me left, which made me even more insecure than I was before and even more desperate to please. And that led to me taking on even more responsibilities and obligations until my soul finally screamed, “Enough.”

This, by the way, is how you end up with a life you hate—or at least one in which you feel you are squandering your potential.

Listen to the Soul

It seems, sadly, more and more of us are feeling this way. The rules we played by for so long no longer work. The deal we made with reality is not worth the price.

We have given up too much of ourselves and have forgotten our passions and gifts in the process, all in favor of being productive, popular, or successful.

And now, it behooves us to consider undoing some of the damage. If the machines will soon be doing most of the work for us, anyway, why not consider your vocation now? Why not ask yourself, “What is mine and mine alone to do?”

What gets you excited or angry?

What do you believe ultimately matters and wished more people cared about?

What would it look like to bravely move towards that deeper work?

It does not do us much good to keep up with “the mass of men.” We should not be all things to all people.

What a soul longs for is meaning, not ceaseless activity. It wants authenticity, rest, and the quiet assurance that whatever you’re doing, it’s the right thing to do.

I could have asked ChatGPT to compose this article for me, prompting it with: “Write me a thousand-word piece in the style of Jeff Goins on why humans must do work that matters. Don’t make anything up, go easy on the ‘it’s not this, it’s that’ statements, and try to avoid going overboard on the em dashes.”

It might have worked, too. Maybe your reading experience would have been the same, give or take a few dashes, but mine would not have been.

Certainly, I could have saved an hour or two, but to what end? With art, the end does not justify the means. The point is the process.

Writing for me is thinking; I am trying to see what I believe in front of me, holding it up to scrutiny so that I can better understand myself.

This is the gift of vocation, or at least it can be. A soul needs more than performance—it needs truth. It wants some important task with which to grapple, not just levers to pull and buttons to push a la Homer Simpson’s humdrum job at the power plant. It wants a job that creates transformation in the doer of that job.

Your soul, it could be said, is that force inside of you, guiding you to and through life’s changes. It’s what is responsible for the evolutions you’ve already undergone as an individual and the ones you’re wrestling with now. Your soul is that quiet voice of change within.

In this time of increasing automation and mechanization of so many human tasks, we need some work that is still soulful, work we can partner with to experience the transformation we yearn for.

Be Careful of the Tools You Use

The paradox of technology is that as we use it, it uses us back.

Very rarely does a tool just do what it was designed to do. It almost always impacts the wielder. Look at the smartphone as an obvious example: what it has done to our attention spans, our daily lives, and the world at large.

We must be aware of what work we put our hands to, and what tools we choose to do that work with, all of which impact us in measurable ways. And we must be wary of just doing things to do them. Busywork is not what makes us human. Soulful work is.

A new world is upon us, anyone can see that, and we must keep finding ways to be human. To connect with ourselves and our work, as well others, in meaningful ways. And I believe this must involve the soul, the ghost beyond the machine.

No, I don’t think it will be easy to slow down and focus on one thing you do for the rest of your life, but I do think that is the only real advantage we humans have left.

Finding what you are uniquely suited to do—that is, your vocation—just might be why you were put on this earth. But such a search takes time, attention, and focus. And if you and I don’t stop our busyness, if we keep trying to do and be more, we may not have any space left to do what is ours.

What then will we be—and will we dare to call it human?

“I have done what is mine to do . . . ”
—St. Francis of Assisi

If you liked this, be sure to check out Jeff Burningham’s The Last Book Written by a Human, in which he makes a strong case for humanity thriving in the age of AI (and how we can do that).

And be sure to read this piece by Megan Hyatt Miller: “The Only Question That Matters About AI.”

And lastly, I’d like to turn the question to you: What are you doing in this era of history when it seems increasingly difficult to be human?