Your Money or Your Life

“shop till we drop”

“nine to five till you’re sixty-five”

Just as with money, our concept of work consists of a patchwork of contradictory beliefs, thoughts and feelings—notions we absorbed from our parents, our culture, the media and our life experience. The following quotations highlight the incongruity of our different definitions of work:
E. F. Schumacher says:
. . . the three purposes of human work [are] as follows:
◆First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.
◆Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.
◆Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.1
The late economist Robert Theobald tells us:
Work is defined as something that people do not want to do and money as the reward that compensates for the unpleasantness of work.2