“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” — Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness.

I

AI is taking my work.

My eyes ache after nearly a dozen uninterrupted hours staring at a screen’s glare. Empty coffee cups of all sizes (filter in the morning, cappuccino at lunch, the late-afternoon espresso) have piled up next to me. The office lights have turned off because I’m the last one on my floor. I get up to activate the motion sensors, so they come back on.

That deck is looking sleek, though. Years of consulting experience have taught me the craft of slide design. Every page has a clear message, supported by data, analysis, and insight. Intense, sometimes tedious hours of interviews, workshops, and number crunching led to this. I email my project partner to review it. I’m exhausted and slightly anxious to get feedback, given how much has gone into this. I close my laptop and call it a day.

AI now does all that work in minutes.

That’s a ton of effort saved.

The part of me who believes in the virtue of work, however, feels uneasy about this. I tweak those slides even when they look good because it feels like something, all those years honing those skills, is being taken from me.

I conclude that those slides still need a lot of fixing. Hallucinations and clumsy imperfections everywhere. I’d bet I could spot an AI slide from miles away, and the proud slide creator in me feels mildly insulted when I do.

At the current rate of progress, however, that won’t be the case for much longer. I remind myself that this is a good thing, adapt, and do my work with these new tools as best I can. Yet I find my emotions—a mix of relief and resentment—confusing.

What will it do to my job? And what will it do to yours?

II

One perspective is that technology has always been a part of human experience. We are homo technicus, living in symbiosis with machines. Technology makes work more productive, which leads to higher incomes, which leads to more demand for shiny new stuff and new services, which requires someone to produce these, so we get new jobs. Of course, some outdated jobs will disappear in the process. In recent history alone, with the advent of computers and the internet, many jobs have disappeared. No more video rental clerks or photo lab technicians, but hey, now we have influencers!

Another, gloomier perspective is that AI differs from any prior technology shift because it will soon outsmart us (look, the thing codes itself now); it can be applied across a very wide array of tasks; and it can act quasi of its own accord. A job market that rewards knowledge above much else is in serious jeopardy if super-intelligent machines run the show without supervision. Not even the influencers are safe. Already, we see fake AI influencers amassing tons of followers on social media. Save the influencers!

But neither perspective questions the role jobs play in our lives.

III

What’s so bad about a machine taking your job?

As a child, I loved to play office. I picked up on what I saw as the essence of a job: structure, identity, and status.

The fireman wears a helmet and acts heroically to save others. The CEO wears a suit, types on his laptop, and makes the important decisions. The clothes I wear and the role I play were my idea of a job. A job was like a character, and it was fun to play one.

In a way, that wasn’t too far from reality. A big part of what I enjoy about my real job today is that it gives me structure, identity, and status. The ritual of sitting in a meeting, wearing a dress shirt, and introducing myself as a consultant is a big part of the appeal.

The tradeoff is that I get less time to define my identity outside of a job. What I do defines me, and if I could, I’d spend more time reading and writing, for example (and maybe I’d finally become half-decent at it). I’d spend more time cooking, or skiing, or on the jiu-jitsu mats, or with my friends and family.

If I lost my job, I’d miss the work itself, or at least parts of it. I enjoy doing something well and collaborating with my team. But I also recognise that work for work’s sake misses the point. Work is about realising an outcome, producing a good or a service that benefits others. Some of that requires grunt work, unpleasant administrative tasks, and other monotony. If AI can do it more efficiently, especially the not-so-fun parts, then it should do that work.

Don’t find reassurance in the hope that AI will create new jobs or fear it will take them away; embrace the possibility of working less instead.

The problem, of course, is money. That’s where the anxiety about AI and jobs is coming from. I am not deeply afraid of working less, but I am afraid of getting paid less. If a machine suddenly does most of our work, then why pay us for it?

There’s a temptation to fill newfound free time with arbitrary work to appear busy and useful. That’s an equally rational and wasteful response. If we all act this way, we revert to kids pretending. We play office.

Solving the issue of income distribution in an AI-dominated future will take some growing up. I won’t solve for it here. Instead, I’ll be back at my desk, looking at slides that are already good and trying, for once, to leave them alone.

Let me tell you about this one time I got my heart broken.

It all started with a regular intro call with a candidate, let’s call him Simon, whom I was trying to recruit for a job. I had done my research on him, tailored my pitch to perfection, and woken up that morning full of swagger. The vibe was on from the start of the call. The small talk was fluid; we shared a few laughs, and the job was just what he was looking for. It turned out we had a lot in common, and a connection was formed. Simon made the first move and suggested we meet up for coffee. When we did, he was charming, witty, interesting and an excellent listener.

I came back to the office buzzing and told my more experienced, perhaps more cynical, colleague about my new friend. His response:

“He must really want the job”

That set off a gentle spiral of overthinking. Here I was believing that I had formed a genuine connection with someone. And maybe I had. But equally, or perhaps more likely, was the possibility that this person just wanted to charm me in the hopes I would tip the scales in his favour and ultimately land him this job. Was I being used? How dare he! But, come to think of it, I hadn’t called him up with all that energy and joviality to make a friend either: I had done it to secure a candidate. So who’s the hypocrite now?

Friends with the right people

The greatest marketeers discovered that the best way to make a sale is to build an emotional connection. People buy things from people they like, people who smile, people who seem trustworthy, people who call them by their name. But it’s not just in sales; the truth is, in life, it pays to have friends in the right places. Thus, the art of “winning friends and influencing people” (as popularised by Dale Carnegie) became a cornerstone of corporate performance and success. People in the business world are incentivised to befriend people, colleagues, service providers, potential customers, and everyone else, regardless of whether they are naturally interested in them. They are encouraged to build relationships that might someday yield them a useful outcome. To make friends with the right people.

Every successful executive I’ve ever met shares the common belief that it is possible to be a genuine friend while simultaneously hoping to one day gain something from that relationship. In sales (business development, customer acquisition, partnerships, you name it), where this relationship-building is most encouraged, the value of friendships can be directly quantified by how much money they pay you or your company. You can measure just how much you’re benefiting from each of your friends.

True believers in this practice see nothing wrong with this. On the contrary, they would argue that their interests and those of their friends/clients are aligned. They only make a sale if the client/friend needs their services, the agreed price is a fair market price, and the service delivered is of higher quality because of the deep and longstanding relationship with the client/friend. Everybody wins. And there is merit to that argument. A business transaction need not be zero-sum, even if all parties are trying to maximise their own economic gains from said transaction.

Trust issues

As the old saying goes, time is money. In life, you only have so much of the former, and in business your goal is to convert it into the latter. So you have to be efficient with your time. There are only so many evenings in the week; who you choose to spend those with is important. You might want to have dinner with your friend Annie, but she hasn’t brought you any business for three years, and you have a target to meet. Instead, you might be compelled to dine with the much less amusing but much more lucrative Connor, who, despite his lacklustre stories, always comes to you with new projects and single-handedly makes up 40% of your revenue. This feels like a reasonable balance: sometimes you have to do things that advance your career, other times you can do things for your personal enjoyment.

But what about Connor? He doesn’t know you’re inviting him to dinner because he pays your company for services. He thinks you two are friends. And he thinks that because you spent the past five years convincing him of that, with all those Christmas cards and birthday wishes and invitations to your wedding. He’s met your kids for Christ’s sake.

Who wants to be Connor?

When building relationships with people who might have a professional interest in doing so, you can never rule out the possibility that interaction is engineered. The simple fact that your counterpart might be, to some degree, motivated by the possibility of a future sale, business partnership, or career advancement colours the whole interaction. As long as there might be a selfish reason to befriend you, you can never be sure you aren’t Connor. Where an ulterior motive may exist, complete trust cannot.

True intentions

The problem with this situation comes down to one thing: conflict of interest.

A conflict of interest is any situation in which someone has multiple incentives that aren’t aligned. In many areas of life, there are laws against conflicts of interest. Politicians, judges, doctors, financial advisors, journalists, academics, and even charity workers must disclose conflicts of interest. Society disapproves of situations where there are competing incentives and seeks to limit their occurrence. And for good reason: letting someone believe you are acting in their best interest when you have other motives is dishonest and unethical. It also dramatically increases the chances of not acting in their best interest.

But in business, conflicts of interest are so commonplace, built into the very foundations, so openly present that we often forget it is there. Everyone in business is acting in their own self-interest. The smart operators are acting in long-term self-interest, which can sometimes involve sacrificing short-term gain for your benefit, in the interest of convincing you they’re looking out for you and building trust. Trust which they will later use for their own gain. This isn’t cynicism; this is the nature of the game. Anyone in business knows that while things might not be zero-sum, there is never a good reason to act in someone else’s economic interest unless it might benefit you down the line.

This is incompatible with what a friendship should be: a relationship founded on a genuine and altruistic desire for the other’s happiness, and a willingness to sacrifice for that end.

Healthy boundaries

So what happened with Simon?

Despite my strongest endorsements, he didn’t end up getting the job. But that didn’t stop us from keeping in touch. When I moved companies, he was among the first to congratulate me and suggest we catch up. We met up in person once more and exchanged a few phone calls. I never came across another good opportunity for him, which was a shame, and a few years ago I left the recruitment industry altogether. Looking back through our correspondence, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was the one who let the conversation die out. It might be that, as much as I sincerely liked Simon, my motivations for spending time with him were mainly professional. Or the fear that my cynical colleague was right, and that Simon only kept in touch for professional gain, made it impossible for me to believe the connection was real.

It is not to say that a genuine relationship cannot emerge from a professional setting. People meet lifelong friends and spouses through work all the time. So what is the difference?

Here is my rule for friendships:

Your therapist can’t be your best man, but your best man can once have been your therapist. You shouldn’t have a romantic relationship with your colleague, but you can have a beautiful marriage to a former colleague. You can’t be friends with someone you benefit from, but you can be friends with someone you used to benefit from.

If you want friends, you have to surrender the benefits. If you want the benefits, you can’t call them your friends.

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When I was a child, my father would always remind me to look others in the eye when talking to them. It’s a show of respect and common decency to acknowledge others by meeting their gaze, eye to eye, he’d say. I was a shy kid, so, to my annoyance, I was frequently called out for failing to do so in public social encounters. He was right, of course, and I learned my lesson; most people have. Then I entered the workplace and noticed that eye contact is becoming increasingly rare.

Have you ever tried making eye contact with someone on a web call? It’s pretty difficult. First of all, you can barely make out their eyes - small and pixelated on a screen. That is, if you’re even trying in the first place. If you’re anything like me, your attention will be tested as email and chat notifications pop up while your colleague is giving that presentation. They fight for your attention amongst a grid of other virtual avatars - including a mirror image of yourself (hmmm … is my hair looking ok?) - and most likely some PowerPoint slide at the fore.

But even if you withstand the frequent distractions, hearing another person’s words is not the same as hearing what they truly mean. Most communication is nonverbal and conveyed through our eyes, gestures, and body language. We miss out on all that when we only communicate via screens.

And it’s not just web calls. There are, of course, ‘hybrid’ meetings, meaning you’ll be in a room full of people, all not looking at each other, but at an oversized television screen prominently placed at the centre of the room. The virtual head of the table commands your focus. Invariably, the glaring lights of digital avatars compel your attention so much more easily than the real-life colleague sitting next to you - even when you speak, you face away from the faces physically there.

When you’re not in a meeting, sitting at your open floor desk (‘designed to facilitate collaboration’) is not much different. Others surround you; the room is full of people, bodies, faces. Yet where do you look and where do you place your attention? Of course, it’s squarely ahead, not left, not right - blinders on - there’s a screen in front of you.

Time for a well-deserved coffee break - at the kiosk of your office coffee shop, however, you’re yet again greeted by a screen. ‘Thank you for shopping with us - please select your payment method …’ You check your phone as the barista prepares your order. ‘Order number 63?’ Thank you, and back to work - no more conversations by the water cooler. The next virtual agenda item awaits.

If you work in any office job, you at least recognise what I just described. Screen-free moments are becoming increasingly rare.

We tend to be very aware of the distracting allure of screens in our personal lives. Who doesn’t feel at least somewhat addicted to their phones? And we take steps to limit our screen time outside of work. No phones before sleep. No phones at the dinner table. A more mindful life without the mesmerising glare of the digital realm. Why not apply the same wisdom to our working lives?

We talk about the ill effects of screens for children, cognisant of the importance of real-life social interactions in developing healthy social skills. Calls to ban or limit phones at schools are becoming more commonplace, driven by evidence that the iPhone generation, which Jonathan Haidt calls the anxious generation, is more distracted, indeed more anxious, and more divorced from the physical world than any before. But why wouldn’t what’s harmful for the younger generation be harmful for us too?

If we heed the wisdom we already apply in our personal lives and try to teach the younger generation, consider the radical idea that minimising screen time makes us more effective, even happier, at work.

Face-to-face human interaction - looking others in the eye, reading their body language, feeling their physical presence in three-dimensional space - is a basic requirement for fruitful communication.

The crux of the issue is that using screens merely gives us the illusion of human interaction. A virtual meeting is a useful tool, but substantively not very different from an old-fashioned phone call. Yes, virtual work means we can collaborate with teams across borders and work flexibly from home - real benefits worth preserving. But it’s no substitute for presence.

When cognitive work becomes increasingly automated, effective teamwork becomes the defining competitive advantage. Teams that replace the illusion of effective communication with real, robust conversations will outrun those that don’t.

Of course, so much of the output of modern work is increasingly digital - slide decks, spreadsheets, emails, tickets resolved, lines of code. And don’t get me wrong, screens and computers are awesome tools. The point is not to reject these tools, but to use them wisely and intentionally.

If we prioritise real conversations over digital ones, our digital work can flourish as well. Deep work becomes possible only when we go on ‘do not disturb’ and focus on a specific task, not while typing during a virtual meeting. So setting a structure around when to use screens, rather than using them for everything, all the time, and all at once, is a step in the right direction.

Reversing the screen saturation trend, back towards a more socially connected workplace based on physical, face-to-face interactions, is no easy task. The only way to achieve it is a greater collective acceptance of screen-free work. It could be running important meetings without any laptops. Or smaller efforts, like making a point of looking at the speaker in the room rather than at the big screen, which invariably pulls your attention. Like being online, being offline has its own network effect. You cannot do it alone.

Have you ever found yourself asking: why am I working so damn hard?

This question may have arisen during a particularly knotty late-night study session, or in the midst of a toxic relationship gone on too long, or when practicing a move or musical sequence for the fifteen-hundredth time. Whatever the situation, when that doubt strikes, it shatters the jar that was holding your whole life together. The easy option is to pretend you never asked and carry on as you were, held together by blurry vision and short memory. The harder, and (temporarily) much more destructive option, is to go all the way down the rabbit hole until you find an answer that either allows you to carry on as you were with newfound conviction, or sets you on a path more in line with what your soul demands.

Ask anyone starting their career why they work and the answer is straightforward: they work for the pay. Ideally, their job will also provide challenge, impact, and a community, but the primary reason most people work is to pay off debt, pay the bills, fund their lives, and become financially stable. It’s a clear transaction: you exchange time and effort for money, which buys security and freedom. Often, before even entering the workforce, the promise of future financial independence is what drives hard work at school or university or sports or arts. The foundational idea is that hard work leads to success, success leads to wealth, wealth guarantees security freedom.

But to be successful in any organisation, time and effort alone are not enough. You have to play by its rules. This applies to everyone, from blue-collar workers to white-collar knowledge workers. Even disruptive entrepreneurs who transform industries have to play by the laws of economics: they have to make a product that generates demand and continually innovate to outcompete challengers. Success requires you to spend more and more of your time doing things not for your enjoyment, but because you have to. Making calls, sending emails, producing reports, networking, reading the latest business news, following up on up-and-coming entrepreneurs, attending team events, thinking commercially. Repeat these tasks enough, and they become a big part of what you are to the world. Hence, the third cost in the transaction is conformity. We end up with:

time + effort + conformity = money

money = security + freedom.

That freedom doesn’t come immediately; it’s a deferred reward. A lifelong exercise in delayed gratification. But is there a cost of sacrificing some freedom now for more freedom later?

It starts early in life. While completing your studies, you strategically choose which internships you pursue. The undergraduate degree itself was carefully selected to maximise your employment prospects, the university too. Earlier still, in high school, you chose subjects which would open doors to top universities. As far back as primary school you were told to work on your math skills because of how important they would be later on. Your parents might even have been strategic in their selection of extracurricular activities to bolster your CV before you even knew what that was. It could even have started before you left the womb; have you heard that fetuses that listen to Mozart in-utero are more likely to become CEOs?

When you’re a child or an adolescent, it feels obvious what you’re doing for your own enjoyment and what you’re doing because you’re supposed to. When you’re taking your first steps into adulthood, you still feel a clear line between the “real you” and the one that’s optimising for success. Speaking for myself, I retained that conviction heading into my first job, even though that job required I wear a suit and tie every day, something I had promised myself I would never do. A small concession, I told myself. Purely aesthetic.

The things we’re supposed to do are not always void of enjoyment. It can feel good to find a great candidate, satisfy a customer, put together a good presentation, to be recognised through a promotion and to feel valued through higher pay. Over time, your emails become crisp, your confidence in meetings grows, your pride in your work expands, and those things you were doing because you were supposed to become a bigger and bigger part of who you are. I stopped minding wearing the suit. In fact, I grew to like it. It looked good on me, and I looked good in it. I even bought a nice overcoat for the colder weather, and that wasn’t mandated by the dress code. A few short years later, it felt strange not to wear a shirt to work.

As you become older, the question of what you do for work comes increasingly earlier in conversations. It becomes a way people understand you, a principal way people come to think of who you are. That’s my friend Paul, he’s a Doctor. Have you met the neighbour Lisa? She’s in Finance. Your cousin is no longer your cousin, she’s a lawyer. And you? Who are you?

For a long time, my job was to find candidates for executive roles. An interesting but repetitive process. My output and performance were increasingly measured by the volume and quality of the candidates I could generate. Locked in my bedroom, working remotely during COVID, I started to feel like a robot whose inputs were roles and whose outputs were candidates. Every day I sent emails, took calls, interviewed candidates, took notes, wrote reports, sent more emails, sharpened my pitch to candidates, searched for new, better candidates, sent even more emails, took more calls, wrote more reports, took better notes, wrote more impactful reports, and on and on and on. After work, I rotted on the couch or in my bed passively watching TV. During those days, the sum total of my existence was limited to the finding, assessing and presenting of candidates. I confided in a mentor of mine, telling her I felt like a candidate generation machine. She put it bluntly: “That’s what you are”. Who was I? I wasn’t Tom; I was a candidate generation machine.

How did I get from the guy who said he’d never change for a job to someone who was entirely consumed by it?

It was the incentives. Economic and environmental incentives to think, behave and act in a certain way. Economic incentives in the form of pay: a salary in the immediate term, the potential for performance-based annual bonuses in the medium term, and the promise of a lifetime of seven-figure earnings if I made it to Partner. Environmental incentives in the way people inside the company respected, praised and lauded successful Partners. To become a Partner was to become part of the elite crew of cool (and rich) kids. These forces were so powerful that, even after quitting, it took me over a year outside of the industry to remember that I never wanted to become a Partner in Executive Search. For most of my life I didn’t even know what Executive Search was. It’s really not that important to me - to the “real me” at least.

But hey, it wasn’t all bad. A lot of it was interesting, I learned a lot, and I earned enough to later have the freedom to quit. Looking back, I would do it all over again. And sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I had gone all the way. What would it be like to be successful? When you reach that pinnacle you set out for all those decades ago, and you now have the financial freedom to be and do what you want to?

From speaking to countless executives and business leaders who did reach that point, here’s what I know. You won’t be unhappy, you will be proud of what you’ve achieved, you will feel the safety and freedom that comes with the earnings. It’s not a bad place to be. But these people’s satisfaction with their lives reveals something about the transaction they made.

What you do on a daily basis not only defines how others perceive you, it defines how you perceive yourself. Beyond perceptions, your work determines your impact on the world and society surrounding you. It alters your worldview and the way you move within it. Externally and internally, what you do comes to define you. Your work profoundly shapes who you are.

In other words: you are what you do.

If I had gone all the way and become a Partner, I wouldn’t wake up one morning and quit my job to follow my “true passion” (if I even knew what that was). Being a Partner would have become my passion. Exchanging work for the prospect of future wealth and freedom means not just sacrificing time and effort. It means accepting to become something different. It means allowing whoever promises you wealth to shape what you do, and therefore to shape who you are.

Acquiescence doesn’t just defer your freedom, it changes what you would do with it.

If you’re planning a career of hard work with the ultimate goal being freedom through financial gains, be aware of this trade-off. Whoever promises you wealth promises also to shape you.

You want to be free. You are now. If you wait, you might not be.

Some of the work you’ll do this week is going to be a waste of time. Some of the hardest work you'll do this week won't count as work to anyone. 

That's not your fault. The issue is something you have come to accept without questioning it: the definition of work. 

If you've ever felt empty after a ‘productive’ day full of meetings, guilty for an ‘unproductive’ day out in nature, or slightly ashamed when you said ‘I’m not working’ whilst you spent all day taking care of your baby, this essay is for you. And don't worry, I won't tell you to quit your job and go travel to South America. I'll leave you with something more useful. 

What is work, really?

Work is not a job, even though we typically use these terms interchangeably:

‘I gotta go to work.

I’m late for work.

I’m out of work.

Now, I’m looking for work.’

A job is a much narrower idea: an exchange of time and effort for money. 

It’s also a recent idea. The modern job emerged sometime in eighteenth-century Europe with the rise of factories (the first places to house industrial machinery). 

Artisans who had previously worked from home began clocking in and out. The daily grind was born. And it really was daily then, as it took about another two hundred years before the emergence of the two-day weekend, and people finally joyfully declared: ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ 

Even your hard-earned paycheck, which you spend on the weekend, is simply an idea that emerged at some point. There was a point in human history when money did not exist. Did people show up to work then? Of course they did. It’s hard to imagine hunter-gatherers going on strike.

‘Listen, man, I know we gotta light this fire, and hunt for this food, but I won’t do it until you pay me. And I want better working hours too. No more overtime!’

In an age before money, people still worked to ensure their own survival and the community's flourishing. It was work based on reciprocity, trust, and shared purpose.

The power of money lies in how it extends the circle of collaboration far beyond the people you care about. It is no longer the people in your immediate circle or your tribe who drive your efforts. Your efforts are now guided by the interconnected web of ‘I-owe-yous’ we call cash. 

Money also allows us to specialise. It makes work more effective. I wouldn't know how to build the laptop I’m writing on, but I indirectly paid many others, each focused on a specific aspect, to do it for me. We thus get more laptops at a lower cost. Especially compared to a scenario where I build the laptop all by myself!

Yet even today, in a world dominated by money, we work without pay. Within the family, we take care of our children, our elderly parents, and the household chores - what we call ‘care work’. 

So, work is neither a job nor a paycheck. 

Work is any effort applied to a purpose, paid or unpaid, caring or not.

It is not only what you do to earn a living or to take care of your family, but also going to the gym to be healthy; it’s comforting your friend when they need you. 

What then isn’t work? All that lacks either effort or purpose. Effort without purpose is a waste of time. 

The definition may be very broad, but it forces the question of which of your efforts actually have purpose. 

Keep this in mind, and you close your laptop without guilt after you finish the deliverable that actually moves the needle, instead of completing yet another task that doesn't. That hike in nature now counts as work too.  A full day taking care of your child, rocking them to sleep in your arms, becomes one to feel proud of. 

But before you close your laptop now, write down the five biggest efforts you anticipate this week - activities that require mental or physical energy and time - and next to each, their purpose. And if you can't, reconsider why you're doing it. Those activities are prime candidates for wasted effort.

On the other hand, some things on there you may not have considered work at all, but if they serve a purpose, then they sure are. 

Now, with that, it's time to get to work. 

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We launched re:work with a question: Why do you work? 

Years of asking senior business leaders this very question turned into a framework - the Four Motivators. These are the drivers that most clearly motivate you: people, challenge, impact, money (see the full essay).

You may already have an answer in mind. But whatever you end up saying to yourself - or to others - often doesn’t reflect your deeper motivations, nor does it reflect the trade-offs you inevitably make.

If you've never thought about it, then you will struggle to find meaning in your work.

If you think this sounds like a lot of deep introspection, then you're right.

But it’s worth it.

Once you are clear about your motivations, you’ll find that work becomes in service of your bigger vision. And that gives you direction.

So, to help you kick-start this process, we've developed a simple test.

→ [Find out why you work]

We also hope to use this as a survey to learn more about the real trade-offs people like you make. (And go beyond the hyper-selective sample of Apex corporate execs that informed Tom’s original hypothesis.)

So be part of the story and tell us why you work.

And keep doing the hard self-reflection along the way!

Tom & David

I worked in Executive Search, recruiting top-level professionals into C-suite positions. On paper, it’s an interesting, exclusive, impactful and lucrative job. The people I interacted with on a daily basis were exceedingly successful executives. The roles I was hiring for were accessible only to the best of the best, individuals who had spent decades clawing their way up the corporate ladder. These people had dedicated their lives to their professions, to their work, and had become the best in their fields. Their apparent passion for their careers felt alien to me.

So I took to asking them: why do you work?

I figured, who better to help me on my existential quest than these apex corporate professionals? If anyone can articulate why they work, and why I should keep working, it will be them. I gathered thousands of answers over the years, from people of different generations, nationalities and backgrounds, religions, education levels and political affiliations.

I was first shocked by how many were unable to answer the question. I discovered the majority of these senior business leaders had never stopped to consider why they did what they did. But with patience and more refined questioning, I was able to establish a pattern.

There are three reasons people work, and one reason people work in business.

The first reason is People. Everyone wants to work with good people. No one wants to work with difficult people. Life’s too short to work with difficult people.

The second motivator is Challenge. Humans need to be challenged. But it has to be the right amount of challenge. Too easy and it’s not engaging; too difficult and it’s demoralising and draining. The exact nature of the challenge matters, and varies from person to person, but the urge to be pushed just outside one’s comfort zone is universal.

The third (and grandest) is Impact. Of the three, impact is the broadest, most personal, and most vulnerable to changing over time. In general, people want to do good. To change the world, even if just a little bit. To contribute to the arc of humanity’s shared history. If possible, to be remembered. Ultimately, to have mattered. What qualifies as impact? It can really be anything. From something as small as saving a company 10% in cloud server costs through incremental efficiencies, to something as intangible as increasing the happiness of one’s team, to something as grand as building out 10GW of renewable energy. More often than not, regardless of whether they achieve what they set out to, people are always able to find some impact in the work they are doing. If they aren’t, they won’t be doing that work for long.

These are the three things people seek in their jobs. People, Challenge and Impact. But none of those explain why you would pursue a career in business. You could, conceivably, find great people, a challenging role and a major impact coaching handball to seven-year-olds. So what draws people to the business world?

It’s money. It usually goes unsaid because it just feels a bit gauche to mention it. Or because people assume it’s obvious that they work for pay and it goes without saying. There is nothing wrong with being explicit about it. In addition to needing it to survive, money also buys security, comfort and freedom. And, perhaps most importantly, with money comes social capital. For better or for worse, material wealth is one of the main ways society ranks people’s standing, competence and desirability - if not to say their value. For good reason, the fourth motivation for work and the main reason people work in business is Money.

In the latter days of my career, I found myself in a crisis. I was successful: I had been promoted multiple times, the hours were good, the money was great, the job entailed speaking with interesting and accomplished people. But I wasn’t fulfilled, and so I wasn’t happy. I thought back to moments earlier in my career where I had felt more engaged in work and more satisfied. I set out to understand what had changed using these four motivators as a framework. Not: why do I work; why did I work?

When I first started working, I was ambitious, impressionable, naive and young. I wanted to change the world, and prove myself in the process. I joined a prestigious, competitive company whose mission was, quite literally, to “change the world, one leadership team at a time”. My motivation: Challenge + Impact.

Over time, work became less novel and more repetitive. The challenge became about speed and volume (a reality made clear when my mentor called me a “candidate generation machine”). Though the challenge no longer interested me, I had by that point made friends in the company. I had grown attached to a team which made me feel valued, respected and important. Plus, I still believed I was changing the world. My motivations had shifted; they were now: Impact + People.

Later, the impact that I had once attributed to myself began to feel artificial. My work seemed to make less and less of a difference, and the knowledge that if I stopped doing it, someone else would step in and do it just the same made me feel utterly impactless. But I was still attached to that great team, and they kept me going. And this crisis in purpose coincided with a jump in pay, which proved quite an alluring benefit. During this third phase, my motivations were: People + Money.

After a few years, I left that first company and joined a new, sexier, younger, and (most importantly) higher-paying company. I suffered through the emotional pain of leaving behind the team I had grown so linked to. The group I joined was composed of equally great people, but the attachment didn’t exist. The job was the same, so my cynicism for its impact persisted. And the challenge was also largely unchanged. I found myself reduced to only one motivation: Money.

I started working to change the world and prove myself. And yet, I was seduced. I told myself I could find people, challenge and impact outside of work, but my time and energy were absorbed by work. Predictably, phase four created greater disillusionment, boredom, frustration, and an urge to go do something else, somewhere else.

Finding fulfilment from work comes down to finding the right role for the right person, something I was paid to do for other people, but haven’t done for myself. But to find the right role, you have to start by establishing what matters most to you. How do you prioritise between challenge, impact, people and money? Why do you work?

What role does work have to play in our lives?

Whether corporate or entrepreneurial, individual or collective, paid or unpaid, our work defines us.

Too often, we make choices about work based on unchallenged assumptions. It’s easier to turn on autopilot and follow the pre-determined script: go to a good school, get a respectable job, be happy.

Until one day you find yourself questioning your decisions. Did I choose this? Is this what I want to spend my life doing? Do I believe in the work I’m doing? Do I enjoy it? Does my work bring me a sense of purpose, fulfilment, belonging? Do I need it to?

We followed that script to the letter and started our careers together: same place, same company.

Five years later, Tom left his high-flying career assessing and examining the choices of top executives to turn that examination on himself. Removed from corporate and commercial incentives, Tom explores the nature of work in different settings to discover what constitutes meaningful effort and what leaves us feeling empty.

David chose to stay on his trajectory, seeking to prove fulfilment and happiness are not incompatible with a successful career. Both in his job as consultant and outside it, David develops strategies for working better, balancing performance and purpose to find peace while excelling professionally.

Our paths diverged; the questions about work remained.

re:work is an intention to open this conversation to the world. Reflecting on work’s role in our lives, reconsidering how we work, and reaffirming why we work.

What you can expect from us: one essay every two weeks, alternating between the two of us. There are no simple answers, and we believe the truth is uncovered through tension, so you can expect other eclectic and varied voices to join in over time.

Together, we’ll explore the deep questions about work openly: what work is, why we work, how we work, and how technology might change that. We doubt we’ll find all the answers, but we know this project will help us find more conviction in where and how we choose to work. We hope it does the same for you.

Tom & David