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