The Worth of Work
Most professional engineers work for pay, and that leads to
an interesting question: which is
more important, the work or the pay you get for it? I bring up that question after reading an essay on work by
the well-known medievalist C. S. Lewis.
In the essay, Lewis distinguished between two types of
work. The first type is work that
is worth doing for its own sake.
Some professions are automatically included in this classification: teachers (Lewis was a professor at
Oxford), doctors, pastors, and other members of the helping professions, for
instance. As long as members of
these groups do their work faithfully and competently, they should have no
problem looking themselves in the mirror and saying, “I’m glad I do what I do,
because it makes the world a better place.” There are other types of work that can fit into this first
category, and I’ll get to those in a minute.
The second kind of work is done merely to get a
paycheck. The thing you do for the
paycheck is almost irrelevant: it
is simply a means to the end of getting money. Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong about earning
money. In a fallen world, money
and economics are inescapable aspects of existence. But if you make money your No. 1 priority and aren’t too
particular about how you get it, you can end up doing things that, at best, are
unnecessary .....