Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.
Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory.
We have to clearly start differentiating between "work", and a "job".
You can work hard at something which provides immense satisfaction and personal value (perhaps even value to others). But a job is strictly something you do in exchange for money.
A job doesn't necessarily contribute to your self-worth. Meaningful work, does.
My idea is that "work", or maybe more precisely, a "job", is something that you only do because you have to, because you need something it gives in exchange, and otherwise won't do.
If you do something because you enjoy it, it's a "hobby". If you are paid for that, too, you are just lucky to have the best of both worlds :)
My definition of "work" is that it is done for anything other than its own sake. It doesn't matter who it's done for or what the benefit of doing it is. Housework is work; writing a blog can be work; cleaning your tools after an enjoyable hobby is work. Anything done in support of something else, whether or not money or other people are involved, is work.
Only those things, like eating, sleeping, talking with friends, sex, play, that are done for their own sake are not work.
Note also that "effort" is not involved in the definition - I know many people that put more effort into their play than into their jobs.
Even taking that at face value, "work" doesn't necessarily relate to full-time employment.
Work can be crafts, social work, volunteering, actually taking time to raise one's kids, hell even playing ball games in the park with friends can constitute work for meaning purposes!
Yeah the word "work" can be confused. What I meant by work was work where you are paid to do something for someone else. Maybe "job" is a better word. I don't have a job and I don't get paid but I do indeed still do a lot of work.
To me, working is just the way you participate in society and civilization.
All the fantastic gifts and riches in a modern economy you enjoy were made by Someone. You need to participate in and support the system by also making things for others.
> Not everything is jobs
Of course not. But it's something, and it's important!
My definition of work: What you do in the meantime for other people who pay you to do it while you're trying to figure out how to arrange your life so you don't have to work.
I think this post and some of the comments confuses work with job. Work is a means to a kind of satisfaction that cannot be achieved via leisure. And people need that and need work. Job on the other hand is everything most of the comments is talking about. Job is what you end up with when you working in a capitalistic system where profit is the sole motive (competition is what drives the need to keep costs down and labor is part of cost. We need capitalism to evolve so that practices are more sustainable call it capitalism 2.0 or whatever). So unless you are the job creator which very few of us are we are resorted to having a job. This is the case generally unless you are part of the smaller segment of people who have been lucky enough to call their job also their work.
Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.
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