When Does Work "Want" To Be Experiential?

There are so many aspects to what we consider vital work in the first place, and I felt it would be helpful to spend a bit of time breaking them down. For instance, we may not always need to "save" certain forms of work (for posterity) where technology can perform those functions well, and we don't actually miss those functions in any vital capacity other than the monetary reimbursement itself. Or, we enjoy the functions but don't want to have to do them at the breakneck pace that innovation in large scale agriculture, for instance, seeks to remedy. I became more grateful for large scale agriculture after the occasionally pleasant toil in gardens - which at times - mostly provided bird, mammal and insect feasts!

The work we enjoy (and also find necessary) that isn't always available in the traditional sense of salary, can not only be apportioned by equal time but it can be envisioned in ways that lets everyone participate. Of course we don't need equal time measure (arbitrage) for work that anyone is willing to do directly (i.e. without skills arbitrage) for money, that robots are not already doing. Also to consider: When does the experience element we value lead to product outside ourselves, and when does it simply affect relationship dynamics amongst ourselves? That matters, even if we don't presently think of it in terms measureable by money.

There's the work we need, the work we desire, "busy work" to keep from having to think or which helps us think, the work we are willing to do and that which we also have to do. There's the work we're happiest doing ourselves, and the work we actually benefit from doing with others, which is what this post seeks to get at today. And - of course - there's the work which in the bigger picture sometimes seems a bit silly, in that it may exist mostly to capture profit and little else!

However there's a lot to be said for capturing profits and under any circumstances, that's how we generate dynamism in the first place. It doesn't really help to "rain" on the profits parade, tempting though it may be (and "distorted' though the profits may seem), without a clear understanding how we might capture the experiential work we want through more rational means. Plus, we want to do so in ways which continue to allow profits. After all, it is the profits which generate further economic choices on our part, and continued momentum for the process itself.

Presently, people are engaged in a struggle as to whether or not many jobs might eventually "go away". To a degree, this depends on whether we're willing to get at the core of what we actually want out of work. What work is experiential, and why does it matter? The work that matters in this regard, is especially the commons of knowledge use which we want to preserve.

While we often think of commons in terms of resources outside ourselves, we are also capable of creating a knowledge use commons wherever we structure work in equal time. Value in exchange is certainly here (profit as driver of further choice), but we can structure value in use (skills arbitrage) as a prior to best capture the value in exchange dynamic. When work "wants" to be experiential that in fact benefits us, for we can think how it would be structured, recorded and measured through knowledge commons. Equal time use also allows us to take advantage locally of the wealth of knowledge now being spread through the digital realm, in real time.

In a recent post titled "Spontaneous Order is More Than Markets", Don Boudreaux of Café Hayek points to two authors with books related to this subject. If you have time, check out the "Glory of the Commons" link. And of course, I'm always glad when Elinor Ostrom gets a mention. But it was this unexpected quote from Hayek, that my recent post about families and economic dynamism seemed to echo:

Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts, and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro cosmos (i.e. the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization) as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.

...And yet those two worlds are often forgotten (or defended in the wrong terms), as people struggle for a single economic world that is rapidly falling away. Few are yet prepared to face the workplace as it has increasingly become defined. While some have spoken of spreading the ownership of capital, we no longer live in the kind of world that thought process seemed to symbolize. The real issue in this regard are separations of working classes which are no longer possible in terms held until only recently, and I will address that in my next post. Now, back to the main subject!

One of the primary things people like about work is its experiential characteristics, something which no robot even needs to have, in spite of what science fiction may continue to imagine. What we have to consider: even though people want much out of work that is not necessarily experiential, this factor makes the work feel important enough that we attach it to our identity, and consequently make room for it in our lives.

A simple way to explain this and I recall an example where someone walked away from a great salary: not everyone is capable of getting up in the morning and going through the required ritual, only to be hidden away all day long doing grunt work and having no one around to speak to. Note to progressives - no one should have to either, even if we want to continue rewarding them handsomely for doing so...out of guilt, perhaps, for the good fortune and pleasure of the lifelong knowledge job?

Even so, we have to be careful about the experiential element of work being lost to a greater degree in the present, because our reliance on a resource rich world to continue funding experiential elements in a collective sense is now being brought into question. Not addressing the issue only means even more experiential work will be lost. How do we think about this?

Part of this discussion goes back to the choices people might actually want to make with one another in a system of equal time measure, which I feel presents viable options to further knowledge based growth from the technological advances of the present. Just the same, the question of experiential work remains important in a larger sense as well, in that budget choices continue to be made now which - when people don't really think about it - they wake up one morning to find that the work they deemed meaningful has been "downgraded" in some not quite quantifiable sense. The dreaded word "efficiency" includes negating experience elements, and people may be compelled to rationalize that personal experiences are not really important.

In healthcare terms - for instance - it is often quite clear when the value in exchange paradigm that demands "results" runs headlong into the experiential element, which may not provide a concrete perimeter to shift expectation levels. What we feel about the experience in this circumstance may become separate from the experience itself. A patient with a chronic condition for instance which is worsening, reaches a point where it's hard to seek a doctor yet again, in the knowing that more expensive tests will be done, more prognosis (or not), more of the same "result" - blood test or whatever, that does not change the significance of the overall issue.

If we were going to do something different in terms of this example, what would it be? Of course a doctor or nurse with a good bedside manner always helps. But the bigger issue is that this described circumstance - which is rapidly running into diminishing returns - is bleeding money all the while at a frightening rate. What a person really needs when they reach this point is something that allows them to make peace with the process itself, rather than a frantic and expensive denial that perhaps delays the inevitable for a little while longer. Also, think about the actual measure nations do for longevity that is part of the prolonging itself. What gets left out is the time shared element which might give a person reason to live longer, in the first place.

Much of the experiential element in any circumstance is simply dialogue. What's more, there are many circumstances in the workplace when additional dialogue is not even really necessary. That's especially true when what we need is a concrete result that benefits from action to get the needed result quickly. Just the same, healthcare in many respects is a far more subjective environment than most that adhere to specific product. Yet it has increasingly put a stop to the kinds of dialogue that might help individuals outside the healthcare environment itself. When we are in reasonably good shape, we can learn how to take care of ourselves on our own, but when we reach a certain point, we need the shared space of time to validate our own concerns that only one on one time with other individuals can provide.

The degree of validation we need from others in one on one time varies, and is dependent on what we actually want to accomplish - is it a matter of understanding a broader aspect of life, or is it something as seemingly simple as some technological quirk that goes right over our head? Even the process of asking for help - when we can't find or figure out online directions - depends on whether we want to know the solution or answer for future reference. Or, is finding that tech answer what we need in just a one time situation, for instance.

For the most part we don't really think about economic activity in terms of individual to individual assistance, even though we struggle with that part of life on a consistent basis. We learned a long time ago not to think of our own person to person concerns as economic. Just the same, that's the part of our lives that we need to reclaim, and not just for the supposedly "feel-good" reasons that of course automatically suggest themselves. Plus, we shouldn't have to feel bad about that aspect anyway. We also need to reclaim person to person assistance for our economic lives for practical reasons: some days we just can't figure out the online answer when no one else is around who can help.

Fortunately, we are able to take many aspects of validation, confirmation and questioning of our own thoughts online, and this post is certainly not to diminish that tremendous benefit. The problem for us is that we also need to be able to express these vital elements of our lives both economically and with others in concrete ways, especially at local levels where arbitrary divisions have often left us unexpectedly powerless to help one another in economic terms. It really is a coordination problem, but not just in terms of coordinating what already is. We also need to coordinate what we in fact, do not want to lose from our lives.

P.S. I apologize for the extra length today! This subject was originally intended for two posts, but an important issue came up in the midst of this undertaking that I wanted to address sooner, rather than later, in the next post.