What is Dignified Work?

What does it look like for work to respect personhood? Where do we fall short in that goal?

There’s little more demoralizing than feeling as though your work is undignified. If your work makes you feel ashamed, meaningless, or simply uninvested, it’s easy for it to ripple through the rest of your life. Whether we like it or not, work has a certain gravity on everything else in our lives. Everything else can easily come to revolve around it.

If we feel that work is undignified or somehow incomplete, what is it that we’re missing? What is it that we want from work, and what do we fail to find? What is it that makes work dignified?

Using Your Full Potential

Before becoming a fiction writer and essayist, David Foster Wallace was studying for his PhD in philosophy at Harvard. His focus was in philosophical logic—most likely, he said, he would’ve wound up working at a think tank doing proofs all day. No doubt this could’ve been a decent career for him, but he ultimately decided to leave Harvard to focus on his writing.

An interviewer, David Lipsky, later asked him what it was that made him choose to switch to fiction instead of finishing his studies. He told him that in the end, it came down to one thing: Philosophy let him use 50% of himself while fiction let him use 97% of himself.

97% might seem like an oddly specific number—I’m not quite sure what 3% of himself he felt he was missing in fiction. Nonetheless, this anecdote seems to me to illustrate perfectly the concept of dignified work: It’s work that touches on everything we are. It’s work that gives us the opportunity to show everything we’re capable of.

David Foster Wallace, as seen in his signature bandana.

Work Made for a Machine

When we think of undignified work, we’re most likely inclined to think first of something that a machine could do. A man forced to work six days a week in a mine for poor pay is clearly not doing something that respects all of his capacity as a person.

In the end, dignified work is simply work that recognizes someone’s personhood. Dignified work is something that is made to be done by a person. That might mean that it’s work that only a person could do or work that at least recognizes that it is being done by a person.

What does this mean for us practically? What sort of work is dignified? What sort of work lacks dignity?

Examples of Dignified Work

Naturally, we can’t all be writers by trade. (Though I certainly believe we can all be artists for leisure.) It should be clear that artists and philosophers aren’t the only ones who do dignified work. Creativity is certainly a great path to dignity at work since the capacity for imagination is one of the major things that sets apart humans.

But work doesn’t have to be creative to be dignified. Recognizing the personhood of a worker is just as much about treating them fairly and respecting their limits. Coming from the world of philosophy, I can tell you without a doubt that there are plenty of degrading jobs for academics. Work that offers less than minimum wage for jobs that go well beyond full-time hours is still undignified, even if it has a worthy aim.

Maybe the ideal of “normal” dignified work is work in the trades. A job that requires some human ingenuity, offers fair compensation, and is accessible to most people—this seems to offer everything essential to dignified work.

Dignified work shouldn’t be something only available to a select few people or something that we need to uproot everything to pursue. In an ideal world, society should be designed around dignified work. Everyone should be naturally free to pursue this.

Dignified Work in a World of Pure Efficiency

Of course, this is not always the reality. How many people today have jobs that don’t respect their personhood? How often are people saddled with work that isn’t really made for humans?

The most undignified work comes when humans are treated like machines. When a person is reduced to a brief stop in the assembly line, there is no opportunity for dignity. When ruthless efficiency is the only end goal, the value of the people who do that work and enable that productivity is lost.

The impulse to understand everything in terms of numbers and productivity is common in today’s world. Grant Martsolf and Brandon Daily at the Savage Collective have done great work covering this, describing this modern desire for efficiency and ‘progress’ at any cost as “The Machine.”

In the end, humans can’t fit into a machine. We aren’t cogs that act predictably. We aren’t tools that do one thing and stay resting on a shelf when we’re not needed. We’re active, free, and capable of so much more than simple machine labor.

Recently, we’ve seen attempts to take even creative work away from humans. Large-language models like ChatGPT (I refuse to call them artificial intelligence because that’s simply not what they are) are being used to try to replace writers and artists.

I’ve heard it said many times recently (I don’t know who originally said it) that we’re verging on a society where we automate our art and manually do all the hard labor. We’re leaving the computers to be creative while we just do monotonous machine work. What sort of image of humanity does that present? It leaves us as consumers and nothing more—we miss out on the most worthwhile things in human life.

Dignified work is something simple and radical. It’s a simple embrace of our nature and a way of protesting against the reduction of humanity in the modern world.

We need work that offers us something more than the bare minimum. The dignity of work is about reclaiming what we are as much as it is about finding a comfortable life to live.

If it only took David Foster Wallace 97% of himself to write an 1,100 page novel, I’m scared to think of what 100% looks like. But that 100% needs to be our aspiration. In a world that often asks for only 1% of us, it’s a long climb up. But this is no impossible pursuit. In the end, it’s just second nature.