meh...work.

Yesterday was a bit of an odd existential-question kind of day for me. These days happen every once in a while, where I question the meaning of life and examine all that I do and yada yada. It’s good, it’s healthy, and it drives me nuts.

While on a coffee walk, I had the realization that I actually care about work. I know I always say I don’t care, and that I’d rather get laid off and travel the world on unemployment (I know…tempting), but I think I’ve got it figured out. I think I just love the idea of not caring about work, of being nonchalant. If people ask how work’s going I just say I dunno…don’t really care, but I suppose I do. I don’t know why not caring about work is such an attractive quality to me (well one that I don’t have apparently). It’s like I want to not care, but I can’t, if that even makes sense.

Then later on last night at small group, we were talking about the wrath of love (tim keller’s words, not mine) and how if we only get angry when we feel emotions such as love. If something crazy happens and it doesn’t make us happy or angry, it’s cuz we just don’t care, which kind of makes sense. Then we tangentially moved the subject to work and stuff. We started discussing the root of sin in work, and how we can seemingly trace much of what we do for work to bad things (i.e. doctors are necessary cuz humans are susceptible to death, accountants are necessary so we don’t cheat each other, social workers are necessary cuz we have social problems, etc).

What struck me as odd is that work itself isn’t a result of the fall of man. It’s not the result of our sin. Humans were charged with the task of maintaining God’s creation from the very beginning, before all that funky stuff with the snake. The fact that our work sucks, however, is a result of our sin. When humans were expelled from the Garden of Eden, man was resigned to toil and sweat to work a cursed ground. Basically, the reason I hate work is because of my sinful nature.

So then I reflect on why I dislike work. I wonder if it was a different job it’d be any different? Maybe it’s just the idea of working? Maybe it’d be the same whether I was a fund accountant or an astronaut. While I’m sure astronauts don’t hate their jobs, there must be plenty of monotony too (prepping for years for a week-long journey) and all that. Maybe at that point in the astronaut’s careers they’d rather be golfing or something…I dunno.

I suppose the point of this is to say that work was meant to be good…meant to be in a perfect world, being good custodians of God’s creation. I suppose maybe that's why I care about work? Too bad we’re sinful…work could’ve been so much better.