Meaningful Work

What is meaningful work? seems to be one of those nebulous questions that demands a level of serious attention even to begin walking the journey of poking at the layers underneath the surface.

One of the fun traits of nebulous questions is that they are often highly skilled in spawning rabbit holes:

• What is work? What is meaning?
• What does meaning have to do with work?
• What does it mean to have neither work nor meaning?

But that leaves us, dear reader, in a tough position because it’s so easy to get stalled even before we have come anywhere close to getting off the ground and moving towards higher understanding.

Through Wikipedia, the general definitions of work are found through the following groupings:

For today, my pickaxe of choice for mining into the depths is to use the lens of physics—through which the originating question appears to be much more benign than its first impressions.

Work done (W) is the product of the application of a constant force (F) on a point that moves it over a displacement (s) in the same direction of the force. Note that directionality is important here because both force and displacement are known as vector quantities, which we will further explore in later sections.

Knowing this, could we then approximate the work that would be required for a person to lift a 1 kilogram mass 2 metres off the ground over their head?

The amount of force required to lift up a 1 kilogram mass would be approximately 10 Newtons.

• Lifting this mass off the ground over a displacement of 2 metres produces a work output of W = Fs = (10 N)(2 m) = 20 Nm = 20 Joules
• Lifting this mass off the ground over a displacement of 4 metres produces a work output of W = Fs = (10 N)(4 m) = 40 Nm = 40 Joules

If we were to double the mass to 2 kilograms:

• Lifting this new mass off the ground over a displacement of 1 metre produces a work output of W = Fs = (20 N)(1 m) = 20 Nm = 20 Joules
• Lifting this new mass off the ground over a displacement of 2 metre produces a work output of W = Fs = (20 N)(2 m) = 40 Nm = 40 Joules

Through these examples, we can then see that it takes about 20 Joules worth of work (Joules also happens to be the same unit of measurement for describing Energy) for a person to lift a 1 kilogram mass at a displacement of 2 metres off the ground, or a 2 kilogram mass at a displacement of 1 metre off the ground. And also that work is doubled either by doubling the force applied or by doubling the displacement.

Before we can go any further into exploring the downstream implications of this definition of work, in its variants of positive work, negative work and zero work, we must first consider what the heck displacement even means.

It is useful to understand that displacement, in addition to its role in the determination of work, is considered to be a vector quantity—which essentially means that it can be expressed by a magnitude and a direction. When we transport ourselves from a certain Point A towards a certain Point B, it is common to think of this journey in terms of distance travelled. Unlike displacement, distance is a scalar quantity and can be fully expressed by magnitude alone. This subtle difference between vector and scalar quantities has useful implications in the way that we move through the real world.

Imagine that you happen to be walking around a larger-than-life roundabout and that it takes a exactly 5 minutes to circumnavigate this particular terrain, starting and finishing at the same point.

If you were to calculate the distance you would have travelled in a single lap of this roundabout, the result would be a non-zero value. In contrast, if you were to calculate the displacement you would have travelled in the very same lap, the result would be precisely zero.

Why is that? Even though the magnitude for both the distance and displacement travelled are exactly equivalent, the scalar quantity can completely disregard its sense of directionality whereas the vector quantity can not. Because of the fact that our roundabout journey starts and ends at precisely the same point, from the perspective of displacement it is as if we had not moved from the starting position in the first place.

Work becomes positive sum when the force that we apply towards an intended direction generates a displacement along that direction. In this context, it is necessary for both force and displacement to be non-zero and positive values.

This gives us four options to choose from:

1. Low displacement, low force => low output of positive work
2. High displacement, low force => medium output of positive work
3. Low displacement, high force => medium output of positive work
4. High displacement, high force => maximal output of positive work

Then in thinking about which of these options would be most useful, it becomes interesting to introduce the additional element of time. High force and high displacement leads to high output of positive work, but over what quantity of time can this be sustained?

Intuitively, the most desirable option would not be to produce maximum work, but instead to minimise force while producing maximal displacement.

This has interesting implications on the modern day attitude of ‘work as hard as you can and see what happens,’ since it reveals that the target function beneath such an attitude is to derive maximal positive work through maximising the application of force—without any consideration for the critical counterpart of force, which is displacement.

Yes, as a rule of thumb, work as hard as you bloody can, but also consider whether this expenditure is generating the displacement you are expecting to see.

This re-framing of the target function away from work and towards displacement is one that is beautiful.

We can optimise displacement by:

1. Increasing work and reducing force
2. Increasing work and keeping force constant
3. Keeping work constant and reducing force

It is the third option that seems to be the most desirable path towards optimising the target function, but doesn’t it sound too good to be true? To apply less force and producing greater displacement?

This introduces the next element for consideration, which is leverage. A classical example of leverage would be in the tightening of a nut by a wrench.

But why is it that, in such classical examples, there always is a wrench that accompanies the nut? Why would things be any different if, say, we swap out the wrench with fingers instead?

Well, visually things would look very different on the surface. A puffy red face and calloused skin are likely outcomes, as the fingers struggle to provide the rotational force (also known as torque) required to tighten the nut but it’s not really the look of things that we should be concerned with.

The reason why the tightening of the nut would be a hard job for fingers while effortless to a wrench is because the wrench has leverage in its nature. As a purpose-built tool for such a job, the wrench allows us to exert a greater rotational force at ‘lower cost’ because of its handle increasing the radius between the axis of rotation and the point of applied force.

In both examples of increasing displacement with reduced force, or increasing torque output by applying the same amount of force at a greater radial distance from center, the essential questions that surface are:

• ‘What is it that is being optimised for?’
• ‘Where might leverage exist?’

It is not enough to endlessly invest into developing a stronger engine and straining it towards a blind direction. It is a necessary-but-not-sufficient strategy towards things. As we make the consideration for these questions, additional avenues beyond hypothetical resource accumulation and hyper-optimised uptime open up to us, of how we might be able to harness leverage and produce meaningful output from the sources that are already available to us today.

Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.

A slow sort of country! said the Queen. Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

— Lewis Carroll