Work

According to Cambridge, work is:
• an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money
• the material used by someone at work, or what they produce
• a place where a person goes specially to do their job
• something created as a result of effort, especially a painting, book, or piece of music

I also like the physics-related explanation: work is the transfer of energy to or from an object by a force acting over a distance. I find this definition empowering. In short, it says we are capable of putting things in motion — and that change in motion is equal to the work.

Across cultures and time, work has been defined in radically different ways:
In Christian traditions, hard work, discipline, and productivity were signs of moral worth and closeness to God. This shaped much of modern Western culture: if you’re working hard, you’re “good”; if you’re idle, you’re failing. This ethic still lingers today in hustle culture — where worth is measured in hours and output.
In Buddhism, one part of the Noble Eightfold Path is Right Livelihood. Work as ethical alignment. Right Livelihood means choosing work that does not harm others and is in harmony with compassion and awareness. Here, work is not just what you do, but the karmic echo of how you do it.
Karl Marx viewed work as the essence of our creative power, but also as loss of self. Under capitalism, workers often become alienated — separated from the product of their labor, from their own creative force, from each other, and even from themselves. In this sense, work becomes estrangement rather than expression. I’ve felt this too — moments when my work no longer felt like mine, but like a machine I was feeding.
In the modern corporate world, we often ask, “What do you do?” as shorthand for “Who are you?” Jobs become self-definitions, and careers become life stories. But is work really who we are — or just one story we tell about ourselves?
Many Indigenous traditions see no sharp divide between “work” and “life.” Hunting, weaving, farming, storytelling — all are forms of participation in the community and balance with the land.
The Greeks often contrasted manual, mechanical labor (seen as degrading) with leisure and contemplation. For them, true human flourishing was found in reflection and philosophy, not toil.

And yet, beyond definitions, we’ve always told stories about work — one of the most enduring being the myth of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus and the Burden of Work

When I was a kid, I had a book called The Legends of Olympus. It contained short stories from Greek mythology. I didn’t understand much at the time, but it sparked my interest in mythology and religion. Later, this interest led me to Jungian psychology. One of the stories was the myth of Sisyphus: condemned to roll a boulder uphill only to see it fall back down, again and again. His work never finished, never mattered.

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, proposes that when Sisyphus accepts the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, he is freed. By embracing the absurd, he reaches a state of contented acceptance. Today the internet is full of “acceptance” slogans — some shallow, some sold for profit. Acceptance can be wisdom, but it is also often misunderstood. Even if Sisyphus finds contentment, in the story he is still pushing that boulder.

For much of my life, when I thought of work, I thought of Sisyphus. Work felt heavy, mandatory, inescapable. A chore, a burden. I remember one odd job where I had to insert around 1,000 paper name tags into 1,000 plastic holders. Nothing about it was difficult, but the sheer repetition made time dissolve into absurdity. I also remember weekly corporate reports: prepared no matter what, forgotten the next week, repeated endlessly. The boulder rolled back down. That’s how I moved into Business Intelligence and Data Analytics — I wanted to spare myself and others from these cycles.

At home, dishes and laundry can feel the same: no matter how many times I do them, the pile returns. In our household, after the laundry is done, we often don’t put it away right away, and sometimes it gathers into what we actually call “the pile” — until one of us can’t stand it anymore.

The Extremes: Hustle and Escape

So what is the opposite of work? If we’re not working, what are we doing? Off the top of my head: play or party. All work and no play. Work hard, party harder.

These associations haven’t disappeared — they’ve just changed form.
On one side, there’s hustle culture. Scroll through LinkedIn or Instagram and you’ll find endless posts glorifying 5 a.m. routines, side hustles, and the grind. The message is simple: you are only as worthy as your productivity.
I’ve been there myself — putting in extra hours, staying late, even winning “Employee of the Year” once. On the surface it looked like success. Inside it felt like running in circles, another Monday report, another boulder pushed uphill.

On the other side, there’s the spiritual bypass. A wave of voices saying: don’t work at all, just align your vibration, meditate, and let the universe deliver. Work gets painted as a kind of failure — proof that you’re not yet “high-frequency” enough. I chased that too, listening for hidden meaning in every word people said, trying to decode the “secret” to being aligned. And when it didn’t click, I wondered if something was wrong with me.

Both stories miss something. Hustle ignores the need for rest, play, and depth. The “universe will provide” narrative ignores the truth that real creation needs embodied effort. Without rest, our work loses depth. Without play, our creativity withers. Without effort, our dreams remain abstractions.

I wonder: which extreme have you found yourself leaning toward — the endless grind, or the endless search?

Music as Work

When I was young, my world often felt black-and-white. Music showed up as spots of colour. Sometimes a song would raise goosebumps on my arms and send a shiver up my spine. Most people around me didn’t sing — it was something left to musicians or those with the right ear or voice. But even in kindergarten I sang, often alone or with my mother.

At around seven, I discovered Michael Jackson on TV. He felt raw, alive. I became a fan instantly. Later I joined the school choir. My high-pitched melodic voice carried me through childhood. Puberty brought depth and less control, and I didn’t enjoy it as much for a while. I then sought other ways to sing.

In high school, while skipping class, I met people playing guitar in the park. I was mesmerised. Soon I was learning from them. My first guitar came from a neighbour — old, rusty, stringless. I fixed it up and found a place offering free guitar lessons. They taught classical, not chords, but I gave it a shot. Week by week I learned simple songs, one string at a time, one finger at a time. It was slow and uncomfortable, but I was intrigued, so I continued. I wanted to be one of the guys in the park.

Later, a friend gave me his brother’s guitar. It had been lying in his attic for years. A really nice acoustic, but with a big crack in it. It looked like it had hit something; the top and side had separated. The previous owner had probably given up on practice. I don’t know. What I did know is that it sounded amazing in my teacher’s hands — and his appreciation of it gave me courage.

For three years I practiced one to four hours a day. My case filled with xeroxed scores and manuals. Then, in 12th grade, I quit. I had been told I needed to focus on exams, but really it was also frustration — I felt not good enough. I wanted to sound like the guys playing electric guitars in the bands I liked, and I couldn’t. Partially I blamed the guitar. The neck was too wide and thick, very different from the slim electric guitar body. My instructor encouraged me to continue, but I couldn’t. I kept the guitar, but it never felt the same again. I longed for the high it once gave me, but couldn’t recreate it.

Looking back, those hours of practice were their own kind of work. Repetition was unavoidable: the same scales and passages over and over. At the time, it often felt tedious. But unlike Sisyphus, each repetition carried me forward. My muscles grew quicker, my ear sharper, my patience longer. Repetition in music was not punishment.

I turned to singing in bands — ten or eleven projects over the years, from pop to punk to death metal. I covered everything, and I wrote songs in each style. I always felt a pull — not toward fame or approval but toward the raw emotion of it. Singing made me feel alive, and I wanted others to feel it too. I wanted to awaken that feeling in them, as other vocalists had done with me.

When the pandemic came, live bands weren’t seeing much action. A friend and I started recording and producing in his studio. I learned the basics of production and mixing, and my world changed. From one option, I suddenly had infinite.

Chris Cornell once sang: “To be yourself is all that you can be.” My love for music has taken me on a journey filled with obstacles, discoveries, and joy. The hardest part wasn’t learning how to do the work — it was learning to do the work that was right for me.

I used to think that if I studied the great masters in detail, I could become one. I tried to reproduce everything I loved in their work. One of my toughest battles was with Chris Cornell. The truth is, you can’t sound like Chris Cornell. Covering Soundgarden and Audioslave taught me that the hard way. I did well for a while but at some point my body refused. It showed me: I will never achieve that goal, no matter how hard I try. After I picked myself up, I finally decided to discover what music I want to make.

Imitating the masters is often how we begin — it’s how we learn the moves, the shapes, the language of the craft. But staying there too long blocks the real work; trying to sound like someone else eventually silences your own voice. I see the same in coaching: people exhaust themselves trying to be like others, when the real shift comes from finding their own rhythm.

Work as Inner Story

But the hardest and deepest work isn’t always visible. It is, as Jung calls it, working with shadow: facing the parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid. When we neglect this inner work, we project it outward — competing, resenting, hating. Marx spoke of alienation from our labor; psychology speaks of alienation from ourselves. Both are true.

Real work includes both: the outer labor and the inner integration. The desk worker sending reports, the musician practicing scales, the parent caring for their child — each is doing outer work that also transforms the inner. Work shapes both body and mind. It builds skill, patience, resilience, compassion. It enables embodiment.

Long before written language, people painted caves, carved figures, drummed rhythms, and danced around fires. These were not decorations or diversions, but ways of carrying memory, emotion, and meaning into the shared space of community. It was as if images and sounds themselves longed to be seen and felt. Art, like language, gave form to the invisible — to dreams, fears, the sacred, the shadow. Where words would later shape thought, art shaped feeling, and together they became humanity’s earliest work of turning inner life into collective experience.

We all tell stories all the time. Each perspective is unique, shaped by body, mind, and sensation. When we express our truth, it becomes more a part of us. Neural pathways strengthen with repetition. It’s why we can play an instrument decades later. It’s why we say “it’s like riding a bike.”

So what if the image we hold of ourselves is also such a pathway? What if it forms whether we are conscious of it or not? What if we can only see it in the way the world reflects us back?

Work, after all, is energy in motion. Physics says it, but so do our lives. Every task shapes us, just as we shape it. Whether we are pushing a boulder, raising a child, writing a song, or facing the shadows within, our work is never only about outcome. It is the motion that makes us, the energy that transforms us, the story we choose to live into.

For Your Reflection

• When has your work felt like effort without progress, and when has it felt like practice that carried you forward?
• What story are you telling yourself about your work right now — moving bricks, or building a cathedral?
• Where are you still imitating, and where are you beginning to sound like yourself?