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In our modern age, our lives depend on work, so much so that many of us question our sense of purpose. The economy is built on profit and competition which sees people’s lives depend entirely on their wages. Work-life today means more than household chores but a lifetime spent earning and living. It means having a career – an identity where we earn and spend most of our hours and days away from our family and serving the economy. The established status quo, where we are raised from schooling to work life, would lead us to assume lasting fulfilment is around the corner, possibly found in the workplace. It’s no surprise the talk of who we are comes down to talking about what job or career we pursue. However, the meaning of who we are is not found nor established in our work life. The jobs or career paths we take are mostly circumstantial, carved by events and constraints, at times borne out of a necessity to make a simple living. This is not anti-work but an important reminder that our purpose and meaning stem from places beyond our alienating economy, in our personal lives concerning how we think, communicate and enjoy our spare hours. This article seeks to highlight the lack of purpose in modern work life in which many of us are replaceable numbers. It will then be emphasised that the way we spend our spare hours has a major impact on feeling and maintaining self-worth. Finally, the article will offer some advice for finding passions and building character.

1) Why modern work life lacks purpose and passion:

Unsurprisingly, many of the jobs carried out today bring little fulfilment in people’s lives. Many of us are joined to organisations, companies and corporations that offer us little autonomy. Every worker is held to a hierarchal order. Whether large or small, every role serves as a cog to a larger functioning machine – the capitalist globalised economy of free trade, competition and profit-making. Work here is more than a mere antonym for laziness, it also means wage labour. All of us must spend or sell our time and skills to earn a living and some more. The focus of this section, however, will not be on economic theory. On the surface, most of us can accept the system of wage labour has kept the world economy afloat. The drive for money has pushed the masses into production, generating a continuous labour force and overabundance. The point is to express that this churning cycle of wage labour has detached itself from meaningful work or productivity. The nature of the economy has turned inside-out, in recent decades seeing people fill job roles out of the sole necessity to live and eat. Ironically, we thus see a job market with ever-increasing demand for niche skills and roles with fewer people needed or meeting those requirements in the workplace.

The advancement of technology strikes an interesting paradox to the difficulties of modern work life. Many industries have grown self-sufficient, and to such a degree many workplaces have gone beyond capable human hands to ultra-precise machinery and computer-enabled processes. This trend of machinery and automation has evidently reduced the scope of impact for workers – blue-collar and white-collar combined. Many jobs now require less intervention, hence fewer workers. Most recently we have seen an admission to needing fewer workers as it has been ruthless efficiency which has led to cuts across many sectors from software development, farming, manufacturing, production, trading, administration and more. Therefore, those retaining impactful roles are amongst smaller social circles, working across multiple skills/sectors or on specialised service needs.

This is all to say, putting it bluntly, the modern workforce serves little practical purpose. It is a reality of our economy to do jobs out of necessity or convenience – after all, this is wage labour so earning an immediate living forms a greater priority than worrying about what life passion we ought to pursue. As the job market expresses, few of us, if any would declare a life passion for shelf-stacking, till scanning, product packaging, inventory logging, door supervising, or cleaning public spaces. Even roles that seem to have long-term standing such as administration, sales or recruitment, would still admit to not needing the full contract hours to finish their assigned work. This question of pointless work becomes more prominent in our near era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The reality cannot be underestimated. Every industry from software to photography, education, legal, and countless more has turned to the use of AI. No longer do services have to go far and wide to retrieve and digest masses of information, or manually code tasks– humans can now delegate to an artificial companion or enemy that forever learns and refines its responses. In short, the growth of AI in our times is just one part of the trend to realise that many jobs are spiritless to the human condition because those jobs have always been replaceable.

In summary, it must be emphasised the point here is not to advocate for an anti-work culture but to highlight the lack of purpose many of us in our jobs. It comes as little surprise, that the search for personal meaning and purpose continues even after chasing a new job. The alienating, profit-making economy has been rinsed off our need for an income, to the point of now being part of sectors that are over-employed or reduced to the most mundane, monotonous roles that sap us off any entrepreneurial or creative spirit.

2) Why our spare time is important – agency and pursuing passions:

According to John Dewey (cited in Carnegie, 1973), the “deepest desire in human nature”, after hunger and sex, is ‘ the desire to be important’. It is fair to say this is not merely ego talking but the yearning in every soul to find meaning and purpose in life. After all, none of us in our dying moments would like to look back on life feeling like we have wasted our years without any achievements and left behind no fragments of ourselves. Legacy matters to us all so we must all question whether our work life is all that ought to define us. Do we want to be filed away into the folders of a corporation, reduced to a number or chart? As a human being, each of us possesses personalities and mental and physical capacities beyond our work life.

There is no dismissing the reality that our lives depend on the very work we do. Regardless of how boring, annoying or frustrating our jobs can be, the nature of the economy demands us to earn an income for rent, family and food for basic living. It comes as no surprise why out of mere necessity people are cornered to settle for jobs that spark little interest in their hearts and minds.

The task falls back on us to push back against the reductive, alienating work-life conditions. We must not allow the market to make us think so little of ourselves. Every sane one of us has a moral compass, a capacity to think, reflect, and create, and an even richer network of ancestry, language, culture, history, passions and interests. While transforming the nature of our job roles in the modern age, we ought to also look beyond the trappings of work-life to the myriad other elements that make us human. It is in our private spaces, in our spare time, and with friends and family that we get a taste of who we are.  Our spare time is our rare opportunity to regain autonomy, doing what we want as a reflection of our deeper intuitions and abilities.

On the one hand, we can find ourselves wasting this scope of passion and energy on the many luxuries of the world. Once we’ve escaped our enervating workspaces it becomes habitual to switch off and wind down to simple pleasures, such as turning to Netflix and other streaming services for another bing-watching session. Worse still, our spare precious hours could be spent drinking, smoking, partying and chasing ever more dopamine. Alternatively, rather than suppressing our autonomy to immediate gratification, there exists an immense potential to use our time and energy to chase fulfilment. This means taking on roles that otherwise are not possible in our workplaces. The drive here is to complete who you are, exercising the qualities within yourself through responsibilities, hobbies and crafts – autonomously, seeing you not others complete the cycle of what life means to you. For instance, this can be as simple as being the best possible dad or mom to your kids, being a spiritual leader in your community, building furniture in your spare time, writing helpful blog articles, sharing wisdom and knowledge in book clubs, doing charity work locally or abroad, designing websites for local businesses, creating new fashion styles, making hilarious and fun YouTube Videos. The list goes on with how we can independently stretch far beyond the constraints of our demoralising work-life and prove ourselves to be far greater. Moreover, in lending true focus to the things we do in our spare time, many new opportunities and future career pathways are bound to open up to escape the ordinary box that work-life traps us inside. In sum, our spare time away from work life is our precious chance to regain personal autonomy. Instead of submitting to simple pleasures, we can direct our time and energy towards actions that empower our identity.

3) How do we find a passion – narrowing your interests/priorities

Now realising the vast potential of our spare time in the modern age, the question turns to a life-long one many reach: how do I find a passion? It’s an age-old question that has troubled youngsters, tossing and turning about what to do next with their lives and careers. Social media tells them they’re simply not living life truthfully if they’re not pursuing their passions. It later becomes an expectation for jobs to match up with an awe-inspiring trajectory to blissful, eternal wealth and happiness.

Most of us simply want a job with the least stress that is equally well-paid enough to support a family and a comforting living. With this overarching goal for contentment in mind, we can look at passions or hobbies through a more enjoyable, personable lens. It is not about what others are doing, or what they’ve reached. Rather, a passion should be about the way you choose, not chase, a progressive skill you enjoy doing. And do not let anyone tell you you don’t have a skill. Every person with their intuitions and unique experiences make all of possessing attributes that form our humanity and purpose in this world. The bored person may still strike back to complain there is nothing to be desired or had – life is misery. Finding a passion, however, takes deep and honest reflection to uncover the sparks that make us wake up, rush back home and look towards the future. Most importantly, we must not get caught in the trap of ‘cosmopolitan dilettantism’. As ambitious as we can be, the truth remains all of us are limited with time. There is only so much we can truly put our mind towards, especially when we still ought to balance time for our partners, family, friends and life’s many chores. The task of cutting back can feel like samurai in a jungle, taking deep acceptance and great precision to cut the vines and stems that enshroud us in ‘busyness’. Once you begin the momentous task of prioritising what absolutely matters to your spare time, it’s possible to carve out the few passions you have long wanted to exercise (Mullen, 2023, p.12,29).

For instance, your passion may be writing, woodworking, gardening, fixing electronics, gaming –as long as you can still support yourself financially, programming, language learning, knitting, cooking, or baking. Whatever the case, our passions reflect our hobbies or interests we continuously return to. Sometimes we may not even know the reason why we come back to it. It can be as simple as our intuition, our gut feeling guiding us towards it, reminding you deep down this is an interest that matters to you of your unique personality, life experiences and views on life.  

In uncovering our spare time and life passions, it becomes easy to get caught up in lofty ambitions and goals that can remove our enjoyment of what we already do. We may already enjoy a path of learning to code, playing a musical instrument, or playing sports like football. However, in our social media age, it becomes a subconscious habit to pit ourselves against others in a false race but also be taken aback by immense ideals. Rather than inspire us, many of us can be made to feel hopeless, and pathetic in our efforts to climb the high mountain of skill and achievements within our hobbies and interests. Hence, we can see the mind drifting away from living our passion and purpose and towards doubt and resentment. In particular, it is all too common for someone to begin feeling like an imposter during a hobby or interest they seek to progress but suddenly face hurdles of learning. Subsequently, a person may notice themselves darting from one interest to another without giving themselves a fair chance of being immersed before deciding whether an activity is something they want to pursue in the long term.

To pursue our passions effectively, we must again embrace life’s principle of taking small steps. Taking small steps is the most emphasised life principle of adopting a gradualist mindset. We must not lose ourselves in the idealised end goal but focus on the very next step we can take in following the interests or passions or even problems that cause our hearts to flutter. There may still be a question about finding that starting path – the truth remains the path you choose to scale emerges out of intuition, a gut feeling that only you can know and enjoy. It is therefore vital to not think through the verdict of others but to sense what activities can bring you fulfilment and continued growth. Once you have mounted this pathway, this one activity or interest, given the spare time you sacrifice away on this, becomes part of who you are.

4) Colouring our character – the importance of our spare time to expressing who we are

The importance of our spare time, what we do and how we spend it, becomes vital to unleashing our unique character. It can be argued passions and hobbies stem from a deeper part of our authentic selves, in life experiences that cannot be precisely replicated. One may feel compelled to follow the next popular trend or do what their friends are doing. On the contrary, this robs us of the authenticity needed for eudaimonia in our fragile adult life. Many of us will at one point realise there is far more value in being unique. Work-life frequently amasses us to being just another number, a subject at the whims of frantic politicians, economists and paranoid work bosses. On the other hand, where we can secure spare time, we uncover a space to be different or our real selves. To put it precisely, be who we are, do what we enjoy and ultimately go beyond our dramaturgical roles. More powerfully, our unique character becomes the platform for finding new friends and a romantic partner. There is little attraction to find in someone who is so robotic and devoid of expression. All of us yearn for human connection that is special and beneficial.  Subsequently, there appears no better way to find and express our unique selves than in our spare time away from work. We must seek to empower ourselves by using whatever precious time to exercise agency in our lives under our deeper values and visions.

Once what we do in our spare time is shared with others, people understand you are more than a suit, an authority figure, a computer nerd, or a worker but an authentic human being. You are a person with likes and dislikes; talents, skills and attributes; a person with flaws but also strengths that people may respect, admire or even love in a future partner. The School of Life teaches us that developing meaningful friendships requires sharing our vulnerabilities. We must be willing to share some of our personal lives to invite others to do the same, in turn garnering mutual belongingness to deeply shared experiences. Expressing our sense of spare time – hobbies and interests allows us to find similar-minded people who may share the necessary interests or visions to form life-long friendships. In all, there is no understatement to the importance of using our spare time to express who we are. All of us hold unique personalities and interests. The workplace may be restrictive but that does not mean we must suppress all the features that make us who we are. Our authentic self can be expressed, shared and enjoyed by discussing our activities in our spare time. It provides a foundation to look beyond ourselves as ‘ordinary workers’ with interests that bring sparks to others.

Conclusion:

In sum, our spare time can be an ailment or even an exit plan to the alienating environment of modern life. Some of many have dreamt of climbing the career ladder but the all-too-common experience we find concerns the lack of meaning and purpose. The modern work life has grown to become work for work-sake- a wage labour that stifles creative purpose, ambition and growth. Fighting back against this robotic moulding requires us to uphold our precious free time. Being aware of our spare time will help us realise no demeaning job title or environment defines us. Rather than dreading the limited hours and list of chores, prioritising time for personal growth or hobbies can compound into a purposeful, productive future. It is what we enjoy and do in our spare time that becomes the expression of our identity. This is the side we should joyfully share with others, aspects that stretch beyond the narrow definition of work life, maximising our potential. Working on elements beyond our work life thus returns us to a holistic vision of ourselves, to see the limitless ways of making a positive impression on the world.

References:

Carnegie, D. (1936). How to Win Friends and Influence People, New York: Simon and Schuster

Hodgson, C. (2024) ‘Tech companies axe 34,000 jobs since start of year in pivot to AI’, Financial Times, 11 February12. Available at: [https://www.ft.com/content/9bace2e9-3ecb-4651-a6c0-b16f0226c0e0] (Accessed: 14 July 2024).

Mellen, Andrew (2023) Calling Bulsh*t on Busy, Florida: First Line Press