But is work as self-development selfish?

The question of "good work" leads to more questions

Last week I ended my essay with these words…

The full Yogananda quotation says:

All honest work is good work; it is capable of leading to self-development, provided the doer seeks to discover the inherent lessons and makes the most of the potentialities for such growth.

Ah ha! Let me rephrase then. All honest work performed with consciousness and intention to learn and grow is “good work.” It think I can live with that.

But - it raises another question in my mind.

And so without further ado, letʻs turn to the next question. If you are reading for the first time, or just missed last weekʻs musings on whether all work is good work, here is a link to Are You Ashamed of Your Profession. And if you are not yet a subscriber and want to be sure never to miss a future essay, just enter your email address in the box below. Free subscribers get the same content as paid subscribers. But the choice some readers make to pay for this work is incredibly validating and I truly truly am grateful for your extra vote of support.

I lied.

It was not one other question. The thought that All honest work performed with consciousness and intention to learn and grow is “good work” raised a cascading series of questions in my mind, a virtual waterfall of “yeah buts”. The very first Yeah But was this: Yeah but isnʻt the idea of work as self-development a selfish view, somehow the opposite of the purpose of doing good work which is that it be in service to others? Shouldnʻt work be of value to an individual other than oneʻs self, or make a contribution to the collective welfare?

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Ooooh. Look where my mind went. I just unearthed a fundamental assumption of mine about the nature of good work! It was there all the time in last weekʻs post. A whisper underneath my words. Work has to create substantive value, not necessarily monetary value. Good work is about service. That seems to be my belief.

On the flip side, dishonest work is not good work because it you are cheating and doing harm to another. And if something that should be good work gets twisted in such a way as to knowingly harm others for oneʻs own gain, that work is not longer good work.

Letʻs run that through a concrete example. The mortgage industry gets real people housed. More mortgages are possible because securitization spreads the risk for lenders. So the mortgage industry does good work, in principle. Still the 2008 financial industry meltdown happened because some finance wizards figured they could make a lot of money in a hot real estate market by creating lending products for borrowers who could not afford those mortgages and then passing the risk to others like a hot potato, until the whole pot of potatoes and the water they were boiling in bounced right off the stove, drowning the whole enterprise. A lot of ordinary folks got badly burned, while a lot of wealthier people simply walked away from underwater mortgages on speculative real estate purchases. And the money already made stayed in the pockets of those who made it.

Where this gets tricky is that the distribution of benefits and harm is not always clearcut. Sticking with the real estate example, I live in a small rural multi-cultural community in Hawaiʻi. I might do an excellent job selling a home in my community to a newcomer family. Perhaps they are community-minded folks with lots to contribute. But at the same time, they are buying a home that only a few years ago would have been affordable to a local buyer. The person who is born and raised here, and wants to raise their own children here, might end up having to leave their home community just to have housing. This process of gentrification is causing harm to individuals who are not directly part of the transaction. In economic lingo, this is called a “negative externality.” No matter how much I raise my consciousness about this, or work as a volunteer towards creating new affordable housing, no amount of learning the inherent lessons in this work undoes the damage.

So yes, in my mind, the otherwise good work I am doing is compromised in the current circumstances surrounding the practice of my current profession.

Before I pat myself on the back for these insights, I have to humble myself because - duh - my definition of good work only seems at first glance to include an aspect missing from Yoganandaʻs. On further reflection, his background of understanding would be different than the one with which I initially considered his words on “good work.” Self-realization as a personal goal is Western thinking. Practicing meditation and yoga for personal stress reduction alone is Western thinking. Yoganandaʻs thinking on individual self-realization, and the purpose of the meditation and yoga techniques he taught, was grounded in an ambitious yet traditional collective goal, namely the liberation of all of humanity from suffering. His teachings were meant to instill a spirit of kinship among all people through recognizing their shared kinship with the Divine. Thatʻs what he meant by “self-realization.”

Yogananda believed that as an individual learns and grows along a path of personal spiritual development, it is in the very nature of that growth that the individual will come to perceive the ways in which we are all connected and therefore wish and act for the health of others, both human and non-human. Unlike our Western economics which considers effects beyond parties to a transaction as “external", the evolved individual understands their work within this larger context of connection.

By the way, this is also an understanding in indigenous cultures. It seems I have not really strayed that far from my year of writing memoir about a period of my own self-development after all.

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Forty years ago when I was in graduate school, the mining industry was first coming to terms with the environmental externalities of their work. In analyzing environmental impacts of a project, the procedure is to calculate costs and benefits in dollar terms, and then weigh the costs against the benefits. If the benefits can be deemed to outweigh the costs, then the project is probably going to be approved by regulatory authorities, no matter how devastating the costs for some who are affected. After all, we need molybdenum to make steel alloys for our pickup trucks, and aluminum for our soda cans and Teslas, and silicon for chips to power our electronic devices such as whatever one you are using to read these words.

In my 1983 dissertation I took a different angle on how to quantify externalities and used calculus and case studies to demonstrate my conclusions. If we start by considering how we are all connected, especially in the remote towns in which most mining occurs, the products and monetary benefits get exported but the social and environmental costs are local, and borne primarily by the residents who also constitute the workforce. Ironically, it means that many of the so-called externalities are actually internal to the local mining operation and so they should have an economic drive to mitigate environmental and health impacts, not solely a moral one.

Unfortunately, in most cases no amount of engineering, planning, or remediation completely offsets those disproportionately distributed costs. And yet, what are we to do? Even the negatively affected mining town residents use the products and live the lifestyle that mined materials support.

And before you widen your eyes and gasp in righteous horror - letʻs pause to remember that making cost/benefit choices and compromises is something each of us does daily. Sometimes the context is personal and I am the only one affected- can I abide the unpleasant side effects of the pharmaceutical I take for a medical condition that otherwise could be life threatening? Sometimes it is professional and my actions have consequences for others - as a physician, do I risk a procedure on an elderly patient whose body is fragile as it is?

How do we make these decisions? How do I decide whether to continue to engage in the work I do and consciously make it “good work”?

Those questions take us full circle back to the question of work as self-development. This precious world, this precious life, is precious precisely because it is composed of moments of joy and moments of pain, of ambiguities and difficulties that demand of us that learn and grow throughout our lives. As Maya Angelou put it: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” If our work cannot be entirely without externalities, can we do it better, can we reduce the collateral damage?

Maybe self-development is always the real work. More glaringly seen to be so in its absence than in its presence. So do a bit better today than you knew to do yesterday, and if you cannot find the collective good or a service element in the work you do, perhaps one day you will find your self examination leads you to your next work.

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This was already a lot for me to chew on this week. And it is not the end of my “yeah buts”. I have a related question to explore next week. See you then. And donʻt forget to like or dislike or add your own thoughts and comments below.