A Thought on How We Understand Ourselves at Work – The Endless Labor of Being Human
- Brainz Magazine
- 9 hours ago
- 11 min read
Lance Kair is a licensed professional counselor, founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, and published philosopher integrating trauma-informed care with existential and postmodern insights. He brings depth, compassion, and decades of lived experience to the evolving landscape of mental health.
Being human has always been hard work. That’s not new, and it’s not poetic, it’s just the deal we got. If we evolved as science suggests, then our early lives were spent scraping along the edges of survival. We foraged, fought, hid, and hoped. We worked for every meal, slept in fear of being eaten, and still managed to produce art on cave walls, small handprints of beings who wanted to say, we were here. If we were created instead, the story isn’t kinder. The first thing that happened after awakening to paradise was losing it. The punishment for awareness was labor. “By the sweat of your brow,” and all that.
Either way, through nature or divinity, the cost of being conscious was work. They struggled and each in their own way having the same doubts and question to ruminate on. Their rituals, religions, beliefs, and what have you, answering them.
Here we are, sitting in office chairs, with our machinery, pushing another button, pulling another lever, drinking reheated coffee.
And yet somehow, I sit here and think it is not meaningless? If I could only find meaning, purpose. What a conundrum! It seems the meaning of life is to find meaning, but I can’t find meaning!
The ancient shape of modern life
It’s comforting to think we human beings have come a long way, but then it’s weird how I go back and forth in myself. In one sense, we have our tools, which perform miracles. We’ve replaced the stone axe with the touchscreen and machine presses, the cave fire with electricity, the hunt with logistics. So, progress is real. But then something about the structure underneath hasn’t changed. The hours still gather around the same poles: what must be done, what must be endured, what might be hoped for. It’s the same, but somehow different.
One way to compare is through progress. Our ancestors went to the river to wash, to the hunt to eat, to the fire to rest. We open tabs, fill forms, attend meetings, scroll, refresh. The texture of our activity has changed, not the plain task of it. They had the same complaints, just different words. They prayed for rain, we checked the forecast. They feared spirits, we fear metrics. They longed for continuity with the world, we long for Wi-Fi.
Technology has advanced beyond their wildest imagination, but our relationship to it remains primitive: we still look at the tools we make as though they’ll complete us. We orient ourselves toward them as toward gods, not to worship exactly, but to receive assurance that we’re doing life correctly. The irony is it seems that the more efficient the tools become, the more aware we are that nothing outside of us will ever be enough. Like the better our tools become, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the more we look to creating tools to fix us.
The myth of progress
Time moves forward despite our best philosophical ideas, and we can’t help but see our new problems as more advanced versions of the old ones. At the same time, it almost feels like we’re going to get a handle on it because we have more of the details of the problems. But maybe progress just means we’ve learned to describe the same old ache with greater precision.
The nineteenth century gave that ache a vocabulary. Nietzsche declared that God was dead, and the world gasped at its own echo. Kierkegaard said we’d forgotten how to know Him, which might have been worse. Both saw the same thing: that meaning was slipping from our public stories back into the private chambers of the self. By the twentieth century, that self had become the battlefield. We built nations, economies, and ideologies on top of an unspoken panic that all our structures might still be hollow. Two world wars and a few police actions later, the panic had names. Existentialism. Nihilism. Therapy. Theologies of despair. And yet, after all the rubble and re-education, people went back to work. Because what else was there to do?
The age of work on the self
The twentieth century gave birth not only to new machines but to new forms of introspection. The old work of plowing fields and building walls became the new work of improving the mind, managing the soul. We started to talk about “self-actualization,” “purpose,” and “personal growth.” Factories became offices, offices became laptops, and labor became invisible. Instead of tilling the earth, we till the self. But is the outside world so abysmally neutral? Receding from our grasp so quickly, we will never get it back?
When the self doesn’t yield good crops, when the sense of meaning withers, we call it pathology. We treat it like something broken. They prayed to the gods, we pray to psychology. Again, the irony is so avoided and missed in the reaching, the feeling of emptiness isn’t a sign of failure. It’s not the absence of meaning, it is meaning. It’s the experience of what meaning feels like when it’s alive.
If meaning is a concept we hold, then how could I ever ‘make meaning’ of my life? How could I not be tense if I am trying to make meaning of things that are already meaningful? It’s a sort of tension we live in. Our ancestors lived it also, they just didn’t name it, or they named it with other words and other lexicons. They felt it in the rhythm of their work, in the repetition of the necessary. We feel it in the constant hum of our devices, in the fatigue that follows every small accomplishment.
Progress hasn’t erased that tension, it’s redefined it. Maybe progress is what makes up the thinking that we have to make meaning of our lives. The tools seem to get sharper, faster, more connected, and this means the user remains the same restless creature, still hoping the next update will finally make existence feel complete, just like praying for rain, hoping for good crops.
It seems like a meaningless meaning that I am meaning.
Every century invents its own reasons for the same human exhaustion. People say, “I feel stuck. I feel lost. I’m working so hard and nothing matters.” That could have been said in Babylon, in Athens, in Rome, in the Industrial Revolution. It could have been said yesterday on a lunch break.
We imagine the feeling as evidence of a missing ingredient, as if there were some formula for a life that finally feels right. It is the feeling of a real mistake. The sense of meaninglessness is not a sign that something’s gone wrong but the feeling that the philosophers have been circling around. The “gap” our contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek wrote about wasn’t so much a space to be filled, it is the shape of modern awareness itself. Kierkegaard’s despair wasn’t a malfunction, it is a call into ourselves. The absence of certainty is itself the invitation: living life as a human being. We call it emptiness because it doesn’t flatter us, but it’s the closest thing to truth we ever touch when we live in a comparison between unconnected people. Yet in truth, as Graham Harman has noted of objects, the feeling of emptiness that we often call existential nothingness is indeed filled with things!
The work beneath work
The philosopher Martin Heidegger once said a work of art is not merely an object, it’s a happening, a moment where a world comes into being. Even as I sit here, these tasks I must do are not supposed to be just a list of tasks. They are more like a listing of the continuous event of a world being sustained through human effort. The subject of our despair is more like a denial of this list, as though the listing should be something else, but it never is, or, at least, it isn’t right now. When someone lays bricks, they’re not just stacking stone, they’re keeping reality from falling apart. When someone files insurance claims, or sells groceries, or listens to another person talk for an hour about their life, they’re performing the same ancient ritual, maintaining existence. Existence is made up of subjects that I know because of the content of reality, and I don’t want reality to be the way it is. I want to be filled with purpose, not tasks!
Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived the World War II concentration camps, added a different angle. While he was imprisoned, he noticed that some people faded away, would get lost in the despair of the terrible place, or go insane sometimes, while others did not. From his horrendous experiences there and surviving it, he figured meaning appears through how we meet what life demands of us, not through what we demand of life. The point isn’t what we’re doing, but that we’re doing it instead of merely reacting to things that are not going our way, we might learn to be responsive to what is in front of us, and toward our integrity.
And yet, of course, here I am moping while we project our great salvation outward, onto the next invention, the next improvement, the next philosophy or device that might save us from ourselves. The tools change faster than we can understand them, but the orientation stays the same: we wait for the thing to give us meaning instead of noticing that our waiting is the meaning.
I hate to think it, but I get the suspicion that this feeling of meaninglessness, then, isn’t what is stopping me. Rather, it is the work, the grind and the friction that keeps us conscious of the act of living, which generates meaning and purpose. Dammit!
The ordinary continuity
If we stripped away the machinery and the jargon, the difference between the prehistoric and the modern human would almost disappear. The body still needs food, warmth, safety, connection. The mind still produces stories to justify the effort. The soul, if we can still use that word, still feels the tremor of being finite and aware of it, but it is more that the conditions are exactly the same regardless of the material environment. The environment gives us the reason to be discontent, lacking and looking for meaning and purpose. When you really think about it, the material is the course, or shows the course, that we are taking while we ponder how empty our lives are!
They feared losing their crops, we fear losing our jobs. They wanted their children to survive, we want ours to thrive. They looked to the heavens for reassurance, we refresh our feeds. And yet here I am, in a way, because all these zillions of people, past and present, nonetheless made it and are making it happen.
Technology moves forward, but our stance toward it, the hope that this will finally make life make sense, is as ancient as the first prayer. Different props, same stage. The play hasn’t changed, only the costumes, but even more ridiculous is that the costumes are the same as well. It's like the early Greek philosophy Heraclitus pondered about stepping in the same river twice. What about being stuck in the same swamp!
The meaning that hides in meaninglessness
The great irony of the modern age is that we talk about meaning as if it were a prize to win. We chase it through careers, love, art, politics, therapy, and travel. A friend of mine would often talk about getting the trophy. She does things she loves, but then after being there for a bit, she would get the feeling that it wasn’t as great as she thought, even though it was really good and fun and what have you. She called it ‘wanting the trophy’.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The eager but restless boredom, the mid-sentence wondering what any of it’s for, is that really meaning doing its work? It shows itself not through satisfaction, nor even some mindful awareness that nothing quite fits or is supposed to fit, but by that very situation.
As my mind wanders to doom-scrolling on my phone.
Is the feeling that “there must be more” not a failure of comprehension? It surely seems like it, but maybe it’s the way existence reminds us we’re here. The same pulse that made early humans paint animals on stone now makes us write emails we half believe in. Both gestures are attempts to meet the same invisible pressure.
We think we’re chasing purpose, but we’re actually participating in it. This is not mindfulness, it is about how we are oriented on things.
What we keep missing
Every generation believes it’s reached some turning point that its confusion is special, its crises unique. Every generation has its crisis around which everything is going to change. Every generation, as well, has looked around and thought: surely this can’t be all there is.
Maybe that’s the only universal truth, but I don’t think so.
The awareness of futility is part of life, it frames it. The father of 20th century Existentialism calls it nothingness. Futility is the cognitive reaction to the encounter with the nothingness that sustains modern reality, or so it has been framed. The feeling is existential anxiety. The irony of the whole thing, if we are indeed searching for meaning instead of hoping, is that the moment you notice that your routine feels empty is the moment you’re fully participating in what it means to be human. It’s almost dumb, but our ancestors felt it when the crops failed, and we feel it when our inbox fills. The continuity between them and us is the feeling imbued by technology and cultural relations, it’s emotional. The raw, simple fact of waking up to the same question every day and answering it by doing the next thing anyway is a kind of orientation in things, not engaging with how everything is actually different, the effect is not withdrawal but stasis. My feeling of being withdrawn is really my own stubbornness of wanting nothing to change, I guess.
I wonder if that is the freeze reaction of the neurological ‘fight-or-flight-freeze’ idea of trauma.
The work that reveals us
When Heidegger described the “clearing” that open space where truth shows itself, he might as well have been describing the human workday. The repetition, the fatigue, the sudden glimpse of awareness that slips between tasks, that’s the clearing. That’s where meaning is supposed to live, but I don’t feel it. It's more like a philosophical intellectualization that has no contact with reality, but I keep trying anyway to interpret that feeling as just an error message. We want to fix it, optimize it, medicate it. But the feeling isn’t the opposite of meaning. It’s what meaning feels like when it’s actually happening.
Our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of trying to escape it. Neither do we, or rather, we do. That’s what modern life is: escape. While they didn’t have books to tell them what it meant or podcasts to analyze it, the constant negotiation between survival and consciousness reflected in our media keeps us from connecting to them to uphold the validity of our meaninglessness, or only connecting through daydreaming about how much better off the simple life was back then.
That negotiation hasn’t ended. It’s the same dialogue, carried forward by different voices, still unresolved, still alive. Modern life is ‘still’ life.
Maybe that’s why my life seems so meaningless? How ironic.
The same work
So what do we do with this knowledge? Probably nothing. That’s the beauty of it.
We keep working not because we believe it will reveal some final truth, but because work is the truth in motion. We live in the tension between what we know and what we feel, and that tension is meaning. When someone says, “I feel like nothing matters,” they’re not really declaring defeat even though it might feel like it to them. They’re naming the actual texture of being alive. The words don’t point to absence, they point to the real thing, the only thing happening. So maybe it’s less proving and more validating that helps us onward.
Our ancestors built fires, raised shelters, and buried their dead. We schedule meetings, pay bills, scroll through screens. The rituals differ, but the essence is unchanged: existence, showing up as effort, as work. Technology will keep moving, faster and brighter, promising to relieve us of the burden of being human. But that burden, the awareness that no tool, no system, no idea will finally do the work for us, is precisely what keeps us human.
The work hasn’t ended. It never will. And maybe that’s not tragedy, but the quiet perfection of the human situation to labor endlessly at the task of being, without ever finishing it.
The task is this: searching for meaning. Is that supposed to be the validation of my life?
I’ll keep searching.
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Read more from Lance Allan Kair
Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor
Lance Kair is licensed professional counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, he blends trauma-informed therapy with deep philosophical insight drawn from thinkers like Zizek Badiou, and Kierkegaard. Formerly immersed in 1990s psychedelic and rave culture, his lived experience with addiction, grief, and harm reduction drives his radically compassionate care. He's the author of multiple philosophical works, including The Moment of Decisive Significance, and is a leading voice in the emerging field of Mental Health Philosophy.
