Women's Work, Part 4: What Makes Work Meaningful (A Feminist Intervention)

Episode Topic: What Makes Work Meaningful (A Feminist Intervention)

Why does care work feel fulfilling on some days, and infuriating on others? What could success look like if we divorce it from individualism and achievement? In this episode, listen in to a conversation with Paul Blaschko '19 Ph.D., Director of the Sheedy Family Program and assistant teaching professor in philosophy at Notre Dame, about how feminist thinkers are reworking western definitions of meaning and success. We’ll consider Ursula Le Guin’s 1982 New Yorker short story “Sur” to illustrate.

Women’s Work is sponsored on ThinkND by the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society at the University of Notre Dame and Notre Dame Women Connect.

Featured Speakers:
- Paul Blaschko '19 Ph.D., University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/87f25c

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Women's Work. 

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Transcript

Meet Your Speakers

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 0:06

Welcome to Women's Work, a series about the working lives and literary works of U. S. women. In this series, we take up questions like, Where did Americans get the idea that some kinds of labor are properly women's work? How is work gendered in women's literature, women's work or works in another sense? How are female writers and philosophers recasting what it means to do meaningful work? I'm your series host, Chris Hedlund. I teach in and help direct the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society at Notre Dame. The program helps students who are studying both business and the arts, humanities, or social sciences to ask big questions like, what makes work meaningful? Or what makes a just economy? This ThinkND series is based on an undergraduate course I have developed by the same name, Women's Work. Both the course and the series are made possible through the support of ND Women Connect, ThinkND, the Notre Dame Alumni Association, and the Digital Learning Sprint grant that I received through Notre Dame's Office of Digital Learning and their campus partners. If you find the content here interesting, I hope that you'll consider interacting with the Women's Word course in other ways, such as volunteering to do an informational interview with our students or participating in our shared read program in conjunction with the alumni group, Notre Dame Women Connect. You can find out more about these opportunities and others through the ThinkND website. Okay, let's talk about women's work. I am so pleased to be joined today by my close colleague, Dr. Paul Blaschko, assistant teaching professor in philosophy, co author of the book, The Good Life, and director of the Shidi Family Program, the program in which, as I just said, I also work. Paul. Thank you so much for being here.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:52

Ah, it's such a pleasure. Absolutely.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:53

Yay. so audience, I've asked Paul to come here today to talk with me about work that feminist philosophers are doing to help all of us, not just women, rethink our approaches to big questions. I mentioned a couple of those big questions already. So what makes work meaningful? how do we avoid burnout in our lives? so Paul and I are going to talk. a little bit about that feminist intervention in the philosophy of work, first on its own, and then at the end, a little bit about, through a story, giving that we're thinking a little bit about literature. Paul, again, thanks so much for being here. If you, before we jump into the details, if you're okay, I'm going to just ask you a couple of broad questions about you. okay, great. So you're a philosopher. Tell us, what does that mean?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 2:35

Yeah, so a philosopher is somebody who thinks, and uses experience, everyday experience, to form a picture of the world. Now there's different sub fields. We can think about how do we know things, or we can think about what exists and why. these are kind of big questions, what you think about when you think about the history of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, but really that's it. We use any sort of evidence or experience, in arguing for a particular view. our methodology, is embarrassingly simple. It's just Thinking, like reading, thinking, so I would say, yeah, that's maybe how to capture it best. just to give a little bit of context for this conversation, the thing that we're most often doing as philosophers is making arguments. We're saying, look, work is meaningful when the following conditions are met. And then we give those conditions. And then we argue about those. We say, one of those conditions doesn't seem necessary, or it seems like, This condition is actually the whole answer. so we're often going back and forth, kind of giving arguments, trying to get it the truth, of whatever it is that we're considering.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 3:39

Yeah. I've always really appreciated when we've talked together and you help students think through here's the premises and the conditions and of the argument. I know I always find that really helpful for my own thinking too. what would you say then, your kind of sub area within philosophy as the philosophy of work? Like I've heard you describe yourself as a philosopher of work, so what does that mean then?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 4:00

Yeah. broadly I do virtue ethics. I think hard about. it is to be a person, what it is to be a good person, are there general sort of, ways that we can characterize, what it is to live well, what it is to be a good person. work is just a huge part of that, right? it has been throughout all of history. I mean, you can't really imagine, a society where people don't work, or at least, You can't imagine one yet. and so in the contemporary world, work, is part of our identity. so many of our values are bound up in it. so it's a huge part of what it means to live well, what it means to live a good life. And so my kind of subfield within virtue ethics is the philosophy of work. and there's a bunch of questions that you can ask in the philosophy of work. You can ask one, what is work itself? Can we define it in some way? what distinguishes it from, other activities like play or leisure? it might seem obvious, but then you start thinking about it and you say, some people, run marathons for fun. that's a lot of work. So shouldn't that count as work and not leisure? does all work, involve getting paid to do something? Or, what about people who are working the land to, raise crops to eat? They're not getting paid. That's just one question, just a definitional question. What is work? and then, we get into all kinds of other questions. What makes work meaningful? should we value work in the way that we do in contemporary society? We seem very caught up in, the sort of status, and power and wealth that can be generated by work. is kind of taken center stage for a lot of us in our lives. is that a good thing? Or is that kind of a sort of historically, unnecessary thing, but a way that our culture has grown up? Should we critically interrogate that and think about that a little bit?

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 5:44

So you teach a class called The Working Life. Are those examples of the kinds of questions then that you study in that course?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 5:52

Absolutely. So we start just by trying to define work. and we consider a couple of different views, give these definitions. But as soon as we do that, we dive into these questions about value, right? What is good work versus bad work? What is work that us up and empowers us, that we find meaningful, versus work that oppresses us or that, feels like toil or drudgery? A lot of my students come into the class with this question of, how am I gonna find meaning and purpose in my work? And that's really, how I advertise it and how I talk about it. and it's where I started when I started thinking about the philosophy of work. halfway through the semester, we try to take a step back and start asking. Should we be looking for meaning and purpose in our work? And I think the answer is sometimes yes. And in some ways, yes, but we need some critical distance because, it's easy to kind of get sucked into this view where work is everything. And to fail to realize that we can find some of the things that we're looking for in work, meaning, purpose, happiness, outside of kind of the traditional workplace. So we, throughout the semester, we kind of make things more complicated. and then by the end of the semester, goal is for students to be able to really articulate in a nuanced way their own philosophy of work. Here's, Why I think work is good or what kind of work I think is good. Here's why, I want to go into this industry. It can get really concrete. but overall, here's the role that I want work to play in my life. Here's how I'm going to try to integrate it into my life and who I am as a person. so that they've got that as a baseline, right? As they kind of then go out into the world and enter, the working world.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 7:35

Yeah, I can see why that would be so important for students at that, especially at that phase of life, where there's so much focus on work and like getting the professional accolades and, you take the classes, you can get the job. But then to think for a second, to kind of zoom out and put that job in the context of a meaningful life. what does that look like? And like, how do, what do you want the relationship between your work and everything else you are as a person to be? so I can see that'd be important.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 8:00

Yeah, and I can even, share, the thing I love to do in my work, the sort of research work or scholarly work, but especially the teaching work I do is I like to look at questions that are really puzzling for me that I have not figured out yet. So when I started teaching this class, when I started designing it. I was in, much the same position as a lot of the students, that I see are in now, right? I found my life a little bit unintelligible. I thought, why am I working so much? Why am I, sensitive to the kind of dynamics of the workplace? And, my self esteem is tied up and whether I've published this or succeeded that way, I don't know. And I wanted to kind of think my way through and think my way out of, the unhealthy patterns, and into leaning into the healthy patterns. and so for me, it's just such a experience, just walking through the sort of narrative, the arc of this course, over and over every time the students are seeing things that I didn't see. I just feel like, yeah, it's just such a gift to be able to, teach a class like this where every year I just get a chance to kind of re examine, check out where I'm at with all these questions.

Defining and Valuing Work

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 9:09

Yeah, as you were talking, I was just like, yeah, isn't teaching a gift? And then you said that exact thing. I feel that same way. yeah. It's really a beautiful thing. Yeah, I want to ask us, so this is called women's work, and so I'm going to narrow it a little bit on, I know that gender is a variable that shows up in that course, as well as you were generous enough to share a chapter from a book project that you're working on currently that had to do with women's work. so can you give me a little bit of an overview, like what are some of the questions or debates that are interesting to you as you think about the intersection of gender and the working life?

Economic Value of Domestic Work

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 9:46

Yeah, I would say there's a very specific kind of question, and it has a really interesting history, in feminist thought, that really interests me. And that is, how do we balance our work life with our personal life? that we even divide things up that way, I think, is really interesting. We need to remember is kind of a contemporary phenomenon. if you were, in a hunter gatherer society, work, the boundaries between work and leisure, work and community, they were just a lot more blurred. It's not like you, went to the office and gathered berries, came back, and then okay, now I'm home. Now it's my personal life. In the contemporary world, it very much is like that. We have workplaces. We go to a place. we have work relationships. We have our professional identity. And then we've got this whole other thing. Our personal life. The thing that we do on our time off. When we're not working. the central question for me is how do we balance that, right? And this is just really a philosophical way of asking the question, how do we achieve work life balance, right? We all think about this. And what's interesting to me is that is really difficult. it's a really tough puzzle. And it shouldn't be, right? the way that I think about it, okay, work takes a certain amount of time. and if we outline in our job description, okay, here's my duties, here's the time, here's when I'm going to be doing this. Okay. And then I'm going to balance this with all the things that I value and want to do with home. We should pretty easily be able to kind of balance those out. And if we find that, okay, this is taking more time, you know what, I'm going to take this responsibility off my plate if I can, or I'm going to take a step back or do something else. It seems like we should be able to balance this pretty easily, but we definitely can't. I think all of us know, it's just very, tough. It's a very tough problem. So I started thinking about this, in terms, not just of kind of a practical or strategic problem, like how many hours should I spend at the office versus how many hours should I spend at home, but really as a tension in the values that are at play when we're thinking about. Professional success, work life, and flourishing as a person in a broader sense, right? Okay, so the question, that I find really interesting from the history, of feminist thought how should we value, domestic work? And domestic work, I think has certain connotations. Even today we think, okay, I know what domestic work is, but domestic work, But if you start thinking about, again, the history of thought here, domestic work, the work of a home, the work of maintaining a home, has taken on very different forms throughout history. At the very beginning of recorded Western, thinking on this, philosophical thinking about this, was called economicus, right? the economy, tending to the economy of the home. that was a kind of Private sphere in a way, but it was much more political and, socially nuanced, than we might have thought, right? Managing a household, economicus, this requires you to be making sort of decisions about goods and distribution of these goods, relationships, and who deserves what, if, in the traditional economic sense, you had people who are working for you or servants. Okay, what is just in how I treat them and what is their good and what does it mean for them to flourish? So it was a really and kind of elevated type of work. now, we think about the more recent history of feminist thought, domestic work has kind of changed. taken on, this, I don't know, this balance where, it's almost explicitly like in the Victorian period, say, kind of reduced to, women's work. It's okay, domestic work. That's the work of the home. Okay. But work, we're going to go out into the workplace, into public, into the political sphere and do this work. and that tension and dynamic causes a lot of Discomfort. understandably, right? and throughout the recent history of thought here, there have been various ways that we've tried to deal with that. I think back to a poem in the Victorian period, The Angel of the House, it was by, pastor who is trying to elevate the work of his wife. And he said, Oh, she's so perfect. She's so gentle. She's so sensitive. if the flower dies, she cries at it. Yeah. And he's trying to elevate and trying to appreciate the value of what she's doing. And yet, especially for the, women thinkers who followed, this is the absolute worst way to try to elevate women's work, right? Virginia Woolf really famously said, the job of a writer, the job of a woman writer is in large part to kill the angel in the house, right? need to get rid of this conception that limits women to, having certain sort of characteristics and this kind of work being appropriate for them and not. Now, in the 70s and 80s, the way this showed up was especially as, a capitalist economy grew, into what it is today. And the economy really took over kind of our working lives and then the sphere of our lives. The question became, how do we recognize the invisible labor that women overwhelmingly tend to do? you can't run a country and, or a factory if you don't have people who have been raised to do that. And, are flourishing as humans. And yet, who do that, and again, statistically, especially historically, this tends to be overwhelmingly women. They're not given paychecks for that. They're not given like benefits for that. yet the economy is just taking that as a given, as an assumption. So in the seventies, there was a movement called the wages for, the wages for housework movement they said, okay, the thing we got to do is either start paying women who do this work, right? Or at least counting that work. In the gross domestic product of the country, we got to recognize it, right? in doing this, we can value kind of elevate, this work using economic value, which is really the primary way that we think about value in the working world today. It's like, how much do you make? how much does your company bring in? What are the profits, et cetera. Now there are various reactions to that. And I'll just mention one. so feminist thinkers at the time, when this movement was getting off the ground, had a moment where they said, wait a second, if we start giving women wages for this type of work, that's actually going to lock them into, a certain, sort of lifestyle where we're actually going to be limiting them, in a way. The real work that we've got to do in order to address inequalities between men and women is to figure out how to close gaps in the economy itself. So instead of focusing on childcare and recognizing it in a certain way, we need to find out what conditions are limiting women in the workplace, in the economy, and then address those things. The sort of domestic life stuff is that we're just going to have to figure that out in our private lives. They call it like job, family, reconciliation or, figuring that out. Now, today, we see. These debates continuing to live on, and we see the limits of some of these ways of thinking, there are still huge gaps between men and women in the workplace and the economy. And the explanations for those, and what it would take to change that, those are all just fascinating, moral, ethical, questions, and I just find that whole sort of history. Illuminating, especially when it comes to this question of just like work life balance. How do we achieve that? Sorry, that was a monologue. I think

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 17:48

You were really going there, Paul. yeah, so a couple of, as you were talking, a couple of things are coming to mind for me. First was thinking about, I'm trying to remember if we've read together, bell hooks, our essay on women at work, but it strikes me that It offers kind of a not the same argument that you're making about kind of the limitations of this 1970s feminist movement that's like we can't pay women because that will stick them in these drudgery roles and kind of, So it's a way of devaluing in a way the work for an intrinsic sense that it could actually be meaningful to be in a household with children. but bell hooks argument was also that when feminists chose to make their focus like to liberation looks like get women out of the house. In fact, then they were overlooking that black women and other women of color have in fact been out of working and working class women out of the house. think about slavery and, like the, this idea that if, oh, if only women are not working in the house anymore, then they're liberated. just kind of shrunk who we were actually talking to with feminism. And so it seems to me that one of, one of the arguments Ben Bell Hooks is making, that I think would kind of dovetail with what you're saying too, is that, Today, feminism is reckoning with how do we allow for, to get back to your question about what makes work meaningful, how do we allow work to look meaningful in multiple different spheres? so that you can do work within the house and that's meaningful work, or you can do work outside the house and that's meaningful work. And also then how do we make feminism intersectional? so that women of different classes, of different races, of different geographic locations, urban versus rural, all feel that their interests, are interrelated. are represented. I don't know if that, if you have thoughts in responding to that.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 19:28

that's totally right and very interesting. I've read some bell hooks. I don't know that I've read that essay.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 19:35

I'll sit.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 19:36

the way that I would articulate it is I think, a goal ought to be, agency, creating agency, or creating the conditions for agency so that, any person doesn't feel constrained or unreasonably constrained in the choices that they're making with respect to work and sort of personal life, family life, right? Um, the other piece of it though, is recognition, right? So there's the agency, there's the thing we're choosing to do. And then there's the status, like the way that it's viewed in society. that's where I think the economic way of valuing things, the way that we just automatically, you know, kind of sort people into status hierarchies in terms of what they do, how much money they make, how much power they have in an organization. That's where I think there's a lot of work to be done, because doesn't seem like, merely recognizing, oh, okay, if you've chosen to be at home, if you're a man or a woman, you are doing, 80, 000 worth of work a year. Okay, great, but that's not why you value it, and

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 20:51

Sure.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 20:51

why you want to do it, is there a way of valuing, which I think would elevate the work, and would increase the agency, without reducing to these kind of economic terms?

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 21:04

Interesting. So in your mind to, to include women's labor in the GDP or something like that would, pose a threat towards, it would act because you use the word reducing to the economic. Would you say that then if you offered in your mind this economic valuation of it, that would take away from this sentence in which it's intrinsically meaningful? Um, that what you're grappling with?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 21:28

That's a question I'm grappling with, and it's

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 21:30

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 21:31

honestly just put to, the women in the kind of focus group that, I've assembled. So as I've been writing, this book, this particular chapter relies heavily on, a group of women that, I met with regularly in my neighborhood. I kind of pretended to be an anthropologist for a bit, I put the question to them. Now, my own view coming into it is It doesn't seem like assigning an economic sort of unit number, to the contribution that a woman is making or a man is making and staying home and raising kids. It doesn't seem like that itself, it doesn't seem like that necessarily degrades the work, but it definitely doesn't seem like it fully captures the value, right? let me give you an example. One of the women that I met with regularly as part of the chapter, writing this book, one of the women, I asked her sort of point blank. I said, how much do you think your work is worth to you? Like at home, is it worth like a hundred thousand dollars? if someone said, I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars to like, do whatever else you want, but not do the work that you're doing at your home. She's no, not a hundred thousand dollars. I was like, okay. How about 500, 000 like a year? She's no, that's not right. And I was like a million dollars. She's I'm going to stop you there. There's no number, right? And what that says to me is that, yes, there is like a monetary, there's a way of measuring, and capturing the value, the monetary, the economic value, of what she does. And it's important, I think, to recognize that. And maybe including that in the GDP would be one way of recognizing it. But I don't think it fully captures the value, either the value that they're finding, that she's finding in this work, or the societal value, the value that's being generated, produced, right? and so I sometimes think If we focus too much on this question of should we assign, economic sort of measure, to domestic work, then count that in certain ways, I think that, that might be one way of recognizing, but it doesn't fully capture the value. Yeah.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 23:41

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that. That like, how do you monitor? How do you put a number on that? what? That beautiful feeling of raising a child like that 100 percent resonates with me. The question I'm thinking about. have you read Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women? definitely you should 100 percent read this book. You'll love it. it's on the subtitle is something like gender, the gender, something about the gender data gap in a world designed for men. but she has an, a chapter on women's labor and the GDP. and her argument is that this is not about kind of like, Rewarding women for their work or like helping them feel like, oh yes, now someone understands that me doing this child care is worth 100, 000 or something, but rather is about this rising to the level of visibility for policymakers that like when policymakers are making decisions about like where to make cuts, they'll be like, oh, it looks like there's no cost if we just check. Away some of the public education funding and it's oh, in fact, what's happening then is that shifting that those responsibilities into that unpaid, like private sphere, domestic sphere, so that women end up carrying that burden more. And from a policy standpoint, it looks like, we fixed that. Nothing's lost, but in fact. And she shows the data about how that pulls women out of the workforce. And then that in fact costs country in such and other ways. and so her argument was have factoring women's labor into the GDP. and this isn't the whole of the argument I'm oversimplifying, but is, in her mind, a good thing for raising to the level of policy, helping people make like social infrastructure decisions that benefit the countries in the long run.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 25:25

I love that. And I'm definitely going to look this up

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 25:28

Yeah, I think you should. You would like it.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 25:30

I think, from how you've described it, I think I'm convinced, I think like that argument, right? And so again, so if the question is, should we count domestic work in the GDP? maybe the answer is yeah, for that purpose, right? the purpose of creating policies that are fair and that sort of make visible all the work that's happening in our society, in our economy. if the question is,

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 25:52

Oh,

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 25:53

or primary way that we value, work in the domestic sphere? I think the answer there is no, definitely not. Um, yeah. And I, I mean, I'm a philosopher, so it's I think, don't know, those questions sound similar. Like, why should we change? I think a lot hangs on it. I really do. I think, articulating, this value, societal value, sort of individual value. It's really important for the way that we relate, to others in our community, to others in our lives, the way that we see other people and recognize them. Um, so though they might seem like really similar questions, I do think that it, that there's an important distinction between them.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 26:36

absolutely. And I think, too, there's a bit of a chicken and an egg. I know the Sheedy students and us will have this conversation about, it is in some ways, Easier, even though it seems maybe impossible in like our gridlocked political system, it's in some ways easier to change the policy or to change the like numbers, the dollars, whatever, as opposed to changing cultural assumptions or societal norms. How do you change people's minds about things? and and in some ways it's like how you don't, you can't change policies until you change people's minds and then vice versa until the policy's in place. So yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 27:10

1, 1. Just just to, give an example of this, one example here, that I find interesting is this question of like child tax credits, right? now people on, like the left and people on the right, often support something like a child tax credits. very different reasons, right? and yet when you then try to have a conversation, it just, it gets really difficult. It's we need sort of language that allows us to communicate, right? because often the discourse. Then blocks any sort of policy progress we could make. It's I'm not going to support that because it was put forward by that person. And you're like, what, one, one goal of mine is just in exploring these issues, trying to articulate of a conceptual framework, or at least enough pieces that we can have those conversations like person to person in a way that gets us out of some of the kind of ideological ruts that we all find ourselves in.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 28:09

Yeah, I totally hear what you're saying. I feel like I could, I feel like I could talk to you about this for like hours.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 28:15

I

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 28:16

and I've, in some ways I think derailed us by being like, let's start talking about politics and the GDP. But,

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 28:20

That's,

Dr. Andrea Veltman's Insights

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 28:21

to think about you're a philosopher, and that's your interest in these questions as a philosopher. Like you mentioned, as a philosopher, those two questions that might seem very similar are in fact, You can see the distinction and that's cool. and so I want to draw upon that knowledge specialized expertise that you have, in this conversation. and one of the ways I thought we could do that on this series is episode is to talk through for audiences, Texts that we've taught together, Dr. Andrea Beltman's Meaningful Work. it's a book we've taught a selection from a chapter of it, and she, Dr. Beltman's a professor of philosophy at James Madison University for the audiences, and so I thought maybe we could just talk through for audiences a little bit about what we've liked about this article, what we have learned from it, and like kind of how it's helped us and students think through what makes work meaningful since. Yeah, that's kind of at the heart of this conversation we're having. Is that okay if I transition us to that? Okay, listeners, the, Dr. Feldman's essay, she lays out four different dimensions of meaningful work, or in other words, four different ways that you could understand work to be meaningful, and this is one of the things that's kind of a hallmark of this essay and that we find so helpful about it is that it is a pluralistic account of meaningful work. she's not saying huh, if you just think about it. This is the one thing, but rather what could be meaningful along this dimension, or like this dimension, and sees how they interact with one another. so I thought for our purposes today, I would read off the dimension from Dr. Beltman, and then Paul, maybe you can give like an example of it for people to kind of help people understand what that means. Does that sound okay?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:02

That sounds great. And maybe, just as a very brief sort of, framing

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:07

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:08

it's somewhat important, I think, to remember that, that Veltman is working within a virtue ethics sort of framework or perspective, which I think is like true and it's a good, it's like the, the right perspective,

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:20

Is correct, is what we can get.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:24

but I say that, in part because it helps explain these kind of different dimensions of meaning that she's identifying, right? So she's, going to emphasize virtue. Okay, why would you care about that? Or capabilities? Why would you care about that? it's because she's got this view on which human beings are a kind of thing. there's certain ways that we flourish and there's certain ways that sort of certain things that keep us from flourishing. And she wants to articulate, okay, with respect to work, what are some of the ways that we can flourish and work, versus, be frustrated or oppressed by our work.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 30:53

Great background. Very helpful. Thank you, Paul. okay, four ways that she says then that work helps you can flourish at work. Way number one, the work lets you develop or exercise your human capabilities, such as intelligence or autonomy, especially insofar as others recognize or value you doing it. Thanks.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 31:16

This is great. So what is a human capability or a human capacity? This goes all the way back to Aristotle. Who's asking questions about what kind of a thing are we, right? what differentiates us from other animals, right? Aristotle characterizes us as the rational animal, right? so distinctly human capacities or capabilities. This is a really broad sort of range of things. It can be, creativity, or it can be rationality, or it can be, social. building, but these are what I would describe as like the distinctively human capabilities, right? okay. So work is meaningful when it develops or exercises this. Again, it's lovely because you can look at just any different industry or any different sort of career path and think about what human capabilities does this cultivate and develop. An investment is going to be cultivating and developing, sort of strategic capacities, economic in the classic sense where, there's goods, we can measure them, we can distribute them, we can see what's going to be better for, this company or this person, whatever. are very sort of human capabilities, right? and engaging those and being recognized for doing that, is a good thing. It's meaningful to us. Just to take a radically different example, the artist, right? who's creating something, with some intention, some sort of desire, wants it to either have an effect, whatever, this thing and being recognized for creating this thing, they're developing this sort of capacity, this capability, this distinctively human. capability. Now again, I think you can apply that to many different types of work. and I think it's just intuitively something that we often value about our work. I love teaching because it allows me to think and to think in community with people. it's crazy that I get paid to do that, right? but that's developing a distinctively human capability.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 33:14

Okay, number two. The work supports you in developing virtues, including self respect, honor, integrity, dignity, or pride.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 33:23

Here, you can think of, all kinds of ways in which work develops virtues. Think about a carpenter who's got to, practice over and over to get the dimensions just right, or to make sure that the table is whatever, This is developing a kind of patience, a kind of attentiveness, really like a sort of love for, the form of this thing, and for the people who will eventually use it, Take a different example, somebody who is, working for a non profit, they're cultivating a kind of empathy for the people that they serve, and a of communicating to the people who they want to donate and bring into that community and connect. These are all virtues, right? And you can bake them down to these simple, okay, patience, attentiveness, love, empathy. But those are the kinds of things, those are the opportunities that work sometimes gives us, a chance to cultivate.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 34:16

Cool. Yeah, so work is meaningful if it helps us cultivate those virtues.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 34:22

Totally.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 34:23

Okay, here's number three. The work provides you with a personal sense of purpose or fulfills a genuinely useful purpose for others, especially something with enduring value.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 34:35

Yeah. purpose is one of these tricky words. we often use it, In the context of talking about work, Oh, I want purposeful work, or I want to feel like I have a purpose and it can be to really figure out what that means here. I think what she's saying is, we know what it means to. like we have purpose in our lives or our work. And we know what it feels like not to have that, right? Like, why am I doing this? Doesn't matter at all. and so that feeling of purposefulness is really important. And that's something that makes your work meaningful, right? But also the purpose you're genuinely serving. So I can imagine cases where these come apart, right? I realize, look, I am an essential piece of a huge puzzle that serves a bunch of people, saves lives, whatever. I don't find a lot of sort of purpose feeling in it. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm, counting the data or I don't know what, but I do recognize, man, this is really important. And people recognize that you're doing something really important. So I think there, it's Either or both of those, ideally, they kind of overlap so that you're feeling the purpose and you're being recognized as doing something that serves a greater purpose. but I think that's how I would cash out or explain that condition.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 35:47

Yeah, neat. Okay, and last but not least, the fourth one. The work helps you integrate different elements of your life, such as helping you build personal relationships you care about, or connecting you to an environment or context that is important to your identity.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 36:04

Yeah. So this I think is actually the hardest dimension to realize or achieve in our contemporary world, our contemporary society for various reasons. but think about the person. For whom, achieving a kind of, professional goal. It's just, that's their life's work. that's what they do. That's what they want to do. I want to be in this kind of a position, right? Their whole life can kind of be organized around that work. now you can take that too far. Maybe that, it gets unhealthy at a certain point. or just consider in a more simple case, I'm a teacher. being a teacher is not just what I do. It's part of my identity. It's how I see myself, how I relate to the world, and that integrates, brings together, different That's it. Spheres of life, different arenas, in a way that's not always true of work, right? So take the opposite sort of, example when this is not working well, you get alienation. So just think of Marx's class, classic sort of depiction of the worker in the factory who's doing something that like a machine could do, but, they're being required to do this 12 hours a day and they're just moving this thing up and down. in that case, you might think, Look, this is alienating. It's taking me away from I don't identify as like a lever puller. I don't love this. I don't see the kind of purpose in this. And one of the great sort of harms or dangers of work is that it can disintegrate us, right? and I think, we all have feelings like that. you're sometimes sitting doing some part of your job and just thinking, why am I doing this? it's not, serving any good. It's not what so that's a dimension where, again, things can go really well, things can go poorly.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 37:47

yeah. I think that last dimension, like you said, it seems to me tricky both in terms of how to understand it and probably implementing it. but in the thinking about the context of women's work then or care work, one of the things that I really appreciate about Veltman is that she uses care work as an example multiple times as she's talking about meaningful work. it's not invisible for her in ways that often when people are philosophizing about work, maybe it's just generalization, but That's not the first go to example. and so that's one of the things I really like about this essay. but she seems to draw out Or use these dimensions of work to help explain why care work can feel just absolutely infuriating in some contexts and frustrating and mind numbing and so meaningful and beautiful and, in value, but can't put a number on it. Invaluable. In other contexts, it seems like it has a lot to do with this. is it helping you build a personal relationship? You care about in an environment? That's important to your identity. did you? Sorry?

The Role of Agency in Work

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 38:47

I would just describe that. I would just kind of link this back to this notion or idea of agency.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 38:54

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 38:54

think so much the way we evaluate our work, whether it's, we think it's frustrating or it's really, Elevating sort of life giving comes down to this question of agency. Like, why am I doing what I'm doing in this context? And how is it being recognized or evaluated by people outside of this context? And there, I think you're right. Bringing up care work as an example Perfect. Because, there are just so many different ways, so many different, feelings that we can have towards some particular kind of care work. It's like the same instance of an action, maybe just like me picking up the house after my kids. feel oppressive. it can feel, useful or it can feel like an act of love and generosity.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 39:41

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 39:43

I think a lot of the sort of, what determines how it feels, a lot of times down to or is at least importantly influenced by agency. am I stuck doing this? Am I forced to do this? do I want to do this? so I think it's just a great thing to focus on. and you're right. It was a generality to say philosophers don't think about this kind of work. True generality. It's a true, it's a true one. we really don't.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 40:07

yeah, I think agencies are really great variable to think about. It also makes me think about, I think she mentions is another variable is who's on the receiving end and are they capable of doing it themselves? like how much agency do they have? she uses, you did, Picking up the house. I think washing dishes is one of the examples she uses and kind of contrasts, washing dishes for an aging parent who no longer is able to manage everything around the house and the quiet meaning that could have versus, washing dishes at a restaurant where you're underpaid and your, your boss is yelling at you versus the experience of washing dishes for your 17 year old kid where you're like, Wash your own, why don't you just put the plate in the sink? is this so hard to understand? Like

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 40:46

Totally.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 40:47

you're doing the same action, but the feeling that you have, or one of those feels meaningful and two of them do not. And so what are the variables that are at play? And that's where, again, those four dimensions of work, I think are so useful. Cause if you're like, why do I feel like this is not meaningful to have someone to, a way to think through a tool for thinking through, okay, why not? What? What boxes is it not checking that could, and then is there something I could do to make it meaningful? Or do I need to find a way to either set stronger boundaries or stand up for myself or get out of this situation? Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 41:19

Totally. I think that's right. And, let me just add two more scenarios. I love the washing dishes example that you're using. The aging parent potentially say, the sort of control for the other variables. Meaningful. this is a sort of integrating, elevating. It feels like a genuine act of love and agency. Okay. the dishes like, in the restaurant you're oppressed. Okay. and then I love the 17 year old example. Here's another one. doing the dishes so that my wife can be out working. Think like doing the dishes of my wife can be out working. I think there, there's really important ways in which that could be Agency building for me, or oppressive for me. I think she's at working because man, she's just like money hungry. She just wants money and ah, there's and it doesn't matter at the end of the day. I would rather that she's here, like doing the dishes with me, that we're doing this together, right? that would feel oppressive. On the other hand, if I'm like, man, I'm doing this because I see her as having this goal, this sort of, part of her identity being built up by this work, and I want to see her flourish in that way, right? Then it takes on a very different feel. Even though in any of these cases, doing the dishes is pretty toilsome.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 42:30

Yeah, absolutely. And it strikes me too that like the first dimension that mentioned, especially in the case of recognition by others, if when your spouse came home, she did not notice that you had done the dishes and did not care, you would probably feel more oppressed doing it the next time than if it was like, wow, thank you so much for doing their dishes. It really felt, it was nice that I could be out doing my whatever.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 42:50

Absolutely. And build that recognition out. Do we have cultural or social ways of appreciating that? Because you come in and it's just it's a basic assumption that you take care of all this stuff and I get to do meaningful, important things or something. And So like the personal recognition, like me saying, Oh yeah, okay, or my wife coming home and saying Oh, thanks for doing this. Okay. Very important. And the cultural sort of recognition, the ways that she can express that sort of gratitude also very important, right? yeah, yes. Absolutely.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 43:25

In some great article. Thank you, Dr. Andrea Feltman. We really like it if you're listening to this. We're fans. I, the last thing I wanted us to do, we should probably transition to this. So this is not forever long of a podcast. the, is to talk, you mentioned that when you're doing the working life course, one of the goals as the course develops more is to help students, put pressure on some of the assumptions that in Western culture, we kind of take for granted about what it means to be successful, what it means to achieve things, what it like a good life in a working professional sense looks like. and I think feminist philosophers of work are really helpful in Kind of, recognizing those assumptions and thinking, what else is there, what are the alternatives, and so I thought maybe we could talk through a little bit about that, in the context, though, of a story, because I, like literature, that's my thing, and this series is about literature in part, Thought it could be a cool ending place. the story that I wanted to talk about is Ursula Le Guin's Sir, which was first published in the New Yorker in 1982. I'm trying to remember, have you read this story, Paul?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:31

I honestly printed it out when you talked about it, and I read half of it, and, maybe fittingly, I fell asleep with my baby in my arm, and I didn't read it.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:39

Good.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:40

of it, and I loved it.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:41

Folks, that is a comment on parenting, not on how good this story is. You should read the story. Parenting is very difficult and sleep deprivation.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:49

riveted and very sleep

Ursula Le Guin's 'Sur' and the Concept of Achievement

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 44:51

Yeah, correct. Good. I'll give you a sum, audience members a summary, Paul a summary for you. it's an interesting, I love this piece, it's interesting, it's a speculative history, which means that it's imagining a historical event as if it has happened. in this case, the event that it's imagining is the discovery of the South Pole, the first expedition to the South Pole. so the story reads as a summary of an expedition, that it's written in the first person and not using I. So the narrator has written this, as she puts it. With the hope that somebody's, her grandchild or somebody's grandchild will someday find this account that she's written. but she puts it in an old attic trunk. the idea is not that it's found right away, but that, several generations from now someone will uncover this and find it interesting. so we're reading this account that she's written in the story, the narrator and eight other women, all from South America decide that they want to see Antarctica. and and while they're there, they then journey arduously, painfully, it's hard to read at times, to the South Pole. and, in this speculative history, it's, Their journey is taking place in 1909, so at this point, there have been other crews that have attempted to get to the South Pole, but have not been successful. The story references one like 1907. as this story is speculating history, these group of nine women, and there's like a small subset of them that actually reached the South Pole, they're the first ones to reach the South Pole successfully. And then, and this is where the story gets interesting, they just decide not to tell anyone. so in this critical moment in the story where they're at, that these three women have made it to the South Pole, and they talk, but they can't, even smile because their lips are frozen. and then they say that we discussed, this is a quote, we discussed leaving some kind of mark or monument, a tent pole or a flag, but there seemed no particular reason to do Anything we could do, anything we were, was insignificant in that awful place. And so they just, they leave without a trace. and so on the one hand, it's like their decision not to leave anything behind to show no sign that they've gone is motivated by I guess you'd say like the existential threat of the South Pole itself. So like they're in the, this place that's like the sublime is the word that comes to mind. Awful to the point, awesome to the point of being terrifying. one of my other favorite lines says something like, Achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul. so it's like this reckoning with achievement. On the other hand, and this part is harder to understand, For me to interpret, or, and definitely students too. They seem to have also a concern for protecting the egos of men who will come after them and want to find the South Pole. so she says something like, I was glad, this is another quote, let me see if I can find it here. I quote, I was glad even then that we had left no sign there for some man longing to be the first might come someday and find it and know then what a fool he had been and break his heart. so there's these multiple reasons potentially, but moral of the story, women find South Pole, they decide to say nothing. As a philosopher of work, Paul, what do you find interesting about this? Or what is coming to mind as I'm describing this?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 48:11

Ah, I love this, and I'm gonna go home and just read the rest of it right away. a couple of things are coming to mind. So one is, an appreciation. for how our activities, actions work as humans, how it relates to a greater whole, so you were describing, this feeling of the sublime or this kind of recognition. I love that. I love that quote, about achievement. And I think that is something that you find in philosophers in, in sort of wisdom traditions, you find this. Reorienting perspective of you're striving for this thing to achieve this thing. This is your goal. And yet, and it's fine. And it's good that you're achieving the thing. And yet, like your actions, right? your achievement, really. In the grand scheme of things, if anything, it represents a connection to the grand scheme of things and how much more beauty and value there is in this sort of, grander scheme of things. So it makes me think honestly of, book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle talks about contemplation as being the thing humans can do that is most godlike, the thing that we've got to strive to do with every fiber of our being. and yet it's an activity that is inherently frustrating for us because We just can't achieve that perspective at the end of the day, but we should always strive to kind of get that. I think that's amazing. I think that's beautiful. The other thing that is just really striking to me is this, second sort of reason, right? to, fail to leave any marker to protect the ego of a man. Now, when you read the quote, you said something like, that, a man in the future is going to come, and suppose He sees a flag here, will realize what a fool he is, and then it will break his heart. implied by that is that he is a fool, regardless of whether or not he realizes it,

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 50:18

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 50:19

or not it breaks his heart, and think that's like a provocative, and also just insightful, recognition. That we can do work, we can try to achieve things, for very different reasons, and I think the danger in achievement, or the danger in what I've come to call like achievementism, this kind of work ethic of our time, is that we see the achievement the Entirely our own and as the ultimate purpose, the point, right? So I want to be the CEO of this company and I get there and I say, I did this, I did it on my own. I worked hard and got this. And this is what I wanted. Now, anybody who's achieved anything right of significance in their life that they had to work, for months or years on that's a myth. You never get there. You never get in that position. And think, all right, that's it. Like I've done it, you always think I'm missing something. There's something else missing something. And so to me, what's interesting about this is that reflects. on the intentions of this band of explorers. They're exploring in like a genuine sense encounter, to see, to discover, this allows them to take out any sort of, external sort of You know, like fame, fortune, like whatever. and it really kind of preserves the purity of that intention. Now you could have both. You could be like, okay, I did it not for the recognition, but because like I wanted to, and the recognition is good. And I think that's often how we think. I think when you do something in secret, you do some good in secret. I think a big, motivating factor for keeping it secret is often that like it, it preserves the purity of that intention. and. It allows you even to appreciate and to recognize that your intention was. For the discovery for that, whatever, and not the recognition, it's impossible to be motivated, or to read your sort of life's history as being motivated by, a desire for status, power, money, wealth, fame, if nobody knows about it. And if you intentionally chose not to tell anybody about it, that's cool. I love

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 52:47

Yeah. Oh, I love it, too. I feel like, when I teach this, I'll often teach it alongside, a man on the moon speech. The first, that, the idea of, the plant, the flag, we're the first, you do it, you, so excited, and, this counter way of thinking about it. There is a line, what you were saying about, for the sake of the actual genuine exploration, where they say, we came to see. No more nor less, and I think too, to your point about they're calling the man a fool. You're right. And there's that, that, those lines happen in the same paragraph where she, where the narrator says, I wish we hadn't gone. Even now, looking back, I wish we hadn't gone. And the difficulty of the task and kind of realizing that it was reckless, I think, in that moment. so it flies in the face of our then hoping that the narrators, if they're not going to plant the flag, at least have this romantic narrative of but I overcame all difficulty and like it sparked this alive desire for exploration and next now I'll try for the North Pole. No, she is wow, that was really hard and bad and like we probably went too far. We shouldn't have done it, and, but here we did, and I do want my grandchildren or something to have the record. So there's a sense in which absolutely she's shaped by it. but yeah, it's like a sense of interest in journey or exploration or seeing without exactly, with any of the focus on achievement or Plant your flag.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 54:12

I

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 54:13

Yes, now students are so mad when I've taught this in the past. I've taught this twice before. I almost was like, I shouldn't teach it again, but nope, I'm doing it again. it's, I'll see what they think this semester, but students have been so mad when we read it. I'd be curious, Paul, do you have a sense, you said you could instantly kind of imagine why that would be the case, but so why do you think students are so mad when we read this story?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 54:40

think, I mean, for one thing, I think our students, default sort of work ethic is achievementism. I think we've just hammered it into them, and I think part of that just, manifests in, being extrinsically motivated to the point where you don't really, Cultivate fully, the virtues or capacities to be intrinsically motivated for something, right? So it's we start seeing the goal as an end in itself rather than of a whole life's journey or something, right? so my guess would be, from the student's point of view, if I'm right about this kind of, achievementism that is seeped into all of our lives, not just our

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 55:20

Oh, absolutely.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 55:22

You know, this challenges that this goes against that. it's almost unintelligible if you're assuming that like the achievement, the recognition, the fame, the whatever, that's the point. it, I think makes you uncomfortable, right? Because then you have to ask all these questions about him. Was that the point? Why,

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 55:39

Yeah,

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 55:40

that would be my guess. I think that would be one part of my guess. The other part is the gender dynamic. Uh, in a way. In a way, you could read the narrator as saying, Men and their egos and the way they work and why they're working, et cetera, this is kind of an indictment of the way that many men work and explorers and whatever. to me, that seems Like it seems like history, but anytime you have some sort of like generalization about men do this or when do, and then to put it in the context of this kind of exploring and recognition and work I just think is always going to. challenge us, in part because it's just such a controversial kind of, area. Like it's just a hard thing to talk about, without just, inadvertently raising these great feelings in the people that you're talking to. And so my guess is, it really, I think some of the discomfort really comes from. the fact that we don't have just a clear culturally accepted just mode where we're like, this is how we interpret the gender aspect of this. We really don't, it's, it's something we would have to talk and think really hard about, but it's a scary area to go to.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 56:55

Totally. Yeah, that's so true. And I think, too, the, another thing that's straightened, that's come out is, on the one hand, you could read this story, and this is how I read it, which is, I think, why I like it so much, is kind of a feminist push back against achievementism as a measure of what success looks like. On the other hand, if you're, you could read it as like a sort of the women anti feminist capitulating to demands on women to just keep quiet and not speak up. speak too loudly, not stand up for themselves. I think sometimes students are mad because they really want like a hashtag girl boss ending where these women like plant their flag and then publish their thing and they're getting the credit and yeah aha women have done it you know they went to the South Pole first and the fact that the women choose not to do that can seem in their mind like, they're just giving into cultural pressure that says women should keep quiet, that women should stay at home. so I think that factors into,

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 57:52

It's so interesting to me that decision to keep secret the fact that they've discovered it in a way. Contributes to this sort of agency that they have in this really

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 58:04

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 58:05

way, right? So I think there are ways of writing this story where it's very clearly a capitulation to the culture. And again, it's more comfortable to read a story like that because there's kind of black and white moral terms. You're like, Oh, so bad. they're so oppressed. There's a way to read it where, it's a complete sort of, a complete sort of indictment of, a certain way of approaching work and exploration. Again, kind of comes from this is like the middle way where by keeping something secret, you're preserving a kind of intentionality and agency. in the face of all these cultural dynamics that are going on, like at a particular time. that's just fascinating. That's

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 58:41

Yeah.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 58:42

It's incredible,

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 58:43

Yeah. Ursula Gwynn, I just feel is she's a genius. I love her writing, and this story. To me, for exactly the reasons you're saying, it's, you can't nail it down to one interpretation. And those kinds of stories then are often my favorite because they just haunt me. I think about it and I question it, and I love doing that with students in the classroom too because there's just so much to talk about.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 59:03

really. I would just add, too, in case anybody's interested, I love the practice of reading short stories or novels, but mostly short stories in my classes. I read, I think, with respect to work, these kind of stories, this kind of speculative fiction, whether it's speculative historical fiction or, I use George Saunders in my class and he often writes about kind of the near future. It's not at all science fiction because None of the technologies are explained or, interesting even, but just like speculatively, just taking us far enough outside the kind of current, sort of economic system and relationships to work, et cetera, and then telling us a story about a person and how they feel and, what understand or don't. it can be just so illuminating. It can just break the categories that we're so used to using in relating to our work in a way that again, then causes that kind of really productive tension, I think, and discomfort where we've to think through some things. Yeah.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:00:06

Yep. Literature.

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:00:08

Yeah,

The Importance of Meaningful Work

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:00:08

Stop. Yeah. I want to ask you one more question kind of to close. so writers, authors, philosophers are offering these pluralistic accounts of meaningful work and challenging traditional definitions of what success looks like or what achievement looks like. Why should we care? Like, why should listeners or audiences care about that?

paul-blaschko_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:00:32

I'm going to go back to the answer that always motivates me when I'm doing philosophy. And that is that about these questions can determine whether our lives go well or poorly. Like whether we flourish or don't at the end of the day. So for me, and this isn't the sort of goal of all philosophy, but certainly practical virtue ethics type philosophy, always asking am I living well? am I? A good person, or am I on the way to being a good person? And so when it comes to questions of meaningfulness and work, it's such a tangled sort of area. And there's so many cultural assumptions and, things that we've got to sort through achievementism, et cetera, that it becomes work becomes one of the most. important sort of theaters in which our lives, play out are lived. it's really important to make sure that you are kind of directing things, that you're the agent, that you're, things are lining up in the way that, that you want them to. so just to make this more concrete, I know as a philosopher, I'm like, okay. if we're motivated by a kind of achievementism, a kind of extrinsic motivation, I want to achieve this thing and then I'm going to be happy. We all know that's not true. It doesn't work. But if we uncritically just kind of accept that and allow that to direct our decisions and pull us into a working life at the expense of other areas of our lives that we could find, important and meaningful, you could live a tragic story. You could get to the end of it and look back and just think, why did I do that? That meant nothing, right? And for me, that's like the scariest thing ever, right? to be in a position where you look back and you just think like, I didn't live well. I didn't like live up to my values and standards. If you critically engage this stuff, wrestle with it, think about it, read the stories. of, think about the arguments maybe a little bit, I think you're much more likely to cultivate like a health, like an intellectual health, a moral health where, know, no matter where your life goes and how it goes, as you mature and grow, you're a lot less likely to be the kind of person that looks back and just says like I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't mean to do these things. ignored important aspects of my life. And so for me, like that's flourishing, right? And that's how the kind of critical consideration, reading, discussion, conversation, dialogue. That's where those skills and activities, they really just, pay off. is In cultivating this kind of, healthy sort of flourishing, state.

chris-hedlin_1_01-10-2025_100649 1:03:21

That feels like a good note to end on. thanks so much, Paul. as always, a real pleasure to talk with you. and audiences, thank you too, for joining us for this episode of Women's Work. On behalf of me, Paul, NDWomenConnect, and ThinkND, we really hope you enjoyed this conversation. And we'll visit think. nd. edu to learn even more. Until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations.