I strain to remember a moment when someone explained to me the reason for labor. My parents, while I have undying respect for them, didn’t really hammer home the point of spending years in school and getting a job beyond the usual rationale of making money, and understandably so. As a broke Filipino living in a rough-and-tumble country, one of the most logical aims you can have is to make money. In fact, making money is second only to making a lot of money. With a lot of money, you can get medicine when you’re sick and entertainment when you’re miserable. You don’t have to worry about food either, which I hear is amazing. And your clothes can retire eventually, instead of being handed down the generations like heirlooms once you’ve worn them for decades. For these glinting properties of money, no Filipino gal ever goes through her life without contemplating once how her problems could all be fixed if she could marry into a rich family. Nor a Filipino lad his life and his problems if he could pull off the heist of the century. Marrying a rich girl is statistically kaput.
On a serious note, money as a reason to work is brilliant for its simplicity. It’s a layman’s fix, which means parents who have to labor themselves and often don’t have time to explain the reason behind anything don’t have to hammer home anything. Money is a tool that the world and its economic functions revolve around, and it only takes picking up someone’s twenty pesos during a flag ceremony in fifth grade to know it. All parents have to focus on is raising their kids with the right morals, and then their kids can figure out themselves as they grow how best to use money once they have it. Better yet, parents can leave the morals to the priests and pastors of their church so they can really focus on work and spend what little time they have for themselves as rest. The point is that when parents say to their kids that they have to work so they can make money, they’re delivering a packaged statement with more meat than bones in it.
One inspired figure who brought up the need to provide a reason for labor was my high school Filipino teacher. One day she gave us a challenging assignment: to envision ourselves ten years into the future and rough out a course that tells how we managed to make our dreams a reality. As a young, precocious genius who took everything seriously, I wrote about being the first Filipino astronaut. No one came close to the heights I set for myself that day, quite literally. Yet while my vision was daring, my poor teacher probably shook her head and wept a little bit when she read my paper and realized how I would end up being a colossal failure, something I’m yet to disprove, unfortunately. Or maybe she lit up at the thought of her student becoming the first Filipino astronaut. The best teachers, after all, teach on the razor’s edge between discipline and openness. In any case, the purpose of the assignment is relevant to the issue of explaining labor. It was marrow-of-the-bone stuff, and it forced out of us our half-conceived passions and reasons for existence through internal questioning. What do we want to do? Who do we want to become? If we could have it all, what would all even mean? And so we went, narrating the best version of ourselves.
I assume the students who actually did the homework probably wrote about being doctors and surgeons, architects and engineers, accountants and lawyers. Some probably invoked the acronyms CPA, MD, PhD, and what have you. Others might have written furiously about how they came into possession of a penthouse, a Ferrari, and a private jet with their cream-of-the-crop salary. The most serious of us, however, probably wrote about something that scratched the surface of why a human being should work. They didn’t write about money as they’d been repeatedly told to write about, and think and study and labor for. I imagine they didn’t write about material things at all. Nay. They wrote about mysterious things that could never be packaged. They wrote about making their parents proud. They wrote about serving their country, and getting married, and having children. They leaned not into what their work was, but into what they should work for. Maybe one even smartened up and expounded on knowing God, but that nerd definitely wasn’t me.
So what makes the claim that mystery is the better reason for labor than money? For one, as abject as life is, working for money is depressing. Every earnest second we spend at work without a tangible reason to work other than a dangled paycheck at the end of a project, a day, or a month embitters our mood and depletes our sense of wonder. Here, images of rats stuck running in wheels wouldn’t be a distant analogy. Anyone who’s lived long enough just to get paid, which is often done in the invisible world of online banking, can probably attest that labor is often a chewing gum that has to be chewed eight hours a day and five days a week, if not more. There is simply no fun in it. No taste, no gusto.
Human beings also don’t live for money. We may burn the midnight oil for overtime remuneration, but the cause for our labor will always border on the mysterious. It’s interesting that while parents tirelessly goad their children to spend years in school so they can get a degree and land themselves a high-earning job, they forget to tell them to make good friends, strive for virtues, grasp the institution of marriage, and fall in love. In their understandable mission to relieve misery in their children’s lives by rearing them in the tradition of money, they forget to rear them in the tradition of truth, which can only be found by digging within. And what else contains the deepest truths within us but the myths, legends, and stories that we’ve been telling ourselves century after century? Money may have paid stonemasons, woodworkers, and carpenters to construct cities and churches, but it was the Bible and the story of Christ that spread to all corners of the world and constructed Western civilization. It could do us some good, then, to retrieve our forgotten stories and remember where we came from. We’ve been laboring for a very long time. A very long time is enough to have figured out what it’s all about.
And isn’t it true that it’s when we’re fully enamored with mystery that we feel we’re truly living? When we discover the tale of a gallant knight who lived eight hundred years ago and had numerous, lethal encounters with death, we’re ignited in our seats and itch to prove ourselves against our weaknesses likewise with valor, faith, and courage. When we stare into a lover’s eyes and bask in the largeness and depth of their being, there’s no guarantee we would make it out alive through the same way we got in, and yet death is conquered. So is labor too. Only then does the eight-hour chewing gum and the grueling soup of sweat, blood, and toil that comes with it adopt a semblance of flavor. Only then, when we’re gripped by mystery and believe ourselves destined to be heroes and lovers, do we begin to sacrifice our work for what we work for.
This is not to de-emphasize the importance of money and formal education. This is to emphasize that no matter how rich and smart we become, we will never be as close to the point of labor, and maybe even life itself, as when we’re working to align our actions with the divine. After all, there’s no sense in amassing wealth only to end up exposed on television for being a corrupt politician. A much more meaningful life can be lived than one that winds up in jail, regardless of fame, money, and material gain. The task at hand is to sort out our values in a way where we don’t invite greed and tyranny. Namely, by putting our spiritual, mystery-seeking needs at the top rather than our basic needs, something the New Testament has a lot to say about.
Perhaps we can begin this sorting of values by offering our youth something more dramatic, flavorful, and fire-kindling than money. Even passion, as a friend of mine once said, is overrated. A serial killer could find every second of his work pleasurable, yet we wouldn’t commend him for it. Our passions themselves have to be brought into their proper places; otherwise, they lure us all the same into a path overgrown by weeds, where we will cease progress toward our heroic ends by being wrapped in vines of obfuscation, where the tree is the forest and money is worth being a corrupt politician for. As children and students, we were repeatedly asked what we wanted to become or, phrased another way, how we wanted to labor. A better question to ask might be what makes life worth laboring for in the first place.
