Book of the Month February 2024: Full-Time

 

Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by David Bahnsen is written by a Christian to Christians, and we desperately need to pay attention to every bit of what he has to say. This book has a pretty simple thesis: everything pop culture has told you about work has probably been wrong.

Overview

"I think we are all familiar with the cliched Hollywood setup of a man 'married to his career' who over the course of the movie slowly realizes that he is missing out on the 'important' things in life and eventually picks an alternative (a romance, his kids, more frequent walks through a garden, mentoring a troubled high school youth) over the 'evils' of careerism and personal ambition." (17)

Now, Bahnsen stresses (over and over again) that there is nothing wrong with these 'important' things. Rather, the problem is in making work and these things enemies. Can you have both work and a healthy life, without downgrading work or the life? Why are we always told we have to choose between them? Shouldn't it be possible to do both?

He makes the case that this is not only possible, but necessary. In a world where fewer people are working than ever before; where those who are working are working less over their total lives than ever before; and most of that work has gotten ridiculously easy (and this book has the data, graphs, and anecdotes to back this up) we somehow worry about working "too much." But Bahnsen argues that humans are actually designed, and a significant part of that design--the primary part--is actually centered around work. People are actually made to produce, not to consume, and getting that backward is a key part of why so many in our moment feel lost, useless, unsure, and alone. We're running around with fire extinguishers during a flood.

The two most striking parts of this book were probably the portions on how the church (particularly pastors) tends to approach work, and how damaging the modern expectation of work-free retirement can be. 

Pastors and Work

One of the key points of this book examines (and attempts to correct) the common view of the Christian church and its pastors toward work. Bahnsen argues that due to a misreading of the Bible (particularly Genesis) and acceptance of cultural standards, most Christians have a guilty conscience about their work, their money, and how they ought to be spending their time. Often they are told that their work doesn't "really" count, or that the whole point is to accumulate wealth so that you can donate it to feed starving children in Africa. The point of work is simply to fund others who are doing "more holy" work. Bahnsen finds this silly; he outright rejects the common split between "service" and "success:" 

"It is rank pietism to suggest that our lives take on greater meaning when we shun vocational work." (152) 

People doing the things that they are good at, for a wage, is not inferior to "church work" or unpaid work. How could it be? As above, it is what we are created to do! 

Bahnsen has some particularly stern words for pastors who try to benefit from the fruits of hard work (such as a contribution to the church building fund) while denigrating it as unholy. You can't have it both ways, he notes: making wealth cannot only be good based on where you give it away afterwards. The author is at his passionate best in this section; it is clearly a phenomenon he has seen much of, and cares deeply about.

Retirement

"If public posturing and marketing campaigns are to be believed, the modern purpose of work can be defined thus: 'Work is what you do so that eventually you won't have to do it anymore.'... Few elements of American life are more deeply seated in our subconscious than the image of a clean break from our careers, followed by living out our golden years outside of the confines of work, office, factory, classroom, for whatever vocational venue. It is rooted in the idea that what stands between you and a thirty-year vacation is only one thing: a number." (132)

While Bahnsen doesn't have a problem with working and investing in such a way that you achieve financial freedom, he does note that our current vision for retirement has two largely unseen costs. First, it sets an unhealthy mindset about work. When work becomes merely a way to eventually not work, it becomes drudgery. If work is what we are designed for, then this is a fundamentally unsound way to approach vocation--and probably explains much of the online kvetching about Gen Z's work ethic. Second, the current approach to retirement cuts off workplace experience and training. The employees that are most valuable (in terms of knowledge) are sent out to play golf, and their replacements have to figure out how to do this without them.

This is a form of economic robbery with two victims: the worker with more to add, and the society not receiving their contributions. We are robbed of what individuals have to offer our businesses, stores, plants, factories, and classrooms. The workers themselves are robbed of ongoing productive contribution and the soul-filling benefits that come with such labor.

This is just the business-specific version of a larger problem, where our society has demonized learning from previous generations at all. When every new generation has to invent the wheel all over again (or worse, get taught history explaining how all the previous periods didn't really have wheels) you wind up with basic incompetence at most levels of society. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Overall, this is an excellent book for just about anybody--the janitor who worries she's not accomplishing anything meaningful, the pastor who is unsure how to handle the top ten earners in his congregation, the wife who is worried her husband spends too much time at the office, and the husband who worries the same thing. Get a copy. Then read it, put it down, and get back to work.