The reality of work, for so many, is so often so far from the ideal, it seems tone deaf or insensitive to say, “The work, itself, should be its own reward”.

But it must be said for two reasons.

The first reason is that creators of work, business owners, leaders — those that set standards and measure value — so often put profits of one sort or another, ahead of people, culture and sustainable human thriving. As a result of this, many people have accepted the idea that work is not something you do for enjoyment. Some of these employers and leaders then give a tiny fraction of what they accumulate back in the form of awards, prizes, and recognition. This practice is as deceptive as it is stingy, supporting the false idea that excellence and talent is rare, scarce, a thing for elites we should all look up to. In this dysfunctional system of work and workers, work as its own reward becomes just one of many abandoned, betrayed truths.

The second reason is the acceptance by the majority of workers of this state of affairs — the acceptance of the idea that it is OK for work to be drudgery, to lack meaning, instead of the willingness to stand up for themselves in small (and sometimes big) ways, to use their imagination and creativity to change how they work, where they work, how they use their time.

Both sets of people in these two reasons have some responsibility.

But there is a third set of people with responsibility. And it is this group I focus on here.

This third group with responsibility are those in a unique position to help those implicated in the first two reasons see and pursue the cultural healing implied by the vision of work as its own reward.

This third group have work they would do anyway, even if they were rich enough to not work. They understand the power of doing what they were created to do, of having work rich with meaning and intrinsic rewards. Some are well off financially, some are not, but everyone in this group is (some version of) an independent thinker and knows their own muse. And they are all well equipped for the work the next three steps entail.

The first step is the rejection of the idea that awards and honors are a good idea for the simple reason that these awards and honors presuppose a false model of human potential and give life to a morally bankrupt, spiritually blind philosophical system.

The second step is a dedication to helping others see how they can choose a life of independent thought and action, in community with like-minded folk, aimed at spreading the power of this creativity and independence as far and wide as possible.

The third step (really a inseparable companion to the second) is the discipline of following their own muse, of not betraying who they are for the sake of more money, for external awards and honor … to model the power of living on a path full of meaning and creative expression.

(Honors and awards can come completely unbidden, unsought. A life organized without regard for recognition can, nonetheless, garner recognition. The real test for those who have chosen to take step one and are recognized anyway, is how this affects their outlook, their behavior, their interaction with others, their devotion to the three steps.)

Regarding the first task. That awards and honors presuppose a false model of human potential, is a proposition most humans disagree with because of their belief in that defective model and because of the self-fulfilling nature of that belief system which creates an experience validating the broken model.

Awards and honors are a crucial part of why most people look up to other humans, devalue and abandon their own (brilliant) potential, and end up believing they are intrinsically inferior and incapable of truly deep development, deep wisdom.

Awards and honors lead to violations of the command “… have no other gods before me” because the sure effect of giving prestigious awards and honors is humans, looking up to other humans, in a way not fundamentally inspiring or healing, but is instead, deeply limiting, even a sort of enslavement. For all false gods debase, degrade, and enslave.

While it is true there are vast disparities between humans in development, in accomplishment and in productivity, these are not due to corresponding disparities in abilities and potentials, but rather to differences in support, opportunity, emotional and physical health, environments favorable or unfavorable to development, and the fact that many do not know their own muse, their own path of inspiration .

Another contributor to disparity is the lack of hard work, perhaps because of reasons in the previous paragraph, perhaps because of some unwillingness to commit, perhaps because what needs to be done for mastery is not understood, but usually because the path of inspiration has not yet been encountered or some undealt with trauma interferes.

Because hard work is the only thing humans truly have control over, it is the only thing that could conceivably deserve an award. But this is never the reason for awards and honors that give the recipients fame and recognition, awards like Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, membership in exclusive societies like the US National Academy of Sciences, Olympic Champion, World Champion of <whatever>, etc.

A very deep concern awards and honors should evoke is the way in which, because they are looked up to, those honored are assumed to be sources of wisdom and guidance.

This is a deeply misguided assumption. In fact, the very process by which they gain those honors almost always means they have compromised away (or even explicitly sold out) at least some of their integrity, betrayed at least parts of who they are, and abandoned large pieces of the path on which they would find their wisdom. As a result, this looking up to is dangerous and pathetic — dangerous because they rarely have any wisdom and treating them like they do impoverishes everyone under their influence, and pathetic because results are so tragic, though this is often only visible over longer time scales.

Moving towards the second task, if wide human thriving were the goal, instead of a culture celebrating awards and honors, we would have a culture that handed out appreciation and expressed gratitude broadly, frequently, authentically, meaningfully, looking for every chance to encourage more inspiration and healing, the two fundamental ingredients of human thriving.

Honesty about importance would be the natural state of the many diverse pursuits of excellence.

For example, there is almost nothing in modern science and engineering that needs to be discovered or developed to “improve the world”. Improvements aimed at making the world a “better place” almost uniformly make it a worse place, a fact easily seen if all externalized effects (costs) of the “improvements” are taken into account when measuring “betterness”.

This fiction should be abandoned.

The truth — we need things like mathematics and physics and geology and chemistry and engineering and economics in precisely the same way we need art and music and poetry and literature — would change how we operate. If the goals were first and foremost filtered through a stubborn devotion to “first do no harm” and aimed at an all encompassing goal of true human thriving, our vision of work would be transformed by a radical change of values. Our new principles, our new philosophy, would still drive deep discovery and development, but in a way that promotes truly universal human thriving, in harmony with patience and wisdom, and with wide participation.

This is what must drive the second task.

The third task is the task of not betraying yourself and those that depend on you for inspiration. For the acceptance of the current, broken system is indeed a very deep betrayal of yourself and everyone looking up to you, learning from you.

The current system of awards, honors, prestige, and privilege, reward cleverness instead of wisdom, so that the more honored an individual is, the less wisdom they are likely to have, the more in line with the broken, spiritually blind system they will be. The narrow siloed reality that so many accept as the way to efficiency and universal freedom and human thriving, instead ensures higher levels of honor correlate closely with the lack of wisdom and vision.

The pursuit of promotion, honor, awards, and prestige inevitably leads to radical narrowing and very often an impoverishment of the rich creative potential of those in that pursuit … we trade away our own souls in the pursuit.

We become willing collaborators in our own betrayal.

One of the biggest effects of the siloing encouraged by the accepted, broken measures, is a blindness to true costs, because externalized costs are essentially invisible, almost if by design. And in our blindness we throw away the massive potential of all but the privileged class.

Then, we have become willing collaborators in the betrayal of everyone else … all those masses who pay the externalized costs in their own bodies and souls.

The clear, “the emperor has no clothes” style whole-system measurement leaves little doubt that if the externalizations of cost were eliminated, we would shift towards a system of first do no harm and broad human thriving. Honesty about costs then, is a first step in halting and reversing the slide into the betrayal of everything valuable, everything good. The next steps must be driven by a bold courage to act on what we see, to refuse to be complicit in our own betrayal, to boldly refuse to collaborate in the betrayal with those that cannot or do not know enough to fight for themselves.

When we understand the scale of what we are throwing away in ourselves and others, we are given an opportunity for redemption, an opportunity to shift to a completely different orbit where abundance and a rich vision of what is possible drives and sustains us. Opening to this redemption, we are given the chance to be alongside others in their paths of redemption, to be collaborators in opening the “kingdom of heaven” (here and now) to everyone.

Then our work is its own reward. Then we have found our place, and because we have, others find theirs.

In this new, living system, in quiet awareness of what is actually real, the only sensible response to gifts is gratitude … appreciation and gratitude.