What is work? I consider this as an important question to answer in order to direct my activities away from being lazy.

To start, there is the most obvious sort of work—physical labor to achieve some tangible end. For instance, you may have to move some supplies up a mountain or dig a ditch to redirect some water. Organizing your labor (e.g. using your hands, operating tools) to do this is an important, universally recognized sort of work.

In the USA, in our present "digital age", many people don't do much of this sort of work. Particularly if you're living in some urban apartment, the closest thing you may do to approximate this sort of job is cleaning your living space or cooking yourself a meal. So what sort of work is there left for us to do?

Defining "work"

In any kind of work, there is some "default" state of things that you have to exert attention and effort to change. Modern science jargon might call this entropy which biological organisms fight against. So in the manual labor examples given above, by default there is no food/supplies at the top of a mountain—through working, we can make some store of food/supplies at the top of a mountain where these things would normally not be found. Similarly, normally, the flow of water would not respect crops planted in some area. By doing work, we redirect water from where it would go by default such that it flows where we intend it to go.

Work means applying will, body, and intellect to change how things are.

Training as work

Sometimes, as given in the physical labor examples above, work is enacting changes on the physical environment. But we probably wouldn't want to say that "working out/exercising" isn't some kind of work because activities like that are involving the application of will, body, and intellect to change how things are. Rather than changing how water flows in a field, other activities may change how we are in form, skill, etc.

There is a kind of work that involves learning how stuff is put together. How to build a bridge, how to analyze the grammar of a language, how to operate some sort of machinery—these are things that we don't know by default. It is only through the application of will, body, and intellect. This may mean forcing ourselves to pay attention and read some text even if we'd rather go take a nap or eat a burger; the work is in choosing activity that goes against some resting state.

Finding work to do

During all this COVID stuff, many but not all people have some kind of job in the sense of role you fulfill for money. Not having some kind of money-making occupation can be a point of great pain for many people—when I transitioned to my current day job (web developer) I endured a period of being NEET (Not Employed in Education or in Training) for some months—at least on paper/institutionally. In fact, I was never NEET for too long in the sense that while looking for jobs and stuff I would work on training my nerd skills and stuff. So I was "working" in the definition as presented here.

Each of us can look at ourselves and our present situations and ask, "what is it that needs work?"

Sometimes it will be obvious what needs to be done—e.g. if your room is really messy such that you can't find things you need, the work you should probably do is cleaning your room. You will probably know if you are neglecting to do some physical work on yourself—e.g. there is some walking/running you ought to do.

In terms of intellectual work, we can take inventory of what we do and what we don't know and fill in knowledge gaps as is appropriate. For instance, writing English, I rarely if ever make reference to a dictionary unless I'm doing something specific like citing the etymology of a word. Not so with the languages I've studied as second languages—I know that there is a lot of work for me to do to make using these languages "comfortable" to use such that using them ceases to be "work".

• Can you memorize information you usually look up (e.g. cooking recipes, some musical piece, a poem, prayers)
• Can you extemporaneously provide an explanation for something you are required to know (e.g. can you pass the "whiteboard interview")
• Can you write a book, create a website, or otherwise better organize information you know?