September 17, 2026
Aside from tech support at my family’s business, my first job was freelance coding at a forensic engineering firm in Dallas which wanted me to develop an in-house system to handle approximately thirty years of non-disposable paperwork such that we could index and reference past cases. My working hours that summer were split between pacing back and forth from the document room to the scanner and holing myself up in a windowless office to develop the indexing front and backend. By the start of school this system was in working order and I had resolved to myself that I would rather work in agriculture than in coding. There is something satisfying about the problem solving done in the act of coding, though this is offset by the long hours alone at a computer working at a product which will never see physical form. All those hours transmuted into data which only two or three privileged others will see.
There is no escape from labor. While employment may be unique among mankind, we still must provide for our survival as any other animal; unlike them our actions are abstracted from that we are providing ourselves with living necessities. Some question the value of this abstraction - that we would be better off foraging at the source as our agricultural ancestors did - or that we may someday exist in a state of abundance such that we may break our burden. A retort to the former is that the history of civilization is a history of the escape from the field; the latter would be nice, though I am unsure that we will truly free ourselves. However, a negative case for the impossibility of escape does not afford work its proper value. Rather than being man’s unique burden, that we alone are given such a responsibility is a blessing given our ability for appreciation of our own works.
We work for survival yes, and our survival ought to be guaranteed regardless of our capacity for it. But our labor is also the way in which we make our mark upon the world. Our lifetimes are short on any reasonable timescale and I do not expect this to change. The effects of our work outlive us. A component of my dissatisfaction toward coding was that a byte of data will likely mean little in the long run. Food preparation goes further in the extension of humanity in that it powers others through their days. A nurse extends the lives of others, and so on. These are the means by which we live on. Domestic labor too ensures our continuance; that it has not been given proper historical praise is a stain on patriarchal society.
This is one of the particular pleasures of engineering. A design may make it from the mind onto paper - or increasingly AutoCAD - and from there be constructed in the physical world. Making themselves manifest is unique to humans and everyone involved in the process, from the South Asian metalcaster molding bolts to the contractor laying the engineer’s pipes to the electrician wiring a facility, each brings the abstract into material existence. Many of these pieces will outlive the worker, not to mention the products of the larger machines themselves.
That labor begets one’s continuance is a blessing endowed upon us, affording us dignity in possibly otherwise painful work. We ought to view everything around us in its proper light; that all we see around us was made by us working in our proper capacities inherited by us so that we may continue past our own lifetimes.