Arbejdsglæde: Well-Being at Work - Danish
On the concept of "work" and the meaning of "producing" for our lives, their differences and relationships
Etymology: Arbejde (work) + glæde (happiness)
I could write tons of hours about the well-being and happiness of individuals in the workplace, and I would never run out of issues to write about.
From employers’ expectations to work-life balance, from employee’s needs to the toxic work environment, there are an endless rain of issues which will never end, also I’ve written some amount of them before and you can read two of them in The Day I Learned My Son’s Sickness From a Business Email and A Young Person Died Because of Work Stress, Again, but today our issue is another one.
Our topic for today is the difference and relation between “work” and “production.”
(I deliberately choose producing over productivity in order to escape productivity's negative reputation as compulsive.)
Honestly, I don’t have a sharp decision about work’s real and deserved(?) place in our lives but I have ongoing thoughts. So, I find it meaningful to reflect them in the company of an optimistic term from one of the happiest countries of the world, Denmark.
Today’s word, arbejdsglæde means happiness and well-being at work in Danish. Obviously, Nordic life style cares living a meaningful, social and close-to-nature life, this is what we explored in this newsletter before with fika and friluftsliv, and now keeping a special term for well-being at work proves that care once more.
I am one of those who believe that humankind must be busy doing something. As the nature doesn’t tolerance emptiness, if you don’t fill your life with something meaningful, then nature will fill it with something out of your preferance. There is no endlessly free life. Instead, there are windy conversations or gossiping all day; or pessimistic and pointless thoughts driving your life. Or, you could prefer to be active which sounds quite well.
〰️
Now, keeping all those thoughts in mind, we’d better turn back to our main topic, “work” and “production.”
Work is different than production. You don’t have to earn money for everything you produce. You can produce music, compose a piece, or play the flute; write a blog for yourself or start a book club; keep a garden to produce tomatoes, cucumbers, or fruits for charity or only for your family. There are endless ways to put ourselves in the world of production. Ending with a result—a product—you could prove to yourself that you have done it.
Work is what you do to earn money. You love it or hate it; you work, produce something, and earn our living.
If you love your job, love what you produce, and earn your living at the same time, then you are in a very lucky minority who is living heaven on earth.
〰️
Many unhappy people around me are suffering from problems with their occupations. The first tribe has problems in their workplace (imbalance between work and private life, inadequate salaries, and so on), while the second tribe suffers from a lack of anything to do in their daily life (a job, an occupation). The second is mostly housewives or unemployed people who wake up in the morning with an empty list of things to do, and worse than that, they have no reason to get out of bed.
The most desperate tribe is the second, I believe. Because if you have a job, whether satisfying or exploiting, then you have some knowledge, experience, and a network, you can change your job or find a way to improve the conditions. But if you don’t have a job or even an occupation, then you have a very limited toolkit to stay floating in life. For this reason, whether you earn money or not, it is vital to have an occupation, a way of producing, to experience satisfaction in life.
Humankind is not created to stay stationary; its traits are appropriate to make life moving, to be in movement, to make orders or break them, to build and to convert, everything, but not to stay motionless.
Wish everyone a week of living in flow, active, and satisfying.
Till next week,
— Gulsun
Thank you for taking the time to accompany me in the story of a new word. Every word of the world’s languages is also ours, belonging to humanity while giving us an essence of the culture in which it was rooted.
We are made of stories—that is, of words.