Work to live or live to work?

I just read a great chapter from a book by Dorothy Sayers called Creed or Chaos?
The chapter was titled ‘Why Work?’ and in short is about the role of work in the lives of people. Sayers, writing around the time of WWII, questions the motives of why people are working. She finds that people are working primarily to earn money. This is still true to today. She talks of the change from wartime production to peacetime production and the view of work in these two systems. Sayers that during wartime production, a product is made because of its usefulness and its ability to fulfill its design. To sum her position up, work is valued for the work done. In contrast, peacetime production seems to focus on producing goods to make money. So we make disposable goods that are bad in design and low in quality just so that people have a way of making money. She points out how this peacetime attitude fosters a bad attitude toward work. Work becomes something despised rather than desired.
This is an important point, as she points out, because according to Christian teaching, man is made for work. Put another way, work is not what one does to live, but what one lives to do. So when we despise what we are made for there is a disruption of the natural order. She believes that this is why war breaks out.
I have personally experience what Sayers is talking about. While I have not experience wartime production, I have experienced a bad attitude toward work. This is an attitude that I grew up with because of the culture I lived in. It was not until I had a conversion in my life that I came to associate work with something valuable. Sayers calls our current system a “social system based upon Envy and Avarice.” She says, “A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built on sand.” What a wonderful description of our society. She asks the question, “… shall we want to go back to that civilization of greed and waste which we dignify by the name of a “high standard of living”?” Is living a good material life work the societal result? Is a “high standard of living” worth the price? As I look at our culture here in America I say no. People pursue happiness through material goods and are enslaved to work as an illusory means to happiness.
Six years ago I started changing my work habits. I started working with the desire to do the best work I could. I wanted my products to be the best they could be. This was, and still is, very counter cultural. This change brought happiness and contentment in my work. The next stage that I went through was asking myself if my work had a positive impact on the world. At that time as a computer programmer, my answer was, and still is, no. So I decided it was time for a career change. I have yet to start a new career, but when I do, it will be a career that gives me the opportunity to work to my best capability and that has a positive impact on the world – to me that means positively affecting people lives.
I like Sayers point about finding the right person for the job rather than the least expensive person for the job. I believe that it is possible for people to like their jobs. But if we give mindless degrading jobs to people, they will never be happy at their job. We need to take into account peoples gifts and skills when they are seeking employment. Everyone benefits when a person is in a job where they can focus on doing the best job they can – where they can live to work.