What is the purpose of your Work?

What is work? That’s the question asked towards the end of the book 'Your Money or Your Life' by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. You can check out their online program at Simple Living Network
They discuss learning how to value yourself and your limited time on this earth in the context of what you do everyday for love or money. According to them, and statistics, as a 53 year old I have less than 2249,325 hours left.
They quote E.F Schumacher, who says:
"The three purposes of human work are as follows – First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services. Second, to enable everyone of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards. Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity."

They include a quote from Studs Terkel's book "Working":
"....It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather that torpor: in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying."

From Dominguez/Robin:
"So we see that our concept (as a society) of leisure has changed radically. From being considered a desirable and civilizing component of day-to-day life it has become something to be feared, a reminder of unemployment during the years of the Depression. As the value of leisure has dropped, the value of work has risen. The push for full employment, along with the growth of advertising has created a populace increasingly oriented toward work and toward earning more money in order to consume more resources."

"The vows for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health -- and often till death do us part -- may be better applied to our jobs than our wives or husbands. No wonder we introduce ourselves as nurses or contractors rather than as parents or friends."

"The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It's that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining work as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity."

"Our fulfillment as human beings lies not in our jobs but in the whole picture of our lives--in our inner sense of what life is about, our connectedness with others and our yearning for meaning and purpose. By separating work and wages we bring together the different parts of ourselves and remember that our real work is just to live our values as best we know how. In fact, mistaking work for wages has meant that most of our jobs have gotten neither the attention nor the credit they deserve – jobs like loving our mates, being a decent neighbor or developing a sustaining philosophy of life. When we are whole, we don’t need to try to consume our way to happiness. Happiness is our birthright."

"Another casualty of our confusion of work with wages is our inner work – the job of self-examination, self-development and emotional and spiritual maturation. It takes time to know yourself. Time for reflection, for silence, for journal writing, for prayer and ritual, for diaalogue with a caring friend to heal the wounds from our past, for developing a coherent philosophy of life and personal code of ethics and for setting personal goals and evaluating progress. Yet, instead of honoring this as important work, we squeeze what we can into evenings and weekends, devoting the majority of our waking hours to the real work of our jobs.
Redefining work gives us back the full experience and expression of these other activities. We can honor our houshold duties, our relationships and our inner work and give this unpaid employment the same creativity, respect and attention that we give to our paid employment."