Every Labor Day in Canada and the US, we pause to celebrate the contributions of workers. It’s a day of parades, barbecues, and a well-earned break from the office. But beneath the ritual is a harder truth: much of our future is already owned by work.
What if we thought differently about it? What if work weren’t defined only as the activity that earns a paycheck, but as something larger, beginning with our most basic needs as human beings?
Work Beyond the Paycheck
The word “work” usually points to paid labor, the thing we do to afford what we need. Yet that definition is narrow. It ignores a lot: the unpaid labor that sustains families, the creative pursuits that enrich our culture, and the daily acts of care that never appear on a balance sheet.
If we widened our view, work could mean any activity through which we meet life’s essentials: food, shelter, health, clothing, community. Once we start there, the familiar link between work and money becomes less obvious, even a little strange.
Needs First, Money Later
Imagine starting with the things we can’t live without. Very few of us grow our own food, sew our own clothes, or build our own shelter. We rely on a vast economic web to make these things available. We trade time and effort in one domain for the money that allows us to access what we actually need.
There’s a distance built into this arrangement. Most of us spend our days producing things we don’t directly use, while depending on others to produce the things we do. Earlier societies lived closer to the source of their sustenance. Today, if the system faltered, many of us would be unable to provide for ourselves in even the most basic ways.
That dependence raises a question: is the market economy the only, or even the best, way to organize our lives around our needs?
The Abstraction of Money
Money is a remarkable invention. Unlike bread or clothing, it isn’t consumed directly. It’s an abstraction, a placeholder for value. Precisely because of that, money can be used in ways no loaf of bread ever could: invested, speculated with, lent and borrowed.
And once lending enters the picture, so does debt. To borrow is to pull tomorrow’s resources into today at a price. That price is interest and, more importantly, time. Debt quietly rearranges our future, committing hours and years of labor not yet lived.
Debt as a Claim on the Future
Seen this way, debt is financial and temporal. It mortgages our days. The time we might have used for family, rest, or imagination has already been promised. A slice of the future is no longer ours to choose freely, thanks to past decisions.
This is where money’s abstraction becomes concrete: it reaches into our calendars and carves out blocks of our lives before we even arrive at them.
An Invitation to Rethink
So as we honor workers this Labor Day, perhaps we can also pause to ask: what would it mean to loosen money’s grip on the definition of work? What if we centered our lives less on earning and consuming, and more on directly sustaining ourselves, our communities, and the relationships that give life meaning?
Perhaps greater freedom lies not in working less or earning more, but in redefining what counts as work and in reclaiming a future that belongs to us, not to work.
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Welcome to new readers who joined over the summer and welcome back to those returning from the break. Looking forward to more questions worth wrestling with together.