What Work Is Worthy of Us?

Sometimes miracles are mundane. Like walking on the busiest street of my hometown, Madrid, practically alone, at 11am on a Friday. That happened to me last week, and it's thanks to the Pope.

It's also thanks to Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, that my beloved concept of interiority is having a revival. The idea of a profound, rich, subjective inner life. I love that we are centering it in public discourse. I see it as a seed: the beginning of treating inner richness as something to strive towards. Culturally, we have long prioritized outer achievement over cultivating the kind of inner abundance that leads to a flourishing interiority, even though it is a better predictor of sustained wellbeing.

We might intuitively know, and researchers have shown, that money and status have a strict ceiling effect on human thriving, whereas a rich inner life acts as an independent, more resilient engine for long-term wellbeing. Especially once baseline financial needs are met, internal psychological traits become vastly more predictive of sustained life satisfaction than accumulating more wealth. To me, this is related to sensing when we have enough. To being able to appreciate what we have, to break out of the compulsion of endless maximization at all cost, a spell that we are currently often under as a culture.

What we see modeled as success is often an extravagant lifestyle in which the loudest voices hijack mass attention, not a rich inner life. This not only devalues the importance of interiority, it also flattens all possible paths of human flourishing into a single, linear image of success. One that, for me personally, is neither creative nor aspirational nor likely to lead to the kind of flourishing for all Life that I desire. Because flourishing was never individual.

What work are we here to do?

The encyclical names this flattening too: the reduction of the person to performance. And reducing our humanity to output machines does not only make us less human. It makes us replaceable. Particularly in the age of AI. What the Pope offers instead is a definition of work as a "path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment", not primarily about efficiency, but about meaning and contribution.

I take this as an invitation. An invitation to consider what work means to us, what work we are here to do.

And we will undoubtedly have to reconsider what work means to us in the near future. Ideally we do that from an intentional place, not out of reactionary desperation, once roles are restructured and we urgently need another way. So the time to do it is now.

Because even if we were to free ourselves of work as we currently conceive it, that doesn't mean we would be freeing ourselves from the question of meaning. Quite the contrary. Who are we when the known ways to spend our time disappear? How do we contribute when what we once knew disappears?

Sitting with these questions is what has shaped my own path. I left Spain when youth unemployment hit 49.9%, but not before traveling the country in a van, interviewing young people about meaning and turning it into a documentary. Later, during part of my nine years at Google, I worked on the future of work, on reskilling partnerships to prepare people for exactly the shifts AI is now accelerating, and on Life Design experiments applying design principles to how we shape our lives.

And I am also still figuring it out. Because there is no such thing as an end to this process. Only a constant practice of listening, experimenting and pivoting to remain in service to what matters to us.

So I agree with Leo XIV on this: work goes far beyond productivity, far beyond the generation of economic utility. In fact, work doesn't need to be tied to money at all to classify as work. It can be the way we express our freedom, our creativity, in my words, how we contribute our weird to the world. And that takes many different shapes.

Exploring the roots

Language always reveals hidden attitudes, even the ones we are not aware of. So let's explore the etymology of the word work. It is juicier than you might think.

Start with the English word and its Germanic root, werk. This carries the sense of making something, of bringing a thing into existence. Creation, deed, act. This aligns with my personal definition of work as the way we contribute to what we want to create.

But with the Latin root it gets very interesting. Tripalium, the origin of the Spanish trabajo, the French travail, was an instrument used for torture and restraint. Seriously. The root of the Latin word for work is a specific torture device. What kind of attitude does that cultivate? And what kind of system are we likely to create when torture is at the root of our conception of work?

With that lens, it makes sense that we coined terms like "human resources", possibly the least elegant, and most revealing, phrase we could have chosen for people. And it is certainly not the kind of vision I want to bring into existence, nor want to unconsciously contribute to. And it is clear to me that paradigms and cultural conceptions live within us until we consciously practice de-conditioning and rewriting those attitudes in ourselves.

Everything we dislike holds an invitation to reimagine it.

The Great Work

Maybe we can recuperate the notion of the Great Work.

The alchemists called it the Magnum Opus, the quest to transmute lead into gold. Later thinkers made our inner worlds the laboratory, and the substance to be transformed became consciousness itself. In this light, the Great Work becomes a lifelong pursuit, the adventure of realizing our unique purpose.

This core idea echoes beautifully across traditions. There's a reason the Oracle of Delphi said Know Thyself. Werde, wer du bist, become who you are, is Nietzsche's version. Jung called it individuation, the beautiful and often messy integration of all that we are, conscious and unconscious, lights and shadows.

And the Great Work is sometimes also the simple work. A lot of unproductive humaning is required to reach that level of integration. The gardening and the simply being. The things we can't outsource. The hours spent lying in the grass, of tasting fresh strawberries, of fully inhabiting our body and the earth with exquisite slowness and attention.

I understand that sensuality is an unconventional term in the current AI discourse. Most conversations about AI sound like: will it achieve AGI? By when? It is a debate dominated by disembodiment, and that is exactly part of the problem. When only one type of knowing, only one register is represented and respected in public discourse, we fail to protect the fullness of our humanity. We cherry-pick the intellectual parts that ironically machines can easily mimic, while ignoring the rest. Our embodiment. Our sensuality. Our ability to play, to enjoy, to simply be. Aliveness, which might actually be the exact thing that makes us irreplaceably human.

Our interiority, our felt sense, is uniquely ours. We cannot outsource, automate, or optimize presence. This is why I believe reclaiming sensuality is a vital act of resistance. I use that word intentionally, despite the modern halo of seduction that has narrowed and flattened its meaning. Originally, sensuality meant simply our capacity to use our senses to perceive and relate to the world around us. It is our original compass for being alive, the very way we belong to this earth.

We are here to live the path that is ours. To find the specific uniqueness we were given. And then to share it, abundantly, generously, truthfully, courageously, with Life.

And here is where I would extend Leo's vision. Humanity is magnificent, but not only humanity is. All life forms are. Even though the language of ecosystems is present in the encyclical, it did not explicitly name the fact that we are just a part of the wider wonder of creation. Magnifica Vita would be more complete, in my view.

And it is not only a minor detail. Remembering that we are part of a wider network of life is essential, because it contextualizes what our work is. The Great Work was never just self-actualization in a vacuum. It is finding our place within something that was already magnificent before we arrived.

And that is my desire. May we all find ways of contributing that nourish. May Life be magnificent, all of it.

With love for this work,
Laura