The Meaning of Work - Labor Day 2026
Labor Day has me thinking about work a little differently this year.
At its most basic level, work is the energy we put into a system to resist entropy, the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder.
In a very literal sense, that work is happening inside each of us every moment. Our bodies are constantly using energy to maintain themselves, repair themselves, and keep the countless systems that give us form and keep us alive functioning together.
When you think about it in those terms, your assets are really, in many ways, stored-up energy from a lifetime of work.
And in a broader sense, we do the same thing every day in our families, our communities, and our society.
We build things. We maintain things. We solve problems. We raise children. We teach. We heal. We create. We repair. We organize. We care for one another.
Without that continual expenditure of human effort, things fall apart.
Seen that way, work feels like more than simply something we do to earn a living. It is one of the defining characteristics of life itself. There is something almost spiritual about it, the idea that we expend our limited time and energy to create order, build something worthwhile, care for other people, and leave something behind.
And that makes me think differently about money, too.
When you think about it in those terms, your assets are really, in many ways, stored-up energy from a lifetime of work.
You worked. You created value. And instead of consuming everything that work produced in the moment, you preserved some of it.
That accumulated work can eventually give you the freedom to retire. It can educate a child or grandchild. It can create experiences with the people you love. It can provide a home where your family gathers. It can support a cause you believe in. It can create security for someone you care about. It can give you the freedom to spend your own time and energy on the things that matter most to you.
Your work can keep supporting what matters to you, even after the work itself is done.
Maybe that is one of the deeper meanings of Labor Day.
It is a celebration not simply of jobs or careers, but of the extraordinary amount of human energy we collectively expend, day after day, to build and sustain our lives, our families, our communities, and our world.
And perhaps prosperity, at its best, is what allows some of that lifetime of work to transcend the work itself.