Analogous thinking about what it means to "work"

This is interesting... I've been thinking about what it means to "work", as in "to find work", "to do work". We don't often think of the connection between "work" as it relates to employment and "work" as it's defined in Physics.

In physics, work is "the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance." So in a physical sense, work has kind of two conditions; a force must act, and energy must be transfered through a distance. If the force acts, but energy isn't transferred over a distance, then no work is done. In other words, for something to be "work", it must move something (e.g. mass, energy) over a distance. And then you can think about what "distance" means in an employment setting. The other component of work is force, which is defined using mass and velocity (" style="vertical-align: middle; ">). Velocity has both a direction and speed. Speed is just the rate of change of velocity, so that's pretty straightforward. More difficult in relating this concept back to employment, is defining direction. What it means to move "forward".

Think about an industrial-scale solar plant, tens of thousands of photovoltaic panels spreading across the landscape. Does this fit our sense of what it mean to move forward? Are the people building infrastructure like this truly what we would consider "workers"?

Perhaps it's not always possible to move forward; perhaps sometimes you need to go sideways, or even backwards before you can move forward. If building a centralized solar plant gets you into a position where you can begin to build distributed rooftop solar applications, perhaps then there's value in it. But the energy exerted to build the centralized plant doesn't become "work" until it moves... what? mass? What's the mass? Mass then could be analogous to society, in which case work is only done when society moves, that is, when society changes.

Therefore, if you're not changing society, you're not doing work. Huh...

Expressed in a positive sense, if you are spending energy and changing society in a forward (i.e. desirable) direction, then you're doing work.