If it wasn't work, it wouldn't be spelled w-o-r-k, my ex-husband used to tell me. By which he meant, if work wasn't painful, it would be spelled p-l-a-y.

It's a truism I've fought all my life--or at least since the age of 14 when I first began trading summer days for money. How could it be that humankind, with its highly developed intellect and moral and aesthetic sensibilities, should be destined to spend the best parts of its numbered days performing tasks that offered so little in the way of inherent meaning, personal satisfaction, and sensual delight?

As an adult I eventually negotiated an uneasy compromise with work by finding ways to get paid for writing about what a pain it was. Over the past 20 years I (and many other writers like me: female, boomer, college-educated) have exhaustively explored the notion of "work/life balance." Or, more accurately, the lack of said balance in our two-earner, two-point-five-children family lives.

But recently I've been wondering about the validity of the whole premise. Why do we put work and life on opposite sides of the scale? Why don't we worry ourselves silly over "leisure/life balance"? I'm starting to think that I don't really want to balance work and life; I want to mash them together. I want work to be spelled l-i-f-e.

Defining work
Let's start with physics, which tells us that Work = Force x Distance. This equation can be used to calculate work done when you apply a force to an object and move it a certain distance. Force is measured in "newtons." If you apply two newtons of force to a wheelbarrow full of dirt and you move it five meters, you will have done ten Joules of work. (Work is measured in newton-meters or Joules.)

This is a nice, concrete, nonjudgmental definition, and "Joules" has a nice ring to it. I can see where, at the end of the day, it might feel good to add up one's Joules and trade them in for food and shelter and a piece of fine art. But for those of us who don't push objects around for a living (and, really, even those who do) it's hardly an enlightening measure.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines work as "any activity for wages or salary, for profit or fees, or for payment in kind. One hour or more of such activity constitutes work." Here, time and payment become the operative variables, in an equation something like "Work = Your Time X Whatever Someone Else Will Pay You to Do" (or, simply, "Time = Money," where the notion of work as catalyst is implied).

The BLS offers a handy table for determining "if you should count an activity as work." Things that don't count include jury duty, volunteer work, and pretty much anything you do that you don't get paid for. The only "unpaid work" that the BLS sanctions with the name work is "15 hours or more which contributed to operating a farm or business by a member of the household who is related by marriage, blood, or adoption." To be extra clear, they include a parenthetical statement explaining that "housework" is not considered a contribution to a family business or farm. Mucking the barn is work; mopping the bathroom floor is not. Neither is cooking, childcare, or yard work--if you're moving that wheelbarrow of dirt across your own backyard, the BLS is not going to acknowledge what you're doing as work, Joules to the contrary.

When the only work that counts is work that someone else will pay you to do, it's not hard to see why the word has taken on some negative connotations. As American anarchist Bob Black writes: "Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is necessarily what work is. To define it is to despise it."

Even the American Heritage Dictionary appears to take a dim view of "the physical or mental effort expended to produce or accomplish something," listing the following as synonyms: work, labor, toil, drudgery, travail. Using the word in context, AHD quotes John Ruskin: "Which of us ... is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest--and for what pay?"

Surely this is not all that work--which Sigmond Freud famously called, along with love, one of "the cornerstones of our humanness"--is or can be.

Rethinking work
In A Handmade Life, William Coperthwaite's eclectic collection of photographs, recipes, poems, and musings on, among many other topics, work, the author (who says that "valid work" in Western society is defined as "the common prostitution whereby muscles, brains, or talent are sold for the wherewithal to pursue personal goals in spare time") asks:

"What if we have been on the wrong track? What if work, including the meeting of mundane needs, were to be recognized as an essential tool in understanding ourselves and our world? What if we were to see that creativity, to be valuable and not merely dilettante, must be rooted in work?" And, "Why must there be such a close relationship between work and income?"

From a historical perspective, the track we are on, the current relationship between work and income, has not always pertained. These are the products of industrialization and a market economy that is based on a concept of scarcity. Before the Industrial Age, most people's work consisted of unpaid contributions to the operation of a family a farm or business. (Although there was no BLS around at the time to tell us so, I feel confident that the women who baked the family's bread, bathed its children, and sewed its clothing considered their contributions to be work.) And, before that, there were hunter/gatherer tribes that, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins tells us, flourished under economic propensities "more consistently predicated on abundance than our own."

In his intriguing essay "The Original Affluent Society," Sahlins writes that, in an industrial society where "all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity." Our hunter/gatherer ancestors, on the other hand, "lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take."

In a situation like this, where no one feels the need to hoard things and no status is attached to ownership, there is also no urgency to constantly improve production rates. As a consequence, hunters and gatherers (there are still people who live this way in remote regions of the earth) never work overtime. In fact, studies suggest they work fewer hours and get more hours of sleep per capita than those of us in more "advanced" societies.

Redefining work
I'm not suggesting that we return to our hunter/gatherer origins, but I do wonder if our postindustrial society might not offer the potential for redefining work in terms of abundance rather than scarcity.

Consider Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited entirely by volunteers. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article about this enormous undertaking, Marshall Poe writes:

"A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers, the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger knew all this when they began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later, everyone knows different."

Wikipedia was made possible by two postindustrial inventions: the World Wide Web and a type of collaborative software called a wiki. And by a postindustrial workforce--tens of thousands of people with day jobs who share their knowledge for free. The result, as Poe writes, "has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known."

It occurs to me that the work these people are doing--in odd hours, in fits and starts, in the realms of their personal passions--operates out of a sense of abundance not unlike that experienced by our hunter/gatherer foremothers and fathers. Knowledge is in endless supply and the work of gathering, analyzing, sharing it can be meaningful, satisfying, organic. More like life.

Debra Wierenga does paid and unpaid work as a mother, freelance writer, and poet.