When my wife and I recently traveled out of state for a wedding, we decided to take an extended weekend vacation. We like hiking and exploring out-of-the-way places, so we booked a place online that was a guesthouse operation in the middle of nowhere (actually, along an old U.S. highway that had been bypassed by a recent interstate). The place had great online reviews and a surprisingly affordable price. While staying there, we met the owner—and the visit turned into an instructive parable for the Catholic vision of good work.
Seth (not his real name) runs several properties in the area, while he lives with his wife and child in the guesthouse. He bought the property in the past year and upgraded it all himself, with his brother’s help; now they are building a house further back on the land where the family will live.
As a host, Seth is there in the morning to present you with bread or make an espresso, and he’s there at night at the rear of the property, with conversation beside a firepit. He’s eager to recommend sightseeing spots in the area and is happy to text you with precise directions to obscure hiking trails. Eventually, he says, he wants to know enough guests that he can just text them directly when they want to take a vacation, thus bypassing the online booking portals.
It’s clear that Seth works hard but also that he really likes what he is doing. He worked for many years as an executive for a nonprofit, where he was either traveling or sitting at a desk. Now, by contrast, his “work” feels a bit like play. Even though we saw him hauling drywall for the house, dealing with repairs on another of his properties, making us coffee in the morning, and retrieving the key when my wife left it behind in the room, he seemed to enjoy it all. He even talked with great pleasure about tearing up an old parking lot and hauling concrete away to create a new grassy recreational area for guests. He is so enthused to be living this new and different life.
I think there are three secrets to the success of Seth’s work, which are also prominent aspects of the Catholic social teaching vision of work. Each of them involves a freedom of activity marked with many moments of the joy that’s fundamental to human dignity. These factors don’t have to be restricted to people who have earned a lot of money at a white-collar job and then go off to do something they love. These can and should be aspects of work that we integrate into all our workplaces.
The first secret is that while Seth earns money from his activity, he isn’t doing it for the money. Earning money and doing something for the ultimate purpose of money are not the same. As Catholic business ethicist Michael Naughton explains, profit and efficiency are “foundational goods” for businesses, but they are not “excellent goods”—they are not the ultimate goals that determine what counts as “excellence” in work.
This way of understanding the role of money shapes Seth’s work in many ways. He isn’t calculating his return on investment for every hospitality choice he made. He wasn’t charging fees for this or that extra. In short, he isn’t trying to maximize profit. The key word there is maximize; of course, Seth needs to come out a little ahead from all his work. But that “coming out a little ahead” is quite different from maximizing his monetary return. That’s part of why the place is affordable. It also means he can work at his own pace. No, it isn’t the most efficient operation—but maximizing efficiency isn’t the ultimate goal.
The second secret is that Seth is truly “working for himself.” He loves that he has found this unique and beautiful place, and he gains energy from his activity because it is activity for himself. St. Pope John Paul II described this crucial element as the “subjective dimension of work.” The objective dimension of work provides goods and services for others and an income for the worker. But the subjective dimension is based on the idea that work is about becoming more fully human, more fully oneself. Work fulfills a personal vocation. The pope summed this up by explaining that “work is for [humans], and not [humans] for work.”
I’m sure there are days and tasks when Seth has to force himself to take the next step; it’s not that work is just easy happiness. But even in the struggles, he has true ownership of his work. It is truly his. Even for workers in larger businesses owned by someone else, it is the responsibility of business owners to emphasize the subjective development of the worker.
Finally, the third secret is that he genuinely wants to build community with his guests; he wants to be friends with his guests. For some travelers, this may not be what they want when they stay in a hotel; they just want to anonymously check in, raid the breakfast bar in the morning, and head out. You might try to do this at Seth’s place, but in fact, you’d have to work pretty hard to resist his overtures of friendship.
If you prefer your overnight accommodations to be an anonymous exchange, you probably wouldn’t like St. Pope John Paul II’s definition of a business as primarily a “community of persons,” nor Pope Benedict XVI’s insistence that economic activities be filled with “quotas of gratuitousness” that involve real personal gift exchange. But that’s exactly what Seth wants and what he calls forth from his guests: an exchange of personal gifts (if only the stories we shared over a few days). Our economic activities shouldn’t be completely impersonal exchanges; they can and should develop human solidarity.
Of course, not everyone can achieve these three characteristics of work, so it’s important for every employer to prioritize these insights. Each of these dimensions comes back to a core truth of the Catholic tradition: Work is first and foremost about defending and developing the dignity of the people who work. All of us can support businesses that incorporate these insights, and all of us can look at our own workplaces for opportunities to make work more fully human.
This article also appears in the September 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 9, pages 40-41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/James Kovin
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