Between Karma and Calling
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| Copyright: Sanjay Basu |
Every morning, before the sun crests the horizon, a street sweeper in Varanasi tends to the ancient steps leading down to the Ganges. She moves with practiced rhythm, her broom tracing arcs across stone worn smooth by countless feet. Half a world away, a programmer in San Francisco stares at lines of code, debugging software that will help doctors diagnose rare diseases. Neither may think of themselves as philosophers, yet both embody a question that has haunted humanity since we first distinguished between mere survival and meaningful existence. What transforms labor into something sacred?
This Labor Day, as we ostensibly celebrate the dignity of work while simultaneously yearning for a long weekend away from it, perhaps it’s worth sitting with this paradox. We live in an era that has never been more productive yet never more anxious about productivity’s purpose. Burnout has become our generational malaise, quiet quitting our form of protest. We’ve optimized everything except our understanding of why we work at all.
The Bhagavad Gita offers us Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna, frozen by doubt on the battlefield: “Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana.” You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. At first glance, this seems almost cruel in its austerity. Work without attachment to results? In a culture that measures worth by outcomes, KPIs, and quarterly earnings, this feels like being asked to plant a garden we’ll never see bloom. Yet there’s something liberating hidden in this teaching. When we work without desperate grasping for specific outcomes, we free ourselves from the tyranny of results. The street sweeper in Varanasi isn’t cleaning the steps because she expects the Ganges to finally, permanently, be pristine. She sweeps because sweeping is what needs doing, because her action maintains a sacred space, because the work itself becomes a form of prayer. The quality of her attention, not the impossibility of perfection, sanctifies the labor.
Marcus Aurelius, writing in his tent during the Germanic campaigns, understood something similar. For the Stoic emperor, work was not about achievement but about alignment with nature and duty. “When you wake up in the morning,” he wrote to himself, “tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” And yet, he continued, we were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes. The work must be done not because it will yield perfect results but because doing it well is what makes us human.
This convergence of Eastern karma yoga and Western virtue ethics suggests something profound: that the meaning of labor lies not in its products but in its process of making us who we are. Hannah Arendt, writing in the shadow of totalitarianism, distinguished between labor (biological necessity), work (creating durable objects), and action (initiating something new in the world). But perhaps these categories blur when we approach our daily tasks with what she called “the space of appearance,” where we reveal who we are through what we do.
Consider the Japanese concept of ikigai, often mistranslated as “purpose” but more accurately understood as “that which makes life worth waking up for.” It sits at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Notice how payment comes last, almost as an afterthought. The dignity isn’t in the wage but in the integration of self and service. Modern work culture has severed many of these connections. We’ve created bullshit jobs, to use David Graeber’s wonderfully blunt term, where people spend their days in tasks they know add nothing to the world’s store of value or meaning. We’ve atomized work into such specialized fragments that we can no longer see the whole we’re contributing to. A friend recently described her job as “sending emails about emails about meetings to plan meetings.” She makes good money. She’s also dying inside, one Zoom call at a time. The Christian monastic tradition offers another angle through its principle of “ora et labora,” pray and work. For the Benedictines, there was no separation between spiritual practice and manual labor. Brewing beer, copying manuscripts, tending gardens, these weren’t distractions from the divine but pathways to it. Every act of creation, no matter how mundane, participated in the ongoing creation of the world.
But here’s where things get complicated in our late capitalist moment. It’s easier to find meaning in sweeping temple steps or copying sacred texts than in optimizing supply chains for fast fashion or writing ad copy for products no one needs. Can Krishna’s teaching about detached action apply to a Amazon warehouse worker racing to meet impossible quotas? Can Marcus Aurelius’s virtue ethics comfort an adjunct professor cobbling together a living from three different colleges? Yes and no. The wisdom traditions aren’t naive about power and exploitation. The Gita, after all, is set on a battlefield, not a meditation cushion. The Stoics lived through plagues, wars, and political tyranny. They knew that sometimes work is simply what we must do to survive, and there’s no shame in that survival. But they also insisted that even within constrained circumstances, we retain some freedom in how we approach our constraints.
Viktor Frankl, writing from the most extreme deprivation imaginable, observed that everything can be taken from a person but one thing. The freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances. This isn’t about positive thinking or accepting injustice. It’s about recognizing that our inner relationship to our work matters as much as the work itself.
I think of my maternal grandmother, who taught at a girls’ school in Calcutta during the final years of the British Raj. In those pre-independence days, educating girls was itself a quiet revolution. She would wake before dawn to prepare lessons by lamplight, carefully writing out Bengali verses on her slate, planning how to teach mathematics to girls whose families weren’t sure they needed to know such things. The colonial administration paid her barely enough to live on, and society questioned why unmarried women needed professions at all. Yet she persisted, understanding that each girl who learned to read was a small flame lit against a vast darkness. She used to tell me how she’d smuggle banned books of Bengali poetry into her classroom, hidden between approved British textbooks. During the Quit India movement, when tensions ran high and schools became battlegrounds of ideology, she taught her students to think rather than merely recite. She wasn’t consciously practicing karma yoga or Stoic virtue. But she understood that her labor was planting seeds in minds that would bloom long after independence, that education was resistance made tender, knowledge transmitted with love, while the weight of empire pressed down. Every lesson was an act of faith in a future she might not live to see. That too is a kind of grace.
The challenge for our generation isn’t just finding meaningful work but creating conditions where all work can carry meaning. This requires both inner work and outer change. Yes, we need to cultivate detachment from results, to find virtue in effort itself, to recognize work as a means of becoming. But we also need living wages, reasonable hours, and systems that don’t grind human dignity into profit margins. Perhaps the wisdom we need lies in holding both truths simultaneously. Work on your own consciousness and work on the world’s structures. Practice detachment from results while fighting for justice. See your labor as both personal spiritual practice and collective human endeavor.
The programmer debugging medical software at 2 AM might find meaning not in the next software release but in the patients who will be diagnosed correctly. The street sweeper in Varanasi might see her work not as endless repetition but as daily renewal. Both are practicing what we might call conscious labor. Work approached with attention, intention, and recognition of its place in the larger whole.
This Labor Day, as we rest from our labors or labor through our rest, perhaps we can reimagine work not as what we do to live but as how we become who we are. The Gita teaches that we become what we repeatedly do with attention. The Stoics believed that virtue was its own reward. Arendt insisted that through action we insert ourselves into the human world. All of them understood what we’re in danger of forgetting: that work, approached consciously, is not a burden to be endured but a practice to be refined. Not a means to an end but a form of participation in the endless creation and recreation of the world. The grace of labor lies not in its completion but in its doing, not in its perfection but in its intention, not in its rewards but in its revelation of who we are and who we might become.
The street sweeper finishes her morning rounds. The programmer closes her laptop. Both have added their small portion to the world’s turning. Tomorrow they’ll do it again, not because the work will ever be finished but because the work itself is a form of prayer, a form of service, a form of becoming. In that becoming lies whatever dignity and meaning we can wrest from our brief time here, laboring between earth and sky, karma and calling, necessity and grace.
Happy Labor Day! Thanks for all your hard work, and I hope you have a relaxing day off!
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