Your Real Work

Mortimer Adler wrote: 

"Men have dreamed of a golden age in the past when the world was young and everything needed for the support of life existed in profusion."

Men have also dreamed of the return of such a golden age in the future.

Some have called for a utopian ideal established by government or some other power or technology, and even many of the anti-utopians have encouraged a golden-age ushered in by increased freedom. 

The common characteristic of most such dreams is the end of work, the lifting of the requirement that "the sweat of our brow" is necessary to have the basics of life.

Virgil put it this way:

Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen....
They gathered, and the earth of her own will
All things more freely, no man bidding, bore.

Keynes, in a stroke of insight, noted that such a utopian dream doesn't mesh well with human nature. 

When any group of people is truly freed from any requirement to work, the members of such a group tend to decrease in happiness. 

Depression, he pointed out, is a disease of affluent societies--seldom of those working hard to eke out a living. 

People need to do things in order to feel good, whether they do things by choice or necessity.

Aristotle taught long ago that humans are made to work, and that even in the absence of work we are made more for constructive leisure than mere play or passive entertainment.

Consider what you would do with your time if you had no need to spend it making a living--not what you would do for fun (though this is a good question too), but what you would do for work. 

This is a truly great question. Whatever your answer, it's probably time to start doing it.