It has been a week and a half since I got back from the East Coast and started the next phase of my sabbatical. The trip east was more vacation than anything, all about re-kindling creativity and zeal for life. It got me out of my comfort zone and into the risky land of new ideas. It takes a certain amount of courage to re-evaluate one’s life and had I stayed in Portland I think I would have been in danger of falling into a state of paralysis, not knowing what to do with myself or how to move forward. So, I jumped into something completely different to reboot my outlook on life. But, for me traveling becomes weary after awhile and now I’m ready to refocus and find clarity amongst the chaos.

I’ve taken to pondering the meaning of work, or rather pondering meaningful work. The question I pose to myself is thus: How can I do work that feels engaging, fun, and useful while also taking care of myself? As an idealist and a tender-hearted person I have worked most of my adult life for organizations that are striving to make health care, especially natural and holistic health care, accessible to all people. They are non-profits and social service agencies providing access to low-income and ignored populations in innovative ways. But, not one of them provided me health insurance while I was working for them. This irony, I think, is indicative of a systemic problem in our culture. The people who serve society under the umbrella of non-profit or charity organizations tend to get the shaft in terms of pay and benefits. I know that all of the agencies I worked for cared about their employees and really believed they were doing all they could to provide for us. But somehow, for one reason or another, there was just never enough to go around.

Dan Pallotta talked about this phenomenon at a TED conference in 2013, “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong.” He says that we are operating on the antiquated notion that it is wrong to make money doing charitable work. Non-profits are supposed to funnel all of their funding into “the cause” while keeping overhead low, which means keeping salaries low and the number of employees minimal. But this is a narrow way to look at the big picture. It strangles organizations because funding people IS funding the cause. In the end this means that the organizations that protect the most vulnerable of us, who do work that is not marketable in a capitalist system but is crucial for society, are unable to really tackle the problems they set out to solve. It becomes a vicious cycle perpetuating a culture of scarcity where no one is ever completely cared for and there is never enough money to do the work. In all of these jobs I’ve burned out eventually, ended up not even being able to muster the compassion for our clients that was essential to the job.

So, how do I do good work and make enough to live comfortably, pay my student debt, support my parents, contribute to my IRA, save money, take a vacation once in awhile and, perhaps, raise a family? I grew up in this culture and there is a part of me that feels comfortable with martyrdom, that it is wrong to make money providing essential services. Mr. Pallotta in his TED talk hits it on the head: it all comes down to the Puritanical view that making money is evil and charity is our penance. As a society we aggrandize capitalism but also crucify those who are too successful at it. The 1% became an evil bunch of SOBs with the occupy movement. However, the folks who make it rich in the for-profit sector and then give it away (while getting a tax break in return) are called philanthropists and are praised highly. The people who actually work in those charities are supposed to suffer along with meager paychecks while that money goes to “the cause.” For those employees the satisfaction of doing good work, of the vocation, is supposed to suffice. But I don’t think it works that way; you can’t eat inspiration and after awhile the struggle wears on a person. In a society built on this world-view how to I transform my own thought process?

What about abolishing the idea of work to begin with? Bob Black proposes just that in his Youtube video entitled, “Workers of the world…Relax!” Whereas Pallotta never questions the capitalist model Black questions the very fabric of it, as well as all the other social structures such as marxism, socialism, anarchism, etc., which are all based on how we distribute or fund work. He says that work is an outdated notion that needs to be revised. We no longer live in a world were scarcity is a fact. All scarcity as we know it is a figment of our socio-politico imagination and perpetuated by our laws, governments, and economies. It is possible for the basic needs of every human on earth to be taken care of, freeing up everyone to “play”. People would make, create and do purely out of volition. In a very taoist way, nothing would be done and nothing would be left undone.

I think there is something very powerful in contemplating a world without work as we know it. We are so often caught up in figuring out what to do for work, or we work because that’s what “good” people do, not because we want to. And, of course, it is very difficult not to with the system we have in place. The only way Mr. Black’s vision could come true is if society as a whole changed completely. But, I think questioning our notion of work is a healthy venture, if not an uncomfortable one.

It has been a challenging undertaking for me. I have been doing so much and yet still feel like I’m not doing anything at all this past week. It has been hard at times to know my own self-worth. How do I validate my right to the resources I’m using, the space where I sleep or the food I eat, when so often it is being given to me by others? What is my worth if I am not working and paying my way, when I am on medicaid and getting food stamps? Am I worth the same as I was when I was renting a room, buying my groceries, and paying for private health insurance out of my bi-monthly checks?

I’ve been scouting the lay of the land, investigating what other practitioners are doing and collecting ideas. It seems the folks who are making a living and paying their loans are also the ones taking insurance. Benefits for acupuncture have burgeoned in Oregon since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. In some other states acupuncture is an essential benefit, meaning that all insurance plans must include it. I have been in a bubble doing community acupuncture these past three years, not concerning myself with insurance billing and not being the slightest bit interested in it. I find the whole idea of insurance repulsive. The fact that people are making money off of denying people health care is despicable to me. Capitalism and healthcare do not make good bedfellows. But, in the current system insurance also means access to care and there are large numbers of people who now have benefits for acupuncture and who will only get treatment if they find a practitioner who takes their insurance. Taking insurance is now a service that we offer our clients right alongside the needles. And, it’s not just for the wealthy. I ran into a woman I have treated at Working Class Acupuncture who works as a clerk at a local grocery store. She said to me happily, “I have been seeing an acupuncturist regularly!” She went on to say that she found a practitioner who takes the insurance the store provides her and who serves a lot of the clerk’s co-workers. I realized that she represents a lot of people like me who fall somewhere between rich and poor, and who have benefits that they can use to get care. Maybe this is what care looks like in a capitalist system. Maybe this is one way to do good work and feel cared for. There is still a lot more to uncover.