The Dignity of Ordinary Work: What Cain and Abel Reveal About Modern Alienation

Your job feels meaningless. You process forms nobody reads. You attend meetings that accomplish nothing. You wonder if an algorithm will replace you next quarter, and you’re not sure it shouldn’t.

Bestselling anthropologist, David Graeber, claimed in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs that 40% of jobs are “bullshit.” The tech class promises AI will liberate us from all this drudgery. The creative class insists only artistic work was truly human anyway.

What if they’re all making the same mistake? What if the problem is as old as Genesis 4, with Cain grinding away at cursed soil whilst Abel utilized the first workplace innovation - a sheep.

When Theory Meets Reality

Bullshit Jobs went viral because it named a real experience. Millions of workers, Graeber claimed, spend their days in pointless roles that add no social value. HR administrators, compliance officers, corporate lawyers. These workers know their jobs are useless, and this knowledge corrodes their souls.

The book resonated because this pain is genuine. Anecdotally it is very common to feel that large parts of work are pointless and frustrating. As a data engineer at a consultancy, I've felt both sides of this. Some days I'm solving genuinely interesting problems: architecting systems, optimizing queries, finding patterns in chaos. Other days I'm debugging someone else's legacy code or writing the same ETL pipeline for the hundredth time. The work's value doesn't actually change between these days, but my feeling about its value certainly does. And I've had to ask myself: what's changing? The work, or my pride?

This subjective experience, common as it is, turns out to tell us more about ourselves than about work itself. When researchers actually tested Graeber’s claims using data from nearly 30,000 European workers, his theory collapsed. Only 4.8% of workers reported that they rarely or never had “the feeling of doing useful work.” Far from the epidemic Graeber predicted, perceived uselessness affected a small minority. Even more striking: this percentage was declining, from 7.8% in 2005 to 4.8% in 2015.

The pattern in the data contradicts Graeber’s core claim, with the overall rates being 1/10 of his initial claim. But more specifically, only 1.7% of teachers report feeling their work is useless. Administrative workers, whom Graeber dismissed as doing “bullshit” work, reported a much higher (though still fairly low) 7.4%. But cleaners and carers report 8.1% uselessness and refuse collectors 9.7%. Professional jobs that Graeber labelled as obviously pointless show lower rates of perceived uselessness than many manual jobs he deemed to be obviously more valuable.

So what actually determines whether work feels meaningful?

The Doorman Fallacy

Rory Sutherland, a famous ad man, describes what he calls the Doorman Fallacy. Imagine a luxury hotel deciding to cut costs by replacing its doorman with an automatic door. The logical function of a doorman is to open doors, and an automatic door does this perfectly well whilst saving £40,000 per year. Job eliminated. Money saved.

Except the hotel can no longer charge premium rates. Guests don’t feel as valued. Taxis don’t get hailed as efficiently. The sense of security and status evaporates. The doorman wasn’t just there to open the door. He was signaling that guests mattered, providing a fundamentally human touchpoint and offering situational awareness. These psychological functions created real value, the kind that allowed the hotel to command higher prices. Yet there is no way to comprehend these from a spreadsheet, as they aren’t transactional, but relational.

Graeber made precisely this error. He judged work by its narrow logical function whilst dismissing its psychological value. Human minds don’t run on logic any more than horses run on petrol. We navigate the world through meaning, signal, relationship. A job can be logically productive yet feel meaningless if its relational context is severed. Conversely, a job can appear redundant on a spreadsheet yet create immense value through what it signals and whom it serves.

When researchers examined what actually predicts whether workers feel their jobs are useless, they discovered something profound. The strongest correlation was with a single factor: whether workers felt respected by their immediate manager.

Five of the top six predictors are manager-quality indices; three are participation; the rest are collegial support and autonomy. Workers don’t feel useless because their jobs are objectively pointless, but because workplace conditions prevent them from experiencing their work as meaningful. A nurse in a poorly-managed, unsupportive environment may feel her vital work is useless. A marketing analyst in a respectful, engaging workplace may find dignity despite producing less obviously “essential” outputs.

The Garden, the Ground, and the Curse

If secular psychology already reveals value that rationalism misses, what does theology disclose?

The biblical story of work begins before the Fall. In Genesis 2:15, Adam is placed in Eden “to work it and keep it.” Work is not the punishment for sin. It is part of human flourishing, woven into creation itself. Adam was to tend the garden, name the animals, and exercise dominion under God’s authority.

But note the relational character of work from the beginning. Adam is incomplete by himself. He is unable to fulfill his created role alone, instead needing the woman as his complement, enabling both to accomplish what they could not do alone. Together they are to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Work from the start is intended to be communal, cooperative, and complementary.

Then comes Genesis 3. The serpent, the fruit, the rupture. God’s curse falls on the ground: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.” The Hebrew word for pain here is itsabon, the same word used for Eve’s pain in childbirth. Work becomes toil. The soil that was originally freely given to man now resists. What was once harmonious collaboration between man and earth becomes grinding struggle.

The curse isn’t just on the work itself but on the relational matrix. Man is now alienated from the ground he works, from the woman he was created alongside, from the God he was made to serve. This is the theological source of alienation, far deeper than the material dialectic Marx imagined. It’s about the fracturing of right relationship at every level.

Cain, Abel, and the Path Forward

One reading of Genesis 4 sees this as humanity’s first major vocational decision. Cain becomes “a worker of the ground.” He engages in direct struggle with the very thing God has cursed. His life becomes one of hard labour and bitterness, accepting the decreed conditions without question. This is a path of outward pious resignation where Cain fully submits to the curse - “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

Abel takes a different approach. He becomes “a keeper of sheep.” Instead of grinding away at the cursed soil, he innovates by finding a way to obtain sustenance without the direct, painful toil the curse prescribes. Rather, he works the original dominion mandate - “And let them have dominion … over the livestock” -  in such a way to sidestep some of the effects of the fall, using the “technology” of the sheep to avoid working with the ground directly.

The Jewish philosopher Yoram Hazony argues that this reveals a divine moral principle: God desires us to use ingenuity to improve our own condition over just merely submitting to hardship. The blessing falls on faithful creativity, on innovation that seeks to mitigate some of the effects of the curse rather than maximize suffering.

This has profound implications. We are not called to idealize toil for its own sake or to view technology as inherently suspect. In the ancient world, the Roman watermill reduced the backbreaking labour of grinding wheat; in the modern the tractor freed farmers from dawn-to-dusk manual labour; and even in the office the spreadsheet effectively mechanized accounting. These are all echoes of Abel’s move. Technology that reduces itsabon, that makes the ground yield its fruit more easily; these participate in a project of redeeming the labour that we must yield.

Yet we must be careful here. Abel's choice wasn't morally superior to Cain's, but it was personally wiser. By reducing the direct toil of working cursed ground, Abel protected himself from one avenue of temptation: the bitterness and resentment that grinding, seemingly fruitless labor can breed. The text doesn’t say Cain’s vocation was actually wrong, only that his heart was. The problem wasn’t the farming, but that Cain didn't do it well, he didn't offer it rightly. The toil itself created spiritual danger that Cain failed to navigate. Both vocations were legitimate; Abel's was simply more prudent given the fallen conditions. Abel's innovation shows wisdom worth emulating, but it doesn't make farming inferior as a vocation.

We are free, even encouraged, to seek work that better fits our gifts, reduces unnecessary toil, or brings greater personal satisfaction. Abel's choice of shepherding over farming was prudent. But this personal preferability doesn't translate into higher eschatological value, nor does lack of choice diminish the dignity of necessary labour. The peasant farming cursed ground “as unto the Lord” and the shepherd tending flocks “as unto the Lord” stood equal before the Divine Gaze, and are both needed by society. Innovation and satisfaction are goods we may pursue, but they don't determine the eternal weight of our labour.

The Ethical Question

While the difference between farming and shepherding might have been a matter of the heart, it’s not true that all work is morally equivalent. The psychologist designing addiction mechanisms for children’s social media apps is doing genuine evil, regardless of how technically impressive the work might be or how faithfully she thinks she’s applying her skills. The food chemist formulating hyperpalatable processed foods engineered to override satiety signals is participating in a system that produces mass suffering. These are not morally neutral activities made meaningful by the worker’s intentions. They’re intrinsically destructive to other people, and by effect, the people doing the work.

Any work whose primary purpose is to exploit, manipulate, or harm another human being violates the foundational principle that every person is an image-bearer of God. Such work cannot be redeemed by good intentions or technical excellence. It treats other humans as mere objects to be used, which is the very opposite of the mutual recognition and dignity that God-honoring work requires. You cannot work “as unto the Lord” while designing systems that prey on the vulnerable or engineer compulsion in the innocent. In such situations you could even be said to be doing the devil’s work.

Yet most jobs occupy morally complex terrain. Even something like arms manufacturing could enable defense of the innocent or fuel unjust aggression, in the advent of the Russia/Ukraine war the West was once again reminded that arms aren’t inherently evil. The application and purpose matter enormously. Pharmaceutical research could heal or addict. Legal work could secure justice or facilitate exploitation. Marketing could inform or manipulate.

The classical philosopher Cicero argued that dignified work must be rational, engaging our higher faculties; strenuous, requiring genuine effort; moderate in temperament, not driven by base passions like greed; and socially beneficial, serving the common good. These remain useful criteria. We should add a fifth: Does this work align with God’s character as revealed in Scripture? Does it promote justice, mercy, truth? Or does it, whatever its technical cleverness, serve fundamentally destructive ends?

The duty in morally ambiguous cases is threefold. First, to carefully discern whether your specific role and company are operating justly. The weapons manufacturer selling to a democratic nation defending itself against invasion is in a different moral position than one selling to a dictatorship using them against civilians. Second, to exercise your agency in pushing for more ethical practices within your field. Third, to be willing to walk away if your conscience can’t be reconciled with the work.

This theology doesn’t excuse exploitation, Paul immediately tells masters they also have a Master in heaven and must be just (Colossians 4:1). The early church’s radical teaching was that slave and master stand equal before God, both accountable, both seen. If your work situation involves genuine injustice, you have both the right and often the duty to seek change or leave if you can.

But for the vast majority of jobs that feel meaningless without being actively evil, the problem is often one of vision. We’ve lost sight of the Gaze. We’ve let the discourse of productivity or creativity or social impact become the only measure of value. When that discourse fails us, when the spreadsheet says we’re redundant, when the algorithm can do our task, when our work doesn’t feel sufficiently “creative”, we despair.

The Creative Class Temptation

There does appear to be a tacit belief among some that only creative or artistic work possesses real dignity. Without naming names, I have heard multiple people claim that “you have to be creative to be human.” I’ve heard these same people describe getting back from their job lecturing at university to doing their “real work” with writing - with the unrealized implication being that teaching the students who had been in front of them was a kind of “fake work.”

The category error here is conflating image-bearing with creativity. Yes, humans are creative. Adam named animals. Bach composed symphonies. Dante penned a great masterpiece. But creativity is just one expression of bearing God’s image, not the thing in and of itself. The peasant still bore God’s image in faithful toil just as the artist bears God’s image in creative work and even the accountant bears God’s image in meticulous calculation. None is superior. All are stewardship of different gifts.

Consider a medieval peasant farmer, struggling to feed his family through backbreaking labour. If we told him his work lacked the dignity of “creative” work, he might be baffled by the category. He knew he bore God's image in faithful toil, just as the monastery's scribes bore God's image in their illuminated manuscripts. Neither was more fundamentally human than the other. Both were image-bearers of God, working to serve those around them, embedded in relationships of mutual dependence.

C. S. Lewis wrote that our desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are “half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

The modern creative class is making mud pies. They’ve convinced themselves that work only has real value if it’s artistic, innovative, expressive of individual genius. They pity the sub-human call centre worker, presumably living a diminished, uncreative life. But if that call centre worker works “heartily, as for the Lord”, even in the face of unpleasant working conditions, they have tasted something the anxious creative, chasing self-actualization and Instagram likes, cannot imagine. They have known whose eyes were on them. That knowledge transforms every frustrated conversation into an act of worship that carries eternal weight.

The Gaze That Changes Everything

Lewis identifies what he calls “the inconsolable secret” in every human heart: a longing “to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality.” We feel like strangers in the universe, perpetually outside looking in.

This is the wound behind the so-called “bullshit job” phenomenon. The pain isn’t primarily about uselessness, it’s about invisibility. The data confirms this: perceived job uselessness correlates most strongly with poor management and weak workplace relationships, not with the actual content of the work. People can find meaning in objectively repetitive tasks if they feel seen and valued. They experience spiritual violence in objectively important tasks if they feel like replaceable cogs. I have met factory production line workers who are happier and more fulfilled at work than academics.

No Christian view of work can ignore Colossians 3:22-24. Paul writes to slaves, people in the least autonomous, least valued positions in ancient society: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”

He writes to slaves who almost certainly faced unjust masters, people trapped in conditions that were objectively wrong and should not have existed. Yet he offers them not resignation but a shocking vision: even labour done under exploitation retains eternal dignity when offered to God. The unjust master could steal wages, inflict suffering, deny basic humanity. But he could never prevent the slave's work from mattering to God.

This is comfort for the trapped, not a command for the free. If you can leave unjust conditions, you should. If you're structurally bound, by economics, by family, by barriers beyond your control; this theology declares that even systemic evil cannot strip your work, cannot strip you, of value before God's face. The command is universal because the source of the work's value is universal. It matters because you're doing it before the eyes of God, and he sees you in ways no earthly power can diminish or define.

This explains why caring professions report surprisingly high job satisfaction despite often unpleasant working conditions. Health workers show only 1.6% feeling their work is useless; personal care workers 1.9%. Nurses dealing with bodily fluids, social workers navigating bureaucratic nightmares, teachers managing chaotic classrooms. They see the people they serve as persons, and they’re seen in return. The work is relational, and relationship images the Divine Gaze.

Good management works the same way. When a manager makes workers feel genuinely seen, values their contributions beyond mere output, creates space for them as persons rather than functions, she’s providing something profound. She’s providing a sacramental echo of how God sees his workers. The earthly gaze points to the heavenly one.

Living in the Age of the Algorithm

Jacques Ellul warned that the real danger of technology isn’t that it will fail but that we’ll be taken in by the discourse surrounding it. He distinguished between technique (the methodical system of efficient means) and technology (the story we tell ourselves about technique). The danger is the overwhelming ideological narrative that frames technical progress as the only solution to all problems, the only valid path forwards.

This discourse works through what Ellul calls “integration by outflanking.” It doesn’t confront moral objections directly. It simply makes them irrelevant by seamlessly absorbing people through convenience. You don’t decide to become alienated from traditional forms of community and work. You get a smartphone because it’s useful. Then you get apps because they’re convenient. Then you find yourself checking notifications compulsively, your attention fragmented, your relationships mediated through screens. You’ve been encircled before you noticed the movement.

The modern experience of work reflects this integration. We contribute small, specific parts to systems beyond our understanding or control. The medieval mason didn’t build the cathedral alone, but he could see the whole structure rising, could walk through the space he helped create, could point it out to his grandchildren. The modern software engineer commits code to a repository that feeds into systems he’s never seen, serving purposes he only vaguely understands, for a company that might pivot or fold next quarter.

This isn’t inherently dehumanizing. Division of labour allows for spectacular achievements. But it becomes dehumanizing when the relational matrix is severed, when you’re treated as a data point rather than a person, when your work is a pure function stripped of face-to-face relationship. This points to why Ellul's warning matters: technology's real danger isn't replacing human tasks but dissolving the human relationships that give those tasks meaning.

Yet “relationship” here requires precision. Not all human contact is dignified. The call centre worker facing abuse from customers experiences human interaction without recognition. The warehouse worker who is constantly tracked by algorithms labours alongside others but as a productivity metric, not a person. What dignifies work is mutual recognition, what Martin Buber called “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” encounter. The medieval mason wasn't merely embedded in the community; he was known by name, his skills recognised, his contribution visible to those who depended on it. His relationships weren't just proximate but reciprocal.

This is why management quality predicts meaningful work so strongly in the data. Good managers don't merely interact with workers but recognise them as persons whose dignity exists independent of output. They create conditions for genuine agency, where ideas matter, where workers are trusted with responsibility. This recognition, being seen as who you are rather than what you produce, echoes the Divine Gaze that ultimately grounds all human dignity.

It's precisely this capacity for recognition, both given and received, that no machine can replicate. ChatGPT can write code, generate marketing copy, even produce poetry. Should we despair? Only if we’ve already accepted the technological discourse’s framing. The algorithm can perform tasks. It cannot worship. It cannot work “as unto the Lord.” It cannot receive the divine acknowledgement that makes human labour eternally significant.

Consider how selective our anxiety is. Most of the people who mourn algorithms potentially replacing creative work wouldn’t mourn tractors replacing farm labour, spreadsheets replacing manual accounting, or washing machines replacing laundresses. Why? Because we’ve sacralized creativity whilst dismissing manual or routine work. We’ve accepted a hierarchy of value that Scripture doesn’t recognise.

The Abel principle applies here. Innovation that reduces itsabon, painful toil, is good. The watermill, the spreadsheet, the tractor, the AI code assistant that handles boilerplate drudgery: these participate in alleviating effects of the curse. We should welcome them as we would welcome any human-empowering tool that makes the ground yield its fruit more easily, though we must exercise wisdom in our wielding them.

On the other side of the coin, we must resist the discourse that accompanies such tools, and recognize that not all innovations serve human flourishing. Some tools are designed from the start to manipulate, surveil, or exploit. When businesses demand efficiency over all else it becomes an idol, when every human activity must justify itself by measurable output, when relationships become “networking” and rest becomes “recharging,” we’ve let technology take the driving seat rather than the humans who are using it. Technology can enable either oppressive surveillance or empowering collaboration. It’s a tool that can enhance or diminish dignity depending on how we organise its use.

Christian discernment is essential in all parts of our lives, work and technology are not isolated from that. We must ask not only whether a tool reduces toil, but whether it preserves human dignity, enables genuine relationships, and serves the common good. Yet as we've already established, the primary determinant of meaningful work isn't the technology itself but the quality of human relationships within which we labor.

The data shows improvement is possible. The decline in perceived uselessness from 7.8% to 4.8% between 2005 and 2015 suggests that work organisation matters more than technology itself. The shift towards knowledge work, with its greater autonomy and participation, has actually reduced feelings of meaninglessness. 

Practical resistance requires naming this discourse when we encounter it. When someone dismisses your work as “bullshit” because it doesn’t produce obvious output, you can recognise the Doorman Fallacy. When AI panic suggests your value depends on performing irreplaceable tasks, you can remember Colossians 3:23. When the drive for efficiency demands you sacrifice human connection for speed, you can choose the inefficiency of face-to-face conversation, handwritten notes, and unhurried presence.

Recovering Dignified Work

The solution to modern work’s crisis isn’t abandoning ordinary jobs for creative ones, nor romanticizing pre-industrial labour, nor implementing universal basic income to free people from “bullshit jobs.” The solution is recovering the relational conditions under which all legitimate work can become an experience of human dignity and divine service.

The medieval peasant’s advantage over the alienated modern worker wasn’t that farming is superior to finance. It was that he worked embedded in community, with clear relationships of mutual dependence. He saw his contribution’s impact on those around him. He operated under a theological vision of God’s provision and human stewardship. His work, worship, and life weren’t fragmented into separate spheres.

We can recover these conditions without returning to medieval agriculture. The key is transformation of work relations, not work content.

For workers themselves: Choose to see your work as working for the Lord. It may be easy to feel like a small cog in a big machine, but so long as what you are doing is not inherently sinful it is inherently valuable because you are doing it. Seek to encourage your colleagues, sharing with them their value as humans made in the image of the divine. Some jobs may make this an easier task than others, but unless your work is inherently immoral, it is appointed for you in this moment by God himself.

For managers: Cultivate respect, participation, and support not as mere productivity techniques but as recognition of workers’ image-bearing dignity. This is a moral issue, not just a management one. When the strongest predictor of meaningful work is whether your manager respects you as a person, management becomes a profound Christian concern. Disrespectful, unsupportive management isn’t just about reduced productivity but more importantly it violates the dignity of image-bearers. It prevents workers from experiencing their labour as the arena of human flourishing God intended. Create the conditions where people can do quality work, use their ideas, and experience genuine agency. Make your people feel seen. Recognition and respect are psychological goods that image the Divine Gaze.

At the structural level: Support unions, policies, and practices that give workers voice and constrain exploitative conditions. The church historically has championed worker dignity. A tradition we must recover against both unfettered capitalism and stifling bureaucracy. Management quality shouldn’t be left to individual virtue alone, as often there is little that can be done alone. Structures matter. Workers need genuine participation in decisions that affect their labour.

Theologically: Recover the Reformation doctrine of vocation. All legitimate work done unto God has inherent worth. The division between “secular” and “sacred” work is false. The accountant’s spreadsheet and the pastor’s sermon can both be offered as worship. Both serve the common good. Both can be done faithfully or poorly, with integrity or compromise. The promise isn’t that we’ll all find careers that feel meaningful every moment. The promise is that God sees our labour, whatever it may be, when offered faithfully to Him.

The Peasant's Rest

The medieval peasant, hands in cursed soil, working dawn to dusk to feed his family, knew something the anxious modern worker has forgotten. He worked before the Gaze. That knowledge didn’t make the labour easy or the soil less cursed. But it transformed the meaning of every action.

Return to Sutherland’s doorman. From a purely logical perspective, his job can be eliminated, and many unhelpful types would tell him that. But he actually creates real value through signal and presence. And there is another Christian layer if that doorman does his work “as unto the Lord,” if he sees each guest as an immortal worthy of care and service, if he offers his labour as worship, then he’s participating in something eternal. An automatic door cannot do this.

This is the truth Graeber missed, the truth those chasing creative validation can’t imagine, the truth the algorithm will never threaten: your work matters because you are doing it. Not because the task is irreplaceable or creative or socially validated, but because you are an image-bearer performing before the eyes of God.

Lewis wrote that “there are no ordinary people.” Every person you meet is an immortal, destined for either eternal glory or eternal horror. The cleaner mopping hospital floors, the programmer debugging legacy code, the compliance officer reviewing forms. All are possible kings and queens of heaven. The task doesn’t confer dignity. The worker already has it, stamped into their very being by the hand of the Creator.

We work in a fallen world. Technique threatens to colonise every domain. Algorithms displace tasks. Systems alienate. The ground remains cursed. But we work before an unfallen God.

So process your forms. Attend your meetings. Let the algorithm handle what it can. And do it all as if the King of the universe were watching.

Because He is.

For from him and through him and to him are all things, including our work, whatever it may be. To him be glory forever. Amen.