The Work of Our Hands: When Labor Loses Its Meaning
Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. — Genesis 2:15
The Design
Before the curse, before the thorns and thistles, before sweat and toil became the texture of labor—there was work. Adam was placed in a garden not to rest but to tend it. To cultivate. To exercise dominion over creation as an image-bearer of the God who himself worked for six days and called it good.
This is no minor detail in the biblical narrative. Man was created in the image of God, and one of the first things God reveals about himself is that he works. He speaks, and things come into being. He separates, orders, fills, and blesses. And then he makes a creature in his own likeness and immediately gives him a task: work the ground, name the animals, exercise stewardship over what has been made.
Work, then, is not a consequence of the Fall. It is woven into what it means to be human—and particularly what it means to be a man. The dignity of labor predates sin. The satisfaction of seeing something cultivated, built, or brought to completion reflects the very nature of our Creator.
The Disruption
Something has gone wrong.
Not merely the curse of Genesis 3, where the ground resists us and labor becomes mingled with frustration. That disruption is ancient, and every generation has felt it. What we face now is something additional—a severing of work from its tangible outcomes that leaves many men unmoored, adrift in a sea of abstraction, wondering if they have built anything at all.
Consider the nature of modern labor.
Your grandfather could point to a house and say, "I built that." My grandfather did just this, he built his own home. He could walk through a field and say, "I planted that." He could repair an engine and hear it roar back to life. At the end of his day, something existed that had not existed before—something he could see, touch, and name. His body was tired because he had spent it on something real.
What do you point to?
A man today might spend forty years contributing to processes he never sees completed, producing outcomes he cannot touch, serving systems so vast and abstracted that his individual contribution disappears like a drop of water in the ocean. He is no longer a craftsman with a product. He is a node in a network, a line item in a budget, a "resource" to be allocated and optimized. His labor feeds a machine so large he cannot even perceive its edges, let alone take satisfaction in its output.
He attends meetings about meetings. He sends emails that generate emails. He updates spreadsheets that feed dashboards that inform decisions made by people he will never meet, affecting outcomes he will never witness. And at the end of the day, he goes home, and if his children ask him what he did at work, he finds he cannot explain it—not because the work is secret, but because it is shapeless. It has no edges. It leaves no mark.
This is not laziness. This is not a failure of character. This is a man responding to a world that has, through no malice but also no mercy, stripped his labor of the very thing that made it human.
The economy has done this gradually, and not without benefits. Specialization and scale have produced extraordinary material prosperity. We live longer, more comfortably, with access to wonders our ancestors could not have imagined. But somewhere in the transaction, something essential was lost: the experience of making something, of looking at the work of your hands and knowing—in your bones, not just in your theology—that it is good.
God looked at creation and saw that it was good. Adam was made to share in that experience. To cultivate, to build, to see the fruit of his labor and find satisfaction in it. That satisfaction was not vanity. It was design. And we have engineered a world that frustrates it at every turn.
And now comes artificial intelligence, accelerating this displacement with frightening speed. The argument for abstract, knowledge-based work was always that it remained productive even if unsatisfying. "You may not build with your hands," the economy said, "but you build with your mind. You analyze, strategize, communicate. You add value." It was a thin consolation, but it was something.
But what happens when a machine can do it faster, cheaper, and without complaint? What happens when the analyst is optimized away, when the strategist is replaced by an algorithm, when the communicator discovers that his emails can be written by software that never tires, never asks for a raise, never wonders if its work has meaning?
If the dignity of work rests on economic utility alone, it has no foundation at all. The machines will always be more useful. And a man who has been told his whole life that his value lies in his productivity will find himself, at last, valued at nothing.
This is where we are. This is what we face. And pretending otherwise helps no one.
The Weight of It
Let us be honest about what this costs.
A man who cannot point to the work of his hands—who goes home each evening without any sense of having built, repaired, protected, or cultivated—carries a weight that is difficult to name. It is not laziness. It is not ingratitude. It is the friction between how he was made and how he is forced to live.
Scripture tells us that whatever we do, we are to do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men (Colossians 3:23). This is true. But it does not erase the legitimate grief of work that feels disconnected from anything real. Paul was writing to slaves—people whose labor was compelled and whose dignity was denied by their circumstances. He was not telling them their situation was good. He was telling them that even in a disordered world, their work could be offered to God.
There is comfort in that, but not a solution. The slave's work was still slavery. And the modern worker's sense of meaninglessness is still a genuine burden, even if it can be borne with faith.
We must be careful here. The feeling of meaninglessness and the reality of meaninglessness are not identical. Your work may genuinely be less satisfying than tilling soil—that is an honest assessment of modern conditions, not a spiritual failure. But "for the glory of God" is not merely a pious coating over pointless tasks. It is a claim about ultimate context that remains true even when proximate experience is frustrating.
Both things are real: the work matters eternally, and the work feels hollow daily. Holding these together without collapsing into either despair or false cheerfulness is part of the Christian life in a fallen world.
A Final Word
I am not going to tell you to build a birdhouse on Saturday.
That is what the advice always comes to, isn't it? Find a hobby. Do something with your hands on the weekend. Remember your work matters to God even when it doesn't feel like it matters to you.
Maybe. But half your waking life, five days a week, for decades, is spent in labor that runs against the grain of how you were made. That is not a problem you solve with a Saturday project.
I do not have a solution. I am not sure anyone does. The economy is what it is. The bills are what they are. You cannot simply walk away.
What I can offer is this: the ache is not ingratitude. The restlessness is not sin. You are a man made in the image of a God who works and creates and sees that it is good—and you have been placed in a system that offers you none of that satisfaction.
The problem is not in you. The problem is real.
