Catholic social teaching, the tradition of reflection on social and economic life from modern popes, is optimistic about human life in a way that is usually quite inspiring. So I paid attention during a recent discussion when a friend pronounced C.S.T.’s definition of work “depressing.”
We were talking about Catholic social teaching’s understanding that work is any creative human activity, meaning that most of the unpaid activities we do for pleasure are considered work along with those we do for pay. But my friend pushed back. “Going for a hike or doing cross-stitch is work? No, thanks. Those things are my down time. I do them for me.”
It’s true that Catholic social teaching would consider most relaxing, downtime activities to be work, but my friend was right, too: The good life absolutely includes more than work. I believe C.S.T.’s inclusive definition of work holds the key to building not just better work but also better lives. But it is also true that this is very different from how we tend to understand work in the United States.
A search through Google Images gives a quick and stark view of how U.S. culture defines work. People at work use laptops, inhabit offices and wear business attire; work is professional, done for pay, outside the home. Many seem to be overwhelmed, slumped on their desks or yelling; work is exhausting, turning us into the worst versions of ourselves. The writer Derek Thompson says that “workism” is a new U.S. religion: Work is all-important, ordering the value of everything else in life. We rank people by the status of their paid job, while those not currently working for pay come in last. Work is what we do for pay; it is bad and overwhelming; and it outweighs everything else in importance.
The Catholic social teaching tradition sees work quite differently. For C.S.T., work is any activity through which humans transform the world using our uniquely human abilities to create, reason and learn. The tradition does not deny that work is often harmful; at its worst, work can even alienate or separate us from our human nature, a serious problem for workers, employers and societies to address. But C.S.T. maintains that in its essence and at its best, work can be good for us, an insight social science confirms. Numerous popes in the last century and a half have taught that work is important for how it changes the world, but more so for how it changes the worker.
As humans, we are constantly growing and changing in good and bad ways, and our work, paid or unpaid, is a major way we shape and change ourselves. This self-transformative aspect of work is more important than the goods, profits or other tangible outcomes the work produces. Finally, while work is important—both for what it produces and how it shapes the person who works—intentional time away from work is crucial for our human nature. Work is not just what we do for pay; it can and should be good for us; and it is important, but not all-encompassing. Catholic social teaching’s inclusive definition of work is deeply countercultural to the common U.S. understanding.
The Importance of Unpaid Labor
When U.S. culture defines work as done for pay, unpaid labor is treated as simply a part of life—so much so that a parent putting in 16-hour days to care for their children is viewed by economists, and may be dismissed by peers, as “not working.” But Catholic social teaching has always recognized unpaid work as work, equal in dignity and importance to what we do for pay. The first document of modern C.S.T., Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum,” talked about women’s work in the home in 1891. Ninety years later, John Paul II included caring for children and the home in a list of work activities that can be difficult toil, even though very important.
The popes often describe work as transforming creation, or the material of the world around us; in work, we shape God’s creation to make it more useful to humans. Transforming creation could look like farming or manufacturing; it is obvious how those activities shape the material of the world. But humans are God’s creation too—so nurses, teachers and therapists transform creation as they act upon their students or patients. We transform ourselves, and we work, when we learn or exercise. Finally, when we apply our creative agency to bring things into being, whether literature and art, tax returns and spreadsheets, policies and laws, or our own social media presence, we are working.
Catholic social teaching is strongly optimistic about the many ways work (paid and unpaid), at its best, can be good for us. John Paul II suggests that through work we “achieve fulfillment as a human being,” participate in God’s ongoing act of creation and imitate Christ. “When [humans] work,” the Second Vatican Council stated in “Gaudium et Spes,” “not only do they transform matter and society, they also perfect themselves. They learn, develop their faculties, emerging from and transcending themselves.” Work is good for us not only when it allows us to provide for ourselves and our families, but also when it allows us to develop our skills into the person we are called to become.
Again, when the framers of Catholic social teaching say work can be good for us, they mean work in the inclusive definition—not only paid labor, but any activity in which humans transform the world and ourselves. Parenting, community organizing, playing sports or an instrument, writing or making art, and improving our skills at cooking or repair are all instances of work in which we perfect ourselves as we develop our skills. Just like paid work, unpaid work helps us gain the skills we are capable of, to become fully ourselves and show up in the world as God intends us to do. And as the C.S.T. framers know, families and societies could not function at all without unpaid labor.
Most adults spend many hours in unpaid activities that are deeply important to our communities but do not usually get much respect or resources because of their unpaid status. As a primary example, caring for our own children also helps adults in our communities who will one day need to rely on the generations who succeed them. Volunteers are also vitally important to communities, sometimes doing exactly the same work that is done for pay elsewhere—like rural volunteer first responders—and meeting many needs there is no money to pay for. And art enriches communities in ways we would not want to live without, even as artists devote many unpaid hours to their creative activity.
There is something disrespectful about insisting that these socially crucial, unpaid activities are not work equal in importance to what is done for pay. Even harder to swallow, for me, is the way identifying work with pay lumps all unpaid activities under “leisure time,” as if caring for children or shoveling your driveway were as freely chosen and restorative as relaxing with a book. C.S.T. has it right: Even those adults without a paid job spend the majority of their waking hours working. That is the most accurate way to describe caring for family members, our homes and ourselves; studying or exercising; handling the logistics of daily life; and all the other activities that those who work for pay must squeeze into the hours around a paid job.
Work Flow and Workflow
“In spite of all this toil…work is a good thing” for the human person, John Paul II insists in “Laborem Exercens.” The social sciences provide further insight into ways work can be good for us. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes an experience called flow, when we become so immersed in a task—which happens when its challenge meets our level of skill—that time passes pleasantly, without us being aware of it. We may be lucky enough to access the enjoyable experience of flow in our paid work, but it is also available in our unpaid work in the home.
Deb Perelman, a cookbook author, points to the flow available in home cooking when she writes: “I didn’t want a book whose goal was to rush you out of the kitchen the second you began to unwind…to operate from the assumption that cooking is drudgery, when for so many of us, it’s a much-needed escape.” The opportunity to experience flow on a regular basis is a real way that our unpaid work can be good for us. This makes it especially important for members of a family or household to divide unpaid labor fairly, not just to avoid burnout and resentment on the part of the one who shoulders the most, but also to afford all household members the opportunity to access the flow and pride that can come with unpaid in-home labor.
Experts on workplace flourishing know that burnout can occur when our bodies do not “complete the stress cycle,” remaining too long in the fight-or-flight response that stressful jobs can impose. Reliable ways to complete the stress cycle include exercise or creative activity, both of which Catholic social teaching would also consider work. Here, again, work can be good for us when unpaid work helps us complete the stress cycle and restore equilibrium.
I think these positive effects work can have on our bodies and minds—helping us enjoy flow and move past the physiological stress response—may be part of what John Paul II has in mind when he says that work helps us become “more a human being.” Work (paid or unpaid), at its best, brings our body, mind, spirit and will into alignment, moving harmoniously toward a valuable goal. When unpaid work helps restore our well-being, it is a visible example of how work can make us more fully human.
Catholic social teaching’s inclusive definition of work, with its insistence that work can be a good thing for us and that almost everything we do is work, could seem to contribute to misguided workism. But it really cues us to expect better from our work lives. C.S.T. should inspire us to seek out work that allows us to develop our skills, abilities and relationships, to enjoy flow, and to complete the stress cycle, whether at a paid job or in our free time.
If our current downtime activities don’t develop our skills or offer flow—hello, passive screentime—Catholic social teaching reminds us that unpaid work can still be restorative. It’s also important that C.S.T.’s inclusive definition of work insists that cooking, child care and household chores, although good, valuable and necessary, are not, in fact, leisure activities. They are work, yes, that engages and shapes us, but which we also need rest from them. The fact that an activity is not paid labor does not make it restful—something U.S. culture ignores when it calls only paid activities work.
Taking Time Out
Do our lives reflect Catholic social teaching’s inclusive definition of work? What might we change—on our own or with the help of our communities—so that it would?
The theologian Christine Firer Hinze of Fordham University urges us to consider our need for two kinds of rest: rest-amid and rest-apart. The former describes the refreshment we might find while working, perhaps in an experience of flow or completing the stress cycle. The restorative downtime my friend Jane experiences doing cross-stitch is rest-amid, an example of the way work (unpaid work in this case) can be good for us.
Rest-apart, on the other hand, happens when we intentionally take time away from paid and unpaid work. Many Catholic thinkers note that we need this second category of rest to remember that we are not God. Despite the great potential God gives us to shape and change the world through our work, we are first and ultimately creatures, who receive the world as God’s gift. When we stop our work, we have the chance to accept and celebrate the world for the gift that it is. Although rest-amid is restorative, rest-apart is equally necessary, and is a right that too many workers struggling to survive in the U.S. economy cannot enjoy.
Paid and unpaid activity is work, through which we change the world and ourselves. At least some of our work should be good for us, helping us develop into who God intends us to be. While work is important, we also need times of rest-apart to remember that we are not the Creator, and that we receive our lives as a gift.
This article appears in June 2026.
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