When work is worship

A recipe for contentment revealed through an unintentional master

Growing up, the adult attitude toward work that surrounded me was that it was a tedious penalty for being financially able. Work was simply an exchange: money for energy. Unless you had a trust fund, it was a universal rule; you worked if you wanted to pay bills. No escape. I absorbed that culture and spent my early twenties preparing for careers that promised a nice paycheck at the end of the month, regardless of how I felt about the work itself. And I got one. It seemed simple enough until I encountered a simpler exchange that not only made life more bearable but also rendered it meaningful.

It is when work and worship are in the same stream. Image: Dan Arndt, 2018, Ambalangoda mask maker

My first glimpse into how work and worship could be the same stream came through a master mask maker in Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka. What struck me first was how disgruntled he seemed to have customers. We had interrupted his work, which he clearly loved to immerse in. There seemed to be something greater in his craft than the prospect of money. When I asked why he chose to become a mask maker, he simply said he had taken to it after watching his uncle carve masks; the act called to him. There was no grand scheme or career strategy. It was pure interest. My questions about how he learned the craft or shaped his process seemed to puzzle him. “You just do it, there is nothing else to it,” he said.

The master was not a financially affluent man. He earned what he could from visitors buying masks, occasional commissions, and the odd state-sponsored grant or award. His workshop was simple, his clothes even simpler. He wasn’t working on a major commission, but he was carving another spectacular mask to exhibit at Shilpa, the state craft exhibition, the following year. Compared to Colombo’s ‘successful’ artists, he seemed uninterested in visibility, interviews, or recognition. What he carried instead was an air of rare contentment. He had neither great luxury nor widespread fame. Even I, writing about him some years later, can’t remember his name. But what does that matter?

Because I remember how the master was deeply immersed in his work. Its reception was of no great consequence to him. Its legacy was irrelevant. His masks were an act of devotion to the relationship he had with his surroundings, perhaps even with his materials. They arose from his curiosity towards an act and his compulsion to converse with it, on terms that were strictly his own. I couldn’t imagine a higher form of creative contentment. For him, work itself was worship.

The master was not interested in teaching me. But he did, nevertheless. He showed me that the gap we assume between work and worship is not natural. The two can be the same. And lives lived in that unity, I believe with good reason, are blessed with a rare sense of contentment.

Worship isn’t only in temples, churches, or mosques; it’s in the act of being deeply there for something. Worship is not a place, but a quality of presence. Worship isn’t in ritual alone, but in how we show up to the world. When someone is fully present in their task—whether sweeping a floor, weaving, coding, or painting—there is reverence in that presence.

I don’t know what became of the master mask maker. Perhaps he still shapes wood into faces with stories. Perhaps he died content in the act of doing so. Either way, he left me with an insight that shifted my own course. I stopped trying to fit into careers that looked good on paper and instead turned to the messy path of becoming a commercial creator to fund my personal creativity. When my son asks me what he should become when he grows up, I tell him to find where he naturally loses himself; to look for acts that draw him with curiosity, to immerse himself; to find worship in life.

Now, I know for certain that work is best as a form of worship. And more often than we realize, worship is the better exchange with the world; one that sustains meaning and pays the bills.

Why the typo changed from a public embarrassment to an endearing sign of being human

A personal story from PW co-creator, Shamalee

The other week, when we were wrapping up an intense period leading up to travel overseas, I couldn't proofread a story that my partner published for our studio newsletter, and it went out with a grammatical error. Now, this was not the first time our studio has made a little mistake, but seeing it on my screen still brought up a bad taste at the back of my throat. Unlike all the previous times, when I would torture myself and question my credibility as a writer, the bad taste subsided almost immediately, because the calm voice in my head said, “Well, it leaves no doubt that this newsletter is written by humans and not AI.”

This got me thinking about how creators will most likely start seeing errors or other slips in perfection more as a hallmark of the humanness in their work, and less as embarrassing things to camouflage. It’s not just when it comes to mistakes; it’s interesting to consider how AI—or the perception of it—will influence creativity around the idea of ‘perfection.’

Just a few weeks ago, I read how the em dash—probably my favourite punctuation mark, because I like to introduce offshoots of ideas into sentences—is starting to get the reputation as a sign of AI writing. And it’s not entirely unfounded; ChatGPT seems to have a habitual devotion to the em dash, giving unnecessary significance to pauses and breaks in common sentences. Because of this, I found myself consciously holding back on the em dash, forcing myself not to bring my layered thoughts into sentences. Soon enough, I realized that I was compromising my mind’s mechanism just to distance my work from what’s perceived as a sign of AI-generated creativity. As much as we are used to prototyping and shaping AI, it will also undoubtedly shape us—the way we create, and our distinction of what makes our creativity ‘human.’

I recently visited my old university at the invitation to critique an undergraduate project on designing stories for Sri Lankan cities in predominantly visual aspects, with some written language components. Here, I became highly aware of how I judge the value of creative work against what I consider to be genuine human creative output versus AI-generated. In 70% of the work presented, the written components of the story, such as slogans and promotional texts, reeked of ChatGPT. And I’m not talking about sentence structure or an overuse of the em dash. Although I couldn’t put a finger on what was so distinctly ChatGPT about those works at the time, now I can. It’s best explained as “saying a lot without saying anything”: words that are strung together to create a sense of (subjective) beauty, but utterly hollow of lived experience and a viewpoint. They are not directional. Words that have logical and even aesthetic coherence, but don’t communicate a point of view in an idea; that have the micro-connections, and the many emotional and sensory associations that we humans make with things in our mind and things we perceive in the outer world. They lacked the many dimensions that seep into the writing of a human who has genuinely experienced the subject. For those students, I didn’t think mediocre writing posed a great threat, particularly because their course was more focused on the visual elements of storytelling. However, I was concerned that they were missing out on the accidental wonder of creativity by using ChatGPT for creative writing.

An idea is not limited to one form of expression; the same idea has many forms, such as visual, linguistic, sonic, etc. When you approach an idea from many directions, your view of it becomes richer and more distinct. As a design student many years ago, I discovered the joy of writing simply through attempts to describe ideas as best as possible. Although my projects were not being marked for writing per se, my attempt to use language to articulate an idea gave me a different hold on it—something more concrete and definitive that visuals didn’t deliver. Ultimately, it led me to a career focusing more on writing designed for commercial outcomes. But I wondered if the students who used ChatGPT for their project writing were missing out on the chance to get a different grip on their idea—or even a breakthrough into an entirely different career path in creativity. I don’t know; too soon to tell. Who am I to judge? Each to their own life and times, isn’t it?

I’m not against AI; in fact, I think it has the potential to rid us of meaningless or tedious tasks. I use a trained version of ChatGPT to draft emails, formal letters to the city council, project proposals, notes to the lawyer, follow-ups, lists… things that I don’t care to excel at. But when it comes to creative writing, AI is more of a technical assistant than a substitute: to cross-check whether a new story contradicts an old one in a series; to proofread and grammar-check drafts. I look forward to the day when AI can do everything I don’t want to do: filing taxes, laundry, groceries, bookkeeping, managing employees—even if it’s at the cost of another machine having an enormous influence on my life. Anything to escape doing chores so I can read and write more, really.

Until then, I just have to watch how the world evolves, understand our parts in shaping it, and hold on to what I like about being human a little closer.

Raise your hand if you overthink stories.

Unpacking ideas with people, over dinner, in the classroom, in conversation, is easy for me. My thoughts gather shape in the moment, dancing with the attention of the listener. I speak freely. I flow.

All that changes when I try to write them down.

The meaning of each word and sentence hardens. There’s a kind of finality to writing that creates friction for me. My focus turns, and I begin interrogating myself while typing. 

Listening while speaking; decoding my own words mid-sentence. 

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion... It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”  — Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

I came across the Margaret Atwood quote while collecting stories for this Food for Thought, in a film called “The Stories We Tell” by Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley.  

What if I approached writing as an interrogation? like in Polley’s film. I could use the questions to lead the story…

I asked the computer Copilot what it thought about this.

Apparently, this is a kind of “second-order thinking”; I had to look it up… Basically, I’m writing while simultaneously imagining the story it generates in another person’s head. Which is likely possible for me, since most of my work requires attention to perceived meaning. I make a living thinking about what other people are thinking about—questioning the questions…

So what do I do with this? Could I just get Copilot to do it for me—can we do that now?

I'm tempted to just share a bunch of links and say nothing. Let them figure it out, I think to myself… 

Can I call it mine, if I add some yellow?

A picture is a bridge to an idea; a word is a definition of an idea. When it comes to graphic design, my ability to translate someone else's gaze is useful, but it seems to complicate the process when it comes to writing. Managing the tension between authentic impulse and anticipated reception is strenuous. It usually stirs doubt in me and spirals into over-editing.

Raise your hand if you are hyper-aware of other people’s imagined interpretation.

That means you have the tool for nuanced storytelling with relational depth. People like us are attuned to signs and how they're received. Most people stop at first-order thinking. Overthinkers have the ability to consider the ripple effects of a decision. We are second and third-order thinkers.

So are we editing for resonance or approval? 

I would say: resonance.

Mike Mills' 1999 documentary AIR: Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing approach to telling a story is all resonance. The story leverages confusion; It embraces the act of telling, with all its imperfections, hesitations, ellipses, and repetitions. It shifts between observer and participant. Instead of pretending to be an invisible observer, the director is in the film as a character in the story. 

Perhaps there’s a way to leverage critical thoughts as a narrative strategy?

Take Barbara Kruger as an example. She doesn't just interrogate, she questions the viewer/reader. Her Direct Address approach flips passive observation into active participation. The story confronts the critic.

But that’s not my intention. These Food for Thought stories aim to provoke thought in the same way two people would explore an idea in a discussion. 

That makes me think of the last part of the Atwood quote: “it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

The resonance of a conversation is hard to summon when alone with a blinking cursor.

When I write, the idea can’t ricochet; it just sits there. Attempts to create a dialogue collapse. The rhythm disintegrates. I have to come back a day later to read it with fresh eyes; pretend I’m replying to someone else’s idea.

Then I pick up the fragmented thoughts and try to build a bridge between them. It’s like “a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood”. There’s a gut feeling that somehow, these ideas are related, but not sure how. So I wrestle with them and bend them into different shapes; come back a few days later and bend them some more… 

Can you feel the pauses where I hovered over sentences, unsure if they belonged? I do this again and again—moving words and sentences around on a page, until they fit the gut feeling.

Maybe these Food for Thought stories aren’t meant to resolve. Maybe the interrogation is the telling.

Food for thought.