Reflections on Purposeful Work

Ted Kaczynski

1978–1979
Somewhere previously in my notes I have given it as my opinion that the reasons
modern man is so prone to frustration and other emotional problems is that in the
technological society he lives a life that is highly abnormal; as compared with the life
to which evolution has adapted him, namely, the life of a hunter-gatherer. I still hold
this opinion; but it leaves open the question of which factors in modern society are
the most important sources of psychological trouble. I have by this time concluded
that the two main problems are (A) absence of a real purpose in life, and (B) lack
of personal autonomy. I think that for most of these people who are dissatisfied with
modern society, the most important factor by far is absence of purpose; but that for
certain individuals, including me, the lack of personal autonomy is more important
(but these two problems are not completely independent.)
What we discuss here is the problem of purpose. In what follows I will make a
number of statements that are unproved. I am not absolutely certain that all these
statements are correct, but in order to avoid being tiresome I will generally omit
phrases like “in my opinion,” “I think that,” and so forth, which I usually use to indicate
unproved statements. Also, the following discussion is meant to apply especially to men.
I am uncertain how far it is applicable to women.
Most people (to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual) need to make
a purposeful effort at something in order to have a fulfilling life. Note the adjective
purposeful — the person must feel that his activity is not merely a game. Solving
crossword puzzles, for example, requires an effort but cannot form the basis for a
fulfilling life, because the activity has no purpose external to itself — one does it
only in order to have something to do. The same is true of games and statements
generally. What is needed is purposeful work requiring a reasonable amount of effort
and self-discipline.
Among the bulk of the population in modern society (that is, among people who are
more-or-less normal though not necessarily leading satisfying lives) it is probable that
many or most emotional problems are troublesome only because of a lack of sufficient
genuine purpose. A man who has a purpose, and who feels that he is succeeding in
attaining his purpose, typically will have high morale, and when one has high morale,
hardships (whether physical or psychological) are easy to bear. When a man’s work is
going reasonably well, and he believes in the value of that work, his guilt feelings or
his sex problems or his conflict with his wife usually will not seem overly important.
He is able to endure these feelings cheerfully along with other hardships. But a man
without purpose will have flabby morale and a vacuum in his life. He is likely to brood
on his problems, and may be made seriously uncomfortable by problems that would
seem trivial to a man with high morale.
In the hunting-gathering life, the most important purpose motivating work is to
procure the necessities of life and some minimal comforts. Especially food. Those who
are ignorant of that kind of life tend to assume it is miserable, and for this opinion
they give reasons of the following type: (a) hunter-gatherers’ work is monotonous; (b)
the work doesn’t utilize intelligence; (c) the object of the work is purely materialistic,

2
therefore has no “higher values” and is unfulfilling; (d) the yield of the work (amount
of food obtained, etc.) is very low, so that the hunter must find his work discouraging;
(e) the hunter lives from hand to mouth and has no long term purpose.
On the basis of prolonged personal experiences of living at the subsistence level, I
assert that the foregoing arguments are based on completely misunderstanding of the
psychology of the hunting life. It is not my principal purpose here to defend hunting-
gathering as a way of life; however, I will discuss separately each of the above points
((a) through (e)) because the discussion will involve certain instructive comparisons
between primitive work and work in modern society.
(a) “Hunter gatherers work is monotonous.” Hunting itself is not typically
monotonous (though it can be in certain circumstances), and it involves ranging over
the country, rather than working always in the same place. On the other hand, some
hunter’s work is indeed monotonous (e.g., picking berries, digging roots, softening
animal skins). Monotony is not ideal, but (for one who is accustomed to it) monotony
does not destroy the value of work or prevent it from being satisfying.
When I first took to the woods, I found burdensome the monotonous task of dragging
poles to the cabin and cutting them up for firewood. But I became used to the work,
and I now feel that it makes a real contribution to the fulfillment that I get from this
way of life. This does not mean that I actually feel any pleasure in doing the task.
It does mean that, though the work is monotonous, it does not bore me, because it
is purposeful. And cutting a load of firewood gives me a sense of accomplishment —
NOT pride in my ability (anyone but a cripple can cut firewood), but simply a feeling
that I have done something worthwhile. When I say “worthwhile” I am not referring
to any abstract philosophical notions about the value of work, or any such nonsense.
The accomplishment is worthwhile solely and exclusively because it is my only means
of fulfilling the physical need for winter fuel. If I had a lot of money and didn’t need
to conserve cash, I wouldn’t cut my own firewood. There would be no point in it.
No fulfillment in cutting firewood unnecessarily. Thus, if I were wealthy, I would be
missing the fulfillment of this kind of purposeful work.
Let me compare this with my feelings about mathematics. I solved problems in
mathematics that had no practical applications; and if they had had practical appli-
cations, it would have made no difference. Even if some engineering firm had used
my theorems for some purpose, those theorems still would have had no use for me
personally, nor for my family or friends.
Mathematical research work was varied and interesting. It was exciting. Some of
it required me to use the very best of my intellectual powers, and when I solved a
difficult problem, I was rewarded with very intense ego-gratification. Yet, as I grew
older, I was increasingly nagged by a sense of purposelessness in the work. Having
proven a theorem, I would sit back and think about it, and I would say, “So what?
What good does this do me? Now I’ll go work on another problem. But what for?”
Thus, I eventually became bored with mathematics.

3
Mathematics, music (listening, playing, composing), reading (light, serious, fiction,
non-fiction), coin-collecting, television — all these eventually led to boredom.
Another example: I hunt the same areas for snowshoe rabbits over and over again.
It is very hard work, because the rabbits must generally be hunted on steep slopes.
The excitement connected with the first hunts has long since disappeared. Yet I still
enjoy hunting rabbits (which is more than I can usually say for cutting firewood), and,
like firewood-cutting, rabbit-hunting still gives me solid, substantial satisfaction. If it
wasn’t for the fact that it is a real, physical hardship to go without the meat, I would
long since have grown bored with rabbit hunting.
(b) “Hunter-gatherer’s work does not require intelligence.” Some aspects of the hunt-
ing life require little intelligence. Other aspects do require the full use of our intelli-
gence (man didn’t evolve his big brain for nothing), but a different kind of intelligence
from that which is most important in modern society. The kind of intelligence most
esteemed and most useful in organized society is the capacity for abstract verbal or
symbol-manipulating reasoning. (This is my own strongest area of intelligence.) In the
hunting life, it is intuitive intelligence that is most important, because the required
knowledge and skills are mostly of a type that cannot be dealt with or transmitted
verbally, except in a partial way.
It seems reasonable to conjecture that the average hunter-gatherer possesses an
amount of skill and knowledge comparable to that of a modern engineer, though of
a very different kind. Be that as it may, it seems probable that the average hunter
possesses much more organized, useful skill and knowledge than that of the average
modern man, since most people today (including petty technicians) do work that
requires only a limited amount of skill or knowledge, and few people cultivate any
learning outside of what is required for their jobs.
(c) “The object of hunters’ work is purely materialistic, has no higher values, and
therefore must be unfulfilling.” This is intellectual snobbery. Let us distinguish between
the materialism of hunter-gatherers and the “materialism” (so-called) of modern society.
Hunters’ materialism is directed toward obtaining the physical necessities of life,
and some minimal comforts that actually contribute to his physical well-being and his
happiness. The “materialism” of modern society is directed toward the accumulation
of a surplus of luxuries that contribute little or nothing to anyone’s physical well-
being. There are various motivations for this accumulation of luxuries: desire for social
status; a need that exists in modern society for constant distraction and diversion
(note how many of our luxuries are toys — that is, are designed for entertainment);
artificial fulfillment of psychological needs that are otherwise stifled (e.g., riding a
powerful motorcycle provides a spurious sense of power); and then there is the fact
that shopping in itself is a form of entertainment. Observe that in each of these cases,
material goods are bought as a means to psychological ends, not physical ones. In some
instances, material goods are sought in order to alleviate the few-residual physical
discomforts remaining in modern society, but the great mass of modern products are
desired mostly for the psychological effects to be obtained through them. In this sense,

4
modern “materialism” is not materialism at all, because its goals are not physical, but
psychological. In any case, this “materialism” is something quite different from the
materialism of primitives.
I suggest that the intellectuals’ scorn for “mere materialism” is due to the fact that
most of them have always been provided with an abundance of material things acquired
at the cost of minimal effort. Take food as an example. The intellectual virtually has
his food supply guaranteed to him by organized society; his palate is jaded by all sorts
of delicacies that are standard fare for everyone today. He need not exert himself to
get food. Thus, he gets only a limited and superficial pleasure from eating, so that he
looks on eating as a lowly and superficial pleasure that provides no deep fulfillment.
But when good nutrition is not to be taken for granted, and when a good meal
is the result of real effort, then food is really soul-satisfying. The hunter’s enjoyment
of food is not only physical, but psychological, and involves not only the meal itself
but the process by which it was acquired — the effort and self-discipline involved in
hunting the meat and picking the berries, and certain satisfactions (which might be
called aesthetic) that are connected with having contact with nature and are probably
instinctive in human beings. If intellectuals lived this way of life (long enough to become
adapted to it), perhaps they would not scorn its materialism.
Of course, though the activities of hunting and gathering themselves are material-
istic, it is true that hunter-gatherers usually have other activities of an artistic and
spiritual order. On the other hand, it would seem that the artistic and spiritual con-
cerns of the hunter tend to revolve around his materialistic concerns. For example,
animals and plants depicted in his drawings tend to be those that he uses for food.
It can be argued that, rather than lowering the value of his spiritual life, this mate-
rialistic orientation actually enhances it. The physical, social, spiritual, artistic, and
other aspects of primitive man’s life all tend to be bound together in a unified whole.
The various aspects of modern man’s life tend to be unconnected and separated into
compartments: His food is not experienced as a direct result of his labor; the act to
which he is exposed typically is not expressive of his daily work; the people with whom
he socializes often are not those wich whom he works; and so forth.
Before I took to the woods, I never drew pictures except to make humorous cartoons.
But after I had been in the woods long enough so that the country got into my blood,
so to speak, I became interested in drawing or carving representations of the animals
with which I was most familiar. My most important source of meat, and the animal
that I was most skilled at hunting, was the snowshoe rabbit, and it was this animal
that I was most interested in drawing. The snowshoe rabbit has a special psychological
significance for me, and in my desire to depict it, I felt I somewhat understood the
motivation of the ancient hunters who left their beautiful drawings of animals on the
walls of caves.
(d) “The yield of the hunter’s work is so low that he must find it discouraging.” The
yield of the hunter’s labor may seem small to us; but usually he gets as much as he

5
needs to live (otherwise man would not have survived). That is all he expects and all
he is accustomed to; hence the yield does not seem small to him.
In another sense, the yield of the hunter’s labor is far greater than that of the
modern worker. Because the hunter’s work makes the difference between survival and
death by starvation, the yield of his labor is nothing less than life itself. The yield of
the modern worker’s labor is only a lot of toys like television sets, air conditioners, and
so forth, these being the things that he purchases with his salary.
(e) “The hunter lives from hand to mouth and has no long term purpose.” Probably
this is largely true.
When I was in my teens I often indulged in daydreams of living as a hunter-gatherer.
In my imagination, the round of labor needed to feed myself in such an existence did
not seem sufficient to fill my life, and I imagined myself setting up artificial long-term
purposes for myself — for example, building systems of primitive bridges over streams.
Not that I thought I would need the bridges, but I thought I would need a long-term
purpose.
Now, having had the experience of hunting for meat, gathering herbs and berries,
cutting firewood, and so forth, as a matter of practical necessity, I look upon such
artificial purposes as silly. I found that when you go out to hunt knowing that you will
or will not have meat to eat according as you succeed or fail in the hunt, your need for
purpose and importance is fully satisfied — you have no need whatever to look forward
to a goal that is five or ten years in the future. When you have to really exert yourself
to procure the necessities of life, nothing else seems as purposeful or important.
The need that exists in many civilized people for long-term large-scale purpose
probably results from a need to magnify our goals in an attempt to make ourselves
feel that we have a significant purpose. (But we work for something over a period of
years, and when we finally obtain it, the reward somehow seems ridiculously small in
proportion to the length of time it took to get it.)
(This concludes our comparison of purposeful work in hunting-gathering societies
with that in civilization.)
I suggest that our own biological predisposition — the purpose that is more-or-less
built into us — is to pursue practical, material, physical objectives. But practical work
is almost impossible today, because The System takes care of all practical problems.
The system is so vast, that the contribution of any one individual to the system’s
practiced work, is insignificant. Thus, no individual can do any significant practical
work. (The argument is oversimplified, but it contains a large element of truth, and
indicates one of the main themes of this essay.)
This (the suggested predisposition to pursue practical, material objectives) may be
part of the reason for the so-called materialism of modern society. Most people pursue
material wealth because material wealth represents to them a practical, physical goal.
These people don’t think about the fact that wealth today provides only psychological
gratifications such as entertainment and social status — which are not what we call

6
practical objectives. (Still, there is reason to suspect that the majority suffer from a
vague sense of purposelessness that they never analyse.)
There are certain other people to whom the purposelessness of wealth today is quite
obvious; these people accept certain artificial goals that society has set up — goals like
Art, Science, Humanitarianism, etc. But, again, one suspects that to the majority of
these people too, their artificial goals are not fully satisfactory, and they are vaguely
troubled. Being essentially bored, they brood on their psychological problems and often
lead frustrated, unhappy lives.
We shall now develop in detail the thesis sketched in the foregoing 3 paragraphs.
We begin by discussing a certain psychological trait.
Some people have more than other people of a psychological trait that I shall call
close organization. If a person has a closely organized mind, then each item of informa-
tion that he possesses is closely integrated into his thoughts, feelings, and behavior. If a
person has a loosely organized mind, then many items of information that he possesses
are not well integrated into his thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In a closely organized
mind, verbally formulated beliefs or values very readily affect feelings and behavior. A
man with a loosely organized mind may verbally profess certain beliefs or values, but
may fail to make the connection between these verbal formulations and his feelings or
behavior.
We illustrate with examples:

1. X believes in law and order. If his mind is closely organized, he is careful to obey
the law himself. If his mind is loosely organized, he may commit a petty theft
without ever worrying about the contradiction between his belief and his action.

2. X cheats on an examination and gets an A. If X has a closely organized mind,

he feels no pride in his grade, because he knows it does not represent his real
level of achievement. If X has a loosely organized mind, he may feel pride in his
A even though he realizes it does not represent his real level of achievement.

3. X visits a prostitute; she puts on a good act and makes a vigorous show of
enjoying the intercourse, but X knows very well that she is only doing it for the
money. If X has a closely organized mind, his pleasure with the prostitute is
likely to be dampened by his knowledge that she is only putting on an act. If X
has a loosely organized mind, his knowledge that the prostitute is only putting
on an act may not affect his feelings in having intercourse with her.

4. Suppose that a certain philosophical scholar accepts the principle known as the
“criterion of verifiability” — or suppose that, if he does not entirely accept it, he
at least agrees that in order to fully understand a statement we must examine
to what extent the statement is “verifiable.”

7
At the same time, this scholar may profess certain political principles or ideolo-
gies without ever having examined these principles in light of the criterion of
verifiability.
If his mind were very closely organized, he would not have omitted such exami-
nation.

5. An example that I have seen myself: A certain mathematician felt strongly that
“serious” music was very superior to the “popular” forms of music. He attempted
to justify this by asserting that the pleasure obtained by the “common man” from
popular music is of a smaller order of magnitude than that obtained by intellec-
tuals from “serious” music. Yet he had no evidence to support this assertion. He
was only guessing. In the scientific realm he never would have accepted such an
unsubstantiated statement. Yet he did not seem to question such a statement in
his personal ideology.

If he had had a very closely organized mind, he would have been aware of the
sloppiness of his thinking here.
We trust that these examples make it fairly clear what we mean by the distinction
between “closely” and “loosely” organized minds.
We make two points:

i. While more intelligent people tend on the average to have more closely organized
minds, common experience would seem to indicate that there are quite a few
individual exceptions. Intelligence, apparently, is not at all rigidly related to
closeness of organization.

ii. Close organization seems to be closely related to thoughtfulness, introspection,

and a tendency to re-examine one’s own thought-processes; but I am not con-
vinced that close organization always accompanies these other characteristics. In
any case, close organization is not identical with these other characteristics. For
instance, the closely-organized response in Example 3 is not the same thing as
being thoughtful or introspective, or examining one’s own thought-processes.

Now let us study the way in which closeness of organization is related to the problem
of purpose.
(alpha) Consider first a person having subnormal intelligence and a very loosely
organized mind. Suppose this fellow is given each day the task of stacking up wooden
blocks in a certain configuration. At the end of the day, his keeper comes and knocks
down all the stacks of blocks, and next day our moron has to stack them up all
over again. Let us suppose that this fellow is not too stupid to realize that his work
accomplishes nothing, Nevertheless, it is possible that he may get fulfillment from his
work: Each day he simply absorbs himself happily in his task and doesn’t bother to
think about whether it has any purpose.

8
(beta) Next take the case of a fellow I once knew who discussed his ambitions with
me and said that his hope was simply to keep on increasing his income indefinitely.
When I asked his motive for this, he answered to this effect: “I have studied economics!
I know that man’s economic wants are never satisfied. No matter how much I have, I
will always want more.” He made no claim that the indefinite increase of wealth would
bring happiness or any other particular benefit. He seemed to realize in a way that the
indefinite increase of wealth was simply a kind of game people play, having no definite
external purpose. Yet this did not prevent him from absorbing himself in the game
and feeling purpose.
(gamma) For another example we can take any one of a number of young researchers
in pure mathematics whom I knew of in the 1960’s. These fellows would grind out
papers one after another, each being of interest only to a tiny group of specialists in a
narrow area of mathematics, and none having any practical applications. For the most
part they never thought about the purpose of all this. If pressed, they might claim
that mathematics has “aesthetic” value. Of course, the supposed aesthetic value in
most of the papers they published was accessible only to the tiny group of specialists
who had the knowledge to read these papers. The obvious question is, why should
society pay these fellows comfortable salaries to gratify each other’s supposed aesthetic
sensibilities in a way that was of no benefit whatever to the public? Nevertheless, like
the moron building his piles of blocks, these guys would happily absorb themselves
in their work and churn out papers without worrying about what, if anything, they
were accomplishing. Presumably, if their minds had been sufficiently closely organized,
they would not have been able to feel a sense of purpose in their work without first
specifying to themselves some definite goal that they were pursuing.
(delta) Now we take a more complex example: a research scientist whose work has
clearcut practical applications. Suppose that he describes his purpose as this: to benefit
humanity by contributing to technological progress. (For the sake of argument, we shall
assume for the present that technological progress does benefit humanity.)
Human beings have an instinct that leads them to want to do good for their own
family and immediate circle of friends. But we feel safe in asserting that human beings
do not have any innate instinct to do good for humanity at large, which consists of
vast masses of unknown, unseen strangers. (This assertion is confined by the fact that,
until very recently on the historical time-scale, nearly all people hold the attitude: “My
family comes first, then my clan, then my nation, and to hell with the rest of the
human race.” I am not criticizing this attitude, which is natural and instinctive for
human beings.)
So, what is the scientist’s motive for wanting to benefit humanity? He needs to
have work to do, and he needs to feel that work is purposeful. He decides to benefit
humanity only in order to fulfill his need for purposeful work. But this means that
benefiting humanity is not his real purpose — his real purpose is simply to fulfill his
need for work. In other words, he is working merely for the sake of working — his work

9
has no purpose external to itself. “Benefiting humanity” is only an artificial purpose
that he has set up in order to make himself feel that his work is purposeful.
Now, it may be that our scientist is a thoughtful man and is aware of everything
that we have just said. But (perhaps) he is able to absorb himself contentedly in his
work and push the question of purpose out of his mind. (Here again we have the moron
piling up the blocks.) On the other hand, if our scientist has a very closely organized
mind, it may be that the problem of purpose will always be too much present in his
consciousness for him to feel content in his work.
The foregoing discussion is oversimplified and incomplete. We will now try to analyze
the problem of purpose in more detail.
Let us roughly divide the modern man into two types.
Type I. Those who have routine jobs, who work only because they have to, who
make no effort to excel in their work, and who have no job-related ambitions.
Type II. Career workers. Those who have ambitions, put a real effort into their
work, and try to excel in it. In Type II we also include those people who try to satisfy
their need for purposeful work through non-money-earning activities, whether hobbies,
or community service, or whatever.
(Of course, some people may be hybrids between Type I and Type II, but that does
not invalidate our argument.)
First, we consider Type I. These people do work that is purposeful for them only to
the extent that they must work in order to avoid the humiliation of going on welfare.
They feel that they are working to avoid a punishment, not that they are exerting
themselves to gain a reward. To judge from my own personal observation, morale
among type I workers often is extremely low. This is not always the case — in some
companies I thought morale was pretty good. But it does not seem to me that Type
I work provides an adequate sense of purpose in life for any but the most placid and
unambitious personalities.
Various manipulative tricks are being tried on Type I workers to make them have a
more positive attitude toward their work. For example, one company, whose employees
would formerly each assemble one section of a telephone book, is now having each
employee assemble a whole telephone book, and this is supposed to give them a sense of
accomplishment in their work. It’s almost a sick-joke. If cheap devices like this actually
succeed, then so much the worse. It would be better for people to be miserable at their
work than to have the company manipulate them in this way.
In any case, if any employee begins to take pride in his work, to try to excel in it, or
to have job-related ambitions, then this will put him into Type II, which we are about
to discuss.
Type II: Career workers. We shall begin by discussing these career workers whose
work is what is generally called “practical.” This type of worker we shall call, for
brevity, a PCW (Practical Career Worker). In order to be definite, we will take, say,
an aeronautical engineer. Let us suppose he is improving the design of an aircraft.

10
What is his purpose in doing this work? Ostensibly it is to make a more efficient plane.
A practical …
[there are no more pages]
.

11
A critique of his ideas & actions.

Ted Kaczynski
Reflections on Purposeful Work
1978–1979

Michigan Uni Library

The text ends abruptly as not all the pages have been archived. The problem may go
back to Ted mistakenly not scanning them all up for Michigan University or the FBI
not providing all the pages.

www.thetedkarchive.com