F3 Work gets treated two ways in most men’s lives: either as the thing that matters most, or as a necessary evil to escape. F3’s field manual says both are wrong, and it has an unusually clear-eyed take on a man’s relationship with his job.
Is work a good thing or a burden?
Good, and necessary, F3 says without hesitation. A man earns his bread by his labor, feeds his family, and serves his community by doing something useful for the people around him. F3 calls this the sustaining relationship, because a man’s work sustains both him and the people who depend on him. It goes further: idleness is bad for a man. Even a man who retires after forty years of hard work finds himself restless, looking for something to do, because play alone is not enough. We are built to produce, and a man who produces nothing drifts out of alignment. Work is not the enemy. But F3 does something odd with work: it files it under relationships.
Why does F3 call work a “relationship”?
Because a man’s connection to his work is powerful enough to behave like one. F3 admits it sounds odd to put a job in the same category as a marriage or a friendship. But it insists on it for a practical reason: if you think of work as just a thing you do, you badly underestimate its power to swallow everything else. Named honestly as a relationship, its pull becomes visible, and a man can guard against it. And it needs guarding, because of all a man’s relationships this is the one most likely to swallow the others.
Why does work tend to take over a man’s life?
Because it is the easiest relationship to maintain, and easy relationships quietly win. F3 points out that work, unlike a marriage or fatherhood, has clear limits built in. It has a time clock. No job is truly every hour of every day. A man can leave it at the office, take a vacation from it, or call in sick. His family offers no such off switch. So when a man is tired and wants the path of least resistance, work is where he goes, because in the moment it asks less of him than the people who need him most. Left unguarded, F3 says, work drifts to the center of a man’s life and pushes the more important relationships to the edges. The answer is not to work less hard, but to keep work in its proper place: vital, honorable, and firmly behind the people you are working for.
F3 calls this Mammon, part of getting right in the F3 Nation Q-Source, the field manual for virtuous leadership that F3 is built on. Read the full teaching: f3nation.com/mammon. F3 Denver is where men practice it. Find a workout.