As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked to David Bahnsen about his book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.

Dominic Pino: So you called the book “Full-Time.” That might seem like a kind of anodyne title in a book about work, since most people who work do work full time. What do you mean by “full-time” in the title, and why did you choose to call it that?

David Bahnsen: First and foremost is the fact that I want to see a full-time engaged labor force. You’re right, most people that have jobs and careers have to work full time, but right now we have a lot of people that don’t have jobs and careers. In other words, the declining labor-force participation rate — from an almost 69 percent level pre-financial crisis to about 62 percent now — does not, to me, reflect a sort of full-time sense in the workforce. And so I am getting at that in an almost statistical or empirical way.

But the second is the mentality. And that’s where I think there’s this opportunity for people to believe that there is a passion in work or ought to be a purpose in work that leads to viewing it full-time and help kind of escape from this work-life balance concept where we look at it as, okay, how do I do enough work so I can get to yoga class, I can get to social time, happy hour, all of these different things — all of which may to some degree have their place, but they are not the things that we do work for. Work is this full-time component of an adult life by design.

If you look at chapter eight of the book, this is the third and final part of my long answer. There was a book that has sold nearly a million copies, primarily in evangelical circles called Halftime. The subtitle tells it all, it said, “Moving from Success to Significance.” It was written by a gentleman named Bob Buford, he passed away a few years ago. I cannot even tell you how many churches across the country have used it as a sort of creed for their young adults or middle-aged adults or whatnot in describing how people are to feel about this kind of midlife approach to career: that what we are to do is view the success we have as something that we at the half point of our life parlay into significance later by being more involved with our church, by being a more generous philanthropist, by extra time with our grandkids. All, again, things I think are wonderful, but all things that are very strongly, even if implicitly, putting a low priority on the work itself — pitting success against significance, pitting career against purpose. And I think that mentality is inherently dualist and I think it is dangerous.

DP: You mentioned the labor-force participation rate. A sort of way to strawman this book might be to say that this is just someone complaining about how the kids don’t want to work anymore. But you go through the labor-force participation rate and you break it down into three different age groups and you look at the problem as it affects young people, yes, but also as it affects older people. Can you explain the way that you split that up into three different parts?

DB: In the labor force, in the chapter you’re referring to in the book, I walked through as kind of the Bureau of Labor Statistics does, a sort of 55-plus set of statistics, a 29–54, and then a sub-29. And I think it’s really useful to break out different statistical issues that I think are all problematic.

Declining labor participation at the sub-29 reflects two different problems. The first is in 16 to 23, where I just think there’s been a war in our country on teenage employment. So the part-time jobs that a lot of us had at one point — hourly wages, just a kind of fresh entry into the workplace, oftentimes sweeping floors, working at a drive-through at a fast food place, working behind an ice cream counter — I think those things are really, really valuable for people before they go into their adult phase of life, before they start a real career. They start to learn how to work well with others. They start to take orders from a boss they may not get along with. They learn how to show up on time. There’s just a character formation that I think is incredibly valuable. So that demographic, I think, is extremely problematic that culturally and economically we’ve moved so far away from teenage employment and even college age and so forth.

But then I think that you do have to look at those in their late 20s that are not in the workforce, possibly not even having left it, just never joined it. This is where there’s a lot of societal cliches, but they are very evident in the data. People living at home until their 30s, playing video games on mom’s couch, that kind of stuff that we talk about. I think that’s probably one of the most concerning trends we see in society, and just in terms of the maturity and productivity of so many young adults, and this is almost entirely males, not females.

So then the other age bracket though is the one where I think people have to realize it is the biggest change in American society, that’s prime working age men. Now you’re talking 29 to 54. And we have a labor participation force that represents roughly 85 percent of that age bracket when you’re talking about men. And these are prime working-age people. And I understand there are some — it’s a very, very statistically insignificant number — but there are some who are financially independent and do not need to work. I’m very critical of that too — why a 40-year-old who’s financially independent would be completely out of productive labor — but regardless, that’s not what we’re talking about here. There is a significant amount that have left the workforce. Nick Eberstadt has done far more valuable work here than I could, highlighting what has become, I think, a cultural epidemic.

And then the 55 and over. Often when you get up into the higher 50s, you start talking about the younger side of the baby boomers and then of course the older baby boomers into their 70s — that’s an entirely different set of issues. In fairness, that labor-force participation rate of the 55-plus has come back post-Covid. It’s about at its pre-COVID level now, but it’s nowhere near its pre-financial-crisis level. And I understand a lot of 56- or 57-year-olds did hit a financial point of independence. Yet I think it is societally very detrimental to lose the experience and expertise of that demographic. And I think that’s what we’re experiencing now is a total lack of the wisdom of so many of the 65-year-olds that are now baby boomers that have retired, where they have been totally removed from the workforce.

I think it has a huge impact on them. A lot of the worth and dignity and productivity that their contributions provided, they have been taken away. And then I think that at a more micro level, I’m an almost 50-year-old business owner. I don’t have the access to 65- and 68-year-olds that I would love to have for their experience and expertise. And then across the whole society, I really believe the biggest message we’ve left, 25-, 30-, 35-year-olds — there’s no question the Gen Y and Millennial generation was deeply impacted by the baby boomers’ messaging about retirement being the point of work. The boomers worked very hard. They built significant prosperity. They produced more goods and services than any generation in human history. But there was a cultural shift that talked about this concept of retirement. It didn’t keep the boomers out of the workforce, but I think it has caused the Millennials to be the first generation to actually resent the idea of work.

DP: So you see a problem with older people, middle-aged people, with younger people. This is something that affects everyone in slightly different ways. You mentioned that concept of retirement as being freedom from work, or that the purpose of work is to stop working. You mentioned that as one damaging idea that has sort of permeated in our culture. Another one that you mentioned is work-life balance. We ran a piece about this on the website, excerpted from the book. I had never thought of this before, but it’s so obvious when you laid it out: work is a subset of life. Work is part of your life. So how can you balance a part of something against the whole thing? It doesn’t make any sense. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

DB: A lot of people say it’s semantics, or you’re kind of nitpicking on the verbiage, and I really do not think I am. I think the inescapable conclusion of the language is that there is your life — which is filled with the things you enjoy, the things that matter, ergo, you’re calling it your life, your purpose, your kind of essence, if you will — and you’re seeking to balance against that your work. I am with you, what you just said: It’s a subset of life and therefore should not be pitted against it.

But the point I want to make is that there’s a whole lot of subsets in our life. We cannot spend 24 hours a day with our children, we cannot spend 24 hours a day with our spouses, we cannot spend 24 hours a day at work, and this is the only one I’m familiar with where people say, “I have a work-life balance.” They don’t refer to a “marriage-life balance.” We basically understand that the complexity of an adult life has a certain compartmentalization dynamic to it. Sometimes it’s seasonal, sometimes it’s day by day, but the point being: People just figure out organically through the normal adult realities of life, how to fit in all the things that are a part of their life. Only work is talked about as something that is an enemy of one’s life, that it is something you are doing for the purpose of escaping to get into this other realm where all the other components of life might be. What I as a proponent of work through this book am not doing is asking people to make those other things a lower priority. I don’t feel the need to belittle marriage, family, or church for the purpose of advocating a strong and robust view of work. But it sure seems to me that others feel the need to belittle work for their own advocacy. This clearly comes not from trying to promote other life priorities, but trying to denigrate work.

DP: And so the message in your book is that work is good and work is the meaning of life. These are not in contrast with each other. They are necessarily part of each other. It’s grounded in a very Christian worldview. You spend a significant chunk of the book interpreting the Bible, running through the Genesis account in Creation about when work was created and what God has said about work. Can you start in Genesis and sort of lay out what it is that you think is important from the Creation story that should inform how we work today?

DB: Not only can I do that, I have to do that. This is sort of my view that I think might be somewhat unique for those who have a reasonable familiarity with certain parts of Christian theology, that when I use language like “work is the meaning of life,” I’m not doing it for shock and awe. I’m well aware that some people may hear it and go, whoa, is he saying work is more important than our spouse? Is he saying work is more important than our relationship with Christ? And I most certainly am not saying that. But the only reason one might interpret that is that they’ve been trained to believe about these things dualistically. My point is that this is what I believe a life in Christ is. This is what I believe is part of an adult life that involves a marriage, companionship, partnership.

What are the husband and wife partnered together to do? To make dinner? I mean, I think that all of these things are a big important part of life, but that partnership that we refer to is engaged in support for one another around the purpose, the telos, of productive activity. And those things are not merely paycheck-generating. It is not family and church fundraising. It is what God made us for. And so to answer your question, I have to root it in Genesis 1, because this is where I have the entire worldview formed for me as to why God created humankind.

What does it mean for a lifetime Christian like me to go around saying that I’m an image-bearer of God, and a dog is not and a plant is not? That’s an arrogant thing for human beings to say, but it’s taught to us in scripture that God viewed all of these components of his beautiful and intricate Creation as “good” and that humankind was “very good.” He then tells us why in Genesis 1:26-28. It was because He made us for the purpose of cultivating the garden, of stewarding the Earth, of having dominion over the rest of the Creation. In Genesis 2:15, it goes on to talk about how the garden was this beautiful place but now needed to be cared for. It wasn’t completed. There was more planting to do, more stewardship, more cultivation. And this was the purpose of God creating mankind. And we, as image-bearers of Him, we share these attributes with Him, His productive capacity, His creativity, His work. That’s where I form the basis of these somewhat bold pronouncements of the book.