"So there it is," Malcolm Turnbull told the Prime Minister's Prize for Science dinner in October. "Don't retire, you'll just get sad. Think of yourself, think of your own health, just keep working, work until you drop, just keep doing it."
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Turnbull was quoting his friend, psychiatrist Ian Hickie. Two days later, when news broke of Hazara asylum seeker Khodayar Amini burning himself to death in Melbourne, I'd been thinking exactly this. Watching a clip of faux-primitive man building faux-primitive hut, marvelling at the simple joy of doing stuff, making things, improving your lot. The joy of work.
And here's what I reckon. The 20th century's biggest lie – and there were a few – was the blanket insistence that work is bad and leisure good.
At its best, work is the purpose-giver, the dignifier. Work redeems us. Certainly, it depends on what work, and for whom. But even at its most rudimentary, work is a human right – a right of which Amini had been deliberately and systematically deprived.
Amini was here on a bridging visa, the kind we hand out as a supposedly humanitarian release from offshore detention; the kind that, since 2012, routinely includes an explicit and indefinite ban on work and study. It is a deliberate deprivation of purpose.
Amini was 30 when he died. When he hopped on a leaky boat to come here, he'd been 27, the same age that I, feeling rudderless, headed off to seek my fortune in London. As it turned out my fortune was a tad preferable.
I was allowed to work and quickly found it, first as architect, then as editor. That work changed my life. I can't help feeling that even the possibility of work might have saved Amini's.
Sure, most of us skive off occasionally, wishing weekends longer or chucking a sickie. But what would it be like, actually, to be explicitly prohibited from working or qualifying, at all, ever? How much of this man's soul-sickness was due to forced idleness? Isn't that itself a form of torture?
Physics defines work as force times distance; a change in potential energy. Measured in ergs, calories, megajoules, elbow grease or eloquence, it moves a certain mass – be it carbon atom, moon rocket or idea – a certain distance. Work is spending energy to make change.
We are born, each of us, with a golden parcel of this energy in our mouth. Our parcels vary in size and intensity, but they're ours to spend; our blood, sweat and tears, to sacrifice in the service of meaning.
But to dedicate your daylight hours to something in which you have no personal or moral stake is (personal view) a terrible, soul-destroying waste. Work draws on but also, ideally, generates a sense of purpose. And nothing thrills like purpose.
Khodayar Amini was a nice guy, people said, friendly, likeable, a talented cook. He was scarcely literate, but before he died he wrote a three-page letter "with my blood", detailing his constant terror of being returned to detention (which happened for 11 months last year after an argument about a small licence fee refund).
"What was my crime?" he wrote. "How your treatment is different from the treatment of the Taliban and Daesh? ... In your view, we are not human beings."
Why did we stop him working? Surely not because we thought him a threat. But because Turnbull is right (and Genesis wrong). Work is not a curse but a blessing. We were punishing Amini, as we routinely punish others, for desperately seeking our help.
