Income, recognition and purpose can pull the same working day in different directions. Virtology's three waves of work ask which motive is organizing your life — and what your workplace makes possible.
By Isabella Becker · 15 min read
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
You opened the banking app at seven in the morning, before coffee, and spent eighteen seconds looking at a number you already knew.
There was no decision to make. No bill was due that day. You simply needed to see it.
What followed was neither clear relief nor alarm. It was something harder to name, something that would remain in the background and bring you back tomorrow.
Money has practical functions. It can also carry meanings about safety, importance and what your work is supposed to prove. Eduardo Casarotto's Virtology explores those differences through three waves of work: working to survive, working to establish worth through recognition, and working to express a considered purpose.
The difficulty may not arrive as a clear statement of job dissatisfaction. It may appear in smaller scenes.
The achievement that cools within a week. The promotion arrives, the announcement is made, and by the following Thursday you are calculating the next one.
The automatic comparison. Within seconds of opening a professional feed, you know which former classmates appear to be ahead.
The dinner-table question. Someone asks what you do. You answer with a title and feel that you have answered a question about something else.
Compulsory gratitude. You have a salary and position others might want, so your dissatisfaction feels difficult to admit.
Sunday beginning early. The coming week occupies the afternoon before it starts. Perhaps the prospect is not only a workload, but days spent sustaining a role.
The number that never settles the feeling. Income has changed several times while the underlying sense of insufficiency has remained familiar.
Each experience can have more than one explanation. The three waves are a lens for inquiry, not a way to diagnose yourself from a reaction to Monday morning.
A framework, not a universal historical staircase
Casarotto uses the waves to organize motives for work and developments in organizational life. His further correspondence between those waves and levels of brain functioning is a theoretical proposal, not established neuroscientific consensus.
The model should also not be read as a claim that all societies passed through the same sequence, or that earlier people worked only for survival. Meaning, skill, obligation, belonging and status have long coexisted in work.
The practical value lies in separating motives that can otherwise become tangled inside a single decision.
Wave in the model
Its central question
What remains legitimate
Survival
Does this work provide what life requires?
Income, stability, protection and material conditions matter.
Recognition
What position and acknowledgment does this work give me?
Respect, fair recognition and opportunities to progress matter.
Purpose
Does this work express something I consider meaningful?
Contribution, fit, values and direction matter.
Scroll horizontally to compare all columns.
The table is not a ranking of people's worth. A person prioritizing survival may be responding responsibly to their actual circumstances.
The first wave: work that keeps life possible
In the source's first wave, work is organized chiefly around earning enough to eat, find shelter, care for dependents and remain secure.
Casarotto associates this emphasis with industrial arrangements that treat the worker mainly as a productive unit in exchange for wages. The point is a critique of reducing the employment relationship to output and payment, rather than a complete account of every Taylorist or Fordist workplace.
There is nothing obsolete about the need for a livelihood. For many people, the immediate question is exactly whether a job makes rent, food and care possible.
That reality changes how the rest of the essay should be read. Someone cannot simply decide that money will matter less when basic needs remain unmet. A conversation about purpose that ignores this can become a demand made by people whose own security is already protected.
In this framework, survival needs are not a stage to be despised. They are conditions that continue to require attention whatever else work may mean.
The second wave: work that establishes a position
The source turns next to the importance of social attention and recognition in organizational life. It uses the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric as a historical reference.
Those studies contributed to the human relations movement and broadened management's attention to group life, motivation and workers' experiences. The archive dates the experiments to 1924–1933. Harvard Business School's historical collection.
The familiar account that productivity rose simply because workers were observed should be treated cautiously. The interpretation and methods have been repeatedly debated. It is too neat to present changing the lights as a decisive experiment proving one universal explanation of motivation. Baker Library on the Hawthorne effect.
In Casarotto's second wave, organizations reward people not only with salary but with titles, levels, awards, visibility and symbols of position.
His criticism concerns what happens when that structure continually stimulates the need to be important. Recognition can become a scarce prize that makes colleagues competitors and places the defense of position at the center of working life.
Respect and acknowledgment are not the problem in themselves. The question is whether the organization recognizes useful contributions or continually requires people to prove that they matter more than someone else.
The third wave: work connected with purpose
The third wave gives greater weight to meaningful contribution and the relationship between work and a considered sense of self.
A person may value the result because it helps someone, develops a capacity or expresses a commitment they endorse. Recognition can still be welcome, and payment remains necessary. The organizing question changes: what makes this work worth doing beyond the position it confers?
Casarotto describes this as a movement toward more conscious, value-directed functioning. That is the model's developmental language, not evidence of a clean switch from primitive brain regions to a separate purpose center.
Purpose does not mean working for free, resigning suddenly or changing into another person. Nor must every task feel profound. Necessary, ordinary work can have meaning through what it supports.
The source's intended shift is in the relationship among motives. Survival and recognition remain present, while purpose helps guide what the person is willing to pursue and how they wish to pursue it.
The conflict inside the same person
The waves coexist. One part of you may want to contribute something meaningful while another keeps checking whether the contribution is impressive enough.
You can care about a project and still resent the colleague who receives public praise. You can need the salary and also want a role that leaves more room for your strengths. Those mixed motives do not make your stated values false.
Casarotto interprets some work-related dissatisfaction through this tension: the effort of expressing a direction while simultaneously proving relative worth.
Working to express who you are can feel different from working to prove that you count.
The distinction does not explain every kind of exhaustion. Workload, health, discrimination and insecurity may be central. It offers another question when the task itself seems reasonable but the motive attached to it never allows an arrival to feel complete.
There is also a conflict that does not belong entirely inside you.
Someone seeking meaningful contribution may work in an organization that responds to every difficulty with a title, a target or another award. The work is completed and performance is praised, but the reason for doing it becomes less clear.
Management writing sometimes uses brownout for this diminished sense of meaning or engagement. Here it is a descriptive workplace term, not a diagnosis made by the three-wave model. Similar experiences can overlap with other difficulties that deserve assessment.
The reverse mismatch also occurs. An organization speaks constantly about purpose while someone needs a clear path to promotion, fair pay or recognition for responsibilities already being carried. Telling that person they should want something more elevated may produce shame instead of engagement.
Neither mismatch establishes a flaw in the worker. The inquiry concerns what the person needs, what the job requires and what the organization actually offers.
A purpose statement is not enough if the practical terms of the work contradict it.
Why rankings can feel larger than information
A title, a ranking or a promotion decision can become a message about belonging and importance. Casarotto links this to his account of pride and social acceptance.
Research provides a narrower point of contact: relative payment can influence reward-related brain responses in a laboratory task. This supports the significance of comparison in that setting, without establishing Casarotto's entire account or showing that every ranking is experienced as a survival threat. Research on social comparison and reward.
In ordinary work, the design of recognition matters. A system that continually displays winners and losers supplies repeated invitations to monitor position. A person may then feel ashamed of the envy or anxiety the system helps provoke.
The response need not be reduced to moral weakness. It can be examined alongside the incentives, evaluation procedures and opportunities for cooperation that surround it.
The practical question for an organization is not how to remove every wish for recognition. It is how to recognize contribution without making relative importance the main route to feeling secure or valued.
Basic needs still interrupt the grandest purpose
A job may leave little space for individuality, autonomy or the use of genuine strengths. It may also intrude on rest, sleep, privacy and connection.
The human-needs framework makes these different dimensions visible. A person can find a mission meaningful while remaining exhausted by the way the work is organized.
When basic conditions are inadequate, another workshop on purpose does not supply sleep, staffing or time with family. A sense of contribution cannot be expected to compensate indefinitely for an arrangement that makes ordinary life difficult.
This is also why the waves should not become a hierarchy used by employers against workers. Asking for adequate pay or predictable hours is not evidence of lower development.
The model is most useful when it broadens the questions asked about work. It becomes harmful if it is used to make legitimate needs look like an obstacle to enlightenment.
The distance between a role and the person performing it
Casarotto contributes a further interpretation: a sustained distance between persona and personality may become costly in work.
A role asks for particular behaviors. If a person feels they must continually perform a version of themselves far removed from their capacities and considered preferences, the presentation can become rigid and tiring.
The source describes an organizational trap: demand leadership, teamwork and resilience without providing the learning, resources or conditions that would support them. Fear of losing the job then supplies pressure to perform the script, even where the underlying capacity or support has not been built.
This is not an argument that nobody should learn unfamiliar behaviors or work outside immediate preferences. Skills can develop, and roles can expand what a person finds possible. The distinction concerns whether the demands are supported, reasonable and open to discussion.
Work-related distress also requires organizational action
The international context matters. This English edition does not treat a Brazilian regulatory provision as though it applied everywhere.
The World Health Organization identifies psychosocial risks linked to working conditions, including excessive workload, limited control, insecurity, discrimination and inadequate support. It recommends organizational interventions that assess and change the conditions producing risk. WHO: mental health at work.
That gives this inquiry a practical boundary. Individual reflection and virtue development cannot substitute for addressing unsafe conditions, harassment, unreasonable demands or deficient staffing.
Casarotto's framework asks additional questions about needs, capacities and fit. Those questions can contribute to discussion without shifting responsibility for an unhealthy system entirely onto the person experiencing it.
The Humanized Systems presentation introduces the Instituto Virtudes' approach to institutions through that wider concern for the person within the organization.
What money may be carrying besides purchasing power
Money pays bills. It can also be associated with safety, control, importance, deservingness, guilt and the language learned at home.
The way you earn, spend, save or refuse money may offer clues about those associations. It is not a reliable shortcut for judging someone's personality: actual income, debt, obligations and opportunities shape financial behavior too.
Casarotto gives prosperity an ethical direction through service. In his account, material resources can support time, projects and help for others. That is a proposed orientation, not the only legitimate reason to seek financial security.
Poverty is not a virtue. Scarcity can restrict a person's options and capacity to give. At the same time, people with limited resources can be profoundly generous; generosity should not be measured by financial surplus.
The useful question is what money is being asked to provide. Is it meeting a material need, supporting something you value or repeatedly being used to settle a feeling it cannot resolve?
Four patterns the source asks you to examine
Guilt and holding back. Some people feel uneasy receiving payment, spending on themselves or allowing resources to be used. The feeling can be worth exploring, but saving and caution may also be appropriate responses to real uncertainty.
A language of permanent scarcity. “There is never money.” “That is not for people like me.” “It always goes wrong.” Repeated statements can shape the questions you ask and the possibilities you notice. They do not cause poverty, and changing language cannot remove structural barriers or substitute for practical financial planning.
Simplicity used as superiority. The source asks whether a public rejection of prosperity can sometimes become another way of seeking importance. This is a possibility to examine in yourself, not a reason to assume that modest living is disguised pride. Simplicity can be a genuine preference or an ethical choice.
Wishful certainty. Hoping that everything will work out is different from identifying an action, skill, opportunity or support that could help. Effort still cannot guarantee prosperity. Conditions and chance matter, and people facing financial difficulty should not be presumed to lack responsibility.
These are possible psychological patterns, not four general explanations of why people do not prosper. Keeping that distinction clear lets the questions be useful without turning inequality into a personal failure.
The car, the pen and what the object has to prove
A prestige object is not inherently a problem. Objects can mark achievement, provide pleasure, serve a practical function or communicate something in a social setting.
The source asks when a symbol moves from representing an achievement to carrying the whole burden of identity. Having the pen becomes needing the pen to establish that you matter.
The distinction is not visible from the price tag. An expensive object does not prove vanity, and refusing it does not prove freedom from status.
You may enjoy a symbol while also noticing how much importance you attach to being seen with it. Mixed motives are possible. They can be examined without requiring a performance of having transcended them.
Material need and nonmaterial longing also need to be distinguished. Money can resolve a bill. It may not, by itself, resolve loneliness, a need for meaningful contribution or uncertainty about who you are without an audience.
Making the passage concrete
The movement toward the third wave is not necessarily a dramatic career change. It may involve bringing your contribution into a more deliberate relationship with your capacities and values.
Two kinds of work can proceed together. One concerns developing the skills a role reasonably requires or finding a better fit over time. The other concerns changing the organization where its demands, culture or conditions are the source of harm.
Neither replaces the other. A person may need more support to learn a task, and the task may need redesign. A meaningful purpose may be present, and a staffing problem may still make the work unsustainable.
In Casarotto's account, Responsibility supports practical agency; Acceptance helps acknowledge the actual conditions; Humility helps keep achievement and symbols from determining personal worth.
These virtues do not require blaming yourself, tolerating abuse or resigning without a plan. They become useful when they support a clearer decision about what can be done, with whom and under what conditions.
Seven days of noticing what work is serving
No job change or major decision is required. Keep the record brief.
Three times a day, note what you were doing and what it seemed to serve: survival, recognition or purpose. Mark more than one if the motives overlap.
Note moments of comparison. A simple mark is enough; the number is an observation, not a clinical score.
Describe something you would still value contributing if nobody knew it was yours. If nothing comes to mind, record that without turning it into a judgment.
Write a sentence you often use about money. Ask what experience it describes and whether it fits every current situation.
At the end of the week, compare the pattern with what you hoped work would provide. Note material constraints and organizational conditions alongside personal motives.
Choose one question to explore next. A week of notes offers a starting point, not an exact measurement of your inner conflict or your place in the three-wave model.
From the working day to structural Americanism
If recognition appears repeatedly in the record, you did not invent the importance attached to titles, visible achievement and being ahead. You learned it in environments that reward particular ways of proving worth.
That is where this essay meets God Bless America. Through structural Americanism, Casarotto examines the cultural expectations that organize what people desire, pursue and recognize. The English translation is available.
Working more coherently may begin with a personal observation. It may also require a conversation about how an institution treats the people whose lives make its work possible.
If difficulties at work are affecting sleep, health or relationships, seek appropriate professional support and consider the practical or organizational help available. A personal exercise cannot replace protection from harmful working conditions. Rights and reporting routes depend on where you work.
About this English edition
Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay; original artwork retained.
