Arendt split the active life into three things we keep confusing

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argued humans do three distinct things we lump together as "work": labor (endless, tied to survival), work (making durable objects that outlast us), and action (speaking and acting among others, the only one that can create something genuinely new in public). She warned modern society was collapsing all three into mere labor.

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition — University of Chicago Press, 1958
Go deeper: get the book →