Our Obsession With Work
What I read: How to Care Less About Work by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen. Published in The Atlantic on December 5, 2021.
I was working on an entirely different post when The Atlantic’s subscriber newsletter showed up in my inbox. Fortune shined on me in that moment because I happened to click on the article by Warzel and Petersen. Wow! It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. This honestly felt like the most important article I’d read in a while. So, I had to write about it.
Historically I have created a strong identity attachment to whatever work I might be doing at the time. That's fine if one is doing exactly what one would be doing were money not a concern, but not many of us can say that. As much as I like my current corporate job, for example, would I be doing it if I didn't need the income? No, I would not. I bet most people would say the same.
Don’t get me wrong. I truly do like my job. If one is going to work in the corporate sector, it doesn’t get much better than the people I work with and the support I feel working there. But that said, I’m fully aware that most people working today, even in generally good jobs, are doing it mostly to pay the bills.
Many will chime in that I’m wrong. They love their work and will extol the wonderfulness of their jobs and companies. That’s nice, but were I able to sit down with anyone saying that I bet you 9 times out of 10 upon some probing I’d discover that if the monetary component was removed from the discussion, given their druthers they would be doing something else that brings them greater joy and fulfillment.
Yes, I know this is heresy to some. We’re supposed to shout from the rooftops how great our career and the work we’re doing are, but I’m not buying it. We can be in a relatively good job working with great people and doing interesting things and still not be doing what our hearts and minds would point us toward if unfettered by the financial cost of living we all face.
Warzel and Petersen start off acknowledging the impact of the pandemic, how frontline workers, the alone and isolated, and parents struggling with children at home bore the brunt of the risk and stress. Then they quickly pivot to stating plainly what many knowledge workers in particular have felt for a while, even prior to the pandemic. Workers wrestle with identifying the meaning of their work. They work long hours. They fall prey to the pervasive productivity ethos that pushes them to work more for even less job satisfaction.
Americans in particular, but also workers throughout the world, have been acculturated to believe that hard work is akin to being a good person. My own Christian upbringing with an overachiever father certainly cemented that perspective into me at a young age. Religions and cultures throughout the world worship at the altar of hard work as a sign of righteousness and honor of the divine. Nope. Work is work. Some work betters humankind. Some work just shuffles paper, bytes, or product around for a profit. I’m not making a value judgment about jobs that simply bring home the money to pay rent and put food on the table, but we should not elevate the mundane to deified status.
People are beginning to view work differently. Accelerated by the pandemic, some no longer consider their work and careers the centerpiece of their existence. They seek more meaning in their pursuits. Rather than find space for their private life amid their work, they see it the other way around. Engaging in activities and pastimes that feed our minds and hearts now often reigns higher than our dedication to our jobs.
The treadmill rarely provides the kind of value and meaning that we hope it will. People are growing more certain in the notion that the status quo of American working life is untenable. But the pandemic has created an opportunity to reconsider and reimagine the structure of our lives and, perhaps, remove the vestigial, extractive elements. We believe that flexible work—not flexible work during a pandemic, not flexible work under duress—can change your life. It can remove you from the wheel of constant productivity. It can make you happier and healthier, but it can also make your community happier and healthier. It can make the labor in your home more equitable and it can help you be a better friend, parent, and partner. It can, somewhat ironically, increase worker solidarity. It can allow you to actually live the sort of life you pretend to live in your Instagram posts, liberating you to explore the nonwork corners of your life, including hobbies and civic involvement. We are trying to get off the damn treadmill so that we can remember the purpose and dignity that can come from the whole of our life.
I don’t see this shift as anything but positive. It’s a positive for the individual because they are happier. It’s a positive for the workplace because I believe happier employees and businesspeople ultimately produce better work and make their teammates and customers happier too. I’ve seen this play out in my own life and remain steadfast in that opinion.
As a core directive in the article, Warzel and Petersen ask the reader to reflect on what they would do “if work was no longer the axis of your life?” Simply asking this question feels indulgent and overly self-serving. But why? Should not our time on this planet revolve around what makes us happiest?
We are so overextended, so anxious, and so conditioned to approach our life as something to squeeze in around work that just asking these questions can feel indulgent. If you really try to answer them, what you’re left with will likely feel silly or far-fetched: like a Hallmark movie of your life, if you got to cast people to play you and the rest of your family who were well rested, filled with energy and intentionality and follow-through. Your mind will try to tell you it’s a fantasy. But it’s supposed to sound amazing, because you need to want it, really yearn for it, to a degree that will motivate you to shift your life in ways that will make the fantasy a reality.
Thinking back to when I was much younger and carefree, I would spend long hours of unscheduled time reading, creating, building, flipping around in the gymnastics gym, and a wide array of other things that were never intended to generate an income or profit. Or I’d lay in my backyard, stare at the sky, and daydream. I did those things simply because they were fun.
Think back on a time in your life before you regularly worked for pay. Recall, if you can, an expanse of unscheduled time that was, in whatever manner, yours. What did you actually like to do? Not what your parents said you should do, not what you felt as if you should do to fit in, not what you knew would look good on your application for college or a job.
The article offers the reader some ideas to navigate your life to include more of those meaningful activities and to deprioritize job and career, unless your work happens to sync with your favorite activities anyway. In that case count yourself among the lucky few and rock it.
If you have hobbies that bring you joy, try to keep them as hobbies. Don’t succumb to the temptation I often feel to monetize everything I do. Just do them. Enjoy them.
A real hobby isn’t a way to adorn your personality, or perform to masquerade your class status. It’s just something you like to do, full stop.
Assuming you can settle into this new way of thinking about how you spend your time, you may inevitably start to backslide into a default need to be productive. Productivity for its own sake only appears to have value on its surface. When you crack it open it reveals it’s just time doing something when you would really rather be doing something else were guilt and cultural programming not drawing you into the net of lockstep obedience.
When the haze of burnout begins to clear, fight the urge to feel productive and channel that into beginning to explore your own pleasures.
The article concludes by asking us to harken back to our childhood, to the manner in which children explore life and their interests with abandon.
We love to talk about kids’ personalities, how unique and weird and joyful they are. We don’t grow out of those characteristics so much as subsume them with duties. But they remain the building blocks of our humanness, the enduring difference between us and robots. We must preserve those inclinations toward delight and whimsy, toward the ineffable and the unimpressive, the feelings you can’t re-create with a machine or optimize for peak productivity. They are worth rediscovering not because they will allow us to rest and, as such, make us better workers—but because they anchor us to who, at heart, we’ve always been.
Please consider reading the article. It starts one place and lands you in another. So I recommend reading it all the way through and not stopping at the introductory paragraphs. In the few minutes it took me to read it I could sense my mindset shifting. We've all had what are referred to as "aha" moments. I had one after reading the article. Maybe you will too.
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