I think there's freedom in being able to sit back and say "it's not that deep". I was in a job prior to this one with an emotionally abusive boss, pulling 50 hour work weeks regularly, going way above and beyond to take on work that was out of scope... and looking back on it, I simply didn't need to. I wouldn't have been punished if I said "I don't know" more frequently, if I had told my boss it would take me longer to do this, if I had gone home at 5PM every day. They didn't give me a raise and promotion anyways. I left my job to find that.
My next job, people just didn't... care quite as much. It was truly just work. My boss made the assumption that it took me about 40% longer than it actually did for me to complete each project. I just kinda never corrected her. I took longer lunch breaks, I went on walks in the middle of the day, I spent time shooting the shit with my coworkers. I stopped work at 5PM at the latest every single day. And I got high praise, got paid like 50% more than I did in my previous job, and just spent way less time thinking about work in general.
That's my goal now - to spend less time thinking about, talking about, and doing work. No one is running around doling out gold stars to everyone. I think it's a totally reasonable arrangement that I give up 40 (okay, more like 30 with my "lunches") hours a week to my boss and I get a generous salary and benefits from it. What have I had to give up? The belief that my job has to be glamorous to be good. The belief that I need to work in the arts and culture sector to do anything meaningful. The belief that grinding and hustling makes me a morally superior person. Being able to step back and say "it's just not that deep" is totally liberating. I don't feel like I need to feel that strongly about work, and I don't feel like I need to do the whole "I do not dream of labor" schtick. I like having a job with nice people, where I can do work that flexes my brain a little, and that I can set down and return to the rest of my extremely fulfilling life at any given point in time. I'd challenge people who feel extremely passionately about their little capitalistic grind (or people that feel extremely passionately about how awful the capitalistic grind is) to do less, feel less, set yourself free.
I think you've really captured what this is all about! I think the career skepticism thing is about finding another gear...which you've described pretty well here. I'm of the mind that a lot of the 'I do not dream of labor' people want exactly what you described (a job with nice people, where I can do work that flexes my brain a little, and that I can set down and return to the rest of my extremely fulfilling life). I think a lot of what they're pushing back against...and why it feels so charged...is the idea that stepping back and adopting this attitude is seen by so many people as a red flag that makes you a liability as a worker.
Agreed with all of this. Something I think about a lot: I see a lot of people I know (am 27 y/o Millennial) get trapped in the whirlpool of burnout TikTok/raging against the machine/Twitter discourse about terrible workplace thinkpieces/being angry and sad and frustrated about the forces (either real or perceived) that keep them tethered to their desks at night or having stress dreams about their job, etc etc. And I think that it’s really hard to make the leap from “realizing the way your life is structured is unsustainable” to “actually taking concrete steps to make your life look different”.
If I were to give advice to 23 year old me, I’d write up a list of little things to slowly try to implement in my workplace that now (in retrospect) I know I wouldn’t be fired for. Stuff like making myself take an unplugged 15 (then 20, then 30) min lunch a few times a week. Tracking on my personal calendar when I arrive at and leave work every day and set a goal for the # days I leave at 5:30. Deleting my email app from my phone. Using every ounce of sick time. Practicing saying “oh I didn’t have access to my phone, but I’ll be able to look at it before X time” when someone asked if I had seen a late night email at 9AM. Going to my boss and saying “hey I have these three tasks due on X date, and I’m worried about getting all of them done by then. Can we talk about which should be the priority and which can get shifted?” All of that is stuff that maybe feels weird and awkward and scary but in most workplaces, is pretty mundane and normal.
But even with all of that, I don’t think it would have totally touched my core anxieties. Caring deeply that my boss thinks I’m going above and beyond, fear that I’m going to be outpaced, deep rooted stress that I’ll look stupid in a meeting. How do you increase detachment? How do you develop a skill like “being okay with looking stupid”? How do you practice apathy? I have a hard time articulating how I got from point A to point B in my own journey, and I don’t know really how to best reach back and help those still stuck in the whirlpool of feeling shitty with no escape route in sight. I fully believe it’s possible for more people than not (especially for people who have the time to create tiktoks about burnout culture) but it’s hard to climb yourself out of that pit.
This comment is perfect! Couldn't agree more. I've worked at a number of different places, some where I worked 60-70 hours per week and others where 40 is perfectly fine. Now that I'm a little longer in the tooth, my need for validation from my job has gone wayyyyy down. It's not even a conscious choice I'm making; I just find that I feel differently about it now than I did, say, 10 years ago.
100 percent spot on. "Work" was once wrapped up in my identity. Today it's just something that allows me the freedom to do what I want in life during the other 240 hours of the week. And if I get some modest enjoyment from "work" -- and, at times, I do -- that's a happy bonus.
I'd even go so far as to argue that I wouldn't work in an environment that I wouldn't get modest enjoyment from. My job is interesting, I talk to interesting people, my coworkers are kind and chill. But I also lowered the bar a lot for myself. Previously, I had in my mind that I needed the kind of job that was very competitive to get, that was at a well-known and and highly-regarded institute, and that I needed to be changing the world in some magic way. Now...... I'm a business analyst, haha. And I like it! And I have so much time to pursue the things I really love in my life. I just had to temper my expectations more.
My current position (which, tbf, is a short-term contract with no benefits BUT came after months of looking) truly just...lets me complete things in the time frame that I complete them. I've spent the last ~six years rushing around to impress and complete ahead of schedule and all of this other stuff and to get this job and see that, actually, I don't HAVE to has truly been so nice. I enjoy not being continuously stressed! I enjoy not feeling like I'm going to disappoint someone at every turn if I don't perform perfectly every second! I want to come in, do what I do, and leave. Nothing wrong with that!
What if it's actually kind of liberating to have your job be a simple, transactional relationship? "But why, exactly, should our culture aspire to such a calculating and extractive means of employer/employee relations?" What else should an employer be providing, though?
In terms of wellbeing, many of us would argue the government should be providing the safety net. The corporate ecosystem of "bullshit jobs" (Graeber) is kind of like a de facto safety net today, providing insurance and means to many Americans. What if we offload that responsibility to the state? Then we can escape this idea that your job owes you something, freeing both parties to focus on a reasonable labor contract.
And what about meaning? The new workplace mantra of "do what you love" means employment also has to provide soul nourishment. That seems twisted, too. I'm not a religious person, but it does seem like religious practice used to fill this void and no longer does.
If health and spiritual happiness are being fulfilled by other institutions operating outside the market, jobs can be more utility-based (like your reader suggests). Maybe we don't need to "reimagine" what goes on inside the workplace, but more what goes on outside the workplace. Maybe we're thinking about work in the wrong way, hoping it will fill needs vacated by other atrophied institutions.
Charlie, Thank you for the follow up. I followed the comment chain on that post and sadly wasn’t surprised when it went south. IMO, Far too many young men (again, mostly men) of my generation (I am 62) were taught or simply believed that their only way to “matter” in this world is to make lots of money and buy lots of things. It became a way to “prove” your manhood.
I sometimes wonder if Oliver Stone helped or hurt when he made “Wall Street” in 1987 and Michael Douglas proclaimed to a generation that “greed is good”. It seems the actual message of the movie was lost on the majority of people.
The people who bought into that and then realized 20-30 years in that it didn’t pan out probably aren’t happy or contented. I imagine lashing out is their recourse.
Anyway, thanks for what you do. I enjoy the “thought paths” you travel.
Michael Lewis has written that a lot of people took the same message from Liar's Poker. He thought the main message was "don't kill yourself to work on Wall Street," but after it was published he got tons of mail from people asking how to get a job on Wall Street.
I think your point about Wall Street is exactly right. Another film where too many people ended up identifying with the villain is A Few Good Men. Take the zeitgeist, turn it up to 11, have a leading man of a certain type articulate its values, and a whole lot of people gladly skip over the point that excess of this kind is (a) criminal and (b) hurts ordinary people.
The irony of the "dispensible" email is that their definition of "mediocre" isn't that far from what leads to success. Show up at work the hours your boss wants you there, do exactly what they tell you, and don't ask too many questions, and you'll get a promotion. It was the times that I tried to be creative or do something more than what I was hired to do that I found myself knocked down.
Even for those who have found success in our work, it's come at the cost of meaning. Sitting at our desk all day on slow days, rushing lunch so our boss doesn't miss us at our desks, copying and pasting yet another PowerPoint deck. So much of what these jobs require is performative and empty that the burnout isn't from exhaustion, but hollowing yourself over the years only to be the one enforcing the system you hate.
The people who don't play the game are just getting it faster. I've made myself indispensable, learning my boss's schedule so they always see me in the office, taking on the extra projects, and proposing new ideas. I've just done more work to end up in the same place.
Charlie, this is a great follow up and an interesting reflection on the variety of views, and especially how much different generations view "work"... My dad worked for the same company for 40 years, and even came out of retirement to consult for a division... He had a solid career, and made a good living selling newsprint. But I feel like the important part is his company saw him as an investment early on, and they basically "grew" together.
My first real job after business school was at Penske... They have a "trainee" program similar to most other rental companies. Basically, they hire people in, work them as much as possible for as little as possible, and then promote the people who survive the initial onlsaught to lower management. They do that again, and wash out the people who don't want to work 60 hour weeks, and promote those who do to middle management. They basically kept a revolving door of people itching to get into the 50-60k salary jobs, and then burned 80% of them out before they reach the 90k+ jobs... When the economy is humming along, they always had fresh meat. I know they were struggling to find new people recently.
It feels like modern corporate jobs are a huge pyramid scheme. You can always see the next level above you, but it's smaller, and moving up there requires you put in 60+ hours and then get lucky and find an opening... they definitely exploit the concept of work hard now, and you will get a promotion later.
I think the cogs are starting to become aware of the issues, and I wonder if larger companies are going to struggle to find new meat to process through their training programs... Maybe we will see a shift back to smaller companies, which would probably be good for everyone who isn't an upper level manager at a publicly traded company.
"It feels like modern corporate jobs are a huge pyramid scheme. You can always see the next level above you, but it's smaller, and moving up there requires you put in 60+ hours and then get lucky and find an opening... they definitely exploit the concept of work hard now, and you will get a promotion later."
This describes librarianship as well, just substitute the 60+ hours/week with the burdensome debt of an MLIS, only to face an industry that's created a paraprofessional level that does almost everything degreed librarians used to do for much less pay. I got lucky sheerly through timing, and was a few years ahead of the glut of folks with their library degrees who are clambering for a shrinking number of "Librarian" positions. I don't know how many people in my organization have their degrees, but I do know it's a much higher number than it used to be. I managed to get into a higher level non-management position, and can see the end of my career at last. The last couple of years have been miserable due to constant reorganizations and being told "we're in transition." TO WHAT? The goalposts seem to constantly move. It's all a farce. I'm exhausted and want out, but can't get out because I need those benefits and good wages. Why the hell is health care tied to employment anyways?
I want something better for those that follow, and don't want them to suffer through decades of soul-crushing employment in the hopes of a few years of retirement. The "it's always been like this and is I suffered, you have to too" argument reminds me of the people who don't want student loans to be canceled, because they paid theirs off.
It strikes me how stuck in the past a lot of these ragers are. I can’t tell you how many crusty old lawyers I meet who worked their way through law school (because tuition was $2000/year), proceeded to vote to destroy higher education funding, and complain people are entitled when they won’t take jobs that can’t cover their payments on $250k in student loans.
"These ‘you are free to leave and find a better job’ emails I got almost entirely came men who were late into their own careers" <-- This. I expect that most of these men were white and cis-gendered as well. Ahh, the luxury of living in a world where you are believed by default, given the benefit of the doubt, and praised for boldness. I am in my early 40's and don't consider myself a millennial (although technically I am on the cusp), mostly because I felt like My-So-Called-Life and Reality Bites were for me. But working in tech most of my colleagues are *firmly* in the millennial category. I have come not only to admire but to count on (for my own children's sake) the ways in which they insist on pushing the workplace forward. The demand for more time to do life things (e.g. taking a parent to surgery) without it having to count as leisure time, expecting an HR department to be adept and agile at identifying bias and that sees it as their obligation to educate the workforce about intersectionality, and assuming there will be safe, clean PRIVATE places to pump breast milk, as examples. In exchange I've seen these colleagues BRING IT in terms of the work and have real loyalty to their employers--it feels like a fair exchange and honestly it feels like being treated as a human. I had a manager in the last couple of years who told me directly that my priorities should be myself first, my family second, and my work last and we were explicit about how to get my work done within that framework. Just because one survived a period of society where they didn't enjoy that balance doesn't mean that everyone was equally able to thrive under its parameters. I am excited to see how workplace models like those in tech drift into other spaces and am hopeful that if these industries keep pushing things forward (even in ways that seem extreme and absurdly generous) that the average workplace will move in the right direction.
I am an old millennial (40) and I was able to change careers entirely by going back to school to get new skills
But, guess what: I am white, male, and most importantly for this, don't have children.
It's really that last element that does it. You can make enough money to support yourself without a ton of difficulty. Two people working can similarly do the same in a marriage.
But having children in America is more or less a guaranteed path to constant financial precarity. You need to break into 6 figure territory before you can have kids and financial security at the same time.
An HR department that "sees it at their obligation to educate the workforce about intersectionality." Yeah, seems like it would be a blast to work there.
If this is the way forward, no wonder everyone is checking out.
It seems to me that if you believe that humans are born with all the dignity and humanity that they require for this earth, then you don't have to believe the myth that work gives you any of that. Once you peel those two things apart, it starts to really attack a lot of our existing power structures.
Yes! I grew up thinking that the idea that all work has dignity flowed from the idea that all people have dignity, and therefore any useful work was a proper expression of that. It wasn't until very recently that I realized what some people mean is that submission to anyone with the money to "create a job" confers dignity.
Fascinating discussion... perhaps the "rage" part of this stems from our failure to account for how recent all this transformation of "work" is. Digital technology has barely been around that long -- historically speaking. We could say it got started in 1994 when the Netscape Navigator web browser was first released. I remember. Fast-forward to today, and it's not too surprising to see how "work" has become this always-on, 24X7, remote, networked, geographically dispersed, and globally connected thing now.
If your job involves staring into a computer screen all day -- and you know that you are -- your work can be done from anywhere in the world. Your employer no longer needs to depend on sourcing workers like you from cities like Seattle or San Francisco or New York or London or Singapore.
We take it for granted that customer service for our bank accounts used to be a "real job" -- but it can now be performed from Estonia or Poland just as easily as the U.S.
Most of us have no clue just how much technology is running the operations of businesses today. Look under the hood of sales, marketing, accounting, finance, HR, customer service, logistics and supply chain management, and you will find stacks and stacks of software running on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastracture, maintained by just a handful of specialists.
Compare today's operations of Tesla or Amazon or Google with those of Kodak, GM, IBM, Xerox, -- the labor reduction is remarkable.
The nineties were a head-spinning time for Gen X. For the first five years we were called lazy slackers. For the last five we were hailed as visionaries creating a new economy. In the end Marc Andreessen capitalized the most.
I have a weird background (former political organizer, including for unions, ended up at a corporation to pay the bills, and ended up in management for a while before I left and went back to school to get out of a role I really didnt enjoy)
One thing from my years as a middle manager that has really stuck with me is a phenomenon I came to call "I had to"-ism. The company was large (Fortune 100 type) and always trying new things to improve their tedious onboarding process.
My personal background and instincts are as a fixer. I went through this process, I knew how it sucked and where it had missed, and I gladly embraced changes that would help new people avoid those pitfalls, or crafted my own solutions when the company didn't address them.
When the company would eliminate something pointless or time-wasting or ineffective, my employees would get -angry-. And always in the same way: "I had to do it, why should they get to skip it?" This is very clearly related to how people respond to work in general, and you address it above. But there's an element of it I think you missed that I want to hit on:
A lot of people convince themselves that the trials, difficulties, or abuses they suffer really did contribute to their success. They believe they wouldn't be where, or who, they are without those difficulties, and they believe that others who get to skip them will be 'less capable' because they didn't have to navigate the challenges.
There's a lot of people who internalize the concept of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' to the extent that they want to inflict that same thing that didn't kill them on others, because if it's not necessary, then their maxim failed.
I eventually tied of that environment, as I was a bit out of place in it as a personality, and went back to school to get some more specialized skills that let me do something besides manage people.
I must be one of the lucky few - I studied subjects I found interesting, I worked for most of my professional career in my areas of expertise, I lived beneath my means, I voluntarily left the workforce while I still had my wits and my legs, and now I volunteer for entities that focus on STEM education and economic empowerment. I have nothing to complain about. I just decided that due to family history and a chronic medical condition, I didn't want to stay chained to a 40 to 60 hour work week. I don't think that this makes me a slacker or burden to society. And while I like to work and would consider returning to the workforce, not many employers would take the risk of hiring someone in my position for anything other than as a greeter, cashier, or piece worker at minimum wage. Sorry, but I'll find a better use of my time.
Look, I get the "100% dispensable" point of view. It's the naturalist/libertarian/pragmatic/transactional POV that more or less defines the American ethos, right?
America has a rich history of having the thinnest civil veneer laying atop the raw Darwinian reality of the laws of nature.
These cynics are right at a very fundamental level: In nature, you either outrun, outmaneuver, or outwit your predator, or you don't get to live another day. This scales up and down the natural world, including humans.
What modern civil society has done is to add a layer of "fairness" and "decency" to the natural order, which is lovely and quite productive for the advancement of our species. But it's just that - a layer. And no big surprise, how thick this layer of protective shielding we add on atop of nature is a big sticking point between those who have more empathy for humans than they do for non-domesticated animals.
What we should be discussing is the level of civility we want to have in our lives. If it's very thin, then we will live and die more like the animals. If it's thicker, we can elevate ourselves beyond the animal kingdom - at the expense of a lot of inefficiencies, people gaming the system, and not having a 1:1 ratio of investment in/value out.
You can't have it all! But what we can do as a society is to step back and agree on what we're debating. I don't think terms like "evil" and "immoral" and "unjust" do this debate any favors. These are judgements based on individual moral frameworks. We should step back from judgements where we can and stick to assessments with commonly-agreed-upon units of measure.
There are a countless number of people of all income groups who will react with anger or indignation at any suggestion that life for the poor or even middle classes should be made better solely becuase they don't think people deserve anything at all.
Adding to this, I quit a job working 50+ hour weeks to get one where I work way less at a nominal 40 hours a week and make double. compensation is not tied to hard work in any way, except possibly that people who make a lot do less work.
Maybe that anger comes from an unacknowledged feelings of having missed out by sacrificing so much (hopefully a good retirement will make up for some of it with these guys.) You can only justify yourself by condemning the next generation to the same hell.
Good work was there in previous generations, so I just want to remind folks that it was once possible and can be again. My father was "mediocre"—with a post-war EE degree from Berkeley, it turned out that he was a better manager than engineer. His aerospace company recognized this and he enjoyed a long, pensioned! career. As I was going into STEM (second career, 90s) a computer science teacher told me that places like Microsoft would chew me up and spit me out before I was forty. So I had a wonderful career in local government.
As for "productivity"—it cannot really be measured in knowledge workers or their managers Those long days "performing" are just smoke and mirrors. I once tracked my time in fifteen minute increments and realized that I could only be truly productive for six hours out of eight, and that was only if I was working on a deadline at optimum intensity, not something I could sustain for more than a couple of weeks. The other two hours were for the "living" part of work: eating, moving, talking to co-workers & participating in the work community, non-project related bureaucracy & admin, etc.
Business researchers successfully hoodwinked entire industries about open offices. Maybe they can find a way to convince the corporate world with some constructive smoke and mirrors that eight hours and home (and sustaining the FTEs necessary for this) is really the only path to corporate success, and that firms are actually damaging their competitiveness by these cold, unrealistic demands on their people.
In the meantime, all power to those who continue to resist at their own financial risk and to Charlie for keeping the fourth estate alive in this revolution.
If your life is mediocre, thats a reflection of YOU, not the start & end times of when you help others (and get paid for it). I've worked 9-5 all my life, which sometimes included bouts of the reality being more like 7a-7p, and I couldn't be happier. I've been blessed to work with amazing managers, co-workers, and team members over the years who have made excellent work-families for me. I've also been laid off twice and changed companies more often than that. Yes, when I was younger and lost a job it was devastating; I was crushed. But once I learned how to roll with the punches that life can sometimes throw at you I became happier than I ever could have otherwise been, had I not learned that lesson. 9-5, 8-6, 7-7, just do it! It'll change for the better as often as you do. So take another online course, get another certificate or degree, just keep moving forward (and by forward, I mean upward). Or slack off and earn less; its up to you. Just don't ask for other people to pay for your comforts in life once you've made the decision to slack off and watch me work harder.
I think there's freedom in being able to sit back and say "it's not that deep". I was in a job prior to this one with an emotionally abusive boss, pulling 50 hour work weeks regularly, going way above and beyond to take on work that was out of scope... and looking back on it, I simply didn't need to. I wouldn't have been punished if I said "I don't know" more frequently, if I had told my boss it would take me longer to do this, if I had gone home at 5PM every day. They didn't give me a raise and promotion anyways. I left my job to find that.
My next job, people just didn't... care quite as much. It was truly just work. My boss made the assumption that it took me about 40% longer than it actually did for me to complete each project. I just kinda never corrected her. I took longer lunch breaks, I went on walks in the middle of the day, I spent time shooting the shit with my coworkers. I stopped work at 5PM at the latest every single day. And I got high praise, got paid like 50% more than I did in my previous job, and just spent way less time thinking about work in general.
That's my goal now - to spend less time thinking about, talking about, and doing work. No one is running around doling out gold stars to everyone. I think it's a totally reasonable arrangement that I give up 40 (okay, more like 30 with my "lunches") hours a week to my boss and I get a generous salary and benefits from it. What have I had to give up? The belief that my job has to be glamorous to be good. The belief that I need to work in the arts and culture sector to do anything meaningful. The belief that grinding and hustling makes me a morally superior person. Being able to step back and say "it's just not that deep" is totally liberating. I don't feel like I need to feel that strongly about work, and I don't feel like I need to do the whole "I do not dream of labor" schtick. I like having a job with nice people, where I can do work that flexes my brain a little, and that I can set down and return to the rest of my extremely fulfilling life at any given point in time. I'd challenge people who feel extremely passionately about their little capitalistic grind (or people that feel extremely passionately about how awful the capitalistic grind is) to do less, feel less, set yourself free.
I think you've really captured what this is all about! I think the career skepticism thing is about finding another gear...which you've described pretty well here. I'm of the mind that a lot of the 'I do not dream of labor' people want exactly what you described (a job with nice people, where I can do work that flexes my brain a little, and that I can set down and return to the rest of my extremely fulfilling life). I think a lot of what they're pushing back against...and why it feels so charged...is the idea that stepping back and adopting this attitude is seen by so many people as a red flag that makes you a liability as a worker.
Agreed with all of this. Something I think about a lot: I see a lot of people I know (am 27 y/o Millennial) get trapped in the whirlpool of burnout TikTok/raging against the machine/Twitter discourse about terrible workplace thinkpieces/being angry and sad and frustrated about the forces (either real or perceived) that keep them tethered to their desks at night or having stress dreams about their job, etc etc. And I think that it’s really hard to make the leap from “realizing the way your life is structured is unsustainable” to “actually taking concrete steps to make your life look different”.
If I were to give advice to 23 year old me, I’d write up a list of little things to slowly try to implement in my workplace that now (in retrospect) I know I wouldn’t be fired for. Stuff like making myself take an unplugged 15 (then 20, then 30) min lunch a few times a week. Tracking on my personal calendar when I arrive at and leave work every day and set a goal for the # days I leave at 5:30. Deleting my email app from my phone. Using every ounce of sick time. Practicing saying “oh I didn’t have access to my phone, but I’ll be able to look at it before X time” when someone asked if I had seen a late night email at 9AM. Going to my boss and saying “hey I have these three tasks due on X date, and I’m worried about getting all of them done by then. Can we talk about which should be the priority and which can get shifted?” All of that is stuff that maybe feels weird and awkward and scary but in most workplaces, is pretty mundane and normal.
But even with all of that, I don’t think it would have totally touched my core anxieties. Caring deeply that my boss thinks I’m going above and beyond, fear that I’m going to be outpaced, deep rooted stress that I’ll look stupid in a meeting. How do you increase detachment? How do you develop a skill like “being okay with looking stupid”? How do you practice apathy? I have a hard time articulating how I got from point A to point B in my own journey, and I don’t know really how to best reach back and help those still stuck in the whirlpool of feeling shitty with no escape route in sight. I fully believe it’s possible for more people than not (especially for people who have the time to create tiktoks about burnout culture) but it’s hard to climb yourself out of that pit.
This comment is perfect! Couldn't agree more. I've worked at a number of different places, some where I worked 60-70 hours per week and others where 40 is perfectly fine. Now that I'm a little longer in the tooth, my need for validation from my job has gone wayyyyy down. It's not even a conscious choice I'm making; I just find that I feel differently about it now than I did, say, 10 years ago.
100 percent spot on. "Work" was once wrapped up in my identity. Today it's just something that allows me the freedom to do what I want in life during the other 240 hours of the week. And if I get some modest enjoyment from "work" -- and, at times, I do -- that's a happy bonus.
I'd even go so far as to argue that I wouldn't work in an environment that I wouldn't get modest enjoyment from. My job is interesting, I talk to interesting people, my coworkers are kind and chill. But I also lowered the bar a lot for myself. Previously, I had in my mind that I needed the kind of job that was very competitive to get, that was at a well-known and and highly-regarded institute, and that I needed to be changing the world in some magic way. Now...... I'm a business analyst, haha. And I like it! And I have so much time to pursue the things I really love in my life. I just had to temper my expectations more.
Love everything about this comment!
My current position (which, tbf, is a short-term contract with no benefits BUT came after months of looking) truly just...lets me complete things in the time frame that I complete them. I've spent the last ~six years rushing around to impress and complete ahead of schedule and all of this other stuff and to get this job and see that, actually, I don't HAVE to has truly been so nice. I enjoy not being continuously stressed! I enjoy not feeling like I'm going to disappoint someone at every turn if I don't perform perfectly every second! I want to come in, do what I do, and leave. Nothing wrong with that!
What if it's actually kind of liberating to have your job be a simple, transactional relationship? "But why, exactly, should our culture aspire to such a calculating and extractive means of employer/employee relations?" What else should an employer be providing, though?
In terms of wellbeing, many of us would argue the government should be providing the safety net. The corporate ecosystem of "bullshit jobs" (Graeber) is kind of like a de facto safety net today, providing insurance and means to many Americans. What if we offload that responsibility to the state? Then we can escape this idea that your job owes you something, freeing both parties to focus on a reasonable labor contract.
And what about meaning? The new workplace mantra of "do what you love" means employment also has to provide soul nourishment. That seems twisted, too. I'm not a religious person, but it does seem like religious practice used to fill this void and no longer does.
If health and spiritual happiness are being fulfilled by other institutions operating outside the market, jobs can be more utility-based (like your reader suggests). Maybe we don't need to "reimagine" what goes on inside the workplace, but more what goes on outside the workplace. Maybe we're thinking about work in the wrong way, hoping it will fill needs vacated by other atrophied institutions.
Charlie, Thank you for the follow up. I followed the comment chain on that post and sadly wasn’t surprised when it went south. IMO, Far too many young men (again, mostly men) of my generation (I am 62) were taught or simply believed that their only way to “matter” in this world is to make lots of money and buy lots of things. It became a way to “prove” your manhood.
I sometimes wonder if Oliver Stone helped or hurt when he made “Wall Street” in 1987 and Michael Douglas proclaimed to a generation that “greed is good”. It seems the actual message of the movie was lost on the majority of people.
The people who bought into that and then realized 20-30 years in that it didn’t pan out probably aren’t happy or contented. I imagine lashing out is their recourse.
Anyway, thanks for what you do. I enjoy the “thought paths” you travel.
Michael Lewis has written that a lot of people took the same message from Liar's Poker. He thought the main message was "don't kill yourself to work on Wall Street," but after it was published he got tons of mail from people asking how to get a job on Wall Street.
I think your point about Wall Street is exactly right. Another film where too many people ended up identifying with the villain is A Few Good Men. Take the zeitgeist, turn it up to 11, have a leading man of a certain type articulate its values, and a whole lot of people gladly skip over the point that excess of this kind is (a) criminal and (b) hurts ordinary people.
The irony of the "dispensible" email is that their definition of "mediocre" isn't that far from what leads to success. Show up at work the hours your boss wants you there, do exactly what they tell you, and don't ask too many questions, and you'll get a promotion. It was the times that I tried to be creative or do something more than what I was hired to do that I found myself knocked down.
Even for those who have found success in our work, it's come at the cost of meaning. Sitting at our desk all day on slow days, rushing lunch so our boss doesn't miss us at our desks, copying and pasting yet another PowerPoint deck. So much of what these jobs require is performative and empty that the burnout isn't from exhaustion, but hollowing yourself over the years only to be the one enforcing the system you hate.
The people who don't play the game are just getting it faster. I've made myself indispensable, learning my boss's schedule so they always see me in the office, taking on the extra projects, and proposing new ideas. I've just done more work to end up in the same place.
Charlie, this is a great follow up and an interesting reflection on the variety of views, and especially how much different generations view "work"... My dad worked for the same company for 40 years, and even came out of retirement to consult for a division... He had a solid career, and made a good living selling newsprint. But I feel like the important part is his company saw him as an investment early on, and they basically "grew" together.
My first real job after business school was at Penske... They have a "trainee" program similar to most other rental companies. Basically, they hire people in, work them as much as possible for as little as possible, and then promote the people who survive the initial onlsaught to lower management. They do that again, and wash out the people who don't want to work 60 hour weeks, and promote those who do to middle management. They basically kept a revolving door of people itching to get into the 50-60k salary jobs, and then burned 80% of them out before they reach the 90k+ jobs... When the economy is humming along, they always had fresh meat. I know they were struggling to find new people recently.
It feels like modern corporate jobs are a huge pyramid scheme. You can always see the next level above you, but it's smaller, and moving up there requires you put in 60+ hours and then get lucky and find an opening... they definitely exploit the concept of work hard now, and you will get a promotion later.
I think the cogs are starting to become aware of the issues, and I wonder if larger companies are going to struggle to find new meat to process through their training programs... Maybe we will see a shift back to smaller companies, which would probably be good for everyone who isn't an upper level manager at a publicly traded company.
Saw this today and thought of this article... https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/pnxz3t/company_called_me_average_so_i_became_average/
"It feels like modern corporate jobs are a huge pyramid scheme. You can always see the next level above you, but it's smaller, and moving up there requires you put in 60+ hours and then get lucky and find an opening... they definitely exploit the concept of work hard now, and you will get a promotion later."
This describes librarianship as well, just substitute the 60+ hours/week with the burdensome debt of an MLIS, only to face an industry that's created a paraprofessional level that does almost everything degreed librarians used to do for much less pay. I got lucky sheerly through timing, and was a few years ahead of the glut of folks with their library degrees who are clambering for a shrinking number of "Librarian" positions. I don't know how many people in my organization have their degrees, but I do know it's a much higher number than it used to be. I managed to get into a higher level non-management position, and can see the end of my career at last. The last couple of years have been miserable due to constant reorganizations and being told "we're in transition." TO WHAT? The goalposts seem to constantly move. It's all a farce. I'm exhausted and want out, but can't get out because I need those benefits and good wages. Why the hell is health care tied to employment anyways?
I want something better for those that follow, and don't want them to suffer through decades of soul-crushing employment in the hopes of a few years of retirement. The "it's always been like this and is I suffered, you have to too" argument reminds me of the people who don't want student loans to be canceled, because they paid theirs off.
It strikes me how stuck in the past a lot of these ragers are. I can’t tell you how many crusty old lawyers I meet who worked their way through law school (because tuition was $2000/year), proceeded to vote to destroy higher education funding, and complain people are entitled when they won’t take jobs that can’t cover their payments on $250k in student loans.
"These ‘you are free to leave and find a better job’ emails I got almost entirely came men who were late into their own careers" <-- This. I expect that most of these men were white and cis-gendered as well. Ahh, the luxury of living in a world where you are believed by default, given the benefit of the doubt, and praised for boldness. I am in my early 40's and don't consider myself a millennial (although technically I am on the cusp), mostly because I felt like My-So-Called-Life and Reality Bites were for me. But working in tech most of my colleagues are *firmly* in the millennial category. I have come not only to admire but to count on (for my own children's sake) the ways in which they insist on pushing the workplace forward. The demand for more time to do life things (e.g. taking a parent to surgery) without it having to count as leisure time, expecting an HR department to be adept and agile at identifying bias and that sees it as their obligation to educate the workforce about intersectionality, and assuming there will be safe, clean PRIVATE places to pump breast milk, as examples. In exchange I've seen these colleagues BRING IT in terms of the work and have real loyalty to their employers--it feels like a fair exchange and honestly it feels like being treated as a human. I had a manager in the last couple of years who told me directly that my priorities should be myself first, my family second, and my work last and we were explicit about how to get my work done within that framework. Just because one survived a period of society where they didn't enjoy that balance doesn't mean that everyone was equally able to thrive under its parameters. I am excited to see how workplace models like those in tech drift into other spaces and am hopeful that if these industries keep pushing things forward (even in ways that seem extreme and absurdly generous) that the average workplace will move in the right direction.
I am an old millennial (40) and I was able to change careers entirely by going back to school to get new skills
But, guess what: I am white, male, and most importantly for this, don't have children.
It's really that last element that does it. You can make enough money to support yourself without a ton of difficulty. Two people working can similarly do the same in a marriage.
But having children in America is more or less a guaranteed path to constant financial precarity. You need to break into 6 figure territory before you can have kids and financial security at the same time.
Amen.
An HR department that "sees it at their obligation to educate the workforce about intersectionality." Yeah, seems like it would be a blast to work there.
If this is the way forward, no wonder everyone is checking out.
It seems to me that if you believe that humans are born with all the dignity and humanity that they require for this earth, then you don't have to believe the myth that work gives you any of that. Once you peel those two things apart, it starts to really attack a lot of our existing power structures.
Yes! I grew up thinking that the idea that all work has dignity flowed from the idea that all people have dignity, and therefore any useful work was a proper expression of that. It wasn't until very recently that I realized what some people mean is that submission to anyone with the money to "create a job" confers dignity.
Fascinating discussion... perhaps the "rage" part of this stems from our failure to account for how recent all this transformation of "work" is. Digital technology has barely been around that long -- historically speaking. We could say it got started in 1994 when the Netscape Navigator web browser was first released. I remember. Fast-forward to today, and it's not too surprising to see how "work" has become this always-on, 24X7, remote, networked, geographically dispersed, and globally connected thing now.
If your job involves staring into a computer screen all day -- and you know that you are -- your work can be done from anywhere in the world. Your employer no longer needs to depend on sourcing workers like you from cities like Seattle or San Francisco or New York or London or Singapore.
We take it for granted that customer service for our bank accounts used to be a "real job" -- but it can now be performed from Estonia or Poland just as easily as the U.S.
Most of us have no clue just how much technology is running the operations of businesses today. Look under the hood of sales, marketing, accounting, finance, HR, customer service, logistics and supply chain management, and you will find stacks and stacks of software running on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastracture, maintained by just a handful of specialists.
Compare today's operations of Tesla or Amazon or Google with those of Kodak, GM, IBM, Xerox, -- the labor reduction is remarkable.
The nineties were a head-spinning time for Gen X. For the first five years we were called lazy slackers. For the last five we were hailed as visionaries creating a new economy. In the end Marc Andreessen capitalized the most.
I have a weird background (former political organizer, including for unions, ended up at a corporation to pay the bills, and ended up in management for a while before I left and went back to school to get out of a role I really didnt enjoy)
One thing from my years as a middle manager that has really stuck with me is a phenomenon I came to call "I had to"-ism. The company was large (Fortune 100 type) and always trying new things to improve their tedious onboarding process.
My personal background and instincts are as a fixer. I went through this process, I knew how it sucked and where it had missed, and I gladly embraced changes that would help new people avoid those pitfalls, or crafted my own solutions when the company didn't address them.
When the company would eliminate something pointless or time-wasting or ineffective, my employees would get -angry-. And always in the same way: "I had to do it, why should they get to skip it?" This is very clearly related to how people respond to work in general, and you address it above. But there's an element of it I think you missed that I want to hit on:
A lot of people convince themselves that the trials, difficulties, or abuses they suffer really did contribute to their success. They believe they wouldn't be where, or who, they are without those difficulties, and they believe that others who get to skip them will be 'less capable' because they didn't have to navigate the challenges.
There's a lot of people who internalize the concept of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' to the extent that they want to inflict that same thing that didn't kill them on others, because if it's not necessary, then their maxim failed.
I eventually tied of that environment, as I was a bit out of place in it as a personality, and went back to school to get some more specialized skills that let me do something besides manage people.
I must be one of the lucky few - I studied subjects I found interesting, I worked for most of my professional career in my areas of expertise, I lived beneath my means, I voluntarily left the workforce while I still had my wits and my legs, and now I volunteer for entities that focus on STEM education and economic empowerment. I have nothing to complain about. I just decided that due to family history and a chronic medical condition, I didn't want to stay chained to a 40 to 60 hour work week. I don't think that this makes me a slacker or burden to society. And while I like to work and would consider returning to the workforce, not many employers would take the risk of hiring someone in my position for anything other than as a greeter, cashier, or piece worker at minimum wage. Sorry, but I'll find a better use of my time.
Look, I get the "100% dispensable" point of view. It's the naturalist/libertarian/pragmatic/transactional POV that more or less defines the American ethos, right?
America has a rich history of having the thinnest civil veneer laying atop the raw Darwinian reality of the laws of nature.
These cynics are right at a very fundamental level: In nature, you either outrun, outmaneuver, or outwit your predator, or you don't get to live another day. This scales up and down the natural world, including humans.
What modern civil society has done is to add a layer of "fairness" and "decency" to the natural order, which is lovely and quite productive for the advancement of our species. But it's just that - a layer. And no big surprise, how thick this layer of protective shielding we add on atop of nature is a big sticking point between those who have more empathy for humans than they do for non-domesticated animals.
What we should be discussing is the level of civility we want to have in our lives. If it's very thin, then we will live and die more like the animals. If it's thicker, we can elevate ourselves beyond the animal kingdom - at the expense of a lot of inefficiencies, people gaming the system, and not having a 1:1 ratio of investment in/value out.
You can't have it all! But what we can do as a society is to step back and agree on what we're debating. I don't think terms like "evil" and "immoral" and "unjust" do this debate any favors. These are judgements based on individual moral frameworks. We should step back from judgements where we can and stick to assessments with commonly-agreed-upon units of measure.
My thoughts on work are captured here on this blog post: https://thoughtstation.com/post/150827074767/nobody-should-work-ever
There are a countless number of people of all income groups who will react with anger or indignation at any suggestion that life for the poor or even middle classes should be made better solely becuase they don't think people deserve anything at all.
Adding to this, I quit a job working 50+ hour weeks to get one where I work way less at a nominal 40 hours a week and make double. compensation is not tied to hard work in any way, except possibly that people who make a lot do less work.
Maybe that anger comes from an unacknowledged feelings of having missed out by sacrificing so much (hopefully a good retirement will make up for some of it with these guys.) You can only justify yourself by condemning the next generation to the same hell.
Good work was there in previous generations, so I just want to remind folks that it was once possible and can be again. My father was "mediocre"—with a post-war EE degree from Berkeley, it turned out that he was a better manager than engineer. His aerospace company recognized this and he enjoyed a long, pensioned! career. As I was going into STEM (second career, 90s) a computer science teacher told me that places like Microsoft would chew me up and spit me out before I was forty. So I had a wonderful career in local government.
As for "productivity"—it cannot really be measured in knowledge workers or their managers Those long days "performing" are just smoke and mirrors. I once tracked my time in fifteen minute increments and realized that I could only be truly productive for six hours out of eight, and that was only if I was working on a deadline at optimum intensity, not something I could sustain for more than a couple of weeks. The other two hours were for the "living" part of work: eating, moving, talking to co-workers & participating in the work community, non-project related bureaucracy & admin, etc.
Business researchers successfully hoodwinked entire industries about open offices. Maybe they can find a way to convince the corporate world with some constructive smoke and mirrors that eight hours and home (and sustaining the FTEs necessary for this) is really the only path to corporate success, and that firms are actually damaging their competitiveness by these cold, unrealistic demands on their people.
In the meantime, all power to those who continue to resist at their own financial risk and to Charlie for keeping the fourth estate alive in this revolution.
If your life is mediocre, thats a reflection of YOU, not the start & end times of when you help others (and get paid for it). I've worked 9-5 all my life, which sometimes included bouts of the reality being more like 7a-7p, and I couldn't be happier. I've been blessed to work with amazing managers, co-workers, and team members over the years who have made excellent work-families for me. I've also been laid off twice and changed companies more often than that. Yes, when I was younger and lost a job it was devastating; I was crushed. But once I learned how to roll with the punches that life can sometimes throw at you I became happier than I ever could have otherwise been, had I not learned that lesson. 9-5, 8-6, 7-7, just do it! It'll change for the better as often as you do. So take another online course, get another certificate or degree, just keep moving forward (and by forward, I mean upward). Or slack off and earn less; its up to you. Just don't ask for other people to pay for your comforts in life once you've made the decision to slack off and watch me work harder.