The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

A businessman is sitting on the beach of a small fishing village when he sees a fisherman approach the shore with his daily haul. Impressed by the quality of the fish, the businessman asks the fisherman how long it took him to bring in his catch. “Oh, just a short while,” the fisherman replies. “Why don’t you stay out longer to catch more fish?” the businessman asks. “Because this is all I need.” “But then what do you do with your time?” “I sleep late, catch a few fish, play with my kids, take a nap with my wife, and then join my buddies in town to drink wine and play guitar,” the fisherman responds. The businessman is shocked. He explains that he has an MBA, and that if the fisherman follows his advice, he could help him grow his business. “You could buy a bigger boat,” the businessman says, “and then use the proceeds to open your own cannery.” “Then what?” the fisherman asks. “Then you could move to the city to open a distribution center.” “And then what?” “Then you could expand your business internationally, and eventually take your company public,” the businessman says. “When the time is right, you can sell your shares and become very rich!” “And then what?” “Well, then you can retire, move to a small fishing village, sleep late, catch a few fish, play with your kids, take naps with your wife, and join your buddies in town to drink wine and play guitar.” The fisherman smiles at the businessman and continues down the beach.

The United States’ mantra might as well be “I produce, therefore I am.”

But in the United States, how we make money is shorthand for who we are. Our livelihoods have become our lives.

Derek Thompson dubbed this new phenomenon “workism.” A workist seeks meaning from their work similar to how a religious person seeks meaning from their faith. According to Thompson, over the course of the twentieth century work has evolved from a chore to a status to a means of self-actualization.

Her identity was straightforward. First, she was a woman of faith. Then a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a fresh-pasta maker. She enjoyed her work at the coffee shop—loved it, even—but it did not define her.

My family history points toward some of the central themes of this book: that workism is particularly American, though it certainly exists in other places, too; that workism is especially common among the privileged, though it also exists in communities of less privilege; and finally, that workism is a relatively new phenomenon, more common among my generation than my grandparents’.

chose to focus primarily (but not exclusively) on the stories of white-collar workers in the United States for two reasons. First, the United States is in the midst of a nationwide trend that defies both history and logic. Throughout history, wealth has been inversely correlated with how many hours people work.

But in the last half century, the highest earners are responsible for some of the greatest increases in work time. That is to say, the same Americans who can afford to work the least are working more than ever.

Second, I chose to focus primarily on white-collar workers because they’re the most likely to look to ...

Among other reasons, high earners are less likely to have other sources of meaning, like organized religion, in their lives.

But although professional culture treats work as the central axis around which the rest of life orbits, the majority of workers in the world do not work to self-actualize; they work to survive. “People who love what they do, those people are blessed, man,” Hamza Taskeem, a cook who has worked in the same Pakistani restaurant for eighteen years, told me. “I just work to get by.”

Here, capitalism is not just an economic system; it’s also a social philosophy—a philosophy that says a person is as valuable as their output. In the United States, productivity is more than a measurement; it’s a moral good.

Two hundred years ago, almost no one had a career—at least not in the way we currently conceive of careers as stories of progress and change. The majority of Americans were farmers, as were their parents and grandparents.

The intensity of work follows the cycle of the seasons: busy during the harvest, more idle during the winter. However, the industrial revolution ushered us into an era where productivity was no longer limited by seasons and sunlight.

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” read the signs at the inaugural May Day protests in Chicago in 1886.

Our Grandchildren,” economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by 2030 we would work only fifteen hours a week. Keynes believed one of the most pressing questions of the twenty-first century would be how we’d occupy our leisure.

Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough. Brené Brown

Most fine-dining kitchens are organized by the so-called brigade system, made popular by a nineteenth-century French chef who based it on the hierarchy of European military kitchens.

“I want to remind people that you have to create value outside of work to protect yourself,”

As Divya’s story shows, a work-centric existence leaves room for little else. During the years Divya was building Prameer, her job didn’t take up just her best hours, but her best energy, too. But none of us is just one thing. We are workers, but we are also siblings and citizens, hobbyists and neighbors.

Diversifying our identity is about more than mitigating the shock of losing our job. We shouldn’t do it just to avoid the sting of negative feedback or the disorientation of retirement. We should diversify our identities because doing so allows us to be more well-rounded people.

And ironically, research shows that people who have hobbies, interests, and passions outside of work tend to be more productive workers, too.

The median pay for a librarian with a master’s degree is less than $30 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

was only in the last fifty years—roughly the period since What Color Is Your Parachute? came out—that “meaningful work” even became part of mainstream vernacular. Before then, satisfaction was reserved for later—if not for the afterlife, at least for after workers left the office.

As corporations shipped manufacturing jobs overseas and domestic wages stagnated, the job security and benefits of the Fordism era eroded. Since the 1970s, real wages—the value of dollars paid to workers after being adjusted for inflation—have barely budged. “With dollar-compensation no longer the overwhelmingly most important factor in job motivation,” William Batten, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, said in a 1979 lecture at the Wharton School, “management must develop a better understanding of the more elusive, less tangible factors that add up to job satisfaction.” In other words, management needed new lures to keep employees happy. Management succeeded.

the second half of the twentieth century, flexibility, individualism, and meaning supplanted job security, workplace protections, and collective solidarity for many American workers.

1962 poll, for example, found that 6 percent of people thought meaningful work was important to success at the office. Twenty years later, the number was 49 percent.

“If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.”

Ignoring workplace malpractice is common in so-called labors of love. The idea that library science is a “sacred duty” is the same philosophy that encourages underslept healthcare workers to “put the patients first,” underresourced teachers to “just make do with what you have,” and unpaid college students to take an internship “for the experience.”

Promoting the message that a profession is inherently righteous allows people in positions of power to characterize injustices as isolated incidents rather than systemic failures—if they’re even discussed at all.

At the same time, job performance becomes dependent on how much meaning workers ascribe to what they do. “The

The majority of zookeepers have college degrees, but the average annual salary is less than $40,000 a year. The

Many zookeepers framed their work as a duty, similar to the Calvinist conception of a divine calling from the previous chapter. As a result, choosing to work in another field would be more than an occupational choice; it would be “a negligent abandonment of those who have need of one’s gifts, talents, and efforts,” the researchers wrote. This exposed zookeepers to exploitation. Low pay, unfavorable benefits, and poor working conditions are often the sacrifices workers across industries must make for the privilege of following their passion.

“By cloaking the labor in the language of ‘passion,’ ” writes journalist Anne Helen Petersen in her book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, “we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”

Fobazi’s paper pointed out, treating a job as something else—a passion, a sacred duty—diminishes workers’ ability to call out and enact necessary changes.

As GDP increased and wages stagnated in the last fifty years, for example, excess earnings have largely gone into the pockets of CEOs. In 1965, CEOs were paid twenty times more than their average employee. By 2015, CEOs were paid over two hundred times more than their average employee.

Furthermore, jobs in historically unionized industries such as manufacturing have decreased while jobs in historically non-unionized industries like tech have increased. Employers adopt the language of personal fulfillment—“Change the world!” “Do the best work of your life!”—to woo employees to these roles. But a thorny question remains: Is it really so bad to look to work for love?

From unpaid interns to adjunct professors who cling to the dream of tenure, those who follow their passion can end up in positions that amplify their vulnerability—especially for workers with less privilege.

“If people are told to follow their passions, but we don’t provide an equal playing field in which they can do that, then telling people to follow their passions helps reinforce inequality.”

In passion professions such as teaching and nursing, where workers are expected to “not be in it for the money,” gender- and race-based wage disparities are amplified. It’s also worth noting that many of these passion jobs are also feminized and, by extension, devalued.

we believe that people make career decisions based on their passions, then it’s easy to attribute wage disparities to individual choices rather than acknowledge the reality of structural injustice.

Furthermore, turning one’s passion into a career is simply not attainable for most.

Following your passion works best for folks with the privilege to manage the inherent risk of doing so.

At the same time, hiring someone like Fobazi to speak at, say, the Association of College and Research Libraries (which she did) is the equivalent of an investment bank with a notorious culture of overwork hiring a work-life balance guru for a keynote presentation. Unless those in power back up rhetoric with policy changes, increasing awareness goes only so far.

“I no longer have a dream job,” she told me. “I’m going in with eyes wide open.”

If I could go back in time and give myself a message, it would be to reiterate that my value as an artist doesn’t come from how much I create. I think that mind-set is yoked to capitalism. Being an artist is about how and why you touch people’s lives, even if it’s one person. Even if that’s yourself, in the process of art-making. Amanda Gorman

Her husband—a doctor, public health researcher, and workist in his own right—was worried. On top of all this, her father had recently been diagnosed with kidney disease, and a pandemic was sweeping the globe. So in April 2021, less than a year after accepting the Wired job, she decided to take a break.

“I’ve always defined myself by my work, which means this transition has been far harder than I ever expected,” Megan told me a few weeks after leaving Wired. “I’m flailing because I don’t know who I am.”

Megan, like many ambitious professionals, had become enmeshed—not with another person, but with her career.

We are not born with a fixed identity; it’s something we build over time.