To be clear, I don’t believe a more transactional approach to work needs to come at the expense of caring about your job or doing great work. There is nothing wrong with aligning your work with your interests or working hard to refine your craft. Rather, I’m advocating for a collective reorientation of our expectations. Much as it is unrealistic to expect a spouse to fulfill our every social, emotional, and intellectual need, it is unrealistic to expect a job to be our sole method of self-actualization. That’s a burden our jobs are not designed to bear.
