The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

Erikson believed people build their identities in stages throughout their lives, a key stage of which is adolescence. Our teenage years are ripe for instability. We grow physically, mature sexually, and face important life and career choices. According to Erikson, we solidify our identities at this critical stage in order to cope with all that’s changing around us.

eighth grade, she became a competitive fencer. “I was super driven by external achievement and external recognition,” she told me. Journalism, a career that provides a constant drip of urgency, competition, and recognition, was a natural fit.

In one of Erikson’s most famous studies, he interviewed veterans returning from World War II. Like Megan after she left Wired, the soldiers were forced to reckon with their place in the world after they finished their jobs. For years, they had identified as soldiers. They knew the chain of command. Their roles and tasks were clear. Losing these things was tumultuous for them. Erikson coined the term “identity crisis” to describe the veterans’ experience—a period of instability and insecurity that resulted from losing a critical part of who they were.

Social scientist Arthur Brooks argues that we’re good at ascribing meaning to the narrative arc of our lives, but are often ill-equipped to react if the script changes. Breaks in the script—such as retirement, a sabbatical, or a round of mass layoffs—test our resilience.

Perhaps no group exemplifies the potential to rewrite the script more than people who are chronically ill. Often chronic illness cannot be anticipated or controlled. Some days you may wake up full of energy. Other days, you might not have enough energy to get out of bed.

Perhaps the most American “I am” label is “a producer.” Workers are measured by their productivity, companies are measured by their growth, and the country’s health is measured by its GDP. We celebrate those deemed to be “productive members of society” and call those who rely on social services “welfare queens” and “freeloaders.” But it isn’t just our country or employer that imposes this value system on us.

What companies generally mean when they say they’re like a family is that they look out for their employees. Familial relationships, however, are unconditional. At-will employment, by definition, is not.

But for workers, relying on work as their primary social community is often fraught. Although employees with friends at the office tend to perform better, they also report being more emotionally exhausted and conflict-avoidant.

A body of research from University of San Francisco psychologist Saera Khan found that in close-knit workplaces, employees are more likely to keep quiet about wrongdoing.

“When you see a group as a coherent unit—which is what a family is—it’s really very hard to break that unit, which is what you’re doing when you disclose wrongdoing,” Khan told me. “You are destroying the idea that this is a healthy, happy family that’s doing well.”

Historically, workers have formed unions to check managerial power. Collective bargaining can help workers ensure they get fair wages, benefits, safe working conditions, and a say in decisions that affect the entire organization. If familial workplaces are built on camaraderie and trust, unionized workplaces are built on contractual obligations. But in the United States, union membership has declined precipitously in the past few decades.

There are various explanations for why union membership has declined. Legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act and so-called right-to-work laws have increased the barriers to organizing and made it easier for companies to union bust.

Justine’s resignation lit a fuse inside Taylor. It was clear that this “family” was willing to part ways with one of its own over a Slack message. Executives spoke often about how everyone was on the same team. But when they forced Justine out, Taylor called bullshit. “They can fire us; we can’t fire them,” Taylor told me. “We were never on the same team.” The only way to rebalance the power, Taylor thought, was for workers to organize. The day after Taylor learned Justine had been pushed out, he took out a pad of Post-its and scribbled down the names of coworkers he thought might be interested in a union drive. That week, he started making calls.

“There’s this fear of conflict.” But Reckers knows as well as anyone that emphasizing family-like company bonds (“We care about each other here!”) is a common union-busting tactic. Employees need contractual protections, not corporate sweet nothings.

As Clarissa began to become a more visible member of the drive, she started to receive pushback from coworkers who were less supportive of the union. This kind of policing among peers is common—both in union drives and in close-knit office cultures—according to various workplace experts with whom I spoke. “People become so passionate about the mission,” Green, the Ask a Manager columnist, told me, “that they often act as if they are personally affronted when a peer who is not part of management tries to set boundaries on their time or what their labor is worth.”

In the labor organizing world, this type of criticism of a worker’s performance and character during a union drive is referred to as “pretext.” It’s a common union-busting tactic from management who might want to fire organizers but are prevented by law from doing so because of their organizing alone.

Kickstarter executives became more vocal about their opposition. In a company-wide email, Aziz Hasan, who took over for Chen as CEO in 2019, declared that the company would not voluntarily recognize the union. In his words, a union would “significantly change the way we operate and work together,” and the company would be “better set up to be successful without the framework of a union.”

In September 2019, almost a year after Taylor first called Clarissa about unionizing, they were each brought into a conference room—the same windowless room in which Justine had been offered a termination agreement the year before—and unceremoniously fired with vague explanations. The previous two quarters had been Taylor’s most productive quarters at Kickstarter, far exceeding every metric laid out for him in his performance improvement plan. Clarissa and Taylor decided to forgo their severance pay, which would have required them to sign nondisparagement agreements, and both filed unfair firing claims with the National Labor Relations Board. “@kickstarter I will not be signing your termination agreement containing a non-disparagement clause,”

Requiring employees to sign nondisparagement and nondisclosure agreements is a common practice. It’s also a way for companies to keep employees from surfacing wrongdoing.

The Kickstarter union was the first to win wall-to-wall recognition at a tech company in U.S. history.

Before the end of the year, the vote paid dividends for workers. In May 2020, Kickstarter lost 39 percent of its employees to layoffs and company buyouts due to the economic strain of the pandemic. But rather than receive the two to three weeks of severance pay management originally proposed, the union negotiated for departing employees to receive four months’ pay and a minimum of four months of health insurance.

Professional relationships—at least relationships between managers and workers—will always fundamentally be about power, even at the most friendly, progressive, mission-driven workplaces.

June 2022, two and a half years after Kickstarter workers went public with their intent to unionize, the Kickstarter union ratified its first-ever collective bargaining agreement with Kickstarter management. The agreement guarantees annual wage increases and pay equity reviews, limits the use of contract employees in favor of full-time jobs, and standardizes grievance and arbitration procedures, among other terms.

When asked “How do you personally define success?” 97 percent of respondents in a 2019 survey agreed with the following statement: “A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.” But when answering the question “How do you think others define success?” only 8 percent gave the same answer. Instead, 92 percent agreed that others would define a person as successful “if they are rich, have a high-profile career or are well-known.”

Even if someone reports that their definition of success does not rely on wealth, fame, and status, it doesn’t mean they act that way.

“In the state of nature, social comparison has life-or-death consequences, so natural selection built a brain that responds to social comparisons with life-or-death brain chemistry.” Our brains reward us with serotonin when we achieve higher status. But serotonin is released in short spurts and quickly metabolized.

While status can inspire excellence, it can also make us dependent on it. And the work of constantly jockeying for position can leave us anxious, stressed, and unfulfilled.

The promise of promotions compels us to keep pushing forward. A problem occurs, however, when we enter into this game without first determining what we value beyond status.

“We seek status because we don’t know our own preferences,” Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, told me. “When we don’t trust our own definition of what is good, we let other people define it for us.”

In certain scenarios, status seeking serves a clear purpose.

These metrics are seductive because of their simplicity. You might have a nuanced personal definition of success, Nguyen told me, “but once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of a value—especially ones that are shared across a company—that clarity trumps your subtler values.”

The U.S. News & World Report higher education rankings exemplify value capture at an institutional level. Before the U.S. News & World Report, standardized rankings for law schools didn’t exist. Law schools each had their own missions and areas of expertise. Perhaps one school emphasized legal theory, while another prioritized corporate litigation. In order to pick a school, prospective students would determine what mattered to them, and then choose a school to fit their unique tastes.

they explained how universities reoriented their admissions standards and educational priorities based on the rankings, which emphasized GPAs, LSAT scores, and the employment rates of graduates. Schools largely did away with their varied specializations and missions in order to position themselves in a way that might help them rise in the rankings.

The problem is not necessarily that U.S. News & World Report created a standard of excellence. It’s that as students and institutions internalized the rankings as the standard, they no longer were forced to grapple with what they valued.

Unlike law or medicine, though, a formal journalism degree is not a prerequisite for joining the field. Nevertheless, going to grad school was just something people in my family did.

“If you could go, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you went, would you still do it?”

Public rankings and rewards can influence our behavior even before we enter elementary school.

wasn’t the presence of the award but the expectation of receiving it that dampened the students’ interest in drawing. The ensuing paper, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward,” has become one of the most commonly cited studies to explain human motivation.

Again, they saw that attaching a contingent reward to an activity transformed the activity from play to work.

It’s something we know intuitively: working exclusively for external rewards rarely brings lasting fulfillment. As the old saying goes, How much money is enough, Mr. Rockefeller? Just a little bit more.

The “if-then” trap commonly plagues elite athletes as well. After ten NBA seasons, eight All-Star selections, four scoring championships, and an MVP award, NBA legend Kevin Durant finally won his first NBA championship in 2017 with the Golden State Warriors. But the summer after, he became distant and despondent. Steve Nash, an adviser to the Warriors at the time, described it this way: “He was searching for what it all meant. He thought a championship would change everything and found out it doesn’t. He was not fulfilled.”

Relying on external markers of success can leave ambitious professionals in any field feeling perpetually unfulfilled.

After finishing a video game, a player may take a step back to ask whether the game was worth it, whether the game was a good use of their time. But in careers, there are fewer built-in pauses. This was certainly true for Khe. It took a series of changes in his life for him to realize that the values by which he was living were not actually his own.

But in that conversation with his boss, he was forced to confront how the firm’s values diverged from his own. The company cared about its employees’ well-being only insofar as it benefited the company.

“I realized the riskier thing is my kid watching their dad be checked out and doing something just for money,”

Khe’s new life is still marked by the status game. The surfboards in his office are their own type of public statement aimed at soliciting others’ approval. The ability to go to the beach in the middle of the day—and tell people about it—is a kind of flex. But the difference is that now Khe is playing a game he actually enjoys playing.

The skeptic in me believes that the lifestyle Khe created was possible only because of the years he spent on Wall Street. Sure, he sacrificed his future earning potential, but he had already “made it.” He’d already accrued the résumé virtues. His substantial nest egg lessened the risk of changing course to pursue a more values-aligned path.

Choosing a career based solely on one’s desires without considering what the market values can, for example, lead people to assume great amounts of debt for schooling that might not lead to practical job prospects. It can lead to situations in which artists can’t focus on their art because they live in a constant state of anxiety about how they’ll make rent. But alternatively, a career choice solely based on the demands of the market, without considering the demands of one’s heart, can lead to situations in which people spend their lives climbing ladders they never wanted to be on in the first place. Even if you are passionate about what you do, the urge to climb the career ladder’s endless rungs can taint the intrinsic rewards of what drew you to a particular line of work in the first place.

Khe has cultivated an appetite for what he already has. He understands his personal definition of good enough.

People tend to personalize what is a societal issue: they chose the wrong job or they chose the wrong partner or they didn’t save enough money. A lot of times, we are working within this system that limits what choices we have. Tara Jefferson