The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

The truth is, I’m embarrassed by how my sense of self-worth is tethered to my productivity.

I’m writing this book on the side of my full-time job. I’ve spent the past few months working fifty to sixty hours a week to get it done. I’m proud after the weeks that I hit my writing goal and ashamed after the weeks that I don’t.

When I started this project, I was motivated by two personal questions: How did my job become so central to my identity? And how might I separate my self-worth from my output?

That’s because there is no universal answer to the question of what role work ought to play in our lives. Our relationship to work is not fixed, nor should we want it to be. It’s by wrestling with work’s place that we uncover what we care about.

One of the main issues with overwork is that many of us have internalized the hustle culture that surrounds us. While I was writing this book, there was no boss mandating when I should or shouldn’t work.

The problem with self-imposed boundaries is that they’re permeable. It was too easy to let my fear of not finishing the manuscript on time or the feeling that I didn’t deserve a break stop me from honoring my intentions.

In the words of author James Clear, “It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.”

Common antiburnout advice like “set a boundary” or “practice self-care” crumbles without institutional support behind it. If your company is understaffed, or it’s the end of a quarter, or your pay is tied to your hours, setting a personal boundary is like trying to shield yourself from the sun with a cocktail umbrella.

But there are limits to structural interventions, too. At the organization level, generous vacation policies and wellness benefits without a reduction in the amount of work managers expect from workers do little to change the culture. As Khe told me, after fifteen grueling years on Wall Street, a two-week vacation was not going to magically resurrect him.

Similarly, on the other side of the globe Japan leads the world with its paternity leave policy: fathers are given up to a year of paid leave. But there’s a chasm between policy and practice. In 2017, a paltry 5 percent of fathers took the paid leave to which they were entitled. This highlights two prerequisites for creating a healthier relationship to work: (1) the structural protections to ensure employees can have a life outside of work; and (2) the cultural will to do so.

Changing the culture of work will require more than companies declaring mental health holidays or workers taking up hobbies. For many of us, it will require a fundamental reimagining of work’s role in our lives.

It’s notable that people’s visions didn’t exclude labor. But removing it as a prerequisite for survival expanded how they conceived of what’s possible.

DISENTANGLE SURVIVAL AND EMPLOYMENT

In order to rest and, by extension, to dream, we first need to feel safe. If we don’t, our mammalian minds will keep part of our brains alert to scan for threats. I think a similar biological force drives my tendency to overwork. Despite my gainful employment and the support systems around me, I still fear, however irrationally, that I’ll lose my livelihood—or at least lose my career momentum. Unless I overdeliver, my logic goes, unless I continually prove my worthiness, I will somehow fall behind. I’ve adopted the values of capitalism as my own: Growth is progress. Stagnation is death.

In practice, the reknitting of our frayed social safety net could take many forms. It could mean shedding our embarrassing status as the only developed nation without federally mandated paid leave. It could mean forgiving the anvil of student debt that still weighs on the shoulders of tens of millions of Americans. It could mean expanding the Child Tax Credit, which has been proven to be an effective lever to alleviate poverty. Or it could mean reimagining our broken healthcare system, on which the United States spends a whopping 42 percent more per capita than any other country in the world.

Instead, I use UBI as an example because it illustrates the cascade of good—for workers and our economy—that can result from raising the economic baseline for everyone.

than decreased her pursuit of full-time work. In fact, Stockton residents who received the stipend were 12 percent more likely to have a full-time job after the experiment. Recipients of the stipend also reported feeling lower levels of anxiety and depression than their control-group counterparts.

To me, what stands out from the Stockton trial is the same thing that stands out from the Great Resignation data: a modicum of a safety net is all it takes for workers to leave jobs that are not good enough. A Pew Research survey found that the three most common reasons workers quit in 2021 were low pay (63 percent), no opportunities for advancement (63 percent), and feeling disrespected at work (57 percent).

American politicians often talk about full-time work as if it were a precondition for dignity. It’s the same ethos behind policies that require people to be employed in order to receive welfare benefits. And although I agree that work can give people a sense of independence and purpose, paid labor is not the only means to that end.

There are millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic who are no less worthy of respect because they were let go—often through no fault of their own.

2021 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that 41 percent of Americans feel burned out. Only 36 percent of employees feel engaged at work.

Clearly, high levels of burnout and disengagement are systemic issues that meditation apps and Zoom happy hours won’t cure. And employers are starting to take notice—if for no other reason than it has become a very expensive problem. Researchers estimate that between lost productivity, employee disengagement, turnover, and absenteeism, burnout costs employers as much as $190 billion a year.

But independent of any particular policy, there are two preconditions for any organization that wants a healthy workplace culture: leaders must model the culture they hope to create, and companies must implement systems to protect employee time off.

But the bottom line is clear: unless company leaders model the culture they hope to create, it will never trickle down to the rest of the team.

DEFINE YOUR VERSION OF “GOOD ENOUGH”

Morrison’s work was important, but it was her livelihood, not her life. When I think about what it means to have a good enough job, I think about Morrison’s father’s wisdom: Go to work. Get your money. Come on home.

Through work, I’ve found meaning and purpose and lifelong friends. But the most important thing work has given me—the thing I need it to give to me—is enough money to live.

Speaking about a job as a transaction may seem crass. We’re told jobs are meant to be callings and vocations and passions, not mere paychecks. But companies already treat work transactionally. They hire employees who add value and fire employees who do not. Losing sight of this creates the conditions for exploitation.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were once at a holiday party thrown by a billionaire hedge fund manager when Vonnegut asked Heller a question: “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” “Well,” Heller responded, “I’ve got something he can never have.” “What on earth could that be, Joe?” Vonnegut asked. “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Morrison’s words, “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” A good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person you want to be.