The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

like a driver on the highway who can’t remember the last five miles of road. Life became work, and work became a series of rinse-and-repeat days that felt indistinguishable from one another.

Since the Googleplex opened in the early aughts, the company’s Mountain View headquarters has been celebrated for its perks. Googlers play beach volleyball between meetings, book deskside massages, and sit down for multicourse dinners. But the true beneficiary of all the campus amenities is Google. They keep employees at work.

The goal of the office, according to Roberts, should be to make it as easy as possible for employees to get their work done and then to get on with their lives.

The office doesn’t need to be your bar or your gym or your go-to dinner spot—and not because cocktails or office gyms or catered dinners are inherently bad. It’s because work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.

Nancy Rothbard, a management professor at Wharton, believes there are broadly two types of workers: “integrators,” people who don’t mind blurring the boundary between work and home, and “segmentors,” people who have a strong desire to separate work from their personal life.

Managers should take note as well, as the same policy might not be as effective for two different workers. An integrator might appreciate the freedom of a flexible deadline so they can accomplish the work on their own schedule, but the same flexibility might stress out a segmentor, who prefers clear timelines.

developing a healthier relationship to work starts with defining what you want that relationship to be. If not, your employer will happily define the relationship for you.

When we say someone is successful, we rarely mean they are happy and healthy. We mean they make a lot of money. This is a truth Americans are hesitant to admit.

“We seek status because we don’t know our own preferences,”

“When we don’t trust our own definition of what is good, we let other people define it for us.”

When someone else determines what it means to be successful, there is no need to define it for yourself.

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

Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett concluded that internal satisfaction from an activity may decrease when the promise of an external reward looms.

He asked the millionaires two simple questions: How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10? And how much more money would you need to get to a 10 out of 10? Regardless of whether people had $1 million, $2 million, or $5 million, the respondents all answered the same way: that they’ll be happier when they have two to three times more money than they have now.

This isn’t to say that ambition and achievement are necessarily bad. But in order to satisfy our souls’ deepest yearnings, there must be alignment between our values and the values of the games we play. We need to make sure our notions of success are truly our own.

Value self-determination is simply figuring out what you care about for yourself. Figuring out your values allows you to tailor your definition of success to your unique personality and life circumstances.

The key is to craft a personal definition of success that takes into account what you value and what the market values—in the words of theologian Frederick Buechner, to figure out “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

“It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.”

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.

To decouple our human needs from our employment status is to declare that each of us has worth whether or not we have a full-time job.

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.

At the end of the day, a job is an economic contract. It’s an exchange of labor for money. The more clear-eyed we can be about that, the better.

“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.”

After interviewing hundreds of people and spending many hours with the central characters of this book, I found that those with the healthiest relationships to their work had one thing in common: they all had a strong sense of who they were when they weren’t working.

“You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”

I began this book with a simple question: what do you do? I want to end with a suggestion for how we might amend this canonical piece of American small talk. All it takes is adding two small words. “What do you like to do?”