The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

Good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means—to define your relationship to your work without letting it define you.

Much as an investor benefits from diversifying their investments, we, too, benefit from diversifying our sources of identity and meaning.

Psychological research shows that when we invest, as Divya did, in different sides of ourselves, we’re better at dealing with setbacks. In contrast, the more we let one part of who we are define us, the less resilient we are to change.

I worshipped work, and as a result, settling for anything less than a job that was absolutely perfect felt like a failure. It was only by removing work from its pedestal that I was able to see my work as part, but not all, of who I was.

And when you invest in multiple sources of meaning—when you, like Ryan, hold multiple definitions of what makes life valuable—you invest in yourself in a way no company, boss, or market can control.

In the fifty years since Parachute’s publication, mentions of the phrase “dream job” in books have grown by over 10,000 percent. If workism is the religion, dream jobs are the deities. But there’s a dark side of expecting work to always be dreamy. “The problem with this gospel—your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion,” writes Derek Thompson. “It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.”

Promoting the message that a profession is inherently righteous allows people in positions of power to characterize injustices as isolated incidents

Fobazi coined a term for this—vocational awe—and wrote an academic paper about its prevalence in librarians. In the paper, she defines vocational awe as the belief that workplaces and institutions like libraries “are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique.” In other words, the halo effect of the industry prevents people from seeing—or acting upon—problems that may exist within it. When workplace issues crop up, such as undercompensation, racism, or sexism, they are seen as isolated incidents rather than systemic flaws.

“The problem with vocational awe is the efficacy of one’s work is directly tied to their amount of passion (or lack thereof), rather than fulfillment of core job duties,”

“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.”

when love and passion become stand-ins for fair pay, fair hours, and fair benefits, workers suffer.

those who follow their passion can end up in positions that amplify their vulnerability—especially

She learned how to create new “I am” statements that weren’t based on her output. “I am generous with my time, I am full of love, I am a good listener,” she told herself. She started to define herself by her evergreen characteristics rather than by what she was able to produce.

“You’re basically saying, this is my social life, my sense of purpose, this is also how I feed myself and my family, and, at any point, someone else can take that away from me.”

There’s a saying in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature that you can’t think yourself to better action, you’ve got to act yourself to better thinking. Figuring out who you are when you’re not working is a practice.

The researchers also found that workplaces with close ties among employees can inhibit knowledge sharing across the organization, as information travels through the bonds of social ties rather than through channels visible to everyone.

In one study, four days hiking in nature without access to technology increased participants’ creative problem-solving ability by as much as 50 percent.

A 2014 study of munition workers by Stanford economics professor John Pencavel found that productivity per hour sharply declined after working fifty hours. And Pencavel discovered that those who worked seventy hours didn’t get any more done than those who worked fifty-six hours.

We shouldn’t work less just because it allows us to be better workers. We should work less because it allows us to be better humans.

Whether your work requires putting out physical or figurative fires, knowing your place on the integrator-segmentor spectrum might help you set healthy boundaries or articulate your preferences to your manager. For example, segmentors may prefer to stick to a predetermined schedule for working hours, while integrators might prefer to intersperse personal tasks, such as exercise or childcare, between periods of work. 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.

studies show that productivity and face-to-face communication actually decrease in open office plans. Employees report feeling the pressure to work longer hours and decreased levels of engagement.

for those of us lucky enough to choose how work fits into our lives, the most important thing is that we actively make a choice. If we don’t, work can expand like a gas and fill any available space.

“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.”

But when we assume others’ values as our own, we undermine our autonomy. Instead of determining our own definition of success, we buy one off the rack.

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

After listening to me ramble on about the pro/con list I had sketched in my head, Robin asked me a question that cut through the noise: “If you could go, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you went, would you still do it?”

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.

Games tell us exactly what we should be doing, and exactly how well we’re doing it. They provide a sort of existential balm.

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 by wrestling with work’s place that we uncover what we care about.

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

leaders must model the culture they hope to create, and companies must implement systems to protect employee time off.

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.”

In 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.

All it takes is adding two small words. “What do you like to do?” It’s a question that allows you to define yourself on your own terms. Maybe you like to read fiction. Maybe you like to cook Mediterranean food. Maybe you like to watercolor or to write. Maybe you do those things for work. Maybe you don’t. Maybe that’s good enough.