The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

If your identity is entirely tied to one aspect of who you are—whether it be your job, your net worth, or your “success” as a parent—one snag, even if it’s out of your control, can shatter your self-esteem. But if you cultivate greater self-complexity and distinct sources of meaning, you’ll be better equipped to weather the inevitable challenges of life.

“I want to remind people that you have to create value outside of work to protect yourself,”

“Boundaries are crossed time and time again because you don’t know your own value.”

identities are like plants: they take time and attention to grow. Unless we make a conscious effort to water them, they can easily wither.

We should diversify our identities because doing so allows us to be more well-rounded people. It allows us to contribute to the world in different ways and to develop a sense of self-worth beyond the economic value we produce.

“Because I developed my identity outside of work, there’s a cost that if work cuts into it—if it ever costs me a larger part of my identity and my life—I know it’s not worth it.”

The Latin word for business, negotium, literally translates to “not-enjoyable activity.”

Worship beauty or money or power and you’ll be left feeling as though you never have enough.

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.

it’s important to remember that the workplace is just one container with one definition for what makes a valuable life.

when you don’t take an active role in determining what you value, you inherit the values of the systems around you.

“Do what you love and you’ll work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

the hypocrisy of an institution that was supposedly “open to all” became increasingly hard for her to bear.

“If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.”

treating a job as something else—a passion, a sacred duty—diminishes workers’ ability to call out and enact necessary changes.

“Not everybody has the same springboards and safety nets to parlay their passions into gainful employment,”

“If people are told to follow their passions, but we don’t provide an equal playing field in which they can do that, then telling people to follow their passions helps reinforce inequality.”

If I could go back in time and give myself a message, it would be to reiterate that my value as an artist doesn’t come from how much I create. I think that mind-set is yoked to capitalism. Being an artist is about how and why you touch people’s lives, even if it’s one person. Even if that’s yourself, in the process of art-making.

Enmeshment prevents a person from developing an independent self, as their personal boundaries are permeable and unclear.

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.

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. People like Megan, who tend to measure their self-worth based on their productivity, can learn a lot from those whose ability to be productive is often out of their control.

She started to define herself by her evergreen characteristics rather than by what she was able to produce.

“When you hit the bottom and you aren’t producing or contributing in any of the ways society expects and capitalism demands, you look around and ask: Do I have value?”

Clearly there’s a risk in relying on a single institution to fulfill so many roles in our lives. “With my work, I was really putting a lot of my eggs in this one basket,”

But I also saw the risks of a work-centered existence. After days of interacting with few people other than my coworkers, receiving one piece of critical feedback made me feel like a failure.

developing a sense of self outside of work starts by giving yourself permission to try something new and not be “good.”

Goal-oriented hobbies like signing up for a marathon or reading a certain number of books in a year can provide accountability to do things outside of work. But striving for a goal still imposes a frame of improvement, which implies work in a fundamental sense.

Figuring out who you are when you’re not working is a practice. It requires letting go of the control, validation, and comfort of a work-centric existence in order to ask a hard question: Who are you when you’re not producing?

What companies and families do share is a tricky power dynamic—a lesson Taylor eventually found out the hard way.

“When you’re a worker in a system where you’re only ever rewarded for outworking your peers, it can create a really unhealthy understanding of your place in the power structure,”

Overwork is not simply a matter of the number of hours worked, but also the intensity and unpredictability of those hours. People in lower-paid jobs have less control over when, where, and how hard they work.

“For the last seven years, I had interpreted that all the time in my day had to translate to economic value,” he told me. “And so when I couldn’t look back at my days and see an economic output, I started to feel like my days weren’t valuable.”

“If the reason you’re attracted to your employer is that they have free cupcakes, there are a bunch more cultural issues you have to unpack.” 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.

“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.”

I realized that the peace Khe feels is not because he ignores what others value. It’s because he’s balanced what others value with what he values himself.

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.”

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

As long as I believed that my self-worth was contingent on my ability to produce, the drive to produce more would always trump my intention to work less.

overwork is a systemic issue—one that is the result of economic, political, and cultural factors—and thus there are limits to individual interventions.

“When cultivating a healthy working culture becomes the responsibility of the individual, it will always fail. Full stop,”

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.

“If people see that their bosses are on all the time, they’ll feel some obligation to do the same.”

“The ability to disengage, relax, and recharge is as important as being ambitious, organized, and productive.”

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. 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.

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.

“What do you like to do?” It’s a question that allows you to define yourself on your own terms.

on the other side of deprioritizing work is prioritizing life.