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over the course of the twentieth century work has evolved from a chore to a status to a means of self-actualization.
The modern ideology of workism asks two distinct pursuits—money and inner fulfillment—to coalesce. These pursuits are not always aligned, and yet we increasingly look to our jobs to satisfy both.
From Sweden to South Korea, wealthier and more educated adults mention their job as a source of meaning at about twice the rate of low earners and people without college degrees. Among other reasons, high earners are less likely to have other sources of meaning, like organized religion, in their lives.
Tethering your sense of self-worth to your career is a perilous game.
The question, then, is how to balance the pursuit of meaningful work with the risk of letting your job subsume who you are.
“Work will always be work. Some people work doing what they love. Other people work so that they can do what they love when they’re not working. Neither is more noble.”
In the words of psychotherapist Esther Perel, too many people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home. When we give all of our energy to our professional lives, we deprive the other identities that exist within each of us—spouse, parent, sibling, neighbor, friend, citizen, artist, traveler—of the nutrients to grow.
What we can control, however, are the expectations we place on our jobs. We can choose to subordinate work to life, rather than the other way around. It starts with a simple acknowledgment: you aren’t what you do.
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 want to remind people that you have to create value outside of work to protect yourself,”
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.
One common trait that researchers have found that correlates with meaning is high levels of what they call “self-determination.” In other words, people are more motivated and fulfilled when they determine what they value for themselves.
“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.”
It’s not just workers looking for passion; employers are looking for passionate workers, too.
quitting was the easy part. The more difficult task was figuring out who she was when she wasn’t working.
“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?”
“With my work, I was really putting a lot of my eggs in this one basket,” Ezra, the video producer, told me. “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.”
After days of interacting with few people other than my coworkers, receiving one piece of critical feedback made me feel like a failure.
“I don’t think you can be in full community with someone who has the ability to fire you.”
People work all the time, so they don’t know what to do when they aren’t working. And people don’t know what to do when they aren’t working, so they work all the time.
Play helps us remember that we exist to do more than just produce.
you can’t think yourself to better action, you’ve got to act yourself to better thinking.
“I do like work. I like what I do,” she said as she looked out to the street, cheeks flushed from the winter cold. “But I do wonder what percentage of my drive to work all the time is that I truly love it, and how much is that I don’t know what else to do with myself.”
A study from the workplace coaching startup BetterUp found that a sense of workplace belonging leads to a 56 percent improvement in job performance, a 50 percent reduction in turnover risk, and a 75 percent decrease in employee sick days.
“In the old industrial model of employment, the more hours you put in, the more products come out,” he explained. But if the product is an idea for a marketing campaign or a headline for a website, Josh found that there wasn’t a linear relationship between how many hours he put in and the quality of the output.
Other high-profile four-day-workweek experiments have been run at companies like the social media startup Buffer in the U.S., the New Zealand–based estate planning company Perpetual Guardian, and Microsoft Japan. In all three cases, productivity increased as much as 40 percent with the decrease in employees’ hours, while workers self-reported feeling less stressed and more satisfied.
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.
Ironically, at its San Francisco headquarters, the enterprise messaging company Slack has made an effort to discourage the phenomenon that its product helps perpetuate. Painted on the office wall is a message that summarizes the company’s philosophy on work: Work hard and go home.
It’s because work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.
One study of over 3 million workers from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that working from home led to a 13 percent increase in the number of meetings and an 8 percent increase in the length of the workday—an average of more than forty-eight minutes per worker.
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 our self-worth is tied solely to external rewards, we can spend our whole lives chasing carrots without ever feeling full.
“If you could go, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you went, would you still do it?” I was so grateful for that question. For the first time, it made me consider my intrinsic motivation.
“It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.”
In order to rest and, by extension, to dream, we first need to feel safe.
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.
Morrison’s work was important, but it was her livelihood, not her life.
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?” It’s a question that allows you to define yourself on your own terms.
