The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

But in the United States, how we make money is shorthand for who we are. Our livelihoods have become our lives.

That said, few Americans are immune to the culture of workism in this country. Regardless of class, nearly every worker I spoke to commented on the pressure of living in a country where self-worth and work are so tightly bound. Here, capitalism is not just an economic system; it’s also a social philosophy—a philosophy that says a person is as valuable as their output. In the United States, productivity is more than a measurement; it’s a moral good.

The answer, in short, is that the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering. Studies show that an “obsessive passion” for work leads to higher rates of burnout and work-related stress.

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

“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.

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.

More than anything, I stopped obsessing so much about my choice. I saw my job as good enough.

Ignoring workplace malpractice is common in so-called labors of love. The idea that library science is a “sacred duty” is the same philosophy that encourages underslept healthcare workers to “put the patients first,” underresourced teachers to “just make do with what you have,” and unpaid college students to take an internship “for the experience.”

Following your passion works best for folks with the privilege to manage the inherent risk of doing so.

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.

The reasons Americans are so lonely are manifold. For one, many workers, like Megan’s parents, have moved away from their hometowns and communities in search of better job opportunities. Add on the decline in social and religious groups, and you get a situation where, as Murthy goes on to explain, work has become many Americans’ primary social circle.

Koretz believes the reason so many of her clients feel this ambiguous sense of disappointment is because they’ve spent their adulthood so focused on climbing ladders that they feel lost when there aren’t more rungs to grab.

The first is to intentionally carve out space for nonwork time.

A time sanctuary can take many forms—an hour a day with your phone in airplane mode, a weekly hobby date with a friend—but regardless of what it looks like or when it is, Koretz believes it’s important to designate time when work is not an option. One of the benefits of, say, going to church or a yoga class is that it’s impossible to work while you’re there. Although many of us intend to work less, work seeps back in unless we actively protect time away from it.

Put simply, if we want to understand who we are when we’re not working, we must do things other than work.

But I can’t help thinking that, through all of our quantified ambition, we lose sight of the wisdom we all knew as children: the joy of play.

But in the first few months, every time she started to relax, she felt the urge to be productive—to either figure out her next step or write a book proposal. But then every time she followed her urge to work, she felt guilty for not relaxing.

What companies generally mean when they say they’re like a family is that they look out for their employees. Familial relationships, however, are unconditional. At-will employment, by definition, is not. Loyalty to the business will always supersede loyalty to employees.

But for workers, relying on work as their primary social community is often fraught. Although employees with friends at the office tend to perform better, they also report being more emotionally exhausted and conflict-avoidant.

I didn’t need a bespectacled manager urging me to juice the economic value from every minute of my days. I micromanaged myself, using each checkout line and elevator ride as an opportunity to tap out one more email.

The research proves a truth we know intuitively: more time to complete a task often means less efficient work.

Yes, working less helps us be more productive. Yes, rest helps our brain function and improves our health, our mood, and our body’s ability to heal. But in addition to all of that, more time away from work allows us to be better friends and neighbors. It allows us to pick up our kids from school and have dinner more often as a family. It allows us to exercise regularly and read for pleasure and create art that no one has to see. It allows us to find time to get involved in local politics and to take a nap when we’re tired. Put simply, working less allows us to be fuller versions of ourselves.

“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.

How did my job become so central to my identity? And how might I separate my self-worth from my output?

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.

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.

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 parents and caregivers whose work is no less dignified because it is unpaid. 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.

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.

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.