The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

by Simone Stolzoff

In the second half of the twentieth century, flexibility, individualism, and meaning supplanted job security, workplace protections, and collective solidarity for many American workers.

Work Won’t Love You Back.

Ignoring workplace malpractice is common in so-called labors of love.

“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,”

This exposed zookeepers to exploitation.

“By cloaking the labor in the language of ‘passion,’

“we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”

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

Not only must workers be passionate about their jobs, but they’re also asked to parade that passion around for the world to see.

Publishing that story didn’t just give Megan praise and recognition, it gave her an identity: she was a journalist.

She didn’t work particularly long hours—or at least not longer hours than she had worked in other jobs—but she came home feeling like “a broken shell of a person.”

Megan was flattered, but deep down she knew that no change in pay or role could erase her ennui.

Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe when someone’s interpersonal boundaries become blurred. Enmeshment prevents a person from developing an independent self, as their personal boundaries are permeable and unclear.

Erikson coined the term “identity crisis” to describe the veterans’ experience—a period of instability and insecurity that resulted from losing a critical part of who they were.

She learned how to create new “I am” statements that weren’t based on her output.

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

So even if one pillar were to crumble, her foundation would remain.

“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.”

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.”

They’ve excelled in school and worked hard to advance in their career, but are left asking, “Is this it?”

they’ve spent their adulthood so focused on climbing ladders that they feel lost when there aren’t more rungs to grab.

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.

A time sanctuary

giving yourself permission to try something new and not be “good.”

Play is a natural antidote to workism.

Figuring out who you are when you’re not working is a practice.

every time she followed her urge to work, she felt guilty for not relaxing.

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.”

that the reasons Americans work long hours vary widely based on industry and class. For

But even as the work wore him down, he interpreted his burnout as a sign of success.

“I’m sorry, Josh, but you’re not going to get it.” Without skipping a beat, Josh said, “All right, I’m leaving.”

He had given a lot of himself to Prophet. He needed to reclaim who he was without it.

“I could actually be well,” he told me. “And the only way I could do it was by opening up more time.”

a cultural movement to avoid promotions in order to minimize stress and maximize free time.

of “tang ping”—workers “lying flat” to actively resist the expectation of constant work.

We should work less because it allows us to be better humans.

Life became work, and work became a series of rinse-and-repeat days that felt indistinguishable from one another.

work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.

At four, he always changed physical locations—whether

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.

There was always another promotion or end-of-year bonus that temporarily anesthetized his existential dread.

When we say someone is successful, we rarely mean they are happy and healthy.

Khe’s life was a picture of résumé virtues.

It’s a game that humans have played as long as they’ve gathered in groups, and yet it’s also the cause of widespread suffering.

A problem occurs, however, when we enter into this game without first determining what we value beyond status.

our self-worth is tied solely to external rewards, we can spend our whole lives chasing carrots without ever feeling full.

Instead of determining our own definition of success, we buy one off the rack.

Video games offer what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls “a seductive level of value clarity.”

I was good at this game; I had spent my life jumping through academic hoops.