“Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.”
I am a woman who stepped back from work for/with a rich *wife*, and we talk all the time about our conscious decision to do that—neither of us is under any illusion that she miraculously, alone, by her own white-male-esque virtue, got a 15% raise or is going to make partner or brought in a dozen new clients the year and a half after I quit my job. We both understand the work I do (literally everything else) is grueling and not particularly enriching but essential and allows her the focus she needs to compete with the men at her firm.
AND YET it’s still exhausting swimming against the current of “real” work = good, homemaking = basic, easy, stupid, especially as we increasingly understand that we’re complicit in the seepage of overwork culture to people who don’t have our privilege, for whom it isn’t a choice. I have an MBA and recognize that it’s just good business for our household for one of us to stay home, but I also feel compelled to tell everyone I have an MBA so they don’t think I’m “just” a spoiled housewife.
I don’t really have a point other than to say it all sucks, and also that the book Bullshit Jobs is what convinced me to quit and also made me a UBI convert.
This is a big part of why I went freelance. I make less money and have less stability, but I decide when my workday starts and ends. I say "no" to projects I don't have capacity to take on. I step away when I need to go to the dentist or take my cat to the vet on a weekday morning (or to grocery shop, if that's when it makes sense to do it!). If someone emails me at 6pm on a Friday, I respond the following Monday.
I recognize there's a lot of privilege at play that allows me to work this way, and part of the reason I have enough of a network to do it is that I worked for a decade in office jobs that did not respect balance or boundaries, and was generally successful at it. But I honestly felt like the only way to push back against unreasonable expectations was to not be an employee anymore. And I think it's pretty fucked up that it came to that.
MTCW: I’m not sure if the answer is for everyone to “work for themselves.” Not everyone can work from home, work for themselves, or become digital nomads. Someone actually has to do the childcare, clean the streets, run the grocery stores, etc. I think your point about legislation and changing the playing field is really worth driving home here. We don’t all need to leave the game if we can change it. Maybe I like working as a garbage collector or librarian or publicist and really just need better, different structures in place to allow me to do that and live a whole healthy life. Working for yourself is still working for someone. See what influencer link under this story.
This makes me think about how “burnout” has been appropriated by capitalism... sure, take a break when you’re burned out, but then DO make sure you come back to doing just as much work until you burn out again and again and again....
What if we all just worked less in general? What if we lowered the bar, and then lowered it again just to be sure?
Wow, this got me thinking in so many different directions.I feel like you draw nicely on the idea that many of these systems are participatory, and that they either force or incentivize participation in a way that precludes—or at least minimizes—group resistance.
A friend of mine recently finished med school later in life, and one of the things he was struck by was how unhealthy the whole process was. He said the general attitude from other doctors was "I went through this so you have to go through this." This seems to be a common theme in certain professions. (I had the feeling you'd written about this practice but I couldn't remember where.)Anyway, that all got me thinking about the French writer Édouard Louis's work. I started reading it early in the pandemic. He thinks a lot about ways that violence perpetuates violence—the ways that people who are treated violently so often enact that violence on others. He is very influenced by Bourdieu and his idea of symbolic violence ("Bourdieu's term for the imposition on subordinated groups by the dominant class of an ideology which legitimates and naturalizes the status quo"-borrowed from https://www.oxfordreference.com, because I'm not a philosopher). Reading your piece, I kept thinking about how these sliding work practices feel like forms of symbolic violence.
Lastly, I was listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Danielle Allen over the weekend and was really struck by something Allen said: "Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again." I do a lot of work/thinking about ideas of maintenance and Allen's sentence spoke to me about how the systems we design demand constant attention/maintenance—the same way a car engine requires maintenance. I think you so nicely highlight here how poorly maintained many of our systems around work have been, and how hard that maintenance work is without proper legislation. So many of the things you highlight reek of systems that have been allowed to decay. And that decay, in turn, is self-perpetuating: It eats up community investment, free time, socializing, mental health.
A small part of the larger problem, but the 43% of workers who feel guilty about the additional workload put on their peers when they use PTO is another example of how corporations take advantage of us. I'm on a small team, and nothing feels worse than coming back from vacation to learn that my peers' week was busier and more stressful as a result of me using days I was entitled to. Another burden we all bear in service of the almighty corporation :-/
Thanks for this piece. One thing popped to mind that feels related but is outside the scope of this piece (or might be reflected in some of the links you included) - "job creep" in hourly/retail settings as a type of overwork. So, not JUST the relentless invasive metrics/tracking technology gig workers are subjected to now. It's also the kind of weird psychological pressure to perform as if you were getting paid on commission .... when you're not. The pressure is INTENSE, as anyone knows who has ever had to push customers to apply for a branded credit card at checkout.
I used to have a part-time nonprofit job that I took in order to get out of a toxic workplace. I knew it wasn't going to pay the bills, so I layered on a part-time retail job (not chosen for any particular reason, I just didn't have a car at the time, and the jobs were in walking distance of one another; I could use the same bus stop for each). It was an upscaleish home furnishings national chain and it was so grim. Every sale at the register was "tracked" with the ID number of whoever had helped the customer. At the end of the day, the manager called into regional HQ and literally reported total sales for everyone that day, by name. WHY? Again, you will be paid exactly the same amount of money whether you make sales or not. We'd received marginal training on the products but the store advertised expert services, so it was to our advantage to just straight make shit up to sound knowledgeable and make customers feel good about their purchases. Moreover all of us were under such intense pressure to be chipper and have a good attitude. While closing, I would listen to the managers switch on their "happy voice" to leave an upbeat EOD report for regional. All possible because of the absolute precarity (threat of being fired or punished with not enough hours) and, I think, also because they could dangle the promise of a manager job over all of us. At the time (about a decade ago) a store manager job paid $40k and had benefits, so it was a serious material improvement, even if you had no interest in the company or "advancing" for any other reason.
All these companies are the same, so there's probably no reason for me to have gone into that level of detail about this specific one, but I think about it constantly when I'm out in the world buying stuff, when I'm thinking about the infuriating behavior of managers in Starbucks union-busting; they all rely on this culty environment to make profit margins work and I would love to read more about this psychological underpinning.
Nowadays I also think about it in my desk job, where sometimes it feels like SETTING ANNUAL GOALS!!! and CAREER DEVELOPMENT!!! is really just a giant scam to get us to work outside the scope of our jobs; unless your path to promotion has been spelled out, there's really no connection between increased effort and increased pay. Sometimes it doesn't feel so different from selling silk drapes and throw pillows with manufactured enthusiasm.
"The data isn’t surprising. But it underlines something that we’ve been talking about for some time now. The more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life. The more you’re paid, the more ostensibly prestigious your job, the more time you spend working outside of standard working hours."
I don't think overwork is particular to the educated, but I do think measuring this by email makes it look that way. When I worked retail everyone had multiple jobs, many of them taking place "after work hours." Is it really a luxury to "not get emails after hours" if you're standing on your feet at 11pm working your second shift of the day?
Excellent piece! I was the overwork queen ... until the pandemic broke something in me and everything became so much clearer. Now I work for a company that doesn’t operate on Friday afternoons and doesn’t email at night or on weekends. It’s fantastic and I’m never going back to my old ways. But I need to get better at taking vacation. Thanks for giving us things to consider in this realm!
I turned down a promotion two weeks ago because the position required checking emails after hours, weekends, and holidays. State government position tied to an industry that runs 24 hrs a day. My supervisor wasn't willing to negotiate on salary and wanted to pay me significantly less than others already in the position, for an undetermined amount of time. This low salary was due to experience I am lacking, but it wasn't that lack of experience that would require me to answer my phone at midnight if needed. I was filling in after the previous person in the position passed away. I filled in for a month before we got around to the salary negotiation and that month showed me clearly the salary didn't even come close to meeting the overwork levels required. So I said no-with the full support of my spouse.
The sense of relief I felt after saying no has made it clear I made the right decision for me. I fully recognize my privilege in being able to turn the promotion down. But if they weren't going to highly compensate me to give part of my life to them, more than they already get in a standard working day, it wasn't worth it for me. Reading this article today reinforces my decision and once again reaffirms my choice. Thank you!
see the thing that is wild for me is that my experience has been the complete opposite…when I worked a “stable” office job with benefits & hourly wages totaling around $43k at the end of the year which was not wonderful but i made it work, for the last 2 years that I was there i was kind of underemployed? i didn’t have enough tasks on my plate, so I would consistently ask other departments to give me work; and I spent a TON of time “looking busy”. i had a lot of residual trauma from that job where I was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum & a textbook case of the overwork that your article speaks of, so I left.
now I’m a “teaching artist” at a youth theater, no benefits, no paid time off, and if I’m very lucky my hourly wages at the end of this year will total to around $28k. i NEED full time hours, but on a good week they typically clock in at around 30-34 hours billed, on a bad week around 18-24. I am very good at my job and for the first time, I love what I do and DONT have imposter syndrome about work, but the job has more assignments & tasks due than any other position I’ve worked in my life. as a result in order to hit my deadlines and “save the show” and keep my job, I work at least 10hr a week off the clock. I’m really trying not to do this, but I’m a one person department and i HAVE to keep the plates spinning, because theater jobs are hard to come by, and nobody else knows how to do what I do. I was NEVER this kind of a person. I’m pro labor and try to think of myself as a leftist, but I feel like I’m failing at both of these things - to the detriment of my health & overall life.
needless to say I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering if working in my dream industry for super low pay is worth it, or if I’ll have to reinvent myself & switch industries a fourth time. It blows.
I've been struggling against overwork (both internally, against my inclinations and fears, and externally, against bosses and with coworkers) for the past five or so years of remote knowledge work.
But what's recently radicalized me about overwork even more is freelancing, which I started doing eight months ago. Now, if I want to work past 5:00 or on the weekend, it actually makes sense (though I try not to). The many cons of freelancing aside, the logic of work actually makes sense in that more work correlates with more pay.
That's made me much angrier about overwork in salaried industries where that correlation doesn't exist. You get paid what you get paid.
It's really made me wonder if there's a case for two extremes: Either you freelance in some capacity and can work more or less and get paid more or less; or you work salary and basically need a union to ensure you don't have to work more than your salary compensates you for. Even though the middle, full time without union, is what's normal, it now makes little to no sense to me.
Phew! Loved this piece. My current and last role were both launching and scaling internal startups. That kind of work comes with periods where there is just too much to be done within work hours, but I’ve always been honest with myself, my managers, and my team that I can only flex up for short periods of time. I “hit” a lot of life “milestones” (marriage, career advancement, kids) pretty young, and I think the thing that actually saved me from overwork (at my salaried job) was that my husband traveled all the time. I simply didn’t have the ability to work at night while solo parenting babies. Of course that meant that I took on much more of the unpaid labor in our household, but things have shifted now in terms of our workloads/schedules.
I think it’s great to see that a lot of Gen Z is setting more boundaries with work and resisting hustle culture (at least that’s the perception; haven’t seen a ton of research). With the ability to work from anywhere, and WFH becoming the norm, it can be all too easy for people new to the workforce (especially those without families) to work at all hours in an effort to show their dedication. I hope we continue to see pushback from Gen Z, and that Millennials and Gen X managers can better model those boundaries.
“Instead of figuring out how to connect all the lifeboats and ditching the ones with holes in the bottom, we keep frantically bailing our own.”
Yes! The irony is not lost on me that companies espouse “team work,” “go team,” “we are in this together,” but not really. It’s every employee against the others, who can maintain the right optics to maybe avoid making the next layoff list? I struggle with the cold reality of transactional relationship between me and my corporate employer. I work for a large tech company and felt the tectonic shift from last year to this year, as soon as “these tough economic times” became the rhetoric, the front line employees are the ones that bear the brunt of justifying worth to the corporate overlords, in the form of toxic, pointless metrics.
I’ve been struggling with office work for 2 decades. At the same time that work generates endless trainings, PowerPoints, and mantras for “how to be a good employee,” there’s no similar depth of guidance for much more important things- how to be a better parent, spouse, friend, or community member. Nor perhaps the time to focus on those things when work is so much of a drag on wellbeing.
Work is a very strong identity and a badge of honor for a lot of people. I can at least take satisfaction in not wearing that badge. But I haven’t figured out the rest of me yet. I have only so much time on the planet and there’s a lot more important things to do. I’m happiest when I have total free agency over my work life, and I probably don’t belong in a corporation but haven’t sorted any suitable alternative to support my family. I’m sure many folks will relate to this conundrum.
The malaise I feel make me question myself and my work ethic. But I DO want to work, who among us doesn’t want to produce value? I just don’t want to do it in service of “quarterly earnings expectations,” short-term thinking, and in service of the bullsh*t power trips and whims of leaders who don’t know my name but will decide how I ought to do my job or if my name goes on the next layoff list.
“Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands. They have rich husbands because they step back from work.”
I am a woman who stepped back from work for/with a rich *wife*, and we talk all the time about our conscious decision to do that—neither of us is under any illusion that she miraculously, alone, by her own white-male-esque virtue, got a 15% raise or is going to make partner or brought in a dozen new clients the year and a half after I quit my job. We both understand the work I do (literally everything else) is grueling and not particularly enriching but essential and allows her the focus she needs to compete with the men at her firm.
AND YET it’s still exhausting swimming against the current of “real” work = good, homemaking = basic, easy, stupid, especially as we increasingly understand that we’re complicit in the seepage of overwork culture to people who don’t have our privilege, for whom it isn’t a choice. I have an MBA and recognize that it’s just good business for our household for one of us to stay home, but I also feel compelled to tell everyone I have an MBA so they don’t think I’m “just” a spoiled housewife.
I don’t really have a point other than to say it all sucks, and also that the book Bullshit Jobs is what convinced me to quit and also made me a UBI convert.
This is a big part of why I went freelance. I make less money and have less stability, but I decide when my workday starts and ends. I say "no" to projects I don't have capacity to take on. I step away when I need to go to the dentist or take my cat to the vet on a weekday morning (or to grocery shop, if that's when it makes sense to do it!). If someone emails me at 6pm on a Friday, I respond the following Monday.
I recognize there's a lot of privilege at play that allows me to work this way, and part of the reason I have enough of a network to do it is that I worked for a decade in office jobs that did not respect balance or boundaries, and was generally successful at it. But I honestly felt like the only way to push back against unreasonable expectations was to not be an employee anymore. And I think it's pretty fucked up that it came to that.
MTCW: I’m not sure if the answer is for everyone to “work for themselves.” Not everyone can work from home, work for themselves, or become digital nomads. Someone actually has to do the childcare, clean the streets, run the grocery stores, etc. I think your point about legislation and changing the playing field is really worth driving home here. We don’t all need to leave the game if we can change it. Maybe I like working as a garbage collector or librarian or publicist and really just need better, different structures in place to allow me to do that and live a whole healthy life. Working for yourself is still working for someone. See what influencer link under this story.
This makes me think about how “burnout” has been appropriated by capitalism... sure, take a break when you’re burned out, but then DO make sure you come back to doing just as much work until you burn out again and again and again....
What if we all just worked less in general? What if we lowered the bar, and then lowered it again just to be sure?
Wow, this got me thinking in so many different directions.I feel like you draw nicely on the idea that many of these systems are participatory, and that they either force or incentivize participation in a way that precludes—or at least minimizes—group resistance.
A friend of mine recently finished med school later in life, and one of the things he was struck by was how unhealthy the whole process was. He said the general attitude from other doctors was "I went through this so you have to go through this." This seems to be a common theme in certain professions. (I had the feeling you'd written about this practice but I couldn't remember where.)Anyway, that all got me thinking about the French writer Édouard Louis's work. I started reading it early in the pandemic. He thinks a lot about ways that violence perpetuates violence—the ways that people who are treated violently so often enact that violence on others. He is very influenced by Bourdieu and his idea of symbolic violence ("Bourdieu's term for the imposition on subordinated groups by the dominant class of an ideology which legitimates and naturalizes the status quo"-borrowed from https://www.oxfordreference.com, because I'm not a philosopher). Reading your piece, I kept thinking about how these sliding work practices feel like forms of symbolic violence.
Lastly, I was listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Danielle Allen over the weekend and was really struck by something Allen said: "Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again." I do a lot of work/thinking about ideas of maintenance and Allen's sentence spoke to me about how the systems we design demand constant attention/maintenance—the same way a car engine requires maintenance. I think you so nicely highlight here how poorly maintained many of our systems around work have been, and how hard that maintenance work is without proper legislation. So many of the things you highlight reek of systems that have been allowed to decay. And that decay, in turn, is self-perpetuating: It eats up community investment, free time, socializing, mental health.
So much here to think about. Thank you.
A small part of the larger problem, but the 43% of workers who feel guilty about the additional workload put on their peers when they use PTO is another example of how corporations take advantage of us. I'm on a small team, and nothing feels worse than coming back from vacation to learn that my peers' week was busier and more stressful as a result of me using days I was entitled to. Another burden we all bear in service of the almighty corporation :-/
Expressing solidarity today - 155,000 Canadian public servants are on strike. Pay people what they are worth!
Thanks for this piece. One thing popped to mind that feels related but is outside the scope of this piece (or might be reflected in some of the links you included) - "job creep" in hourly/retail settings as a type of overwork. So, not JUST the relentless invasive metrics/tracking technology gig workers are subjected to now. It's also the kind of weird psychological pressure to perform as if you were getting paid on commission .... when you're not. The pressure is INTENSE, as anyone knows who has ever had to push customers to apply for a branded credit card at checkout.
I used to have a part-time nonprofit job that I took in order to get out of a toxic workplace. I knew it wasn't going to pay the bills, so I layered on a part-time retail job (not chosen for any particular reason, I just didn't have a car at the time, and the jobs were in walking distance of one another; I could use the same bus stop for each). It was an upscaleish home furnishings national chain and it was so grim. Every sale at the register was "tracked" with the ID number of whoever had helped the customer. At the end of the day, the manager called into regional HQ and literally reported total sales for everyone that day, by name. WHY? Again, you will be paid exactly the same amount of money whether you make sales or not. We'd received marginal training on the products but the store advertised expert services, so it was to our advantage to just straight make shit up to sound knowledgeable and make customers feel good about their purchases. Moreover all of us were under such intense pressure to be chipper and have a good attitude. While closing, I would listen to the managers switch on their "happy voice" to leave an upbeat EOD report for regional. All possible because of the absolute precarity (threat of being fired or punished with not enough hours) and, I think, also because they could dangle the promise of a manager job over all of us. At the time (about a decade ago) a store manager job paid $40k and had benefits, so it was a serious material improvement, even if you had no interest in the company or "advancing" for any other reason.
All these companies are the same, so there's probably no reason for me to have gone into that level of detail about this specific one, but I think about it constantly when I'm out in the world buying stuff, when I'm thinking about the infuriating behavior of managers in Starbucks union-busting; they all rely on this culty environment to make profit margins work and I would love to read more about this psychological underpinning.
Nowadays I also think about it in my desk job, where sometimes it feels like SETTING ANNUAL GOALS!!! and CAREER DEVELOPMENT!!! is really just a giant scam to get us to work outside the scope of our jobs; unless your path to promotion has been spelled out, there's really no connection between increased effort and increased pay. Sometimes it doesn't feel so different from selling silk drapes and throw pillows with manufactured enthusiasm.
"The data isn’t surprising. But it underlines something that we’ve been talking about for some time now. The more educated you are, the more money you make — the more time you spend working, and the slipperier your work becomes, oozing into all corners of your life. The more you’re paid, the more ostensibly prestigious your job, the more time you spend working outside of standard working hours."
I don't think overwork is particular to the educated, but I do think measuring this by email makes it look that way. When I worked retail everyone had multiple jobs, many of them taking place "after work hours." Is it really a luxury to "not get emails after hours" if you're standing on your feet at 11pm working your second shift of the day?
Excellent piece! I was the overwork queen ... until the pandemic broke something in me and everything became so much clearer. Now I work for a company that doesn’t operate on Friday afternoons and doesn’t email at night or on weekends. It’s fantastic and I’m never going back to my old ways. But I need to get better at taking vacation. Thanks for giving us things to consider in this realm!
I turned down a promotion two weeks ago because the position required checking emails after hours, weekends, and holidays. State government position tied to an industry that runs 24 hrs a day. My supervisor wasn't willing to negotiate on salary and wanted to pay me significantly less than others already in the position, for an undetermined amount of time. This low salary was due to experience I am lacking, but it wasn't that lack of experience that would require me to answer my phone at midnight if needed. I was filling in after the previous person in the position passed away. I filled in for a month before we got around to the salary negotiation and that month showed me clearly the salary didn't even come close to meeting the overwork levels required. So I said no-with the full support of my spouse.
The sense of relief I felt after saying no has made it clear I made the right decision for me. I fully recognize my privilege in being able to turn the promotion down. But if they weren't going to highly compensate me to give part of my life to them, more than they already get in a standard working day, it wasn't worth it for me. Reading this article today reinforces my decision and once again reaffirms my choice. Thank you!
love love loved this one. Thank you AHP!
see the thing that is wild for me is that my experience has been the complete opposite…when I worked a “stable” office job with benefits & hourly wages totaling around $43k at the end of the year which was not wonderful but i made it work, for the last 2 years that I was there i was kind of underemployed? i didn’t have enough tasks on my plate, so I would consistently ask other departments to give me work; and I spent a TON of time “looking busy”. i had a lot of residual trauma from that job where I was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum & a textbook case of the overwork that your article speaks of, so I left.
now I’m a “teaching artist” at a youth theater, no benefits, no paid time off, and if I’m very lucky my hourly wages at the end of this year will total to around $28k. i NEED full time hours, but on a good week they typically clock in at around 30-34 hours billed, on a bad week around 18-24. I am very good at my job and for the first time, I love what I do and DONT have imposter syndrome about work, but the job has more assignments & tasks due than any other position I’ve worked in my life. as a result in order to hit my deadlines and “save the show” and keep my job, I work at least 10hr a week off the clock. I’m really trying not to do this, but I’m a one person department and i HAVE to keep the plates spinning, because theater jobs are hard to come by, and nobody else knows how to do what I do. I was NEVER this kind of a person. I’m pro labor and try to think of myself as a leftist, but I feel like I’m failing at both of these things - to the detriment of my health & overall life.
needless to say I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering if working in my dream industry for super low pay is worth it, or if I’ll have to reinvent myself & switch industries a fourth time. It blows.
I've been struggling against overwork (both internally, against my inclinations and fears, and externally, against bosses and with coworkers) for the past five or so years of remote knowledge work.
But what's recently radicalized me about overwork even more is freelancing, which I started doing eight months ago. Now, if I want to work past 5:00 or on the weekend, it actually makes sense (though I try not to). The many cons of freelancing aside, the logic of work actually makes sense in that more work correlates with more pay.
That's made me much angrier about overwork in salaried industries where that correlation doesn't exist. You get paid what you get paid.
It's really made me wonder if there's a case for two extremes: Either you freelance in some capacity and can work more or less and get paid more or less; or you work salary and basically need a union to ensure you don't have to work more than your salary compensates you for. Even though the middle, full time without union, is what's normal, it now makes little to no sense to me.
Phew! Loved this piece. My current and last role were both launching and scaling internal startups. That kind of work comes with periods where there is just too much to be done within work hours, but I’ve always been honest with myself, my managers, and my team that I can only flex up for short periods of time. I “hit” a lot of life “milestones” (marriage, career advancement, kids) pretty young, and I think the thing that actually saved me from overwork (at my salaried job) was that my husband traveled all the time. I simply didn’t have the ability to work at night while solo parenting babies. Of course that meant that I took on much more of the unpaid labor in our household, but things have shifted now in terms of our workloads/schedules.
I think it’s great to see that a lot of Gen Z is setting more boundaries with work and resisting hustle culture (at least that’s the perception; haven’t seen a ton of research). With the ability to work from anywhere, and WFH becoming the norm, it can be all too easy for people new to the workforce (especially those without families) to work at all hours in an effort to show their dedication. I hope we continue to see pushback from Gen Z, and that Millennials and Gen X managers can better model those boundaries.
“Instead of figuring out how to connect all the lifeboats and ditching the ones with holes in the bottom, we keep frantically bailing our own.”
Yes! The irony is not lost on me that companies espouse “team work,” “go team,” “we are in this together,” but not really. It’s every employee against the others, who can maintain the right optics to maybe avoid making the next layoff list? I struggle with the cold reality of transactional relationship between me and my corporate employer. I work for a large tech company and felt the tectonic shift from last year to this year, as soon as “these tough economic times” became the rhetoric, the front line employees are the ones that bear the brunt of justifying worth to the corporate overlords, in the form of toxic, pointless metrics.
I’ve been struggling with office work for 2 decades. At the same time that work generates endless trainings, PowerPoints, and mantras for “how to be a good employee,” there’s no similar depth of guidance for much more important things- how to be a better parent, spouse, friend, or community member. Nor perhaps the time to focus on those things when work is so much of a drag on wellbeing.
Work is a very strong identity and a badge of honor for a lot of people. I can at least take satisfaction in not wearing that badge. But I haven’t figured out the rest of me yet. I have only so much time on the planet and there’s a lot more important things to do. I’m happiest when I have total free agency over my work life, and I probably don’t belong in a corporation but haven’t sorted any suitable alternative to support my family. I’m sure many folks will relate to this conundrum.
The malaise I feel make me question myself and my work ethic. But I DO want to work, who among us doesn’t want to produce value? I just don’t want to do it in service of “quarterly earnings expectations,” short-term thinking, and in service of the bullsh*t power trips and whims of leaders who don’t know my name but will decide how I ought to do my job or if my name goes on the next layoff list.
Can’t help but think of the contingent vs tenure track faculty dynamic