#workism

“[W]hen we talk about ‘meaningful work,’ what do we actually mean? Negotiating peace treaties, growing food, making spectacular amounts of money—all of these can be framed as meaningful, depending on who is doing the framing, and what it is they truly want. Meaning isn’t something to be found, and it can’t be uncovered by heartfelt commitment, long hours, and self-sacrifice. Meaning is something we make.”

“Hodgkinson, a journalist and writer who runs the UK magazine The Idler, advocates for people to lead less busy, less driven lives, with more diverse sources of meaning than career alone. ... His solution is to let go of the idea that full-time work is the only possible route to success, suggesting that the model of the permanent, long-hours job should be scrutinized, and that workers can take their lives into their own hands by resisting its ubiquity. ... There’s a much more global story” than the American experience alone, says Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, a graduate business school with campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi, who originally trained in psychiatry. In Petriglieri’s conception, the difference between finding a situation bearable—possibly, indeed, happy—and unbearable is about whether we experience ourselves as performing a willing sacrifice, or simply as suffering. ...  For some, the ‘because’ of our job could be making the world a better place. But it could also simply be allowing us to pay the bills or care for our family. Meaning isn’t reserved for work with some ‘higher purpose.’ But it has to be there.”

“Many practical ways of combating the brutality of modern working come from within—not necessarily from self-optimization strategies or work hacks, but from simple changes that, in turn, change the culture around us. Leave the office at 6pm. Take holidays and talk about how completely you disconnected. Ask for paternity or maternity leave and take it, ostentatiously. Negotiate remote working and spend time at a cabin in the woods with your laptop and morning runs around the lake. Show your colleagues that you are free. Show yourself. This is true for managers, perhaps even more so than for workers: Petriglieri points out that when a manager has a talented report who is willing to make sacrifices, it’s particularly important for the manager to guard against exploiting them.”

Quartz, April 10, 2019: “The key to loving your job in the age of burnout,” by Cassie Werber

Manpower Group Q1, 2019: Employment Outlook Survey Global (20 pages, PDF)

Manpower Group Q2, 2019: Employment Outlook Survey Global (20 pages, PDF)

The Atlantic, February 24, 2019: “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” by Derek Thompson

BuzzFeed, January 5, 2019: “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen

Havard Business Review, August 28, 2018: “Are You Sacrificing for Your Work, or Just Suffering for It?” by Gianpiero Petriglieri 

The New Yorker, June 7, 2018: “The Bullshit-Job Boom,” by Nathan Heller

“The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.“

“But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.”

“On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies.”

“How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired the economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief—the faith, even—that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.”

The Atlantic, February 24, 2019: “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable: For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver,” by Derek Thompson

Harvard Business School, 2018: Valuing Time Over Money Predicts Happiness After a Major Life Transition: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Study of Graduating Students , by Ashley V. Whillans and Elizabeth W. Dunn (34 pages. PDF)

Spending Time

“While overall life satisfaction is a metric shaped by many variables, Hamermesh said there’s some research specifically on how stressed people are feeling about time. “Perhaps not surprisingly,” he writes in his forthcoming book, Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource, “any switch that increases time away from work reduces stress.” Some of the biggest reductions in feeling stressed about time, he notes, come from substituting an hour of sleep or TV-watching for an hour of work.”

“Americans of all stripes—millennials especially, some argue—are indeed burned out, and elites in particular have unrealistic expectations that work be not just remunerative, but self-defining and wholly fulfilling. It’s also true that the rising devotion to work in America correlates with a decline in religious worship. But work itself is neither a religion nor a substitute for it. ... [W]ork too often accomplishes precisely the opposite of what religion promises: It saps meaning from life.”

“Thompson defines workism as ‘a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community,’ later adding that it’s ‘the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.’ In an increasingly secular America, ‘workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.’”

“It may be that the decline of religious faith among America’s elite removed the restraints on a deep American drive to work and acquire. Without religious norms, there is little to keep the most ambitious from working all the time. ... When society becomes more secular, those limits on capitalist striving disappear. At that point, the capitalist spirit becomes ‘unbridled’ and, in [Max] Weber’s words, ‘the pursuit of wealth, divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn it into a sporting contest.’ This is an uncannily accurate picture of the work-obsessed mind in twenty-first century America.”

“American Protestantism may have gotten us into our current work obsession, but it and other religions—their practices adapted, perhaps, to secular tastes—also offer a way out. Religious observance interrupts the workday or workweek. ... You don’t necessarily have to go to church or mosque or synagogue to put rituals like this in place. It’s possible to create secular versions of them. You could treat the weekend for the purpose that the labor movement intended, as two consecutive work-free days. You could even submit to an ascetical regimen to free yourself from the yoke of work.”

The Republic, March 4, 2019: “How to Save Americans From the Hell of Work,” by Jonathan Malesic

The New York Times Magazine, February 21, 2019: “Wealthy, Successful and Miserable,” by Charles Duhigg

The Atlantic, February 24, 2019: “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” by Derek Thompson

The New York Times, January 26, 2019: “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” by Erin Griffith

The Republic, January 10, 2019: “Millennials Don’t Have a Monopoly on Burnout,” by Jonathan Malesic