Embracing the “Good Enough Job” in a Work-Devoted Culture

By

Brigid Schulte

When an enticing job offer came Simone Stolzoff's way a few years ago, the journalist faced a moment of crisis. The job was for a field outside his chosen profession of journalism. He felt frozen, forced to choose, not just between two jobs or two different career paths, but it felt like he was having to choose between two different identities.

He was shocked that his sense of self had become so wrapped up in work. That sparked a years-long odyssey to understand why Americans in particular are so work devoted-building on writer Derek Thompson's idea that work has become so like a religion in the United States that he dubbed it "workism."

The result of Stolzoff's search, his book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, takes readers into a deep history of work, the structure of the economy, policy choices and just how we got to the point where people are expected to follow their passion and find their dream job. Stolzoff argues that we need to reframe our relationship with work and embrace our larger selves and identities outside of work. Too often, Stolzoff writes, people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home.

His book comes as more research shows how the mantra to pursue passion, that work is a calling and a vehicle for self-fulfillment, can lead to workplaces taking advantage of people: why pay decent wages or offer career advancement when workers should just be grateful to have the opportunity to follow their dreams in the first place? "The rhetoric that a job is a passion or a "labor of love" obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract. The assumption that it isn't sets up the conditions for exploitation," Stolzoff writes in an essay.

It's a great and important read. My copy of Stolzoff's book is dog eared and underlined and filled with exclamation points and "aha" moments. The following is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Schulte: So howdid work become so central to many people's lives?

Stolzoff: One of the reasons why our relationship to work is so fraught in the United States is because the consequences of losing work are so dire. For example, the majority of Americans get their healthcare through their jobs.

There are also cultural factors. In the last few decades, the decline of other institutions like organized religion, and neighborhood and community groups, has left a vacuum where people still have a need for purpose and community and belonging. And many Americans have turned to the place where they spend the majority of their time, the office, to try and fulfill all those roles that used to be borne by a wider foundation of institutions.

Then you can look at economic factors, which really differ depending on what side of the income spectrum you're on. For lower earners, Americans have to work so much because of stagnant wages. Whereas some workers work to self-actualize, the majority of Americans work to survive. On the other end of the income spectrum, our tax structure and a number of different factors have led Americans to consolidate more wealth than a lot of our developed nation peers. And the more hours people work, the more wealth they can build. The irony is that the more successful you are in your career, it often means that you work more and more.

But the biggest issue that I focus on in the book is the subjective value that Americans give to work. Our country's mantra might as well be: "I produce, therefore I am." We live in a country where productivity and self-worth are tightly bound, and therefore more work, or work being central to your identity, is seen as a moral good.

Schulte: I've been fascinated by the research on what's called the"moralization of effort"-the idea that there may be some evolutionary programming that has left human beings valuing effort, even when it isn't effective or doesn't produce anything. In other words, at one time in human history, we valued the person who was industrious and we knew we could count on them to help us hunt and gather for food or build shelter. But in our modern era, it's come to mean putting a premium on often useless busywork.

Stolzoff: You can go back to our country's origin-the Protestant Work Ethic and capitalism were really the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA. It goes back to this very Calvinist idea that we are put on this earth to be able to work hard and prove that we are chosen to go to heaven, and our ability to work hard and find our calling is indicative of the ultimate future that we will have.

So even for that person who is showing up to work every day when there's nothing to do, it's not necessarily because their productivity is the thing that is worth valuing. It's the moral good of just showing up to work. That's in many ways a very ancient idea.

In recent years, we've really seen this taken to an extreme. In this country, we treat CEOs like celebrities. We plaster, "Always do what you love" on the walls of our coworking spaces. We deify these jobs that we have, as if you can't be a fully formed person until you find that job that allows you to do what you love.

Some people do what they love. But most people do what they have to, so they can do what they love when they're not working. And if we live in a country that says, "Your dream job is out there! Never stop searching!"and you haven't found it, it feels like it's some sort of personal or moral failing. It creates this formula for success that is tantalizing yet not attainable for the majority of us. And it creates a lot of room for disappointment.

Schulte: You talk about the office. And we have this assumption that following your passion is something that only knowledge or college-educated desk workers do, that they're the ones whose identities get wrapped up in finding their dream job. The conventional wisdom is that, for hourly or low-wage workers, they just have jobs and those jobs are just a means to an end. But it's more complicated than that, isn't it? I think of all the child care and home care workers I talk to. They are all very passionate about their work, even though working harder and harder often doesn't provide them with enough money to survive.

Stolzoff: The idea that work can be a source of self-actualization is a belief that those with privilege can afford to entertain. I interviewed this cook in this Pakistani restaurant, and he said, "Doing what you love, man, those people are blessed. I just work to get by." That's the reality for the majority of Americans. And yet, we still live in this culture where productivity and self-worth are so tightly bound.

I think there are two separate issues when thinking about more service and hourly work versus office and knowledge work. The problem with the lower wage sectors in this country is that we make it unreasonably hard to survive. When you're working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to put a roof over your head and support your loved ones, you're not necessarily concerning yourself with questions of "Is this my dream job?"

Whereas you have people coming in to knowledge jobs and thinking, "Is this job my vocational soulmate? Is it the perfect fit that will help me self-actualize in this lifetime?" Which has its own problems.

One bridge that was really useful for me to learn about it was this concept of "vocational awe," which is this idea that in certain lines of work, particularly nonprofit, passion-oriented jobs, service-oriented jobs, and creative jobs, we have the idea that having the privilege of doing the work is a form of compensation in of itself.

A lot of the problems of under compensation, of lacking workplace protections are on full display in these workplaces. Certain industries have this halo effect-education, healthcare, even screenwriters in Hollywood- where people say "You work for more than the money," or "There's a line of people at the door that would gladly take your job." One of the problems with this mentality is that it implies that our work choices are these individual, personal decisions, and therefore they don't require more structural interventions. The growth of the organized labor movement and unions is this realization that, "Wait, even if I am working in a field doing what I love or serving the public good, I am a worker still. And in order to have and exercise my voice, it makes sense to band together." Some of these systemic injustices that exist in some of these fields can get swept under the rug when we see them as passions or callings and not what they are-jobs .

Schulte: In your book, you write about how Steve Jobs told people to keep looking until they found their dream job, and then you contrast that with someone on Tik Tok saying, "I have no dream job. I do not dream of labor." So how do we move out of this idea that work should be a passion and that work should be central or all-consuming in our lives? We tend to think these are individual problems that require individual solutions. And we do need to think, what can an individual do? But what about the bigger factors that may be influencing our decisions? How can organizations or policymakers shift our work-focused lives?

Stolzoff: Yeah, "Care less about your job" is not very actionable advice. I also want to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with aligning your interests with your way of making a living, finding work that you are passionate about, that you care about, that you think will make a difference.

I think the important part is that when the work day is done, you have the capacity to go home. I think at the individual level, the best thing that we can do is make sure that we're investing in other facets of who we are, that we're diversifying our identities in the same way that an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolio. We, too, benefit from being able to invest in these different sides of who we are. We are all more than just workers. We are parents and siblings and friends and neighbors and citizens, and all of these other identities need time and attention in order to grow.

The research backs this up as well. It says that people who have greater self-complexity, people who have invested in different facets of their being, tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes sense. If you're rising and falling based on your professional accomplishments and your boss says something disparaging, or you have a bad day at work, it can very easily spill over into all other facets of your life, if you aren't investing in other sides of who you are.

Research also shows that people who have greater interests and hobbies tend to be more creative, more innovative. And it's not just us, but our society can benefit when people have time to invest in their local communities or get involved in causes that they care about.

But the point that you made is true-it's not just on the individuals to shoulder these burdens. A lot of our broken relationship to work is systemic, and therefore interventions have to be made at the systems level of the firm or the company or society as a whole.

One of the foundational ways that we can develop a better relationship to work as a country is to make the consequences of losing work less dire, to decouple our work from our basic human needs and our survival. The things that we've seen in the pandemic that moves towards more universal childcare, universal healthcare, re-knitting of our frayed social safety net-these are the types of policy interventions that will lift all ships.

At the company level, a worker can have an intention to work less, but if it's the end of the quarter, or their boss is telling them that they have to do certain things, or they get paid by the hour, those intentions can only go so far. The most progressive employers are taking a longer view and thinking about sustainable productivity, as opposed to just short-term gains that tend to burn their employees out.

I'm inspired by leaders who model the type of cultures that they hope to create. If your boss is always online, or responding to emails at 11 p.m., that's going to trickle down to the rest of the company. And I'm inspired by companies that create structural protections for their employees' lives outside of work: mandatory minimum vacation days, or robust policies around health and personal paid family or sick leave. These are ways to ensure that their employees are seen as not just workers, but full humans as well.

The irony here is that, especially with a tight labor market, employers who honor their employees' full lives will attract the best employees. They'll retain the best employees. They'll have less churn and hopefully be able to demonstrate in the actual business results the benefit of taking a longer view and creating a culture of sustainable productivity.

It's not just a burden to be placed on the individual or society. The data point that I always come back to is that, in Japan new fathers are entitled to up to a year of paid time off. And the last data that I looked at showed that a paltry 5 percent of the fathers took the time that they were allotted. So there are these two prerequisites for change. One is the structural forces, the policies in place to allow people to have lives outside of work. But then we also need to have the cultural will for people to take advantage of these policies. It's not just individuals or institutions. we require a new perspective, a new way. A cultural revolution, if you will. And I think that's underway right now.

Schulte: So just whatis a good enough job?

Stolzoff: You might think that it's a slacker manifesto or an excuse for people to spend more time sitting on the couch. I don't believe that. I think work is really important. We do it more than just about anything else. But I argue that it's best if we're able to think first about what makes a life well lived, and then think about the ways in which our jobs and our careers can support that vision, rather than the other way around.

If you're making decisions based on what society values without considering what you yourself value, you could find yourself in a position where you are working your way up a career ladder that you don't actually want to be on, or playing a game that you actually have no interest in winning. I saw this a lot with high-achieving folks in industries like finance or law, where they're very driven by these external forces of motivation without actually checking in with what they themselves value.

There's also risk when people sometimes overvalue what they value, without considering what society at large values. I'm thinking about people who might try and go all in to pursue their art, but become so preoccupied with how they're going to make rent that they can't actually focus on the art that they hope to create. Or people that take on lots of student debt in order to pursue a graduate degree that might not lead to stable job prospects on the other side.

So I think the sweet spot is finding that balance-holding what we value in one hand, holding what society values in the other hand, and trying to find work at their intersection.

Schulte: You write about the need to diversify our lives. Is that something you've had to do? And have you found the sweet spot with a good enough job?

Stolzoff: This was particularly true after I left the design job and started working for myself. I'm working on my second book right now, which is about uncertainty and how to get better at dealing with what we don't know. It's a very big topic and relevant to climate change and AI and automation and people's careers, but also just our normal decisions in daily life and relationships and self-doubt.

I had this assumption that my tendency to overwork and to open up the laptop on the weekends was a function of the companies that I worked for or the industries in which I worked. And then I started working for myself and quickly learned that "Oh, wait. I am the problem. I'm the worst manager that I've ever had." It was my own fears of not getting enough done, or not being worthy, or not being able to prove my self-worth that kept me working late and opening up the laptop when I'd vowed not to, and having very porous boundaries between when I was on and off the clock.

One thing that I found in my own life is that intentions to work less are all well and good. But the problem with these individually imposed boundaries is that they inevitably break. And so I've tried to find more structural protections from overworking, like investing in other activities. For example, my wife and I love to salsa dance. And one of the great things about the dancing world is that people could care less about what you do for work. No one cares how many books I sold that day, or how many pieces I've written. It's another container that has a different set of values. And that's something that I always urge people to think about is-certainly the office or work is one container, with one set of metrics that matter, but how can you find other containers in your life? Whether it's through your family or your relationships or your hobbies, just things to remind yourself that we exist on this earth to do more than just produce economic value. And I think the more containers you have, the more well-rounded, fuller version of yourself you'll become.

Schulte: So where do we go from here? Do you have a call to action for people?

Stolzoff: There are many different paths. And if you're holding your breath waiting for universal healthcare, you're gonna suffocate. Some of the things that you can do just exist in the way in which we talk about work and our jobs. It's such an American way to start a conversation, to ask, "What do you do?" Or assume that people's jobs define them.

One thing that I urge people to try is to find ways to center other parts of people's identities beyond just what they do for work. And so a cheeky suggestion that I give at the end of the book is instead of asking people, "What do you do?" try asking people, "What do you like to do?" Just by inserting those two little words, hopefully you can have a conversation that is more rich and about more than just how people earn a living.

I think some of our enlightened peer nations around the world have very much taken this to heart. The way in which Americans center work isn't just at the policy level, but it's also in the conversations that we have and in the ways that we think of ourselves. And so as individuals, I hope that you can try and carve out some time in your days and your weeks in your life to make sure that you're investing in other facets of yourself beyond just the professional side. Because we would all be better off for it. It'll create better relationships. It'll create tighter-knit communities and neighborhoods and ultimately a better society.