Hi hello,
Many of us have been in this state of evaluating our work-life-balance, especially since the pandemic. We have shows like The Bear featuring characters coming to terms with the costs of their all-consuming professional ambition. We have more disillusioned employees aware that their jobs will not, at the end of the day, have their backs.
And yet I find myself thinking a lot about a passage I read in
’s newsletter back in spring. She writes:I think we’re in a transitional place, as a culture, regarding our preoccupations with work. Anti-careerism has been a focus for a while now among the young left, and while that’s been a healthy and necessary shift away from the hustle culture/girlboss era, I do think we’ve overcorrected a bit. That’s not a bad thing; it’s just the reality of the cultural dialectic. But I suspect we’re nearing the end of the romanticization of the clock-in-clock-out lifestyle, whereby it’s considered an act of self-care to not care about your job and to never do more than you’re asked. To be clear, these new norms are potent under the purview of the labor movement—to refuse to give more to your employer than it gives to you is a valid way to highlight exploitative policies. An employer and its employees are not actually “a big family.” This should continue to be highlighted. From a mental health perspective though, not caring about your work, which you most likely spend the majority of your waking hours doing, is actually pretty depressing, and I suspect a lot of people are learning this in real-time.
I was thinking about this last week while watching a basketball game with some friends. For the first 30 minutes, I technically watched but wasn’t actually paying attention or investing in the drama. After realizing how boring and unpleasant this was, I decided to try caring instead. I learned about the players and the stakes, asked questions about the parts I didn’t understand. Unsurprisingly, this changed everything, and quickly. By the second half of the game, I was hooting and hollering, making alliances with and enemies out of my friends, and generally feeling more present and awake. The time flew by. That night reminded me of how much more enjoyable it is to genuinely invest in whatever you’re doing, even if it’s not immediately appealing to you. This is especially true when it comes to work. It may sound easier to give nothing—to promise to keep your face pointed at the screen, and nothing more, to do “braindead” work—but I actually think it’s a lot harder. This isn’t a bid against work that others might deem unglamorous or boring (most jobs can be interesting to the right people), it’s a bid against apathy generally. I don’t think checking out for long stretches of time is good for the human spirit.
I really liked this, and it seems to fit with a lot of themes I’ve been thinking about this year related to attitudes and language. I’m lucky to have the kind of job I have and I don’t expect everyone to love their work or derive a huge sense of identity from it. But I also think there are more personal costs to embracing a reflexively anti-work ethos than people sometimes acknowledge. And I think I’ve felt pressure sometimes to feel guilty or lame about working hard, like it means I’m duped or operating under some false consciousness. But I don’t think that’s right, and I’m excited about a lot of things outside of work, too. I think caring about my job allows me to be a better, more informed, empathetic person for all those external things, and I think unfortunately if you can’t stand how you’re spending most of your waking working hours, those feelings more often than not tend to bleed over into your relationships and the corners of life you do care more about.
This is kind of a long way of saying I am proud of what I’ve done this year, I’m looking forward to reporting next year, and I also feel excited about non-work related things. I hope you have that too, or can take steps to finding it. Even if we “can’t have it all” we can have a lot.
In keeping with end-of-year roundups I did in 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015, I’m going to highlight a dozen pieces I’m most proud of from 2023, out of 43 stories I published this year.
1. How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood (12/4)
2. America’s Afterschool Afterthought (2/21)
4.Some homeless people won’t go to shelters. Should they be left outside? (9/14)
5. How housing activists and unions found common ground in California (8/21)
6.The new “science of reading” movement, explained (8/15)
7. Where are all the apartments for families? (4/23)
8. Fixing the child care crisis starts with understanding it (4/17)
9. Republicans’ abortion bans are nothing like those in Europe (6/6)
10.The next wave of abortion rights ballot measures looks different from the last (7/12)
11. A bold new federal experiment in giving renters’ cash (9/12)
12. Stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t need them (3/13)
Thanks so much for reading, and for tolerating this newsletter in your invariably crowded inboxes. Remember to send me tips next year! :)
See you in 2024,
Rachel
I don’t disagree with your example but what I see in huge swaths of the care economy (education, health care) are people who are deeply invested in doing their jobs well, yet conditions are set by bosses so that the employees who deliver the service must choose between breaking themselves emotionally and physically and doing a good job. Ultimately as you point out, it’s a catch-22, these people are not capable of doing their jobs without caring, so if they give anything less than self-destruction level effort, they hate themselves which causes “burnout” or “moral injury” or whatever the term is today. Either way I see care workers so physically and emotionally exhausted they are broken by their labor conditions.
Good life lesson, a hard one to give without feeling lame or like a secret boss but one that is definitely true!