I would like nothing better than to write about people I know who are feeling happy and fulfilled in their jobs. But most of the people in my life, unfortunately, are not feeling that way. Those on the younger side are faced with existential questions about what they want to do with their lives, and whether their current career paths will provide fulfillment and enough financial success to be able to live the lives they want to have. They also worry about whether they will be able to afford a place to live, whether they will be able to travel and have adventures, and they wonder what type of behavior is okay to put up with at work and what type is not. Those on the older side are exhausted and burned-out from constant turmoil and upheavals at work, made even worse in many cases by the work disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perpetual work stress and exhaustion leaves a person vulnerable to a particular sort of fantasy, which is when we start to dream about getting a job that is “just a job” – meaning, a job that one does not emotionally invest in, that earns one a decent income and stability in return for a moderately reasonable amount of effort. “Just jobs” are jobs that do not make your heart strings thrum with joy; they are jobs that don’t in any way resemble what you dreamed you’d be doing when you thought about your future career path; they give you what you need to live but they don’t cause agita, heartburn, and debilitating stress. The Cut recently published an article titled, “I Just Want a Dumb Job,” featuring three women who pursued their dream careers and eventually concluded that for a whole host of reasons, their dream jobs were unsustainable. Now, they are working in jobs that in no way resemble their dream jobs and while they are less than excited about their jobs, they are also feeling much healthier and more stable overall. (I’ve also heard stories about people leaving high-paying executive jobs to work at Trader Joe’s, which would not make ME happy, but I gotta admit, the employees there seem pretty cheerful.)
This all sounds tempting – it reminds me of how often my friends and I, and my husband and I, talk longingly to each other during periods of extreme work stress about working in entry-level jobs where you show up, you get paid (albeit, not very much), and you go home. No round-the-clock emails and texts; no unreasonable demands on your time outside of your shifts. (With my friends, it’s usually a bookstore job, even though a) I’m not sure those jobs pay a living wage and b) I’m not sure there are enough bookstores to support the number of burned-out senior employees who want them. With my husband, who is a longtime successful senior leader, he always fixates on jobs that involve making steak subs or tacos.)
But this all leads me to pose the central questions of this piece: Is it really, truly possible to find a stress-free job that also pays a living wage and affords you stability and lack of drama? On a more fundamental level, is it possible for someone to achieve a mindset where a job is really, just a job – something purely transactional, with clear boundaries and expectations?
I think the answers to these questions depend on a number of things – most of them having to do with how well you understand who you are, and what makes you tick. To expound on that:
What sorts of jobs are you drawn to? I have spent almost my entire career in the social sector, working in communications for foundations and nonprofits. This means that I work on causes that I, and many others, care a great deal about – healthcare reform, climate change, education, criminal justice, affordable housing, reproductive health access. Caring passionately about the organization’s mission, and the outcomes you’re contributing to through your individual efforts, seems to be a hard-wired feature of these sorts of jobs. On top of that, I work in communications – a discipline that is largely based on engaging audiences through emotions, shared values, and storytelling. So, working for mission-minded organizations and being a communications professional make it hard for me to imagine a social sector job in which I could somehow maintain emotional distance – where the job would be “just a job.”
OTOH, if I were, let’s say, a marketing employee for a company that produced toothpaste, I could see how possible it would be to show up to work and dutifully fulfill my job responsibilities, and do nothing more and nothing less. But my goodness, I’d be bored out of my mind. Which leads me to my next question, which is:
What is your own, personal relationship to work? I recommend achieving a measure of self-awareness and honesty when it comes to this particular question. I, for example, am fantastically productive when I am working on something I truly care about, with people I like and respect – I will do anything and I will work my hardest and put in my best effort. But I can easily become a pain when things beyond my control cause a project to go completely pear-shaped. A very long time ago, I was repeatedly asked by many higher-ups at an organization I worked at to start a company-wide intranet, as a way of building culture and improving internal communications. It was something a lot of people wanted, but no one could agree on how it was going to get done and who was going to do the work (I could obviously do the concepting/communications/writing parts, but not the design/build on whatever antiquated platform we had available). I kept on getting repeatedly pressured about delivering on the intranet while encountering resistance from everyone and their mother about the additional resources I needed. This is exactly the type of situation that sends me ‘round the bend, when everyone is good at applying pressure or asking for things, but can’t seem to offer any help or solutions for the roadblocks.
A colleague of mine at the time said, “Your frustration is understandable. But what I don’t understand is why you feel so much anger about all of this.” I understood his question because he was a preternaturally calm person and from his POV, there was no good reason to get so angry or frustrated. (Anger is usually most detrimental to the person feeling it, although it’s scary for others to experience, too.) (I should also note that the intranet was built, and it looked great, and people really liked having it.)
But you see, I couldn’t stop myself from feeling those feelings. (This reminds me of when doctors tell you to just “do a better job of managing your stress!” Which to me underestimates the complex nature of how stress is triggered and perpetuated.) And that seems like a solid indicator that I am not the sort of person who can treat a job as “just a job.” I cannot do my work without putting my heart and my feelings into it. This, for me, has led to moments of brilliance and insane amounts of productivity, but it has also caused a great deal of stress, disappointment, and frustration.
Finally, what place does work occupy in your life? How much does it inform your identity? For most of my career, I’ve been a more-than-full-time type of person – meaning, I have never had the mindset that a job was a 9 to 5, weekday sort of thing. This might have a lot to do with my Korean cultural upbringing, from which I absorbed the lesson that success – in anything – hinges upon working harder than anyone else. The lessons of the Korean deli/store owners who kept their stores open all night so as to make enough money for their kids to attend Ivy League schools and become doctors or lawyers are firmly embedded in my cultural DNA. Even now, as a consultant and a writer, when I am not as hungry for money or recognition, I will spend hours and hours on a project because I care deeply about the quality of the final results.
Spending inordinate amounts of time working has some benefits. There is nothing like the camaraderie you build with your colleagues when you are working round-the-clock with them. There is nothing like the satisfaction you feel where you work and work at something because you want it to be good and the end result is, indeed, a triumph. Hard work, in other words, does have its rewards.
However: the more one gets invested in one’s work, the less likely it seems that a person can treat a job as “just a job.” The standard full-time work week in America is usually around 37.5 – 40 hours a per week. That’s a lot of time! Most importantly, that’s a LOT of time to spend doing something that you are not fully invested in, with your heart and your mind.
For me, knowing that I tend to go all-in on work means that I recognize that work IS a huge part of my identity. I’ve already spent so much of my life already as a working person! And the jobs I’ve had have been hugely impactful and meaningful in my life – for good and for ill. I am hugely proud of some of the things I’ve accomplished or been involved in, during my career, and feel grateful that I’ve met so many amazing people and learned so much, through the different phases of my career. At the same time, I still carry around a lot of grief and yes, some anger, about some of the shit that happened at some of my jobs.
I guess what I’m saying is that for me, the fantasy of finding a job that is “just a job” is exactly that – a fantasy. If I do continue to work – consulting and freelance writing are very up-and-down, every quarter I wonder if this is when I start sliding sideways into early retirement – I will never treat the job as just a job, because I simply can’t. It’s not who I am, and it’s not how I work, and it feels wrong for the types of projects I work on. However, if you are the sort of person who can work at a job in which you’re not emotionally involved, but still affords you stability and financial security with no heaping side helpings of stress, more power to you! In fact, I may even be a little bit jealous.
Minna Jung Consulting 