My husband just started a new job; I started a new job in January of this year. Both of these opportunities came after a period of not working for a year or more. During these hiatuses, we experienced some struggles and anxieties related to not finding a promising job opportunity, but we also recognized what a privilege it was, to be able to exist day after day without meetings and deadlines and fire drills and more importantly, to have substantial savings and to still be able to afford groceries and gas and the like.
So far, our new(ish) jobs are going well. My job checks the boxes of many things I said I wanted out of a job: smart, friendly, dedicated colleagues, subject matter that matters to me and to others a great deal, and opportunities for me to use different parts of my brain, like I get to creatively ideate as well as knuckle down on the details of execution that I care so much about getting right. I have written about what work means to me quite a few times in this space, so I’ll just link to those pieces here and here. For my spouse, it’s probably too early to tell, but so far, things are going well in that he likes the people and he’s already formed a feeling or two about why the work matters. These two things, IMHO, are more than half the battle.
During our respective work hiatuses, we were given the advice that we could officially retire now and live off of what I believe is called “passive income.” I don’t know if I fully believed in that advice, btw – with our country in such peril at the moment thanks to our feckless, corrupt leaders and our chronic disinterest in actually, you know, supporting humanity, it sometimes feels as if everyone is but a healthcare crisis away from bankruptcy and financial ruin. But I do know that I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of obtaining educational credentials without incurring debt; of having parents, on both sides of my marriage, who were successful immigrants to this country and who are absolutely committed to sharing their gains with their children and their grandchildren.
Every once in a while, nowadays, I still think about that advice – that we could have retired instead of taking these jobs – because it returns me to the core question that prompts me to write so often on this topic and still remains very relevant to me today – it’s the question of, why do I work? Why do any of us work, and how do our motivations differ from person to person and group to group?
The first motivation for working, usually, is money. You know how kids and young people are often asked or pushed to name what job occupation they want to do someday? (When I was 5, I distinctly remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a ballerina, and I also remember her answer: “But they have such ugly toes, dear.”) Oftentimes, their responses are either highly specific and ephemeral in nature, or vague and aspirational. This, to me, feels perfectly normal – kids and many teenagers and young adults don’t have a effing clue what a job or a career really is. They know that their parent or parents disappeared from their worlds for a good portion of every week, but they really had no idea what their parents’ jobs were or what it afforded them in terms of comfort, security, pleasure, etc.
But if you grow up in a lower-income or no-income household, you for sure know sooner rather than later that money is one of the reasons why people work. And then later on, you realize that growing up with little to no income means that a) you don’t take for granted what income can do and b) many doors are closed to you simply because you didn’t grow up privileged or wealthy.
(The phrase “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” which is such a favorite lie of conservatives, is really meaningless. In fact, the original meaning of the phrase was all about how absurdly impossible it was to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps – that one could not defy physics by elevating oneself above one’s boots, and it’s really modern conservatives that inverted the meaning of the phrase to imply that if only everyone could be more self-reliant, we wouldn’t have any more poverty or income inequality.)
The second reason many people work, I think, has to do with cultural and societal norms around identity and relevance. For example: there’s a nonstop push-pull discourse around women in the workplace. While we should be way past the notion that women can absolutely succeed as leaders and income-earners and the like, women still find themselves in impossible situations where we are expected to do all the things on the domestic front (childcare, cleaning, cooking) and somehow still generate income. Just one tiny example of this: regardless of work status, women are still treated as the default parent – the one who gets the school notifications, the committee requests, etc. I remember being looped into a group of parents who were trying to sort out a camping trip being planned by the friend group my son was in – everyone was fresh out of middle school, so things like transportation, reserving camp sites, etc., all had to be done by adults. ALL of the parents on the email thread were women; one woman, upon being added to the thread, sent an acerbic response asking for her ex-husband to also be on the thread, since they were divorced and shared custody. She absolutely rejected the default assumption that she was the only parent to deal with; I have found numerous times that it is tough for me to do the same.
I think the third reason people work is about shared purpose and community – I have re-discovered, since being at my new job, that it is a goddamn delight to work alongside smart, creative people – to give advice that is clearly valued, and to receive advice that feels useful and occasionally illuminating. (And, recently I gathered with friends and former colleagues from a long-ago job, and that experience reminded me of how many happy memories I have of working with great people, on worthwhile things.) And my husband has already experienced those same moments of gratification, as have our kids (to a much more limited extent – the job market feels a lot more exploitative and punishing when you are in your twenties). It is not ALL sunshine and roses – I have had stressful days, and moments that feel yucky, and during those days, I think to myself, “Why did I go back to work when I didn’t have to? Why do I still work at all?” And, I am missing the mental freedom I had when I wasn’t working – how much less crowded my brain felt, when I wasn’t juggling between work tasks and all of the tasks that come with being a parent, a spouse, and a loyal daughter whose parents are still alive and require a great deal of navigation help and support just to exist.
But then I return to all the times I wrote in this space about how much working actually, truly, means to me. And then I have a good moment or two at my job and I feel like I want to shout it from the rooftops, that it is, actually, still possible to find a job with an organization that is working to make a positive difference in the world and has hired really smart, fun people to do that. And it still holds true that for me, I work because I have yet to let go of the notion that I can be useful – to the organization I work for, to the people I work for and with, to the younger people I’ve mentored and advised over the years, and to my family, who would be fine if I didn’t work but understand and support why I still do.
Other thoughts I am having these days:
- We are getting fed so much slop and disinformation these days in our feeds, it is disheartening to think of how easily people will subscribe to a narrative, even when it’s NOT TRUE, which therefore weakens the foundations of facts and evidence even more. But I am wondering if people are getting just a teensy bit better at sifting through the slop and the crap to find the verified facts and storylines – for example, my feeds these past few days have been filled with the horrifying story of the (CONTENT WARNING) sexual assault of a young woman by several young men at a Cornell University fraternity house. So many people shared that the employer of one of the accused young men fired the person after learning of assault; a ton of people, however, immediately pointed out that the storyline was false . Once again, it made me ask myself how we are surviving these perilous times of misinformation and bad actors – being online, these days, is like swimming through crystal-clear, delightfully crisp water one moment, then the next moment you find yourself swimming through a swamp and not knowing if a carnivore is going to chomp a limb off. But I do wonder if people are getting better at sorting through the good content from the thoroughly spoiled.
- On that same note, when I was solo-consulting and writing many case studies about organizations still pursuing good causes and doing good work, I sometimes realized how disorienting it felt, to be flattened daily by horrible headlines and events but then get lifted up and inspired by the people and the causes I was writing about. We are caught in this endless cycle where it feels like, on one hand, there are truly horrific things happening daily, much of it perpetrated by our elected officials, and we are met with complicity, denials, and hypocrisy. But at the end of the day, every day, I still subscribe to hope. I still believe that there are plenty of people out there who are doing good things, on behalf of the people who have suffered the worst and most grievous harms in the past decade. I’m not going to give you the pablum advice of, “silence your phones, take a mental health break,” etc. (If it works for some of you, great, but it sure doesn’t work for all.) Instead, I would say something like, being a good person – to yourself, and to others – is an act of self-care. Doing good work, with good people – that is also an act of self-care.
