The one thing I’m happy I’ve maintained from my foreign culture is that I don’t see work as an integral part of my identity. I want to do a good job, but work ends when I leave.
We’re Killing Ourselves with Work:
I’m not alone in viewing work as something like a religion. In a 2019 Pew Research report, Americans ranked “having a job or career they enjoy” as more essential to a fulfilling life than marriage, children, or a committed relationship of any kind.1 Another Pew report found that American teens ranked “having a job or career they enjoy” as even more important to them than “helping others who are in need.”2
The problem, though, is that our jobs don’t love us back. Americans put in more hours3 and take fewer days off4 than people in comparably large and rich countries, but only around half of us find our job satisfying, and just 20 percent5 find it engaging. For most of us, mistaking the desk for an altar leads not to self-actualization but to burnout and ennui. In Thompson’s words, “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight.”
Adding to the confusion is the fact that so much contemporary work doesn’t have a tangible impact. The currency of academia is producing papers that, on average, maybe 10 people will ever read.9 Even people in more “applied” fields of knowledge work are liable to have a hard time articulating exactly what they contribute to society. As the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote, “Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks that they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” How do we find a healthy relationship to our work when the work’s value is so unclear?