26. That's why they call it work

Hello! Some new folks have joined us in the last few weeks, so I just want to say welcome and thank you for being here. I’ll preface this essay about work and passion by saying that although the work of writing brings me so much meaning, no matter how much I love it, it will still be labor. If you enjoy it, I’d be honored if you’d consider financially supporting it.

The day this reaches your inbox will be my last day of work. For the past year and a half, I’ve been working at the front desk of a chiropractic and physical therapy office. Front desk being a loose term, as most of the time I’ve been seated at a makeshift kiosk my boss’s dad constructed out of fiberboard and squeezed into a back hallway between three bathrooms (the smells are something else let me tell you!). Regardless, today is my last day sitting there. 

Here I am at my little desk (briefly unmasked for the photo), office flip phone in left hand, taking patient information with my right.

It’s no secret that this isn’t the job of my dreams. In fact, I’ve never really loved a job I’ve had (though some short-term gigs had their charms). Work has always been a means to an end, a way to make some semblance of a living so that I can do the things I want to do in whatever time is left: namely, see my friends and write. 

Perhaps because of my dispassionate work history the last four years, it’s difficult for me to get on board with the defining idea of my generation that my work should be my passion, and therefore, my life. My life has always happened outside of work, in spite of work. Yet, even though I’ve kept my identity separate from what I did between 9 and 5, the nature of my work has still been important to me. 

From a young age I started adding moral valence to labor. There was good work and bad work. Good work helped people. It could be indirect, as in the narrative I told myself about my first job in a public health research institute: I was helping make critical research possible, and, in turn, this work would change policy. We were building a body of evidence that would shape the state of U.S. health care. I was working to understand, perhaps one day solve, one of the biggest problems in our country. Good work could, of course, also be direct. My job at the PT/chiropractic office, though less intellectually stimulating, felt like a more immediate means of helping people: I was helping them get care. 

Bad work was the work of sellouts, people in it for the money, cogs in the complex capitalist system. Bad work did not help people, and often made the world worse. Bad work was what happened at the banks that came to recruit my college classmates. All throughout my senior year, I’d watched the poaching process in action, as peers and friends put suits on and walked off campus to catered lunches and presentations by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and all the many consulting firms—McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman. 

Recruiters told the students sipping seltzer that they wanted the best minds in the country and that’s why they’d come to Yale because the students here were the future! Recruiters told these students that the work at their firms would prepare them for everything else—they would gain skills that would allow them to pivot into any career and then make a difference down the road. And for students who had been achieving the next thing their whole lives, had been told how smart they were their whole lives, had believed they could do anything and didn’t want to close a door, these words were enough to lure many into the fields the self-righteous of us labeled “soul-sucking.” Privately, I thought of them as evil. 

I am not proud of my rudimentary framework of good work and bad work, nor am I proud that I didn’t really consider why some people might take these jobs—often out of financial necessity. It is a privilege that I could choose to go into fields where I made less money, and when I hear about my friends’ salaries, I have to remind myself that this is a choice I am actively making. 

But even when I didn’t want to accept that fact of my choice, it was comforting to believe that I had chosen “good work.” Even if I didn’t like what I was doing every day, if it was good work, then I was a good person, because much as I wanted to resist the idea that job = identity, I wanted just as badly to find work that strengthened my identity because it mattered so much to me. I wanted to find “my passion.” 

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I was talking to my sister Anna about all of this, right after she’d been offered her first job, a second grade teaching position in an underfunded DC public school. She is one of those rare people who has known she’s wanted to be a teacher since before she could read. And she’s always been adamant about teaching in a public school. Anna and I grew up going to public school in Indiana, our middle and high schools both serving a large proportion of students who were living under the poverty line. In addition to being an institution she believes in, public school (until college, that is) is what she has always known. 

But Anna also worried that by taking a job at a school where most of the students lived in poverty, where a significant portion of the student population was unhoused, where the level of need outweighed the resources, she might be preparing herself to burn out in her first year of teaching. As we talked, walking around the neighborhood, I caught myself saying that this school was really “doing the good work.” It sounded vaguely religious. Indeed, when many people in my generation don’t participate in organized religion, work often fills the hole of meaning religion fills for others. And as a nonreligious person, my good/bad framework serves as something of a moral compass within our capitalist society. It’s a tool to help me find the work that could offer purpose, but also the work that might tell me who I am. 

Under this view, the harder and more self-sacrificing the work is, the more underpaid, under-resourced, under-acknowledged the work is, the nobler it is. The good work is the work of being a martyr. It is not a coincidence that the work I view as good, and perhaps more aptly, meaningful, is not prioritized in our society. This work is not highly profitable, so money is diverted away from it, and these jobs remain underpaid, under-resourced, and under-acknowledged. 

With some exceptions, capitalism does not reward teachers, journalists, researchers, social workers, public servants, healers—the careers I tend to identify as the most “worthwhile.” And I do think we should aspire to prioritize the work that helps people rather than the work that advances capitalism and entrenches inequality, but I also think the good work/bad work framework devolves into moralizing, and fails to advance the supposed primary cause of helping people. It’s worth troubling our current hierarchy of how work is valued and compensated, but my flimsy classifications of good and bad only alleviate my individual reservations about whether or not I’m doing the right thing, offering myself tepid confirmation that my morals are “good” while doing nothing to actually effect change. 

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My mom, who grew up in South Dakota and Minnesota without a lot of money, often jokes that she’s bestowed on my sister and me the same curse her parents bestowed on her: she just wants us to be happy. I have never felt pressure from my parents to go into any particular field, but perhaps that was in part because my parents had similar ideas of what “good work” was, even if never overtly stated.

It has taken me a long time to understand what might make me happy and has the potential to feel meaningful. (I hope that’s journalism, since that’s what I’m choosing to pursue.) But it’s taken me even longer to understand that getting to choose to pursue a passion, to choose my line of work based primarily on whether or not it feels meaningful, is in itself an immense privilege. For so long I wouldn’t recognize that perhaps the folks, or at least some of them, grinding away in investment banking offices are doing so because they didn't have a choice, or felt they didn’t have one. Because in our backwards society, there is rarely an end-of-year bonus for work that fills us up with meaning. 

Many people have discussed this more rigorously and eloquently than I have, but it continues to be something that I grapple with as I turn toward a career that I hope will give me purpose and allow me to work on big problems without taking over my life. I’m not sure if this work exists, and I worry that my pursuit of it will keep me climbing the rungs of a ladder searching for something I’ll never find. But I also believe that even if a career in journalism does end up being one I can be passionate about, it’s still just a job. 

I don’t believe labor can or should fully fill me up. Capitalism is not designed to incentivize us to pursue meaningful work; it is designed to exploit labor for profit. When we force our jobs to become our lives and our identities, we fall into the trap of workism, defined by Derek Thompson as the belief that our jobs will offer community and transcendence (a promise many of us have heard from potential employers). Under this belief, no matter how much we love our jobs, we are going to be disappointed and burnt out if we make them our lives. At the end of the day, work is just work, and life is all the other stuff—fulfillment, connection, community, joy, and if we’re lucky, transcendence. 

Fortnightly Faves

1. This deeply affecting short story from the New Yorker. CW: suicide.

2. The new season of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. There’s a total of nine stand-alone episodes, each made by different creators and ranging in length from 7-21 minutes. They’re all thought-provoking, and some are gorier and more disturbing than others. But if you just watch one, my favorite was “The Very Pulse of the Machine.”

3. Several popsicle walks, where you eat a popsicle and walk around the neighborhood. It is the perfect combo of refreshing and stimulating, and even better if you make Deb Perelman’s key lime pie popsicles, which I did.

4. This essay rang true to me (a very nostalgic person) in terms of how the digital age repackages nostalgia into something consumable and continuously experienced rather than a self-contained era we look back on with the wisdom of retrospect.

5. This Ada Limón poem, which is even better when she reads it (at 45:30 in this episode of the Ezra Klein Show), and which made me cry as I was walking south on Columbia Street, a street I have walked down many times, but never before listening to Ada Limón on my third-to-last day of work.

6. This interview about fangirls, which struck something in me, even though I don’t feel like I’ve ever really identified as a fangirl. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve realized how much I do love Harry Styles. :)

7. This comic by Sarah Mirk on gender and what the teens can teach us. This is part one, but check out the second part here.

   sarahmirk

   

   A post shared by Sarah Mirk (@sarahmirk)