Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: The Good Enough Job

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Today on The Sunday Story, author Simone Stolzoff discusses his book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, about our complicated relationship with work. Stolzoff explains how as jobs have changed over generations, so has the meaning we derive from working. Stolzoff shares his findings on our modern relationship with work and ways we can find more balance in our lives.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

So I just got back from some time off. You know, I love my job. And I have to say that with this job that I have currently, it's not super hard to get back into work. But I have had jobs where it was tough. And even though I really do love my job, sometimes you just want to sleep in and watch TV, right? Like, you know, you don't always want to get up and do something. But there's also when you have a job that, you know, sometimes maybe you don't love as much, it can be a lot of pressure. And it turns out that just taking a

vacation might not be enough to combat the burnout that so many people are feeling right now. Like you can't just book a trip to the Bahamas and Lord knows I wish I could go to the Bahamas and expect to feel better about work when you get back. It's still the same. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. In his new book, The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work, author Simone Stolzhoff says we need to completely reimagine our relationship with work. Stolzhoff says many Americans, especially those who have the privilege to choose what they do for a living, wrap too much of their identity into their jobs. And his book puts language to a struggle so many people have.

So for Labor Day weekend here at the Sunday Story, we're bringing you a conversation between author Simone Stolzoff and NPR producer Raina Cohen. The two of them met three years ago when they were paired up as accountability partners in a class for aspiring book writers. Raina got a front row seat to Stolzoff's deep dive into America's troubled relationship to work. Here's Raina. She's going to take it from here. Hey, Simo. I'm so glad we get to sit down and talk about your book today. It's a pleasure to be here. So your book profiles all these different workers across the U.S., but at the beginning, you do get personal and talk about your relationship to the topic, and you say that

you are a workist. I don't think that's a term that a lot of people know. So what is a workist? A workist is a term that was originally coined by the journalist Derek Thompson, and it refers to someone who looks to work as a religious person might look to God. So not just looking to work for a paycheck, but also for a source of meaning and identity and purpose and community. And as I argue in the book, this is a relatively new phenomenon. We did not always look to work for such a burden. When you listed out those things like looking to our jobs for meaning and identity, it really sounds like we were asking for a lot. What were you trying to understand about this relationship that people have to their work?

I was trying to understand how we got here. So how work has come to be so central to so many Americans' identities and sources of meaning, whether this is something that is different from how people looked at work in the past, and then also what are the costs of looking to work to be so central in our lives. If you look to work as your sole source of identity and meaning, it can be a risky proposition because your job might not always be there. If your job is your primary source of identity and you lose your job, either to a furlough or to a layoff, as so many people have found in the past few years, it can leave you hung out to dry.

If you treat your job as your primary source of identity and meaning, it can neglect other parts of who you are. Certainly we are all more than just workers. We are neighbors and friends and parents and siblings and citizens. And yet if we are giving all of our best energy and time just to one aspect of who we are, we can become less well-rounded versions of ourselves. So everything that you're describing here makes me think of some of the family history that you talk about early on and tracing different generations in your family. If we look at those different generations, what do we learn about how Americans' relationship to work has changed over time? Yeah, so I think first and foremost, there's something cross-cultural about it. My family is Italian, and Italy is a country that has a different value system than the majority of us here in the United

States. So my grandma, for example, grew up in a very small town in Puglia in southern Italy, where all of my uncles and aunts and cousins still live. And first and foremost, she was a woman of faith, someone that worshipped and devoted her life to God. Second, I'd say family was probably her second priority. Many of my family members still get together for lunch on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at a long table with 10 or 12 folks. And work was important, but it was more of a means to an end. She worked in a coffee shop in that small town in which she lived. I still remember the bulbous bicep she had from pulling down the manual lever of the coffee machine. So first she was a woman of faith,

then a woman of family, and her work was important, but not the entirety of her identity. Then you think about my parents, who are both psychologists, they are boomers, and they very much have treated work as a way to support the life that they want to lead. So yes, they chose a profession that aligned with their interests, but also were very real about the economic purpose that work serves in their life, in order to pay for their material livelihood and to pay for, for example, their son to become overly educated and concerned with these finer things of society. I'm reminded of the common phrase that my grandfather was in the

military so that my father could be an engineer so that I could become a poet. And it's very much true for me in college. I studied poetry, actually poetry and economics. You can already see a little bit of a tension between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce in my life. And from a young age, I thought, you know, work is the thing that I'm going to do more than anything else. And so choosing what to do for work is the most consequential decision

I could make. So I spent my 20s playing Goldilocks with careers, looking for that vocational soul mate, that perfect job. And I worked in advertising, and I worked in tech, and I worked in journalism, and I worked in design, all the while trying to find that perfect job. And it wasn't until after this meandering career looking for perfection that I found out that maybe I was the problem and having too high expectations about what a job could deliver. And these expectations of transcendence, of self-actualization, are not actually burdens our jobs are designed to bear. Where do you think that we're getting these messages that work should be transcendent and self-actualizing? I think there are different ways to slice it.

I think there are things that are cultural in nature, things that are political, economic, historical. If you think back to our country's foundation, the Protestant work ethic and capitalism were really the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA. You might think that conflating work and identity is nothing new, but I do think in the last four or five decades or so, there have been some trends that have made work catapult into the central place into our lives. For one, you have the decline of other sources of meaning and identity,

things like organized religion and neighborhood and community groups. A lot of these institutions that once provided meaning and identity in Americans' lives have deteriorated, and yet the need for belonging and community and identity and meaning remain. So many Americans have turned to where they spend the majority of their time, which is the office, to try and fulfill all of those roles. Yeah, I mean, this is really familiar to me, living in a place like D.C. where a lot of people move there because of their jobs and their identity really is wrapped up in what they do. But is this something that is that common across the country, this idea that you are supposed to be able to find this deep fulfillment in your job? I think it depends on different demographics that you look at.

You know, certainly the majority of people work to survive. But particularly among college-educated, white-collar workers, there is this need to look to work to be more than just a job. There was a recent survey from Pew that found that this actually holds globally. People who are high earners, who are college-educated, are more than two times more likely to look to work as a source of meaning and fulfillment than low earners or people that didn't go to college. And I think there's also an economic explanation, which is that if you look back in history, for the majority of the 20th century, the average time that Americans spent working steadily declined. This was due to advancements in technology, due to organized labor and different ways that workers have made

working conditions better for themselves. And yet, in the 1970s, there's this weird trend that occurred, which is as our peer nations continued to decline the amount of time they spend working, Americans flatlined. And among some demographics, namely college-educated high earners, the same folks that I was speaking about earlier, their work time increased. So this is ahistorical on both kind of a personal level and on a societal level. Historically, the more money you make, the less you work, because, frankly, you can afford not to. But around the 1970s, college-educated Americans, and particularly college-educated men, started working more than ever. So part of the investigation of this book is to understand why. And the argument that I make is the subjective value, this cultural significance that many college-educated Americans have given to work

that has equated their sense of self-worth and meaning with the hours and output that they produce. So you mostly talk about white-collar workers, the kind that you're describing, but you also did talk to people who were doing gig work or were blue-collar workers, and I'm wondering how did they talk about their relationship to their work? Yeah. So, you know, the way I frame it in the book is that workism is an affliction that both exists on an individual level and on a societal level. We live in a country where productivity and self-worth are so tightly bound. But the reasons why a college-educated professional and, say, an hourly service worker work long hours are likely to be different. The majority of people work long hours because they have to, especially with stagnating wages.

People have had to work more just to buy the same loaf of bread. Whereas if you're talking about a college-educated, say, lawyer or banker, entrepreneur, often the choice to work more is exactly that, a choice. You have this great line in your book that I think gets at this choice, which is, if workism is the religion, dream jobs are the deities. Timo, you and I are both millennials. I feel like I've always known about this idea of a dream job. Like when I was a kid, people were asking me, what do you want to be when you grow up? And where did this idea of a dream job come from? Yeah, so with any sort of cultural phenomenon like this, it's hard to pinpoint an exact source. For one, there was the growth of the sort of business self-help movement that started to frame work not as something that you did in the early 1970s that started framing work as a question that

you should start with asking what turns you on, what would bring you the most fulfillment, instead of what way in which you can contribute to society or something larger than yourself. I think a lot of it was due to the scripts that millennials and young people today have inherited from their parents. And many of them saw that and really believed that if you follow your passion, the money would follow and told many of their children that, you know, you can be whoever you want to be. We asked children growing up, who do you want to be when you grow up? This language, this rhetoric around you are what you do

is very much entrenched in our culture and our society. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. We're back with The Sunday Story. Producer Raina Cohen is talking with writer Simone Stolzloff about his new book, The Good Enough Job. There's a story in the book that you tell about a woman named Fabazi Itar, and she was really into this idea of a dream job ever since she was a kid. Can you tell me what you learned from her about the risks of buying into the idea of a dream job? Yeah, so Fabazi, like many middle schoolers, was an avid reader. And through books in elementary and middle school,

she found escape. She found stories of other people who looked like her. She was black in a predominantly white school district. She found stories of people that she could connect to. And a lot of them were the result of recommendations that she got from her school librarian. And so she decided in early age, you know, even before high school, that she herself wanted to be a school librarian. You know, another librarian told me once that librarians aren't made, they're born. It's a very common profession where you might feel a sense of calling from an early age. And so Fobazi studied English in college and then went on to graduate school

to get a library science degree. But it wasn't until she entered the industry that she saw some of the values of what she heard from her grad school professors about libraries being the last truly democratic institution, being inclusive to all, were not actually borne out in her lived experience on the job. From the other side of the reference desk, she saw a workforce that was overworked, underpaid, and predominantly white. And so she wondered, you know, how could this paradigm of inclusivity and democracy have such a different experience for the people who are actually doing the work in the libraries?

And she coined a term that I think is very illustrative of what happens often in creative or mission-driven industries. She said that she was experiencing vocational awe. So in certain lines of work, particularly mission-driven industries like education or healthcare, maybe creative fields like writing or artists or other sorts of non-profit work that are really driven by the impact that you hope to make, there's often this halo effect of the industry itself. People think that because you work in a library or because you work in a hospital, your work is inherently righteous. But Fabazi argued that sometimes this halo effect, this perceived righteousness, can cover up a lot of the injustice that exists in these different fields.

We call nurses essential workers and yet rarely give them the compensation and protections commensurate with the severity of the jobs that they are doing. I think we're seeing this on full display with the strike right now in Hollywood, where many people treat the privilege of being able to be a screenwriter as a form of compensation in and of itself. But the truth is, love, unfortunately, doesn't pay the bills. We work fundamentally to pay for our material lives. And when we frame a work as a passion or a labor of love or a calling, as opposed to what it actually is, a job, a lot of workers can suffer. So there are people who work a lot and identify with their work, at least because at some point they got satisfaction from the work itself, the writing or working with people in a hospital or

kids or so on. But there's another kind of way that people get wrapped up in their work that you point out. Can you tell me about one of the people you profile in your book? His name is Kay He, and what drove him to work the way that he did? Yeah. So Kay represents sort of your typical type A ambitious worker. He grew up in lower middle class upbringing in New York City, was a Cambodian American immigrant in his first generation. And he always saw acquiring status as the way that he would be accepted and eventually belong in these different circles in which he was a part. And so in high school, he really saw it as a means to an end. He focused on getting top grades, and so he could be admitted to a top college. He ended up going to an Ivy League school and had a similar calculus where

he looked at the different majors and what he might be able to study and use the highest earning potential as the metric that determined his success. And he chose banking. And then he went into finance and he joined Wall Street and quickly rose up the rakes. He worked for BlackRock, which was at the time the largest asset management firm in the country and was quickly promoted. He became the youngest managing director of BlackRock in the firm's history. And yet, he wasn't fulfilled. It took a moment when he was preparing for a friend's wedding, and he realized a chunk of his hair had fallen off. Here's a man who, on paper, has had incredible success. He was making seven figures. He owned an apartment in New York City, but he was completely motivated by these extrinsic motivators,

the next promotion, the next bonus, the next raise. And he had almost never in his life taken time to consider what he himself values. So the danger here is that if you're only motivated by what the market or what the world values, you can find yourself climbing a ladder that you don't actually want to be on or playing a game that you don't actually hope to win. But I think there's risk on the other end of the spectrum as well. If you are just considering what you yourself value without considering what the market values, it can lead to a position where, for example, you assume a lot of student debt to go to graduate school to pursue a degree that might not actually lead to stable job prospects on the other side. And so the key in my mind is to hold one of these in each hand. In one hand, what the world values. In the other hand, what you yourself value and try and pursue

a career at their intersection. Because I think there's risks of over-indexing on either end of the spectrum. Yeah, I mean, I think it's so interesting to have Fabazi and Kay's stories side by side because one person is motivated by passion and really has this letdown, and then another is motivated by status and money and ends up having his own kind of version of, you know, come to Jesus moment about what he wanted his life to look like. What is it about Kay's approach that is seductive to people? Why would somebody approach their job like a game? Well, for one, you get validated all around you. You know, when we say someone is successful, we rarely mean that they are healthy or happy. We mean that they've

made a lot of money. If you are able to post about your recent promotion on Instagram or tell people at the dinner party, there's a lot of social praise and capital that can come with that. The problem, though, is that if you're purely living this game, what the journalist David Brooks calls living by resume virtues, you know, the things that would show up on your resume, you can lose sight of your intrinsic motivation. So when you're talking about people looking for validation outside themselves, I'm thinking that maybe that was kind of the same thing in the history that you were telling when people were looking to something like religion to help them figure out what their values

were. I mean, they were still looking outside themselves then, and we're doing that now. So is this really different in any way? So the writer David Foster Wallace has this great quote where he says, everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. If you worship beauty, you'll feel like you're never beautiful enough. If you worship money, you'll feel like you never have enough money. I think the same is true for work.

If you worship status and success, you'll never feel completely fulfilled. And there's the risk that your job might not be there. I spoke to many tech workers recently in the Bay Area who were working for Meta or for Google or for Twitter, now known as X, and they thought it was their calling. They thought this was their dream job. And yet they, alongside thousands of their colleagues, were laid off. And so the difference between something like work and maybe a religious god is that work can break your dreams in two and leave you to pick up the pieces in a way that maybe organized religion is less likely to do. But as opposed to just putting your faith in one thing, what I

advocate in the book is for diversifying your identity. So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. So one of your suggestions really flips the idea of a dream job on its head. You say that we should view our jobs as transactional. How do you think we benefit from doing that? I think a job, first and foremost, is an economic contract. It's a way of exchanging your time and your labor for a paycheck. Certainly it can be much more than that.

It can be a source of community, of meaning, of purpose. But if we aren't clear-headed about the fundamental purpose of a job, which is to pay us enough money to live, we can lose sight of the reason why we're working. I think a lot of the collective organizing, whether it is UPS workers or screenwriters in Hollywood or nurses in New Jersey, are moves towards understanding the material nature of the world that we live in and the fact that our job can be a means to an end. Our job should pay us enough in order to be able to have lives outside of our jobs. Well, I mean, there's a line that's, I think, very striking where you say, go to work, get your money, come on home. I just wondered whether there was some risk that people

would take this transactional idea as an excuse to be kind of nihilistic about their work or just think like it doesn't matter how they earn their money if the point is to clock out, you know, go home. So what do we lose if we stop telling people to run toward their passion and instead just sort of treat work as an economic contract? Yeah, I think this is a very nuanced point. And even if you just look at the title of the book, The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work, you might think it's this slacker manifesto or arguing in favor of not caring about your job at all. But I don't actually think that's a recipe for fulfillment or happiness either. I think we all know this on a personal level.

The longest days at work tend to be the days where you don't feel engaged or you don't feel connected to what you do. So what I'm advocating for is for the hours that you're at work to focus on work. Hopefully work can be a source of meaning and fulfillment. Hopefully you are lucky enough to be able to align your work with your interests or your passions. But importantly, when you're done with the workday, to go home, which is to say, to think about how you can invest in yourself and your life outside of work as well. Part of the risk of a work-centric existence is it doesn't just take our best time, but often our best energy as well. And so I'm not telling people to not look to work as a source of passion or a vehicle for having impact or changing the world, but also to understand that for some people, they

do what they love, but for the majority of people, they do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working. And as a former mentor told me, neither is more noble. We've gotten to this place in society where we really revere people whose work and identities neatly align. You know, the astronaut or the painter or the social entrepreneur. But for many people, work is a means to an end. They work to live, and they can express their values outside of the office as well.

So one way to give people an opportunity to find these other sources of meaning, even if maybe they're harder to find than they were in the past, is to have people work less. And you've talked about how a lot of people have no choice about how much they work. And then some people like Kay wanted to work or pushed himself. So when it comes to sort of the solutions to dealing with workism, do we need to have different kinds of approaches for these different types of workers? Or are there sort of solutions that might help

both of these types of workers? Yeah are there sort of solutions that might help both of these types of workers? Yeah, I'm glad you asked. I think a lot of times we put the onus on the individual to find solutions to workism or workplace burnout or the lack of barriers between our lives and our jobs. And in actuality, I think the onus should be placed more often on institutions and on policymakers. So part of the reason why our relationship to work is so fraught here in the United States is because the consequences of losing work are so dire when, for example, your health care or if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country is contingent on your ability to find a job. So one intervention is to re-knit our frayed social safety net. And so the consequences of losing work become less dire and people are able to hopefully find jobs that align better and that are good enough for them. Another is thinking about at the firm or the company level.

I think especially in recent years, a lot of organizations have given a lot of lip service to work-life balance or to mental health in the workplace. But there's a difference between policy and rhetoric and practice. I think as a start, we need leaders and organizations to model the types of cultures that they hope to create. So you can tell people that you don't have to be online after five o'clock, but if the boss is sending emails at 11 p.m., who's to stop everyone underneath them on the org chart from doing the same? I think companies have a lot to gain from being able to have clear boundaries between when workers are expected to be on and off the clock. This is

borne out in the data that a lot of these experiments around four-day work weeks are showing that by working fewer hours, workers are able to produce as much, if not more, in certain circumstances than they would if they were working longer weeks. And so I think there's very much a business case to think about how protecting workers' lives outside of work can lead to more sustainable productivity over the long run. But then we shouldn't just work less because it makes us better workers. I argue that we should work less because it makes us better humans, better able to show up for our loved ones and people that matter in our lives, that are able to invest in things like causes that we care about or local politics or things that are bigger than just the stock price of a corporation.

So early in the book, you introduce yourself and you write, I am Simone and I am a workist, or at least a recovering one. How would you introduce yourself now? I'd say I'm Simone. I am a San Franciscan. I am a humanist. I am an ultimate Frisbee player, a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur, and I love to write. That was Simone Stolzloff, the author of The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work, talking with NPR producer Raina Cohen. If you like the deep dives you get on The Sunday Story, check out NPR's Consider This podcast. This week, Consider This is covering how hurricane evacuation orders are decided, Biden's push to make prescription

drugs cheaper, the role state politics played in the racist killings in Jacksonville, and more. Listen to Consider This wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Liana Simstrom. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt and Justine Yan. Our engineer for this episode was James Willits. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great Labor Day weekend.