Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley with Carolyn Chen

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

More than just a region, Silicon Valley has also become a concept — and what that concept represents means a lot of different things to different people. Some might think of it as a techno-utopian dreamland where billionaires are made. Others, perhaps a soul-sucking dystopia driven by a never ending rat race — also where billionaires are made. Whatever you may think, one thing that's hard to disagree with is the idea that work dominates Silicon Valley, and while some here are simply working to live, a certain privileged class of society actually lives to work. It's this class of workers that are the main characters in Carolyn Chen’s new book: Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Carolyn Chen is an Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. How has work become the new religion in Silicon Valley? What material and historical conditions led to the spiritualization of work? What strategies do workplaces deploy to ensure workers find meaning and purpose in work — and what other realms of life does this impact? What happens when work takes over the institutions that shape our souls? These are just some of the questions we’ll explore in this conversation with Carolyn Chen.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. So please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. What we're seeing is that tech companies are using spirituality as a competitive advantage

and that they are very interested in the spiritual care and development of their employees as a way to make them more productive. Tech workers look to work to fulfill their needs for identity, belonging, meaning, purpose, and transcendence. And these are the kinds of social and spiritual needs that Americans at one time turned to religion to fulfill. So essentially, work institutions are now fulfilling the social roles that religious institutions used to play. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

More than a region, Silicon Valley has also become a concept. What that concept represents, though, means a lot of different things to different people. Some might think of it as a tech utopian dreamland where billionaires are made. Others, perhaps a soul-sucking dystopia driven by a never-ending rat race, also where billionaires are made. Others, perhaps a soul-sucking dystopia driven by a never-ending rat race, also where billionaires are made. Whatever you may think, one thing that's hard to disagree with is the idea that work dominates Silicon Valley. And while some people here are simply working to live, a certain privileged class of society actually lives to work. It's this class of workers that are the

main characters in Carolyn Chen's new book, Work, Pray, Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Carolyn Chen is an associate professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. How has work become the new religion in Silicon Valley? What material and historical conditions led to the spiritualization of work? What strategies do workplaces deploy to ensure workers find meaning and purpose in work? And what other realms of life does this impact?

What happens when work takes over the institutions that shape our souls? These are just some of the questions we explore in this conversation with Carolyn Chen. Welcome to Upstream, Carolyn. It's great to have you on. So happy to be here, Ravi. I'm wondering if maybe just to start, if you could introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write Work Prey Code. Yeah, so I am a sociologist of religion. And so my area of

specialty is really religion. And it's not businesses or corporations or work culture, really. And I've written, actually, my areas of expertise is religion, race and ethnicity. And previously, I've written about Taiwanese immigrants and converting to Christianity and Buddhism after coming to the United States. And I've also studied Asian American religions. coming to the United States and I've also studied Asian American religions. But what brought me to this project is that I am interested in, you know, religion and contemporary American life in general. And one of the things that I noticed, and I think that anyone who lives in a, you know, major metropolitan area in the United States will notice is that religious

affiliation is on the decline. And we've seen, this is sort of a trend that we've seen that's slowly been a trend in the last 50 years, but we've really seen it more pronounced, I'd say, in the last 20 years. And where it's most pronounced again in these major metropolitan areas like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Cambridge, which as I'll talk about later also happen to be knowledge industry hubs, the places in the United States where high-skilled job growth is really growing the fastest. Okay, so let me get back to what I was talking about. So I'm really interested in the manifestation of religion in contemporary American life. And I think that if you'll notice that in major metropolitan areas, you know, religious affiliation is declining.

And so the challenge for any scholar of religion today who's looking at contemporary American religion is, well, how do you look at religion among these folks? And so I became really interested in looking at religion in secular spaces. And how do we see religion in these secular spaces, particularly among folks who might say that they are religious, we call them religious nuns, N-O-N-E-S, or people who claim to be spiritual but not religious. So that actually started me to look at religion and yoga studios, because yoga studios are secular spaces, right? But they have a lot of religious and spiritual practices. You see icons, you see images there,

you see texts. And so I started doing ethnography in yoga studios, and I started interviewing yoga practitioners. And as I interviewed them, this theme kept on coming back over and over again, which is, you know, I would ask them, why do you practice yoga? When do you do it? And I'm always interested in how people use religious practices. What is it for? How do they use their religion? And they would say to me over and over again, well, I use it because I practice yoga because it helps me to relax. It helps me de-stress at the end of a long day of work. And things like, oh, well, when I do yoga, it makes me a better X. And here you can fill in the blank. It might be an attorney. It might be a teacher. It might be an accountant. It might be a doctor. And so what I

realized as I talked to them was that actually they were sacrificing a lot in their lives for work. They were willing to forego sleep, their relationships with their family, with their friends, their mental and physical well-being. And so they were sacrificing for work. And work was actually the center of their lives. And yoga was really merely a therapeutic practice, sort of an ancillary practice that supported this other thing that they were worshiping. And so it became clear to me that, wait, here what I thought was maybe the religious thing, which is what we call religious, you know, the practice of yoga, actually that wasn't what was religion in their lives. What was really religion was work. And if

I can just back up, I just meant to mention this, is that a lot of times we think of what was religion in their lives, what was really religion was work. And if I can just back up, I just meant to mention this is that a lot of times we think of what is religion is those things that identify as religious, right? So religious people, religious texts, religious communities, but we kind of come to a dead end if we use this approach to look at really the way that I think that religion manifests among so many people today in major metropolitan areas in the United States and other Western countries as well. Thank you so much for that. And I definitely want to get into this idea that you you touched upon how like the religiosity or the sort of religious parts of a lot of these practices that have become

so popular in the Bay Area, things like yoga, mindfulness, meditation, that kind of thing, like the religious elements have sort of been stripped out of them. And I think that's really interesting and important and definitely want to come back to that. But maybe if we could just set the table a little bit here. So like in a nutshell, what's your main thesis in this book? Like, how do religion and spirituality actually exist in Silicon Valley from, you know, what you've researched and experienced? So what I argue in this book is that essentially that work replaces religion in Silicon Valley. And we see this happening in two ways. The first is that now tech workers look to work to fulfill their needs for

identity, belonging, meaning, purpose, and transcendence. And these are the kinds of social and spiritual needs that Americans once at one time turned to religion to fulfill. So essentially, work institutions are now fulfilling the social roles that religious institutions used to play. But secondly, what we're seeing is that tech companies are using spirituality as a competitive advantage and that they are very interested in the spiritual care and development of their employees as a way to make them more productive. So for instance, they are bringing in classes like meditation and mindfulness into their workplace. They are, I spoke to a lot of executive coaches and many of them bring in spiritual practices

into their coaching as well. Many companies now bring in spiritual and religious leaders that give like TED Talks, you know. So for instance, at Salesforce, Dreamforce, they have their annual meeting, Dreamforce in San Francisco. For two years in a row, they brought in 30 monks from Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery to come in and basically minister to the conference attendees. come in and basically minister to the conference attendees. And essentially, what we see happening is that companies understand that when workers align the deepest parts of themselves to their work and to their company, they produce more, they perform better, because they're essentially identifying themselves with the company. And I thought it was really interesting. You mentioned in the book that the companies are now creating positions like chief

spiritual officer and chief mindfulness officer or Google's search inside yourself program. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this is sort of based on this idea, which I found in tech companies where the personal is the professional. So it's a play on the personal, the political, but this idea that knowledge workers perform at their best when their bodies, minds, and spirits are in the optimal condition. So it's for that reason, you see, you know, and these are in pre-pandemic days, which is when I conducted my study, that tech workers are so invested in making sure that their tech workers have, you know, healthy meals, that they have exercise, that they are feeling emotionally fulfilled. But there's

also increasingly now this spiritual aspect too. And I'll give you an example from one person in my study. He was a very young engineer. This is at a startup that the founder saw a lot of potential and promise in, but he felt like he lacked confidence. And I think he lacked what I think the CEO would call spiritual wholeness. And this had to do with some of his upbringing, being teased as a teenager and so forth. And so the CEO had him attend a spiritual retreat and then also assigned him with an executive coach who taught him spiritual practices and taught him how to meditate, taught him how to be mindful. And included in that were spiritual practices of reflection about thinking about what his purpose is in life. And ultimately, that, of course, came down to him identifying

his purpose through his labor, you know, through his work. How convenient. How convenient. And this totally paid off for the company, because this young engineer who kind of came in and was sort of green, but really talented, ultimately he became the head of engineering at the firm. And I also interviewed this guy and he was just completely gung-ho. He was like all in. The other thing is that we see companies, and this is a case study of Silicon Valley, but I think that a lot of my findings really generalize to knowledge industry hubs and to professional workers all across the United States. And what we see is that in almost all Fortune 500 companies now, that they've adopted these

basic elements of religious organizations. They all have a mission. They all have organizations. They all have a mission. They all have ethics. They all have practices. They have an origin myth. And many of them even have a charismatic founder, right? And these are things that are just completely fundamental now to what people would say is considered to be a successful organization. And if you think about the way that people talk about work these days, they use this language of passion, right? Of mission, of calling. Again, words which we would borrow from the religious sphere, or we might borrow from private spheres such as other organizations such as families or religions, where really our devotion is unlimited,

right? Where these are organizations, these are institutions that ask for our unlimited devotion and unconditional love. And now that is completely normal for our work organizations to be using that kind of language. Yeah, particularly the family language makes me think of a lot of the union busting stuff going on at Amazon and Starbucks, where these like ideas of like, we're a family, you don't need a union. We're just, you know, we're a family, that kind of rhetoric. And we spoke with Sarah Jaffe, who wrote a book called Work Won't Love You Back. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you're familiar. Yes, I'm familiar with it. And so many, I think that there's

a sort of national fascination with the tech workplace like oh they're offering these meals they're offering smoothies they have swimming pools they have gardens they have all these things in the workplace well these things are actually not new in fact corporations such as Sears and Kodak had things like cafeterias and bowling alleys in their campuses also in the 1950s. And the reason that they did this is so that their workers would identify of these spaces and community for identifying and for spaces of leisure, essentially. So it's sort of these invisible ties of bonds and affection and obligation, which I think that companies are building, but in this way, using this very private, you know, the language that we usually see in families and religions. And I want to uplift one of the quotes from your book, people are not selling their souls

at work. Rather, work is where people are finding their souls. And the same would go with finding friends and companionship and family and all of the above. And I guess before we get more into that, you touched on some of the like historical examples of this, but I'm wondering if maybe a little bit more deeply we could outline the material historical conditions which led to this sort of spiritualization of work in America like, what roles did white collar work and religion play in American life prior? And sort of how have those been transformed in 21st century Silicon

Valley? Yeah, so that's a really great question that you asked. So I want to take you back to like the 1950s. And this is where we see the sort of the rise of the white collar class and the rise of these sort of corporate cultures that are happening. Well, during that time, the typical white collar worker worked from nine to five. And it's really interesting. The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills writes about white collar workers. And basically he writes about work as being a time where you sell your soul. And literally that's what we do in labor, right? We're selling ourselves, we're selling our time, we're selling our energy, we're selling our labor. So he had the sense, so he wrote about

essentially this is where you sell your soul or you give your soul away, but that you recover your soul outside of work. So when we think about work, we have to think about work in the context of the larger kind of ecology of civic institutions and social institutions. And the 1950s is a time of the height of civic participation in America, where it's actually the time of the height of religious participation and affiliation, where actually religious affiliation was outpacing the rate of the population growth in the United States.

And so it was not just only in their faith communities, but so let me just back up here. What you see in the 1950s is the growth of these corporations and also the growth of suburbs. So what you have is white collar workers. And here, let me just say, these are white, usually white men who are working in these companies and they're moving out to the suburbs and the suburbs are new. And there's this kind of explosion of social organizations that people are participating in. It's the bowling league, it's the rotary club, it's your church or your temple or your synagogue, and it's the softball

league. And so it's a sense that you're working from nine to five, okay? And then you're building your life outside of work. And there was that clear separation between work and life. And this is for the average white collar worker. I think this is a different situation for executives. But what we see happening in the late 70s and early 80s is we see this increase in the number of hours that white-collar workers are working. And this is a response to these larger changes that are happening, the rise of global capitalism and the kind of competition that we see. We also see the rise of the knowledge economy as well and the service economy that's happening and the outsourcing of blue collar labor in the United States. And so as a result of sort of the kind of demands of global capitalism, what you see American firms doing is essentially saying, well, we've got to up our game,

you know, and work intensifies and it becomes more demanding. And so you really see this jump in the number of hours that white collar workers are working. But at the same time that we see that work is taking more, demanding more time and energy, it's also changed to give more. And so what you see is that corporations have become very strategic. They actually, in the 80s, they were really intent on competing with Japan

and they started to borrow from Japanese work culture. And they had this whole movement of strong cultures where, you know, the workplace, the corporation should be your family. There's also some pretty dramatic changes in the workplace where companies started profit sharing. So you have stock options, also the flattening of hierarchies, so that everyone feels like they have a choice and that everyone can sort of be their own manager. So what happens is that work both becomes more demanding, but it also becomes more fulfilling. And they start to borrow again from these other spheres. That's when having a mission, having a purpose in an organization becomes something that's

fundamental that you absolutely need to have. And here, if I can just back up, if you want to think about a knowledge economy, and if you think about, like, say, in the tech industry, well, how do you increase your profits? It used to be in an industrial economy that you can increase your profits by mechanizing or you outsource, right? You outsource so that the cost for labor is cheaper. Well, in a knowledge economy, those things don't work. The way that you grow your value is that you grow the value of your most important asset.

And the most important asset in a knowledge economy is actually your knowledge worker, your high skilled worker. And it's actually not just their brain, right? Their coding skills or their programming language, which, you know, you can retrain and train them to have better skills, but it's also their spirit. So that's where the spiritual aspect comes in. How do you engage the spirit? How do you essentially mind? That's the language that I use. How do you engage the spirit? How do you essentially mine? That's the language

that I use. How do you mine the spirit? And here is where usually in a capitalist model, when you mine something, you exploit something, right? So you kind of draw down all of its value and you kind of transfer it into capital value. And that's what we see also happening with the human worker. But instead, you can grow that value by fulfilling their soul, right? And developing their spirituality so that they find meaning and fulfillment in work. Yeah, and I really, I love the term mining. It makes me think of the idea of extractivism, which permeates so much of capitalism, broadly speaking, right? Like from literally mining to what you're talking about,

which is much more sort of ephemeral. Right, exactly. Exactly. And I think that we have talked for a really long time. You know, I think that still our sense of the relationship between labor and, and capitalists is one of extraction. But what we see, I think, in this new knowledge economy era, is the reversal, kind of the turning on its head as a language from one of extraction to one of really fulfillment and developing. But that's really sort of the language and sort of the way that it's packaged. But what you see in these companies now is really very much of an emphasis on personal development.

Yeah. I'm wondering, going back even further than the 50s, much further, I couldn't help but sort of think about the Protestant work ethic when I was reading the book. And yeah, I mean, what would you would you make any parallels between this sort of the Protestant work ethic, which I won't get into what that is, because I'm sure most people know what that is at this point. And just curious, like, if you can make any connections to that and what you write about.

Yeah, so let me talk about that for a little bit. Yeah, I'd love to. So when the German sociologist Max Weber was writing the Protestant work ethic, we have to remember that he was writing during a time when really the alpha institution in European society is the church. And so life revolved around the rhythms and the logic and the needs and the goals of the church. And so he was really interested, well, how does the meaning of work and how does an economic system develop when it's based on this

sort of Calvinist, you know, when Calvinism, the Calvinist church is the alpha institution of a society. And at that time, he argues that essentially, because of their system of their theology of salvation, which is that you could never know if you're someone who is saved, and that that's simply predetermined, that the only way that you could be assured that you are saved or feel like maybe you're saved is by your production, by the outcome of your, the output of your work. And I think that we live in a time now where religion isn't the alpha institution, right? of our life, the logic of our life, the goals of our lives really revolve around the office institution of the economy. That's capitalism. And most deeply felt is through our work institutions. And so what's interesting in Max Weber's time is he asks, well, how does work revolve around religion? And today, I think that if we want to understand religion, we have to understand how religion and spirituality revolve around

the rhythms and the needs of the economic system, because that's our alpha institution. We take it so much for granted. For instance, Robbie, if I asked you, if you asked me, hey, can you do this favor for me tomorrow at three o'clock? And I say, no, I can't, Robbie, because I'm working. You and I both agree that that's a legitimate excuse. Of course we can't, because work is your priority, right? And we don't even question that assumption. This is sort of simply the norm that work comes first. Yeah, that's a really great way of putting it. And so, yeah, let's fast forward again to when, I guess, around the 1950s and on when all of this sort of began in terms of this new shift in the way that corporations and companies

were trying to instill into their workers. Like you write, quote, not until the rise of the modern corporation did management learn to systematically mind the social needs of the human worker for productive labor. And I'm just wondering, like, how conscious of a shift was this? Like, what did it look like? Is there evidence of board members or CEOs or capitalists like in rooms talking about this kind of stuff? Like, how is it showing up in like literature around that time? Like, I'm just, yeah, I'm curious what was going on in the minds of the folks that were sort of responsible for these shifts. How did that sort of play out?

So what happens in the 1950s, 1940s, actually, before that is a rise of what's called the human relations movement. And it was this field of study. It was a group of organizational psychologists based out of Harvard. it was a group of organizational psychologists based out of Harvard. And they became really interested in essentially, how do you apply principles of organizational psychology to help industry to make workers more productive. And so what they concluded is that, essentially, if work could fulfill and meet the social needs of human beings, that workers would become more attached to the workplace. And that it was important to not think of workplaces as merely economic institutions, but as institutions that could also meet the social needs of laborers,

and in doing so would actually benefit work organizations. So one just really quick example is a number of experiments. They were called the Hawthorne studies where companies, where they did this study where they showed like, oh, well, if we change the light bulb in this factory room, our workers going to become more productive. And what they realized, what they came down to the conclusion was that it didn't really matter whether they changed the light bulb or not. It just mattered whether the employees felt like the company cared, whether they enjoyed changing the light bulb or not. And so it was like this big, bulb moment, literally, for them. Like, ding. We need to treat our workers as humans. And we know that they will be more engaged.

They will be more loyal to us if they feel that we care. And if they can also associate feelings of community and belonging with the workplace. So these were ideas that were already circulating, right, in the 1940s. And I think that you have these different moments in industry where like, it's sort of, so, you know, I talked about Kodak and Sears in the 1950s. The board members may not have been sitting there and being like explicitly, like, we need to make sure our workers feel fulfilled and belonging at work. But they were probably thinking like explicitly like, we need to make sure our workers feel fulfilled and belonging at work. But they were probably thinking like, hey, the unions offer like bowling leagues.

We don't want them to join the unions. So why don't we give them what the unions offer and even more, right? Give them the kind of pay and insurance and et cetera, et cetera. So they will have no interest in joining the unions. So I think that that's what's going on in the 50s, say. But by the time in the 80s, it's just very much, they're looking specifically at Japanese work cultures where literally, it is your family, you're spending like 24 seven there. So let me just also back up here, Robbie, just to talk about, I think that what's also happening is like HR is itself changing because HR is really the department that's really strategically thinking about how can we create community? How can we create this family environment, et cetera, et cetera. environment, et cetera, et cetera. And that you see HR changing where at one time it was actually one person that I interviewed told me like in the seventies, like HR really referred to human remains. It was really, it was really the department that was ostracized and that was stigmatized. It was sort of that brought the lowest value. And they really saw HR function as making sure that the

company kind of, in terms of protecting it from legal liability, that was essentially what HR, what the role of HR was. But I think the role of HR has really transformed since the 80s, so that it's now seen as a really important partner in creating that kind of community, seen as a really important partner in creating that kind of community, the kind of mission, the kind of purpose. And here you have, in these tech companies that I go to, they'd have these whole departments with professionally trained people. I mean, these people are trained to think about how I can engage you more into the workplace, you know, how you could be happier in the workplace. And so I use this term corporate materialism to talk about the work that HR does to act essentially to care

for the body and soul and mind of their workers. And so I think that that's a huge, huge change. And so here you might not have the CEO who's thinking about all these things, but you have all these other people who are thinking about these these things, but you have all these other people who are thinking about these things. And many of these people aren't necessarily thinking so crassly, like, how do I make them more productive? Many of the people I interviewed in HR, many of the mindfulness workers, they were very much like, I'm a people person. I want to make people happy. I want to bring wholeness to their lives. So their concerns were really about this, but because they work, and this is what, you know, it means to belong to a capitalist system, that in order to do that, they sort of had to be a part of this larger system where wholeness and spiritual fulfillment had to make sense within a system where profits had to be increased. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Carolyn Chen, author of

Work, Pray, Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. We'll be right back. Definitely this is the wrong place to be. There's blood on the futon. There's a kid drinking fire going down to the sea. They got people to meet, shaking hands with themselves, looking out for themselves. Looking out for themselves When they ask you for credit Give them a branch When they want you to get it Chew on the grass

I know, I know Cause they told me to tell you There's nothing to tell you There's nothing to tell you there's nothing to sell you in the afternoon riding the scapegoat burning equipment decomposing cool off your jets take off your sweats i got a funny feeling they got plastic in the afterlife. When they want you to cry, leap into the sky. When they suck your mind like a pigeon you fly.

I know, I know it's the positive people running from their time looking for some feeling. That was Cyanide Breathment by Beck. Now back to our conversation with Carolyn Chen, author of Work Pray Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. So you write that, quote, today companies are not just economic institutions, they've become meaning making institutions that offer a gospel of fulfillment and divine purpose in a capitalist cosmos. And I'm going to be uplifting some of these quotes throughout the interview just because there are so many fantastic quotes and you're such a really compelling cosmos. And I'm going to be uplifting some of these quotes throughout the interview, just because there are so many fantastic quotes, and you're such a really compelling writer. And

yeah, I guess I'm curious, like, I know about a few of like, there's Amazon's Amazon, like meditation app, and they have all these like, little weird things that they're doing. I'm wondering, like, what are some strategies specifically that workplaces are deploying these days? Things that maybe stand out or that you thought were particularly interesting or bizarre? I mean, I think that work institutions have always been meaning making institutions. There's always been that potential. But what's changed is that they are very strategically doing that. And in addition, that we have the impoverishment or the absence of other institutions that are providing meaning for us, the absence of those other institutions that we're invested in, so that in a sense, work becomes that alpha institution that articulates meaning

so clearly for all of us. And so how I see this happening is, again, like where companies so clearly articulate their mission. I mean, when I interviewed folks in Silicon Valley, I was just so surprised by how anyone I could meet could tell me what their mission was in life. Like Robbie, if I just asked you right now, like, what's your mission in life? I'm not sure that you could just tell me. I mean, maybe you can. I'd at least need a minute. I'd at least need a minute. Right. And it's so,

but it was so interesting that people there, they just knew, like sometimes they would call it their North star, but they could so clearly articulate it. And so quickly articulate it because in a way they'd been trained to know it and to identify it. And it always related them to essentially their productive labor. I mean, it wasn't it was never something like it's to make the company more money. Right. It's to democratize electronic knowledge or it's to you know what I mean, or it's to connect people. electronic knowledge, or it's to, you know what I mean? Or it's to connect people, right? So sort of using that this very transcendent language, but you would manifest that through participating

in capitalism. So I would participate in these professional development seminars. And in one of them, we would form these small groups, and we had to form a small group and we had to all go around and share with one another what our purpose was in life. And after that, everyone would applaud for you. So you'd feel like uplifted and encouraged. And I was like, oh shoot, what am I going to say? Because I don't know. I hadn't really thought about this, but I just came up with something in my head at the last minute. And so mine was because, you know, I'm a teacher and a scholar. I said, well, it's to enlighten minds. You know, so that sounds very, you know, Silicon Valley.

So I said, it's to enlighten minds. And when I said that, you know, everyone clapped and, you know, gave me a high five and patted me on the back. clapped and, you know, give me a high five and patted me on the back. And you know what, Robbie was so interesting is that that was a really powerful moment. Because I knew I was partly performing, right. But I really had to think about it. And then I got the encouragement of others, they affirmed me in the process. And what I said, stayed with me for the rest of the year. You know, it wasn't like every day I said a mantra, like my, my mission, my purpose is to enlighten minds. But I thought about it. And I brought it back to me in my teaching. And this is the weird thing is that

I got this huge teaching award that year, you know. And so here's where I'm going to say that, like when I say that workplaces are these really important meaning-making institutions in our lives, like I experienced it myself in participating in this culture. And there's something very alluring and very attractive about it.

And it just makes sense today because who else, what other institution is giving me purpose and making me articulate it? And then like giving me high fives and applauding me, you know, and even giving me a raise for it, right? No one's who, who is rewarding me for having a purpose that aligns with their institution. Well, it's the workplace. I've also said that in knowledge industry hubs, such as Silicon Valley, workplaces really offer us the most efficient solution to living a meaningful life. It's kind of the scary reality and the thing that I hope that my book sort of names. Yeah, no, absolutely. And when you were just

recounting that story to me, I was thinking, I mean, that does sound really nice. Like you're finding community, like-minded community, you're finding purpose, you're articulating that, you're becoming more grounded in yourself and all this other stuff. It's just, it's the end that it's put towards that feels a little icky, right? And like, you write how Buddhist religion has been repurposed and repackaged to serve secular business interests, writing, quote, people don't belong to Asian religions, but consume them through the spiritual marketplace of self-help books, retreats, therapeutic treatments, and self-improvement and motivational seminars and the like. And we had the pleasure of speaking with Ron Purser, the author of McMindfulness recently. And yeah, fantastic. And there's a

lot of parallels between your work and his. And I guess I have kind of two related questions about that. So you talk about how corporatized Buddhist ideas and mindfulness are deployed in workplaces in Silicon Valley. And I'm wondering if you can talk about what that looks like and what it leads to. And then also follow up, like, how are these traditions, things like yoga or mindfulness meditation, ultimately like diluted and stripped of where their sort of religious end is a kind of liberation. But however, now those very practices are used so that you could become more focused, so that you can become better at problem solving, so that you can become more resilient in the workplace. So these practices, which at one time in the religious sense are sort of supposed to be about not achieving anything, are now instead these means to these very material ends, right, of

becoming more productive. So for instance, many companies now offer meditation and mindfulness classes, and they see this very much as a way of making their workers more focused, to be better at problem solving, to release their stress. And in many ways, what you see is that the question that I would often ask people is like, well, wouldn't it just be better if you gave people time off? Or how about if you lower the expectations? And people would always just say that. And I knew how silly I sounded when I would talk to people in tech companies, like managers and people in HR. And they were just always like, no, no, no, the work is fine. We just need to give them these tools in order to deal with this better. Right. And so what I saw them as essentially sort of band-aids, or it could be like, you know, like you're really tired, right. But you drink coffee so that you could stay awake. That's kind of how this is. And so essentially, and this is this is and so essentially and this is the argument that purser makes as well ronald purser is that simply it just reinforces and it just um enables already this system of capitalism

right and exploitation the other way that i saw it also happening is just in the inversion of the traditions and the ideas so in so for compassion, which is one of the highest virtues in Buddhism, instead became turned into a work skill. And especially, I saw the words compassion and empathy being deployed strategically among user experience designers because it became a way for them to understand their users so they would talk about okay here let's practice meditation and mindfulness so that we can become more empathetic and more compassionate so we can really understand we could tap into the suffering of our users they would use this kind of language and we could feel into how our users actually use our products. So the end was very much, it had these very instrumental ends.

And in the book I talk about, I compare the way that tech workers today use practices like meditation and mindfulness compared to folks in the 60s and 70s who participated in the counterculture. And I call them mystics, you know, where they were really interested in meditation and practices of mindfulness and the Dharma, really because they were interested in expanding their consciousness and sort of the spiritual journey that they saw themselves on. Where for folks today who are part of the tech industry and not even, and those who are just affected by the tech industry and the kind of instrumentalism that it promotes, is I call them users of religious technology, where essentially they're using religious practices,

Buddhist practices as a problem solving tool to help them get somewhere else. And usually they use them as problem-solving tools in the workplace. So to get to some of your answer of like how Buddhist traditions change when they're brought into the workplace, I want to share with you a story that a Buddhist priest shared with me. And he told me that he'd been a priest of a Zendo for about 30 years in the Bay Area. And he told me, my members are dwindling. And it's because people don't have time to come to the Zendo anymore. It's because they're so busy working. And so he said, you know, the way that I'm going to deal with this, the way that I'm going to solve this problem, address this is that I'm going to bring meditation to the workplace, which is what he did. But in the

process of having to bring meditation to the workplace, he really had to alter the teachings dramatically. He had to lengthen that. So a talk that he, a teaching that he might prepare for the temple that might last for an hour and a half, he said, well, now I have to do this in shrink it down to 30 minutes, right? So you have to essentially conform to the logic of the workplace, which is one of efficiency. The other thing is that he had to legitimize all of his practices in terms of the bottom line, and he had to prove and show that they met the bottom line. He also had to strip out any kinds of ethical teachings, which might question the practices of the company, right?

And that's a huge part of the Buddhist tradition are the ethical teachings. And that was something that a lot of the mindfulness and meditation teachers that I interviewed really had to struggle with, because they saw this as part of the heart of the teachings, and they had to leave this out. But I want to also back up and show this sort of larger ecology of like, what happens when work becomes the alpha institution well these meditation and mindfulness teachers these dharma teachers they live in the bay area and as you well know the cost of living is so exorbitant that they're not getting paid enough if they're just teaching at spirit rock or at the community center and so many of them had to start

or at the community center. And so many of them had to start teaching at companies and had to bring their teachings to the companies in order to survive in the Bay Area. I mean, none of these were people who saw it as their life's goal to make tech workers more productive or even had any kind of real desire to be teaching at Google. But this is one of the things that they needed to do to essentially adjust and to be able to survive in what I call a tectopia, a world where a society where work becomes the highest form of fulfillment. I think that it's really interesting to zoom out as you do in the book. And, you know, you write that the corporation is the closest thing to a community that most people have after family in the United States. And I'm wondering, yeah, like, how is this religion of work altering the social fabric of America? Like, what are some

of the broader implications of wage labor being seen as a spiritual endeavor? So again, I just want to go back to like us really taking a critical, like thinking critically about the way that we talk about our relationship to work, where we're used to usually talking about it as being extractive. But I think that our eyes are really open when we really understand that work is often what is fulfilling us. And so what I see in a place like Silicon Valley, which I call a tectopia, you know, it's a, of course, it's kind of more suggesting that it's a dystopia, but a society where work becomes the highest source of fulfillment. Is it the workplace acts like this giant, powerful magnet in society. It's the alpha institution, and that it's attracting all of the time, energy, and

devotion and resources of a community. And if we were sort of to map out the time and energy and devotion of a community, it's all getting attracted to the giant magnet of work. And what we see is that these other social institutions, our families, our faith communities, our unions, even though it's a work institution, it is not a part of the company, right? But our neighborhood associations, our rotary clubs, et cetera, et cetera, that these are magnets that have shrunk in size. They've contracted and they've become weaker and weaker. And so what happens is that all of our time, energy, and devotion is being monopolized by the workplace.

And we have little to give to these other institutions. And that if any of these other institutions want a share of a community's time, energy, and resources, they have to come and they have to service the workplace, which is the large magnet, which is attracted all of the time and energy and devotion of the community. So that's what we're seeing happening in the case of this Buddhist temple that I talked about. But it wasn't just the Buddhist temple. I saw this also among Christian churches. So I talked to ministers and pastors, and they also told me the same thing. They said, you know, our congregations are shrinking, and the people

who do attend church will, you know, 20, 30 years ago, one pastor told me the average member of my congregation would come every Sunday and also stay for Sunday school. And now he says, I'm lucky if that typical person can come even once a month for just the Sunday service, right? And it's because all of their time and energy is being monopolized by the workplace. So we see that happening. We see people pulling out, disinvesting in the public. So in these tech workplaces where, at least in pre-pandemic times, they're fulfilling all of their needs. They can eat three meals there. They can exercise there. They have their whole social community there. They can do their hobbies there. And then they also have their bus, right, which they can rely on to bring them home.

They essentially live in this tech bubble and they don't need to engage with that public at all. So they disengage in the public. they disinvest in the public, because the public is really not necessary to their survival or to their fulfillment. And so when I would talk to local public officials and political leaders, they would tell me the same thing again and again, that essentially, we're really, it's a challenge to engage, again and again, that essentially we're really, it's a challenge to engage, politically engage tech workers because they're really politically apathetic. They don't need the public because essentially all of their wholeness, it's been privatized and these companies provide for it so well. So you just see this disinvestment from neighborhoods to local politics to faith community organizations. And instead,

everything is being invested into the workplace for their source of fulfillment. And you've got to remember too, is that these tech companies have literally this army of trained professionals to make you happy and whole. That's the way that they talk. They would talk to me about nurturing the souls of their employees, about bringing wholeness to their employees. I mean, there is no public institution that talks like this. There's no, like faith communities, families simply cannot compete with these resources of the tech company. One mother of a tech worker that I interviewed just told me, she just said, like, I can't provide for my daughter in the way that a tech company can. So again, the magnet, I use that image of the magnet to show how people are drawn to work. I think that it's important to

flag that, that people are drawn to work. And that's sort of the kind of relationship that we're seeing happening with the workplace. And I think it's really important to note, if it's not clear already, that we're talking about a very specific slice of the population here. And it's interesting because we can discuss the impacts that all of this stuff has on them, but it also permeates out into like, people who don't have access to all of those sort of more privileged things. And I mean, you brought it up to it, like it not only impacts the material conditions that the rest of us have to live with in the Bay Area, where like, the people that are sort of making the most money are not really very interested in investing in community or public infrastructure.

Like, I think that's a big part of living in the Bay Area, seeing that stark divide between what it's like to like, take a bus to work versus like a tech bus versus what it's like to take public transportation to work if you know, Especially living in certain neighborhoods that might not have access. But also just like I keep thinking of this. When I was in my early 20s I worked at a used music store and consignment shop in the South Bay. And I had a co-worker who had just moved to the Bay Area. And he was from Boston. and he was working alongside me. And I remember he was talking about how he wanted to move back because he said, it's just such a rat race out here. have, I mean, at least traditionally the reputation of being a rat race, like it's supposed to be a place with fairly chill vibes. But I think I really appreciate your book because it helped

add another piece to this puzzle that I've been trying to make sense of in my head is why does life feel so difficult here in the Bay Area in so many ways, not just in terms of like housing costs and other stuff, which is insane, but also just like the general vibe here can oftentimes it can really suck. It's really oppressive. And like, everybody seems so focused on on work and productivity. And it's not until you sort of get out of here. And like, I spent some time living in Burlington, Vermont, where I was just like, again, it's hard to articulate it. But the quality of connections, the quality of life, the pace of life, completely different. And yeah, I just keep coming to back to that idea of like rat race. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that here, again, so as a sociologist, I keep on bringing up the role of social institutions

and to think about in different places, social institutions will have different kinds of power and influence in that locale. And I think that in the Bay Area, the workplace is, I keep on saying, the alpha institution. It is the institution that has the most power and influence, and it forms our daily life, not only just our habits, our rhythms, but also the very interiority of ourselves, our spirituality as well. I know that one person that I interviewed was from Georgia, and he was an entrepreneur, and he converted to the religion of work here, but he was comparing life in Georgia to the Bay area. And he said, well, back there, your work was just basically what you did to survive, you know, to cover your bills, to be able to afford a roof over

your head. And then he said, you know, but here it's your identity you know and so if you think about here it is your work that locates you socially and it also your work which locates you spiritually right you know when I think about at least these tech workers the first question is well what do you do you know what is your purpose in life? And, you know, it kind of answers the question. Well, in another time and place, in other times and other places in the United States, the first question isn't, what do you do? The first question, at least, you know, when you kind of think about 1950s, and here, there are a lot of things that are wrong about 1950s America, a lot of things that, you know things that we would want to change. But the first question might be something like, okay, what club do you belong to?

Or what church do you go to? And I think that we need to remember that tech companies have learned something that is really important, is that where we find belonging and meaning, that is what gives us purpose. That is what comes to define our lives. And that's what we will shape our lives and the choices that we make. So if it is the tech company that is giving us that belonging and meaning in life, then we will conform our lives, our communities, our society to the needs of that institution. What I find really fascinating is sort of like the act of work can actually be quite fulfilling in many ways. And so talking about it having like a spiritual element isn't necessarily that strange or disconcerting at all. I think for me, what's the most alarming is really when it's

like wage labor, like, you know, coming from a Marxist sort of framework. It's like when your spirituality consists of being exploited and ultimately being a machine, so to speak, for the creation of profit. And that's where it becomes really horrifying for me. And like, I think, you know, you talk a lot about how, you know, work is displacing religion or rather the two are becoming one. And it's the fact that that's happening is impacting a lot of other social institutions. But it seems like there's just something aside from that super nefarious, just in terms of how it's impacting our relationship to work, like, and sort of the strength of, you know, we're seeing, you know, people keep saying that, like, yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of union activity,

seeing, you know, people keep saying that, like, yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of union activity, but union density isn't actually that high. But like, in terms of how, you know, workers see themselves as workers and the labor movement as like an opposition to capitalism, I feel like what's going on right now is so dangerous, because, again, it's this idea that the workplace has now become family and like, would your family exploit you? Like, that's not even something that would probably enter the minds of a lot of these people. So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, well, I think that the thing that's different about that, when we especially when we think about tech workers, is that one of the reasons why they can think of themselves as family and being so personally invested is that many of

them have stock options. I mean, they see themselves as being part owners of the company as well. And so they don't see themselves as just working for someone else, but they see themselves as also working for them. So here's what it is. It's like when you think about the institution of work, they're now being materially connected to work, right? The fortunes of the workplace, they benefit from it, but they're also now connected socially to the workplace. All their friends are there. They're also spiritually connected to the workplace because they're seeing their sense of meaning and purpose being worked through and manifested through the fortunes of the company as well.

When you feel that kind of investment, both material, social, and spiritual, I mean, that's complete identification with the company. And so I think that that's why it's so hard for, I mean, I was recently talking to a Google worker who's just like telling me this is never going to happen. Unionization will never happen at Google. And he was something, someone who was very sympathetic to unions, but he says, I can never see this happening. So yes, it's absolutely, it is absolutely nefarious. It is. And I think that it doesn't, at least for the spiritual component, right? Or in the social component of it. Yes, we might depend on our workplace financially, okay, for our material security. But the way that we can disentangle ourselves from the workplace is by building dependencies and connections and bonds of our social bonds and our spiritual bonds with other

organizations and institutions. So essentially, when I, you know, in my book, I talk about, well, how could we worship something else other than work? And here, you know, I think we're worshiping work because we are depending on work, materially, socially, and spiritually. And so my answer to the question of how we can stop worshiping work is that essentially we need to worship something else. You know, how do we build those bonds of dependency, of social dependency, of spiritual dependency with other organizations? How do we build these institutions that we find it worth sacrificing to, that we can find belonging and meaning and purpose in these other institutions? And so that to me is a way that we can, in the current sort of configuration that we live in, in a capitalist society, this is the way that I see as a way to make some kind of

change. And it's a difficult thing. I mean, it's a completely difficult thing to do, but I think that that offers us some freedom actually from work, as if we can learn to find fulfillment in these other things. And again, they need to essentially be other institutions and organizations that can rival work. Sounds very difficult to achieve something like that when sort of we have this algorithmic determinism that is built into the foundation of the system. But yeah, I mean, all of the options seem pretty challenging when you're, you're so deep into the material conditions and the cultural conditions that have sort of resulted in where, in where we're at now. Um, I, I have a couple more questions. Just really curious. First, like, have you gotten any, like, critical feedback from the folks that are either featured in the book or that, you know, that broader community? Like, I'm just say something, Robbie, to your earlier comment is that, you know, even in the 80s is, yes, they became more demanding, but they became more fulfilling.

And they sort of crowded out these other and replaced these other institutions of fulfillment. you know rather than again that if work if we're drawn to work because it's fulfilling us well then how can we find these other spaces and other institutions that fulfill us so that's sort of what I'm getting at but but the response back to your question about response so you know what's amazing I've been really actually really encouraged by the response that I've had from folks in Silicon Valley and people like in the mindfulness movement. I feel like there is some kind of change in Silicon Valley. I mean, not all the people, but I think that particularly among maybe the Gen Z folks who are coming in and who, you know, have experienced the pandemic, a lot of them are just sort of, look, you know, they're sort of like,

we know we're getting into this, we know that there are problems. And they're really interested in my book, because it's kind of like, we want to go into this with our eyes wide open. And so I've been really encouraged by that. And I've been also just actually sort of blown away because some of the folks who are in the mindfulness community who are bringing meditation and mindfulness to corporations, they've been really open to my book. I mean, I have one organization that essentially brings meditation mindfulness into corporations. And they said, we're going to put your book on our training syllabus because we want people to really think about these issues and wrestle with these issues.

So, you know, I think that they feel open to this dialogue. And I just want to say that I think it's also because while I am critical of the system, I think that, you know, I really try to put myself in the shoes of the folks who are teaching it and to show kind of their struggles and the strategic decisions and compromises that they have to make when they're working within a particular system where the bottom line is the most important thing. Well, yeah, thank you so much. This has been like a just really illuminating and important conversation, I think. And your book is just, you know, a really great contribution to a lot of the sort of internal criticisms that are coming from Silicon Valley towards Silicon Valley. So really appreciate your work. And I'm curious if you had any final thoughts or anything that I didn't ask that you want to share?

Well, I just want to say thank you to you, Robbie, and for the listeners for taking interest in my book. And I hope it starts a good conversation and debate about the role of work in our lives and hopefully ways to invest in the public and other institutions that can fulfill us. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Carolyn Chen, author of Work, Pray, Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Thank you to Beck for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. If you're interested in learning more about how spirituality is being deployed to create more docile, pliant, and productive workers, check out our conversation with Ron Purser on his book, Mick Mindfulness, How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and

couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make to Upstream are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with ongoing support from the incredible folks at Guerrilla Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review.

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