The 'Good Enough Job' with Simone Stolzoff
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In February 2020, right before the world changed forever, my own world changed: I experienced my own serious case of burnout.
My prevailing memory of the week it all came to a head was that it was really fucking scary. How did I get here, I wondered, as I waited for an emergency doctor’s appointment in an east London hospital on a Sunday afternoon. I had not slept for more than three weeks, and I felt profoundly out of control of my life. I seriously doubted my ability to continue functioning if I did not get some immediate help — be pharmaceutical, spiritual, or otherwise. The doctor sternly told me I had to take a week off work.
I did that. And in the weeks and months that followed, I vowed that I would do whatever it took to never go back to that place again. As it turns out, that required making fundamental changes to my lifestyle, career path, and worldview. But I was fortunate, weirdly, because my own personal disruption happened precisely at the time when our societal attitudes towards work would change more in 18 months than they had in the ten or twenty years prior.
Someone who has been tracing that wave of change is Simone Stolzoff. He’s a writer, designer, and deep thinker (disclosure: we used to work together at Quartz) whose forthcoming book, The Good Enough Job, will trace how work has become a central source of identity for so many people. It will also explore how we can search for other sources of meaning and identity beyond our professional lives — something Stolzoff cleverly calls “diversifying your meaning-making portfolio.”
Stolzoff has as lot of insight into how we got here, and more crucially, even more into how we can get out of it. The solutions are societal, structural, and yes, personal. One one thing that stuck with me from our interview was this: The first question we ask each other is always “what do you do?” What if, he proposes, we changed that to: “What do you like to do?”
If anything feels important in my life right now, it’s figuring out how to answer that.
R: Since the pandemic, there’s been a huge discussion about how people are fed up with work. And it’s not just privileged knowledge economy people like you and me. It’s service workers and customer service folks too. What is not working?
S: There’s privilege in even asking yourself: What work do I want to do? For civilizations, for centuries, more wealth meant the ability to work less. The data tells us an interesting thing happened in the 1970s in the US, when this cadre of overly-educated elites started working more the more money they made. It’s a trend that defies logic and history because now the reward for working harder is often more work.
There’s this researcher Erin Cech and she researches the passion principle — the idea that work should be your highest form of self expression. She found that regardless of whether or not you went to college, what your race is, where you come from, there’s a huge uptick of people looking to work as a source of meaning. Even those who don't have access to meaningful work are not immune to the pressures of a culture that expects workers to do what they love.
R: Do you think work should be a source of passion and meaning? And if so, isn’t that very convenient for the capitalist forces that want to wring out everything from us?
S: It can be and I don’t think it necessarily should be.
When I was 22 I got the opportunity to interview my favorite poet/writer, Anis Mojgani. He was my professional rockstar. I asked him about this idea of loving what you do and never working a day in your life. I was expecting him to give me a kind of pep talk about following your dreams, and yet he said something I’ll never forget: “Some people love what they do for work. And some people do what they have to do for work so that they can do what they love when they’re not working. Neither is more noble.”
Right now I think the scales in our society are tipped. We’re very much idolizing the people whose work is a reflection of their identity — the painters and social entrepreneurs — as if this is the beacon of success in life. The point I’m trying to make in the book is that for some, there’s equivalency there. But not for everyone. I’m arguing that instead of subordinating life for the sake of work, to do the opposite.
R: If I said I have a job that pays my bills that I don’t care that much about, but I’m able to sign off at 5pm every day, or I work four days a week, and the rest of the week I do things I love. By our current value system, that would not be a successful life. And yet it is.
S: It is, and I’d argue that life is potentially more balanced and sustainable and better for your mental health and better for your community and your city and your family and your friends.
It’s not for me or you to tell someone of where they should be on that spectrum of a job as a means to an end versus a job as a means to self actualization. But what I hope is that, instead of people just adopting these external measures of success that we see in society — whether it’s a job title or income level or a position seen as cool — that people take the time to define what success means to them. So people don’t find themselves winning at a game they don’t want to be playing.
R: I have this theory that work is the last socially-sanctioned addiction. I think over-work can serve an emotional purpose for people in the same way booze or drugs or sex can. But it’s not even recognized as a potential source of harm. When I look back at my former attitudes to work, I would say I kind of was self harming with work. I know that sounds dramatic, but it did sort of bring me to a dramatic ending.
S: One of the reasons is that we haven’t really taken addictions to work that seriously because society might have a lot to gain from our addiction. The incentives of capitalism push us to work to our limits.
But I think across the board, one of the big questions — especially for people who do enjoy their job or get fulfillment from their work — is: “Why should I work less?”
To them I’d say: Have you ever gone off the grid or gone camping and for the first day you’ve lost reception and you feel this phantom limb vibration in your pocket. And then, over time, you sort of settle into the new lifestyle of being off grid and from that place you begin to recharge and regenerate. I think we need that. In order to cultivate other identities, in order to find other sources of meaning beyond our professional lives, we need time and energy. It starts with working a little less.
R: Can you say more about what working less looks like?
S: You can look at it at the policy/government level, the company level, and the individual level. Things like leave for parents, mandatory sick days at the company level, firm boundaries between when workers are on/off the clock, paid time off for all employees. At the individual level it might be as simple as not opening the laptop on a Saturday.
The point is that we need structural protections against overwork because the alternative is that, thanks to the incentives of capitalism and the economy, work will be like a gas and fill any space it can. Although a lot of the individualistic solutions around burnout — set a boundary, practice self care — are well intentioned, without the structural support behind them, they will break.
R: There’s something I want to add though. In addition to all the structural and company policies — all very important — if you find that you cannot stop yourself from opening that laptop on Saturday, you really need to investigate what’s going on there. Investigate why you feel so driven to seek order, certainty, validation, praise or whatever through your work. In all the necessary words that have been written in the last couple years about overwork, I think that piece is missing — and it’s especially relevant for the privileged, over-educated among us.
S: There’s a study of new parents that comes to mind. The findings from the research were that new dads sometimes work more than before they had their kids. The explanation was that something like parenting doesn’t always have a one-to-one relationship between the effort you put in and the results you get out. And that can be really hard for people’s self esteem and sense of self worth. So by returning to your job as, say, a financial trader — where you can very easily see the fruits of your labor and it’s a known quantity — you can tether your self worth to work.
R: Right, you don’t have to face the chaos and randomness of the universe that arises when you bring new life into the world.
Totally. If we let our self worth become modulated by professional accomplishments, it doesn’t allow us to maintain the clarity of our own minds. From a spiritual perspective, diversifying our sources of meaning can be incredibly grounding. And so you’re not sort of rising and falling based on whether your boss gave you a point of validation, or how many clicks your article got, or whether the stock price went up and down. If our goal is to find the middle path, is to find that balance, I’d argue over identifying with anything is never going to be a resilient strategy.
R: Can you tell me more about “diversifying your meaning-making portfolio?” What does that look like in practice?
S: Cultivating other identities and sources of meaning takes time and effort, as mentioned before.
The more “I am” statements we have, the better. For me it’s things like I am a San Franciscan. I am a believer in communal living and therefore I live in a co-op. I am generous with my time, therefore I find time to mentor people that are younger than me. I am respectful of my elders, which means I can be humble in the face of people older than me. I not only say those things from a language perspective, I try to back them up with how I spend my time.
At the end of the day, the only thing a job is is an economic contract. It’s an agreement to exchange your time and labor for a paycheck. It can be a lot more than that — it can be an identity, a vehicle for change in the world, a source of meaning. But it doesn’t have to be. And that realization is actually really empowering.
R: So let’s connect this to a larger picture. Some of the smartest, most gifted and resourced people go into these career trajectories where — not only do they not have time for their communities — they don’t even have time to take care of their basic needs, so they outsource them to apps. Is the hope that, if we stop living lives where every waking moment is focused on optimizing our careers, we can begin to have some space to engage in doing something that is rooted in the collective identity?
S: Maybe it takes something like Covid or a climate crisis to wake people up to the fact that, in the face of a global tragedy, the idea that meaning in life should be found in the office is almost satirical. That’s not to say that work can’t be a means of improving the world or that MRNA vaccines weren’t a result of a team working very hard together. But I do believe we have higher virtues and values and priorities as humans than to just be workers.
Every single person in the world has had some sort of reckoning about their relationship to work in the last two years. Record unemployment tells you your job might not always be there. A frontline worker choosing between health and paycheck makes it pretty clear we need to do a better job of protecting workers. Or even privileged workers like us, the question of when you strip away all the cushy office perks, are you fulfilled selling software?
This book I am writing was relevant before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the climate crisis have shown us why it is so important to at least have the time to be able to do things beyond producing shareholder value. If not for any other reason to enjoy some of life.
R: If someone were new to this idea of working less, or cultivating a more diverse identity, how should they start? Short of quitting their job, what are early steps individuals can do as part of this effort to diversity and reframe their relationship to work?
S: Sometimes when I tell people there’s value in cultivating other identities beyond professional, people will be like “I don’t know what to do. I’m not into sourdough starters.” I think a nice way of figuring out some identities you can cultivate is asking yourself: What did you like to do as a kid? And there’s a lot of wisdom in that. How did you spend your time when time was a little more abundant or when you were free of the pressures of capitalism. And if all else fails give yourself the permission to try something new. You’d be surprised by what might stick.
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