This week in the future of work
A very personal note
For the past couple weeks I’ve been staying at my father and stepmother’s house: Pop is at the end of his life, and while he celebrated his 84th birthday last week, I’ll probably only be here a couple more days.
Four years ago Pop was first diagnosed with cancer, and when it came back he decided that buying more time with aggressive treatment, but spending more of it in hospitals dealing with the side effects, felt like a losing proposition. At that point, he moved down to his library so he could spend his last days with my stepmother, and to be close to his books and notes. Fifty years earlier he had embarked on a life as a history professor (a vocation I studied for myself), and the space is filled with dozens of neatly-arranged binders from monographs and other academic projects, hundreds of notebooks from archival trips and fieldwork, a dazzling collection of fountain pens and mystifyingly large number of disposable pens, and thousands of books. Poking around it one night, I realized that the library’s layers grew outward around him. Closest to his desk were notes and papers for a book on post-World War II Allied planning in south Asia, a project he worked on even when the cancer came back. Further away, on shelves stacked two rows deep, were books and papers from earlier books; buried behind those, like the cosmic background radiation of the Big Bang, were his books from graduate school.
It’s a room that contains his life’s work, and where he has done much of his life’s work; it was an extension of himself. Sitting with him, I was reminded of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. For Pop, like Newland Archer, his library “for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings... the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened.”
Pop’s decision to close out his life in the library illustrates how work at its very best can give meaning to our lives— not just giving us a reason to get up in the morning, but ultimately helping us face the impossible. “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears... to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life,” as Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said. So much of our thinking about work and work-life balance focuses on the daily challenges of scheduling, or fitting a workout in between conference calls and kid pickups. But we should look a little bigger than that.
I’ve been rereading Frankl’s great book, Man’s Search for Meaning. For those of you are familiar with the book, my reasons are self-evident; for who don’t know it, Frankl had lost his wife during the Holocaust, spent time in concentration camps, and during the war discovered that the key to his survival was his ability to give meaning to suffering. Those who no longer had a reason to live, or lacked the inner resources to create a meaning, perished. Those who did could endure and outlast their captors. Later in his private practice, he found that patients who were able to bear the loss of a loved one, or who dealt most gracefully with a terminal illness, likewise were those who could find purpose in their loss.
How do people learn to find purpose? Frankl argued that meaning can come from three sources: from work; from experiences (especially with loved ones); and from having to face insurmountable obstacles. The ability to create meaning even under impossible circumstances, Frankl observed, doesn’t spring from nowhere: it’s built on a lifetime of small but meaningful relationships, experiences, and works. One of Frankl’s most important insights about “the meaning of life” is that it’s not something you derive from philosophical principles, and it’s not a reward you find at the end of a quest. You don’t discover meaning; you make it, every day. Because life and circumstances constantly change, “it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way,” Frankl wrote. “Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. ‘Life’ does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete.” You have to keep updating the meaning of your work, your effort, you life; and the more experience you have to draw upon, the better you can do it. Creating meaning— like creating anything, or speaking a language, or even resting— is a skill.
Pop told me when he decided to stop treatment that he now felt he had lived a good life, that he had outlived Japanese occupation and outlasted the Trump administration, and he was certain of his choice. His decision to move down to the library is a testament to how much good work can give our lives meaning, and how good spaces have the power to remind us of who we are, and remind us that a lifetime of good work can give us the strength and grace to meet life’s greatest challenges.
Don’t Love Your Job
Pop was lucky to have launched his academic career at a time when jobs were plentiful, the career ladder was clear, and tenure was still a thing. When I finished my Ph.D. in 1991, the ladder was starting to break; and it’s never really been fixed. The material and professional conditions that underwrote Pop’s life have been replaced by a world of adjuncting and precarity.
Even in places that really value their workers, there’s still a fundamentally transactional nature to employer-employee relations, as Emi Nietfeld’s New York Times piece, "After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again,” reminds us. It’s very thoughtful reflection on how companies create a gloss of friendliness over a structure that’s a business exchange, and the damage it can do:
I bought into the Google dream completely. In high school, I spent time homeless and in foster care, and was often ostracized for being nerdy. I longed for the prestige of a blue-chip job, the security it would bring and a collegial environment where I would work alongside people as driven as I was.
What I found was a surrogate family. During the week, I ate all my meals at the office. I went to the Google doctor and the Google gym.
However, once she has a problem with her technical manager that she reports to HR, things go bad, and ultimately she leaves.
After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.
So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job.
Where’s she working now? Facebook.
Her book Acceptance is coming out later this year, and it looks like one of a growing number of books pushing back on the idea that you must love what you do— Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back is another great one— or at least, making the argument that you need to choose how to direct that love. (It’s also something I’ve written about from time to time— that it’s terrible advice that has unequal gendered consequences.)
On Care Economies
One of the most memorable experiences I had when I was researching SHORTER was spending a day at Normally, a design firm in London run by Marei Wollersberger and Chris Downs. Normally had operated on a 4-day week since its founding, and Marei and Chris were amazingly thoughtful about the benefits of a shorter workweek.
One of the questions I asked them was, what do people do with their extra day?
MAREI: A lot of it is about taking care of someone. That someone can be yourself, and your own health and wellbeing. It can be children or a child. It can be a parent; sometimes a parent gets ill and the person wants to spend more time with them so you go a long weekend—
CHRIS: Just before you came in I was talking to one of the team whose mum's been taken ill and he was there on Friday— in fact he’s taken a couple of extra days, and I said yeah, that’s fine, no problem, spend some time with you mum. So care, absolutely, yeah if you summarize what people do with their fifth day? They care.
The importance of care— to ourselves as moral beings, to those we care for, to the economy as a whole, to the smooth running of the world— is something we often underestimate. Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that “Rosie Could Be a Riveter Only Because of a Care Economy. Where Is Ours?” She notes that during World War II, when women were heading into factories, Congress recognized that child care was, essentially, a kind of infrastructure:
In 1941, they passed the Defense Public Works law of 1941 (known as the Lanham Act) to provide for the building of infrastructure like water and sewer treatment, housing and schools, all of which were recognized as necessary supports to the war effort. Two years later, Congress relied on this authorization to allocate $52 million (about $800 million today) to build over 3,000 federally subsidized day care centers.
The whole piece is well worth reading, and I include it because questions about how to value and organize care are going to play a big role in shaping the future of work.
That’s all for now. More from the other side.
Alex