The Sunday Story: The Good Enough Job
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So I just got back from some time off. You know, I love my job and I have to say that with this shop that I have currently, it's not super hard to get back into work. But I have her jobs where IT was tough. And even though I really do love my um sometimes you just want to sleep in and watch T V 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 um and IT turns out that just taking a vacation might not be enough to combat the burn out that so many people are feeling right now. Like you can 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, is still to say. And I shara go, and this is a sunday story.

In his new book, the good enough job declaiming life from work author Simona, those also says we need to completely imagine our relationship with work stores off, says many americans, especially those who have the privilege to choose what they do for a living grab 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 were bringing you a conversation between the authors and epr producer ramoo in.

The two of them met three years ago when they were period up as accountability partners in the class for aspiring bookrunner. Rina got a front row seat to those of deep dive into america's troubled relationship to work. Here's rina. She's gna take you from here.

Hey, simo, i'm so glad we get to sit down and talk about your book today.

You should be here.

So your book profiles all these different workers across the U. S. But at the beginning you do get personnel and talk about your relationship to the topic and you say that you are a workest. I don't think that's a term a lot of people know. So what is the workers?

A workest is a term that was originally coined by the journalist Derek Thompson. And IT referred to someone who looks to work as a religious person might look to god. So I just look into 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 do 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 are asking for a lot. What are you trying to understand about this relationship that people have .

to their work is 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 our lives?

If you look to work as your soul 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 fellow or to a light off, as so many people have found in the past three years, you 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 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 amErica an's relationship to work has changed over time?

Yeah so I think first and for most, there's something cross cultural about IT. My family is italian, and italy is a country that has a different value system. Then the majority of us here in the united states, so my grandma, for example, grew up in a very small town.

And pola and southern italy wear all of my uncles and on some cousins still live. And person for most SHE was a woman of faith, someone that were shipped and devoted her life to god. Second, i'd say family was probably her second priority.

Many of my family members still together for lunch on A A weekly by weekly basis at a long table with ten or or twelve folks. And work was important, but that was more of a means to an end. SHE worked in a coffee shop in that small town in which he lived.

I still remember the bulbus by sap SHE had from pulling down the manual lever of the coffee machine. So first he was a woman of faith than a woman, a family, and her work was important, but not the entirety of her. Let me think about my parents, who are both psychologists.

They are bombers, and they very much have treated to work as a way to support the life that they want to lead. So yes, they chose a profession that aligned with their interest. But also, we're 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.

And reminded of the common phrase that my grandfather was in the military so that my, that IT could be an engineer, so that I could become a poet. And I was very much true for me in college. I studied poetry, actually, poetry and economics.

You can already see a little bit of attention between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce. In my life. And for me, a Young age, I thought, you know, work is the thing that i'm going to do more than anything else.

And they are choosing what to do for work is the most consequential decision I could make. So I spent my twenty years plane goldilocks careers looking fair. That vocational soul made 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 the smitherman 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 burden. 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 they're different ways to slice IT. I think there are things that are cultural 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 strings that in twine to form our country is DNA.

You might think that conflicting work in identity is nothing new, but do you think in last four, five decades or so, there have been some trends that have made more catapult into the central place, into our lives? For one, you have the decline of other sources of meaning and identity, things like organize 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 and meaning remain. So many americans have turned to where they spend the majority of their time, which is the office, to try and to fill all of those rules.

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. Um 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 is a recent survey from pew that down, 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 in fulfilment. Then low owners or people that didn't go to college. And I think there's also uh, an economic explanation, which is that if you look back in history for the majority of twenty a century, the average time that americans spent working started declined.

This was due to advancements in technology, due to organized labor in different ways that workers have made working ing conditions Better for themselves. And yet, in the one thousand nine and seventies, there is weird trend that occurred, which is, as our peer nations continued to decline them out of time, they spend working america's flatland. And among some demographics, namely college educated high earners, the same folks that I was speaking about earlier, their working time increased.

So this is a historical and most kind of a personal level. And on societal level, historically, the more money you make, the less you work, because, Frankly, you can afford not to. But around the one nine hundred and seventies, 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 you mostly talk about why colour workers um the the kind that you're are describing. But you also did talk to people who were doing good work or were blue colour workers, and am 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 workers m is an affliction that both exists on an individual level and on a societal level. We live in a country where productivity and southworth 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. Or as 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 you have this great line in your book that I can gets out this choice, which is, if working ism is the religion, dream jobs are the daddy. H, you know, you both millennial. I, I feel like I ve always known about this idea of a dream job. Like when I was a kid, people are 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 is hard to pinpoint an exact source. For one, there was the growth of this sort of business self help movement that started to framework, not as something that you did in service of others, but actually in service of yourself.

So there are books like what color is your parachute that came out in the early thousand and seven 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 the Young people today have inherit from their parents.

And many of them saw that really believe that if you follow your passion, the money would follow, and told me of their children and that, you know, you can be whoever you want to be. We ask children growing up, who do you want to be when you grow up? This language is reti c around you are. What you do is very much entrenched in our culture, in our society.

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we're back with the sunday story producer rain. A coin is talking with writer salmoni dose off about his new book the good enough job.

There is a story in the book that you tell about a woman name for baza eta. And SHE was really into this idea of a dream job ever since he was a kid. Can you tell me what you learn from her about the risks of buying into the idea of a dream job?

yeah. So for zi, like many middle scholars, was an abbot reader. And through books and elementary and medical school, SHE found escape.

SHE found stories of other people who looked like her. He was black and a predominant White school district. SHE found stories of people that he could connect to.

And a lot of them were the result of recommendations that he got from her school library. And so he decided, in the early age, know, even before high school, that SHE herself wanted to be a school librarian. You know, another library told me once that librarians aren't to made they're born.

It's a very common profession where you might feel a sense of calling from an early edge. And so for B, I study english college, and they were graduate school to get a library science degree. But IT wasn't until he entered the industry that he 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. We're not actually born out in her lived experience on the job. On the other side of the reference desk, SHE saw a workforce that was overworked, underpaid and predominated wait.

And so SHE wondered, you know, how could this paradise of inclusive, ity and democracy have such a different experience for the people who actually doing the work in the libraries? And SHE going to term that I think is very illustrative of what happens often in creative or mission driven industry is SHE said that SHE was experience in vocational, uh, so in certainly ines of work, particularly mission driven industries is like education or health care, maybe creative fields like writing or artists or other sort of non profit work that are really driven by the impact we hope to make. There is often the 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 for but they argue 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, commencer IT 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 a material lives. And when we frame a work as a passion, or a labor of love, or a calling, as opposed to what that actually is, a job a lot of workers can suffering.

So there there are people who work a lot and identify with their work at least a because at some point they got satisfaction from the work itself. The writing or working with, you know, people in a hospital or uh or kids are so on. But there is 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 profiling your book? His name is k he. And what drove him to work the way that he did?

Yeah so okay, represent sort of your typical type. A ambitious worker he grain lower middle class, are bringing in new york city with a cambodian american immigrant, 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 apart.

And so in high school, he really thought, as a means to an end, he focused on getting top grades. And so he could be admitted to a top college. He did up going to an ivy gue 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 thinking. And then he went into finance, and he joined wall street and quickly rose up the ricks. He worked for a black rock, which was at the time the largest asset management firm in the country, and was quickly promoted.

He became the Youngest managing director of black rock in the first 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 race. And he almost never in his life taking 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 later 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 is 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 to go to graduate school to pursue a degree that might not actually lead a 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, and the other hand what you yourself value and try and pursue a career at the intersection. Because I think there's risks of over indexing on either end of the spectrum.

Yeah, I think I think it's it's so interesting to have habit and case stories side by side because one person is motivated by passion and really has this this let down, and then another is motivated by status and money and end up having his own kind of version of come to jesus moment about what what he wanted his life to look like. What is IT about case approach that 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 brock was 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 were talking about people looking for a 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 with their values, where, I mean, they were still looking outside themselves then, and we're doing that now. So is this really different anyway?

So the writer David Foster wallace has a great quote where he says, the everyone worships, 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 sadness 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 bear yet who were working for meta or for google or for twitter, not known as x and they thought that was their calling.

They thought this was their dream job. And yet they are longer. Thousands of their colleagues were laid off. And so the difference between something like work and maybe, uh, religious god is that work can break your dreams and two and leave you to pick up the pieces in a way that maybe organize religion is less likely to do, but is supposed to just putting your faith in one thing when 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 ad. 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, I can be much more than that.

I 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 U.

P, S. Workers, or screen right in hollywood, or nurses in new jersey, or moves towards understanding the material nature of the world that we live in. In the fact that our job can be a means to an end, her job should pay us enough in order to be able to have lives outside of our jobs.

Well, I mean, there's there's a line that I think very striking. Are you where you say go to work, get your money, come on home. I just wondered whether there is some risk that people would take this transactional idea as an excuse to be kind of analytic 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 um so what do we lose if we stop telling people to runs told their passion and instead just to treat work as an economic contract .

yeah I think this is A A very nuances point. And even if you just look at the title of the book, the good enough job repco iming life from work, you might think it's the slacker anifah or arguing in favor of not caring about your job at all. But I don't actually think that's a recipe for fulfilment or happiness either.

And we all know this. On a personal level, the longest days at work tend to be the days where you don't feel in gate or you don't feel connected to what you do. So what i'm advocating for is for the hours that are at work to focus on work. Hopefully, work can be a source of meaning and fulfillment. Hopefully you are luck enough to be able to alive new work with your interests or your passions, but importantly, when you're done with the work day to go home, which is to say, to think about how you can invest in yourself, in your life outside of work as well. Part of the risk of a work center existence as 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 fashion or a vehicle for having impact or changing the world, but also to understand that for some people and 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 got ten to this place in society where we really reveal people whose work in identities needed a line, you know, the astronaut or the painter or the social entrepreneur. But for many people, work is the means to an end. They work to live, and they can express their values outside of the office as well.

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

Yeah, i'm glad you asked. I think a lot of times we put the honest on the individual to find solutions to work as a workplace burnout or the lack of barriers between our lives and our jobs and the actuality. I think the owner should be placed more often on institutions and on policymakers.

So part of the reason why our relationship to work is to frag here in united states is because the consequences of losing work are so dire when, for example, your health care, or if you're an immigrant to your ability to stay in this country, is contingent on your ability to find a job. So invention is to read, net, are afraid, social safety net. And so the consequences of losing work become less dire.

And people are able to hopefully find jobs that online Better and that are a 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 the boss is sending emails at eleven 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 born 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 uncertain circumstances, then they would would if they were working in longer weeks.

And so I think there's very much a business case to think about how protecting worker's lives outside of work can lead to more sustainable productivity over the long run. But then we shouldn't just work less because that makes us Better workers. I argue that we should work less because IT makes us Better humans, Better able to show up for loved ones and people that matter in our lives, but are able to invest in things like causes that we care about, our local politics, or things that are bigger then just the stock Price of a corporation.

So early in the book, you introduce yourself and you write, I am Simony and i'm a worker, or at least a recovering one, how would .

you introduce yourself? Now i'm suna safra san I humans. I am an ultimate frisbee player, a chocolate chip cookie connector. And I love to, right.

That was Simony stores of the author of the good enough job recreating iming life from work talking with in P. R. Producer rana coin. If you like the deep dive you get on the sundays story, check out in pr considered this podcast. This we consider.

This is covering how hurray e evacuation orders are decided, violence pushed to make prescription drugs cheaper, the role state politics played in the racist killings in Jackson ville and more. Listen to consider this whatever you kit your podcast this episode of the sunday story was produced by Andrew mambo and edited by liana sim's. Um our team includes Jenny Smith and Justin.

Our engineer for this episode was James willets. I read the gucci is our exceptional producer. We d love to hear from you.

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