When something’s not quite right, you know. It finds you in stillness, gnawing at any sense of quietude you’ve managed to create. The small voice in my own ear has nudged me to question into my relationship with work. I grapple with what role work should play in life and the development of identity. Though many say that your work shouldn’t define you, we cannot be defined just by weeknights and weekends-- many of us spend more of our waking hours in whatever form our office takes. Some say that you should pursue what you love and you won’t work a day in your life. Then, our work seeps deeply into our identity and any failure there threatens our entire sense of self-worth.
I am a teacher. I [mostly] love the actual teaching part and the days go by fast. I don’t love so often working seven days a week and the guilt I feel about what is left undone when I don’t. What I do feels so meaningful, yet the flip side is the accompanying sense of moral burden and a struggle to turn off my work brain and invest in other parts of my personhood or other people who are not my students but still worthy of love and time.
As a millennial, I’ve partaken in many conversations about the sometimes-intimidating “defining the relationship” conversations. We approach the “what are we?” conversation with a tentative sense of resolve when we realize that the ambiguity has become emotionally detrimental. I’ve even been known to approach those conversations with preplanned (and written) questions. Yet instead of questioning if my relationship with work is as it should be, I see work as a constant, unrelenting and unavoidable, and my relationship with it mirrors those qualities. In recent years, I have sacrificed relationships, health and personal happiness for my job. Now, I wonder how inevitable that is in our current cultural landscape. Should we choose to adhere to the belief that each job includes pointed challenges and that such challenges are inherent to working especially within capitalism? Or should we conclude that through careful job selection and advocacy, we can pursue a truly healthy relationship with work?
I live in my own bubble of teachers. I needed to branch out, to understand how other people grapple with this questions outside of my own workspace.
Through this project, I hope to understand the hidden joys and challenges of different industries. I wish to learn how others conceptualize their own identities inside and outside of the workplace and how they interact with work in healthy or unhealthy ways. I seek to create a modern homage to Studs Terkel’s Working. Mostly, I seek to listen and share so that you can listen and share and that we can build an awareness of what is and what could be. Thank you for being here!
Additional Sources:
“Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” (New York Times)
“BS Jobs: How Meaningless Work Wears Us Down” (National Public Radio)