Is Work Your Drug of Choice?
The best cure I've found for work addiction and job cynicism
Did you pass your last workplace drug test? Woo-hoo for virtuous pee! But this week, The Mode/Switch discusses a drug no urine test can catch. Work is often my drug. For you, it might be a placebo. Either way, I’ve found a cure.
When work’s your way of avoiding emotional pain
Last Thursday night, I thought it was Friday, and I came home ready to do the weekend. Turns out, everybody else in the house had had a sucky day. I should have been sympathetic. I mean, geez, I write a newsletter about sucky days at work. But I felt disappointed and lonely and irritated. Supper didn’t go especially well.
As we were clearing the table, I said in a bright, strained voice that, “Guess I’ll head back to the office to finish a project.” Not a good idea, but I was peeved.
I brewed some Folgers at my desk (another not very good idea), and I banged out a writing project. I was pretty proud of myself, submitting that thing to the editor with a timestamp of 11:58 pm. But I also had to avert my gaze from the irony that my writing project addressed “workism,” or the nearly religious belief that, whatever our problem is, the solution is always more work. (Editor, forgive me, for I have sinned.)
Overwork felt only too briefly good. It did not feel good waking up at 4:30 AM, after fewer than 4 hours of sleep, vibrating with caffeine. It did not feel good quarreling with my partner, because I was short on everything needed for kindness. It did not feel good falling asleep under my desk the next day at work. Twice.
When work’s your way of staying cynical
During the pandemic, I interviewed 47 rising professionals (ages 22-40) about how they cope with job intensity in the knowledge economy. Their stories showed just how tempting it is to be cynical in the workplace. (I should also say that my interviewees, for the most part, were keeping cynicism at bay.)
If Gen Xers like me exaggerate how important their jobs are, Gen Zers and millennial employees can treat their jobs like what David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs,” that is, “all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.”
Instead of a drug, then, these people’s jobs felt like gummy vitamins that supposedly build immunity—and don’t. I read the reports like everybody else: I know that scientists can’t find definitive proof that dosing zinc or Vitamin C helps much at all. But still, every morning, I press down on the childproof cap, unscrew the thing, and pop a few of those chewables. Am I deluded or despairing?
Some people seem vulnerable to vocational delusion about their capacities to cure the world. My research turned up some managers and directors and team leaders who, so to speak, kept prozac in their desks for immediate distribution They really and truly desired to contribute to their employees’ wellbeing, but it’s all too easy to forget they’re managers, not therapists.
Other people are so convinced their jobs were saving the world that, in my cynical moments, I think, like, are you doing this job like ecstasy? These people are the entrepreneur types, and (in less cynical moments) I admired them immensely. But their temptation was to exaggerate the world’s immediate fixability. (You’re a nonprofit leader, not a superhero.)
But the bigger problem for rising employees today is feeling deflated about work.
Some despairing employees basically deal with inhuman conditions by blowing smoke up their bosses’ butts, smiling and lisping, It’s all good, even when it’s very much not. These are the most disempowered workers, doing low-paying jobs like retail or intake. I understood why they played the role of the cheerful employee. It’s a coping mechanism, a survival tactic. But the temptation for people like this is to avoid self-advocacy. (You’re an essential worker not a disposable item.)
Some of the most jaded employees I talked to thought their jobs were basically as effective as fish oil. This job ain’t gonna give meaning to me or anybody else—so pass out the products and services like late-capitalist omega-3s. What can it hurt? It’s all pointless. The problem is that placebos often turn into nocebos, that is, sugar pills that actually do harm. Cynicism burns you inside out. (It’s a job, not a Coen Brothers movie.)
All this to say: there’s more than one way to be a user at work. Some of us are dope fiends (um, yep, that would be me); some of us are placebo dealers (well, is that you?).
Let’s talk about one way to rehab our relationship to work. Think of it as a mode/switch from being a fiend to being a friend.
This info-graphic matters (thanks, Hannah!) because the first two categories point to places where overwork can happen, and the others to where cynicism can happen.
Here’s a cure for work addiction and job cynicism
There’s no more powerful way to heal your relationship to your work than what communication theorist Michael Hyde has called “the life-giving gift of acknowledgment.” Whether your work’s a drug or a placebo, you’re actually calling out into the universe, “Is there anybody out there?” What you need is that most vital of affordances—the gift of being seen.
And the best way to be seen is to find a seat in a circle of friends.
I stumbled onto the vocational power of friendship by accident. Last year, finding myself in a new job and feeling a tad overwhelmed, I asked a pastor friend of mine for some help finding a spiritual director. She gave me a list of names, but she also suggested that what I really needed was to have beers with some guys she knew.
So the boys and I met up on a Wednesday night in downtown Grand Rapids. We spread out the snacks and beer and—I’m happy to report—talking with them really, really helped. But what helped even more was that everybody said we should do this again. The five of us have been meeting every 2-3 weeks ever since.
My research suggests that friend circles works for other struggling professionals, too. While writing a book on spiritual capital, I came across a millennial business owner who described herself as neither religious nor spiritual. But she called her gathering Church: “So, we drink, we eat junk food, and sometimes vegetables, and it’s very low-key. It’s at my house, and we set intentions. We talk about all of our stuff. Everybody cries almost every time. We stay till about midnight or 1:00 in the morning, and we just get it all out in a very secure, safe, brave environment that has a lockdown on—nothing leaves it.”
People overwork because they’re afraid of not being noticed. People under-work in despairing aloneness in the cosmos. But for drug or placebo, the cure is friendship.
Final advice about curing over-under-work by finding friends
Find more than one friend. If you experience work as an addictive substance or a despairing placebo, it probably won’t be enough to say, Just you and me, bestie. If you’re trying to cure a poor relationship to work, I think it’s important to find a circle of friends. In my twice-monthly hangout, there’s Boomer, a few Xers, and a Gen Z. Because we all have very different addictions, very different placebos, we can speak from resourcefully varied standpoints.
Find friends outside of work. Your friend circle probably shouldn’t be with coworkers. Trying to fight the job-as-drug problem will be counterproductive if your coworkers simply reinforce your addiction. Or your cynicism. Try to look for time and honest talk before 9 and after 5.
Find friendship not romance. Seeking friendship in the U.S. is often confused with seeking sex. Men will find this harder than women. Heterosexual men, in particular, tend to assume that their closest relations have to be romantic ones. Look, my guys, we gotta rethink this. (Do yourself a favor and read this interview by Anne Helen Peterson.)
Find the courage to confess what you need. You may be reading all this and saying, Yeah, sure, but how do you find people for your circle of friends? Ezra Klein recently asked, “What kinds of relationships would you want in your life, if you felt you could ask for them?” Notice that phrase “if you felt you could ask.” Often we simply don’t. One of the biggest obstacles to the healing power of friendship is not feeling worthy of befriending. You are.
The path to curing co-dependency with your job—or your cynicism about your job—is a practice you’ve known how to do since you were a kid. This practice takes some grace, sure. But you can do this thing. The script isn’t complicated: “You seem pretty great. I’d like to know you better. Want to get some food?”
Take heart, work addicts and cynics. Befriending happens.
On my book wishlist these days…
I started this piece joking about workplace drug tests. But you don’t need better pee; you need a better we.
* Thinking of friends as our “we” comes from Rhaina Cohen’s book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.
* David Brooks’s recent book came up in my friend circle last week from someone who doesn’t usually like David Brooks. But this one looks indispensable: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
* Want to take the friendship conversation deeper into leadership territory? Check out Victoria White’s Holy Friendship: Nurturing Relationships That Sustain Pastors and Leaders.
Listen While You Work
Every week, Hannah puts out a Listen While You Work playlist. But in response to last week’s tunes, one Mode/Switcher wrote in with a request. Since it’s pertinent to this week’s theme, we’ve embedded the song here: