Whut's Happened to My So-Called Career?
Sometimes your life squashes your work, sometimes your work squashes your life. Either way, you feel tension, disappointment, even sorrow. Let's think about how to respond to vocational obstruction.
Like most of you, I’ve been working since adolescence. For most of that time, I have known only one thing: how to work a lot. In other words, I’ve learned how to be the ideal worker, a term developed and used by at least two Joans, the sociologist Joan Acker and the feminist Joan Williams. The ideal worker is constantly accessible, easily relocatable, highly competitive, and free of caregiving responsibilities. Most of us, don’t actually manage to measure up to the ideal worker, and it drives us bonkers. Why do we keep trying?
We keep hoping it will save our life from all the things. Colon cancer. Digital overwhelm. White theft. Sexual harassment. Your shit-for-brains administrator and his financial mismanagement.
Look, I admire your work ethic. You’re amazing. But working like a superhero won’t save you from any of that.
Things happen, and, no matter how awesome an employee you’ve been, you feel like an underaged passenger on the runaway train of life and work.
What This Newsletter’s Not Said Enough
In the early 2020s, journalists got excited—and managers got frustrated—when some 4 million Americans quit their jobs every month. During those same years, and by sheer luck, I was interviewing dozens of Gen Z and millennials about their experience of professional overwhelm. I’m happy to say that I heard plenty of stories of job quits and job switches made powerfully and decisively. This newsletter has shared some of those stories here and here and here. (I could tell you many more such stories. But you’ll find them in my forthcoming book Digital Overwhelm: The Millennial’s Guide to Coping at Work).
But what this newsletter’s not talked about enough is what happens when your work and your life shut each other down.
Sometimes, your work smashes your life. Your manager’s constantly texting you while you’re taking your kids to the playground: “Happy Saturday! Could you take a quick look at this doc before I zip it to the higher-ups—thanks a bunch!”
Sometimes, though, it’s your life smashing your work. The test results come in. The spouse walks out. The car is totaled. The child withdraws.
This past week, I was in Atlanta at a NetVUE conference focused on vocation. My colleagues and I presented on “Make ‘Work and Life’ Work.” It was a fairly good presentation, offering fairly good ideas for mentors of rising professionals.
But one person in the audience came ready to take a lot of notes and then, at a certain point, put her pen down. There was, she told me over breakfast the next morning, a missing piece in our polished presentation: Where was the tension between work and life? Where was the conflict? Where was the obstruction? Where the disappointment? These, too, are important parts of calling.
The next day I went to her talk—and she turned out to be a Vanderbilt professor, Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, who’s working on a book called Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. In a blog post, she summed her argument this way: every vocation “comes inevitably with undersides—struggles and complications that we can never fully anticipate and for which we need to be aware and prepared.”
One of McLemore’s co-presenters was Deanna Thompson who, at the age of 42, was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. She spoke with quietly devastating authority about why we have to talk about the role of sadness in vocation. Work and life, she argued, aren’t always “joy-inducing.” As a good Lutheran on the cusp of Holy Week, she noted one responsible translation of Jesus Christ’s words on the cross: “My God, my God, where the hell are you?”
So, here’s my question for this week: is there a mode/switch to make when your so-called career goes off the rails? What mind change, what habit change, can you adopt when career disruption makes you feel like a stranger in your own life?
Your Mindset Might Need to Change
When your career is obstructed, allow yourself to admit one thing: it’s not finally all about you and your choices. We’re all doing our best, more or less, in what one journalist has called the everything-is-weird economy. So, the pressures you cope with everyday are probably not finally traceable to some stupid mistake you made somewhere back a decade ago.
When you settled on that major. And then changed your major eight times.
When you married that person. And then that other one, too.
When you said yes to that job. And then, to the next three jobs in rapid sequence.
When you had that kid. And then that other one, too.
When you bought that Chevy Cobalt.
I mean, those decisions are consequential. But don’t miss the brute fact of the godawfulness of the early 2020s. The pandemic and the racial upheaval and the institutional breakdown pulled us tight on a number of tensions. Here’s one example: We all feel the pressure to grind and hustle like the ideal worker. But at the same time, we feel terrific pressure to be a perfect parent. The scholar Caitlyn Collins recently told Ezra Klein that the conflict between being an ideal worker and an ideal caregiver is “crushing American parents right now.”
The sociologist Mary Blair Loy notes that this is especially bad for moms, who feel an impossible conflict between what her book calls Competing Devotions. You want to be the perfect parent for your utterly helpless child (?), and you want to be the perfect employee for your utterly meaningful work (?).
And that’s just one cross-tension in American society today. There are plenty more where that came from.
So, here’s a mindset change for you when your work and life collide and collapse: admit that the tensions you’re feeling right now aren’t all of your own devising.
Your Habits Might Need to Change
When you experience career disappointment or failure, the first habit to change might be how you pay attention to your life. Maggie Jackson has recently written a book about uncertainty, and she commented on a podcast with Kate Bowler that that in times of uneasiness, when we find ourselves hissing, “My God, where the hell are you?” we automatically become more intensely aware of our surroundings. Our eyes literally, physiologically, widen.
But even so, it’s easy to return to a narrow focus. When I run into trouble in my career or in my life, my attention might widen for a moment, but then it tends to tighten and narrow until I’m staring at my life through a tiny hole, muttering to myself “Why me?” But what if instead of narrowing your focus, you widen your attention by asking the question, “What for?” You might not get an answer to that question, but you will expand your awareness.
I learned that shift in questions from why me to what for from a friend whose husband endures paraplegia. One day, she and he were out on a bike ride when his front tire hit a divot in the road. He wasn’t hit by a truck. He didn’t ride into a tree. His wheel hit a small bump, he fell to the asphalt, he split his helmet in half, and he broke his spine.
She told me that people hearing this story always want to one of two things:
What did he do wrong? They want to know this so they can reassure themselves that such things will never happen to them. (But they will.)
What good came of it? They want to know this so they can reassure themselves the universe makes transparently good sense. (But it doesn’t.)
That makes me think that the second major habit shift we need when work and life collide and collapse is how we tell our stories. Instead of sharing testimonies that construct a simple moral universe (as in, “She did something wrong, so she got punished”), instead of telling stories that evoke an transparently safe universe (as in, “Everything happens for a reason”), we should tell stories that allow for the actual complexity of life and work.
Your Career’s Gone Kaput—Radical Joy’s Still Possible
I spend a lot of time researching institutional racism, and one of the most striking elements of disempowered communities is the phenomenon of Black joy. It’s easy to look at the experiences of citizens of color and see only professional obstacles, maddening disparities, and institutional biases. Living and working within the pressures of predominantly white society is not for the faint of heart. But there is also the strange and abiding fact that Black and Brown citizens know how to laugh, know how to sing, know how to move in utter human abandon. In short, they know how to live with what the Black writer Joe Davis calls “radical joy.”
Here’s an unutterably strange fact: learning to negotiate disappointment and obstruction, unfairness and instability just might mean getting schooled in crazy joy.
Let me offer a last word, this one from my scribbled notes at Deanna Thompson’s talk last week. She said something to this wonderful effect: what if vocational joy isn’t so much a relief from heartbreak as it is a reality flowing from heartbreak?
