Why Do You Feel Restless at Work?

Your job's more like white water rafting than a scenic overlook

Do you ever spot an advertisement for your company and wonder, for the briefest moment, if you really belong there?

But doesn’t most company messaging feel like a Scenic Overlook for professional fulfillment? Don’t most websites offer employees grand vistas of equity, sustainability, security, success, satisfaction? Don’t most brands promise you a sense of belonging?

Sure. But when you turn your coin-operated telescope on the company culture itself, you may find belonging hard to bring into focus.

For my part, anyway, I stare and stare at hyped up mission statements and tricked out websites without really seeing them—or at least without seeing myself in them.

That sounds narcissistic. But all too often, I can’t see the brand I belong to in a way that makes me feel that belonging.

Maybe the problem is that we see our jobs as vistas rather than rivers.

Why Workplaces Make Terrible Overlooks

In an essay called “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy notes how hard it is for tourists to actually see the Grand Canyon. Because you’ve seen so many postcards, promotional videos, and Instagram vacation shots, you end up comparing the view right in front of you with all the images you’ve seen on socials.

A few years back, my daughter and I took a mule tour along the Grand Canyon. It was a little tedious honestly, ambling along in a long line of legs-spread-wide riders wearing floppy hats. The only thing I remember is our guide’s story about a mule they had to retire because he kept bucking people off so he could roll in the sand.

Now that would be a way to see the Grand Canyon! You get bucked off, hit your head on a fallen tree branch, and then wake up ten minutes later. Your guide is somewhere a mile ahead still telling funny stories to all the floppy hats. But you’re at the brink of the Canyon with nothing but red rock and open air before you. You can finally see it! You are one with what you see.

Or is that just your mule’s nosebag you’re looking at?

My organizational research over the past few years suggests that many workers today do not enjoy the view their workplaces provide. They’re chasing a vocational vista.

• Maybe that was the beautiful vista that many workers chased during the Great Resignation, when millions quit their jobs every month from 2021 to 2023.

• Maybe that’s the vista that drives so many people to build start-ups. Nothing makes you belong to a brand like designing it in the first place.

• Maybe never finding that gorgeous overlook that makes us feel lonely at work. (Employers, heads up! According to the Cigna Loneliness Index, loneliness costs companies an estimated $154 billion a year.)

But instead of treating your job as a scenic overlook you can only accidentally enjoy (once you get kicked off your mule), trying riding it like a white-water river.

Why Workplaces Make Amazing Rivers to Ride

Institutions today feel very choppy. I have this memory—perhaps a false one, but one that’s still hard to shake—that when I was entering the workforce in the 90s, organizations felt like stable platforms with impressive views. Today, they feel janky and twisty like a roaring river about to capsize your raft. I think my colleagues of color would say that institutions only seemed like a shelter to me because they were made for people who look like me.

But for whatever reason, more and more of us today experience institutions, not like the brink of a canyon but like the rapids flowing far below.

The sort of good news is that survival is good for belonging. If we can admit that our institutions feel like perilous rivers, maybe we can regain our sense of personal and collective engagement.

Perhaps it’s hard for you, as it often is for me, to feel belonging when you stare at the far horizons of meaning that your company promises. But, look, for the moment anyway, you do belong to the boat you’re in and the people rowing next to you.

So, grab an oar. Brace your feet against the seat in front of you. Give a shout to the team on the other side of the raft. Be willing to laugh when you get dowsed. Allow yourself to feel the fear and risk your surroundings create. And if someone’s going over, grab their life vest.

Maybe the goal these days isn’t the quiet sigh of vocational serenity that breathes out “Now, that’s gorgeous!” Maybe the goal, for now, is staying above the rapids for as long as you can manage.

And when you do fall into the water, don’t waste time bemoaning the boat that dumped you. Find another and start pulling with a new set of teammates.

What Workplaces Might Yet Become

I hope that, as we leave the upheaval of the early 2020s, our institutions become quieter and more stable and more conducive to worker wellbeing. I hope that our workplaces become more equitable, more sustainable, less prone to peril. I hope that in the years to come, we can build companies and brands that create company cultures we’re constantly proud to affiliate with.

But until that future arrives, staying alive together may be the best way to finding belonging at work.

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Listen While You Work

Here’s this week’s LWYW playlist curated by the Mode/Switch’s communications coordinator and designer Hannah Sherbrooke. And speaking of listening while you work, make sure to follow The Mode/Switch Pod on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Maybe a thousand-word newsletter like this isn’t your scene. But the Friday morning podcast (featuring a rotating team of intergenerational mode-switchers) just might be the convo that keeps you going on the white water of institutional life today.