How are things?
I’ve found myself landing on a catch all question of, “how are things?” in lieu of the usual “how are you?” or the timeless, “how’s work?” In a world where everyone is still in some state of flux, “things” seems to encompass it all, while leaving space for someone to answer honestly, all while only divulging just as much as they want to.
And so today, I am in said flux! Generally I’m alright and in some ways I’m absolutely wretched but in others I’m quite happy. So anyway, let’s begin.
But first, do yourself a favor and shuffle this absolutely critical playlist. A few of my personal favs: this, this, this, this, this and this, but I haven’t finished listening to it, so just give the whole thing a listen and let me know your favorite(s).
How are things?
It’s been months since I last wrote to you and the chaotic energy of thinking about it has been mounting! What began as a fleeting, yet frustrating thought turned into a once every few weeks nagging feeling to a near daily, quite distracting mental block. And here we are with some probably-obvious-to-a-lot-of-people-but-not-so-obvious-to-me shit to talk to you about.
At the core of this is a conversation with Justin, my exceptionally great and oft consulted friend on matters of the mind and most notably, work. I’ve discussed work with Justin many times before. I’ve talked to quite a few friends about occupational distress over the years, but Justin seems to have a very healthy relationship with work, which I admire, so I inquire with him frequently.
A few weeks ago, I had a particularly difficult few days on the job. Some things hadn’t gone the way I wanted them to. This happens to us all I’m sure, but for some reason, this time it was particularly annoying and I was having trouble understanding why. All of a sudden, in response to something relatively trivial, I was deeply and immovably frustrated.
I was reminded of something my mother once said,
“Life is going to keep presenting you with the same lesson until you learn from it”.
My mom is like an older sister to me, so admitting she’s right is annoying, but I gotta hand it to her with this one, she’s spot on.
We’ve all been there. Something happens to you once, and in response you feel something negative about it but not so irritated. It happens again, and those negative feelings return but now they come with a stinging feeling of redundancy. Then it happens once more, and in addition to the negative feelings, you’re simply annoyed with yourself for letting it happen again. And then it happens again. At this point, if you’re anything like me, you become livid with oneself for allowing this scenario to happen yet again. I wish I could say this only happens at work but I feel it with relationships, with friendships, with my personal life. My family says I’m stubborn, so I chalk this cycle up to that.
In the case of work, the issue seems to be an unkempt obsession of identifying with my job. Work is a really big, like sometimes embarrassingly big deal to me. I obsess over work. When I’m stressed, I work. When I’m happy, I work! When I don’t know how I feel, I generally end up working. Progress at work makes me feel like I’m making progress in life.
I know I know, “find a hobby, Nina!” “Go outside, Nina!” “Don’t you realize there’s more to life than work, Nina?!”
I am in fact aware that there is an entire world out there and I understand that it’s meant to be enjoyed, but for one reason or another, I’ve historically enjoyed filling my free time with work. This is fantastic when I enjoy my job and the people I do it with. However, it’s terrible when I don’t enjoy my job or the people I do it with, for any meaningful amount of time.
I’m so obsessed with defining myself by my work that an ongoing frustration at work leads to a gutting feeling of worthlessness, which in turn makes me feel like I’ve deviated from my unclear picture of “success”.
In plain English, because my self worth is reliant on my job, when things feel wrong, I feel lost. Very lost.
As I mentioned, I had some such moment the other day and so I took to asking Justin all the same questions I normally do, but this time, something felt different.
After quire a bit of back and forth, Justin asked me, “what’s important to you?” and I replied that I wanted a job which I aligned with personally, with people I respect and enjoy working with, while getting paid enough to live an exceptional life. His response, in so many (paraphrased) words was, “good luck with that”. I don’t normally accept this statement to be true, but if you refer back to my mother’s wise words and couple it with my deep frustration, it’s not so surprising that it finally clicked. If all that I want is too much to expect and I can only have some of it, then which parts are actually important to me? And even more importantly, which parts have to come from work?
Money?
Status?
Knowledge?
Variety?
Service to others?
Validation?
After some thought on these topics, I realized that what I want, what I’m calling my values, are first and foremost, unclear to me. And I also concluded through that seemingly fruitless exercise, that my values have nothing to do, at least not inherently, with work. Or anything for that matter. Your work or your friendships or your hobbies, don’t technically have to align with your values. They’re likely to, but they don’t have to.
And that last sentence is what finally struck me!
My work does not have to align with my values.
My friendships don’t have to align with my values.
My hobbies don’t have to align with my values.
It feels wrong writing these sentences out, but it’s technically true. Actually, I bet if you took a look at those three categories: work, friendships and hobbies, you might find that some of yours don’t align with your values as much as you think they do.
Before I get too ahead of myself with extrapolations, I’m not saying my job isn’t fulfilling. I’m simply encouraging you to go through the practice of considering your work and how it serves you. If you value the things I said I valued earlier then what if your job was just a paycheck or just a group of people you like or just easy enough to give you loads of free time—but not all three at the same time? How would that change your perspective on work? When I considered those questions, I was suddenly able to consider a world in which my job wasn’t my entire life and rather a vehicle to create time and space for me to pursue what was deeply valuable and meaningful to me, even though I’m not sure what that is just yet..
After explaining this revelation to enough friends, I came up with a spectrum for how you can evaluate work based on your set of values:
tl;dr:
Work can be additive or dilutive to your values, or it can be a third, middle category that I’d never considered before, which I’ve termed, non-inhibitive. In a non-inhibitive setup, your values and your job can have nothing at all to do with each other, except to provide you with the space (i.e. financial stability or flexibility) to pursue the things which are additive to or aligned with your values.
In a world where a job isn’t the only thing or even the thing that fulfills you, your job can be objectively evaluated on a spectrum from additive to dilutive and non-inhibitive, which is somewhere in the middle.
Let me explain.
Best case, work is additive.
This is likely less than 1% of the population. If your job is additive, you’ve found the magical state where your job is both fulfilling and provides for you in the way that you want it to. For me this looks something like a relatively high-paycheck, with a flexible and remote friendly schedule, working for highly intelligent, accomplished, passionate, kind and thoughtful people, on work that makes the world a better, easier or just generally more enjoyable place to live. You could be completely unaware of your values and have an additive job. That’s called being lucky. Or maybe you worked really hard to find it, in which case, good for you!
Worst case, work is dilutive.
This is not a great place to be. You should probably find something or somewhere else to work if you feel like your job is diluting your ability to live or pursue your values for an extended period of time. I presume a lot of people are in this category, especially those who don’t have the privilege of choosing where they work for various reasons. For those of us who do, I ask you, why the fuck are you in this job? Seriously? Is it the paycheck? Or the title? Or the external validation? Is it worth it? If you’re privileged enough to have a job where you ask yourself any of those questions and have to wonder, then you’re probably privileged enough to find something new or at a bare minimum, nudge your job out of the dilutive category and into the non-inhibitive one.
If you need help with this one, call me.
Medium case, work is non-inhibitive.
I’m not entirely clear on how many people fall into this category because people don’t normally talk about or evaluate how fulfilling and aligned with their values their jobs are.
Non-inhibitive means in any given moment, people are in varying degrees of satisfied and dissatisfied with work. They’re also neither deeply unhappy nor are they deeply fulfilled. I believe most jobs, for those privileged to have choices, fall into this category.
This bucket probably constantly teeters on the edge of being additive or dilutive, but that’s based solely on how self aware you are of how you feel about your job. If you are aware that your job is non-inhibitive and you’re ok with that, then your job could easily become additive with a few minor tweaks! It could also just stay in the non-inhibitive category forever, which is also fine! However, if you’re unaware that your job is non-inhibitive and you subsequently find yourself unhappy with work, then it’s probably becoming dilutive. In that case, you could evaluate the gig and simply realize that your job is non-inhibitive and be ok with that! The primary objective is to avoid the dilutive category at all costs by figuring out what matters to you and either nudging your job into the additive category or settling into the non-inhibitive category. Then, you can make the most of it until you find a job that is additive, which may never happen, but I think it’s worth trying.
Where do you land?
Obviously this is all a spectrum that shifts with the circumstances of your life at any given moment. If you, like me, are doomed with the gift of self-awareness and a tendency towards finding fulfillment through work, I implore you to figure out what actually matters to you and then place your job on the spectrum as soon as possible. You might find that your job is unfulfilling but that you can make time to do more fulfilling work in your personal life and be just fine. This doesn’t have to drastically change your life, but it should kick your awareness into high gear.
If none of this makes any sense to you and you’re blissfully ignorant of it all, then fuck man, I’m jealous of you. Ignorance is bliss after all?
As a workaholic, this whole thing may be upsetting to come to terms with. It feels like you’ve wasted a ton of time on things that don’t actually matter. It’s ok. We’ve been sold this idea that work is meant to be fulfilling and because we spend so much time there, we’ve come to believe it to be true, because to not believe it would mean we’ve spent more time than anywhere else (often even more than sleeping) on something that doesn’t actually make us feel very fulfilled. That actually, work is just work and your values, where you find true, lasting fulfillment can more easily exist beyond the output of the work you do.
I feel an incredible sense of freedom for the first time in a long time because I finally understand that I was pouring myself into my job in moments of stress because I just didn’t know where else to put that excess energy and time. Now I’m off to figure out what to pour my stress into…
And on that note my friends, this was too much to text.