Do You Love Your Work? I’m Really Asking
One more email, before I tumble off this supermarket car park roof
Do you love your work?
My father was a taxi driver.
My mother did different things but mainly shop work for the last decade of her working life.
Did they love it?
My father was a taxi driver for 27 years. One night, a few years short of his state pension, he came home and said he was finished. He couldn’t go back to driving the taxi, not one more night. And he was as good as his word. He simply turned his phone off and that was that. People locally thought he had died.
The notion of loving your work is a modern one, that marks a certain privilege. Having the headspace to ask yourself whether you love your work is the preserve of someone at a comfortable distance from basic survival. I don’t think my parents ever thought to ask themselves if they loved, or even liked, their work. Work kept my brother and I in new school shoes and a winter coat each year, luxuries mostly denied to them as children.
For many years, I internalised a touchy dynamic between work, money and self-worth. Work was something everyone I knew did; it was a legitimiser. Growing up in a working class border community, work seemed to make everyone pretty unhappy and terribly old before their time. The whole thing seemed a grim grind.
The fact that I’m writing this article is testament to my parents’ success. This is a middle class preoccupation. I’ve never been hungry a day in my life and my children live like boy kings. But we’ve punted that needle all the way round. Now, the the most gifted people I know are the most strung out, caught up and over-identified with their work.
Am I happy yet? Do I love it yet?
A public presentation of passion for your work seems to be part of the insane emotional demands companies place on their people now. Tech companies are the worst for this. Trading off the passion and youthfulness of their employees is more painfully obvious than it’s ever been. It’s no longer enough to be a loyal, intelligent and hardworking employee. Instead you become a brand advocate, shilling for them across your own social networks and wearing the branded hoodies and generally forcing a level of enthusiasm that I know from first-hand experience is truly mentally damaging.
This is even harder now when so many of us are working away in our own homes, without the physical demarcation of a commute or an office. The boundaries are becoming gossamer thin, and they weren’t great to begin with.
Author Sarah Jaffe writes:
“The really insidious thing about this commonsense idea that you should love your job is that it makes you feel really screwed up if you don’t.
“We’re taught that if we don’t love our jobs we should just go and find a new one we do love, rather than thinking that it could be to do with the conditions we’re working in and the way we’re treated.”
There’s an emotional manipulation at play here. Cults do it well, and so do many businesses I know and have worked for. (FYI: these places always have the darkest secrets and are overcompensating publicly. Again, that’s from first-hand experience.)
I don’t want to be in the grim grind but I don’t want to bind up what I do with who I am. I mean, how can you really love a job?
Join me in reality.
Love is for your family, your people. You can appreciate your work. Work can even be a teacher. Work can fulfil something ancient within you, or act as a lightning rod for painful lessons you’re steadfastly ignoring, but you are not what you do and you never were.
Self-worth is not something you ask your current job for. No branded hoody should sublimate your true human value.