Do You Love Your Work? Part Two! ❤️

Me, off looking for meaning in all the crappy jobs I’ve ever had.

When we spoke last time and I asked if you loved your work, you really took me at my word, didn’t you?

Hoo boy.

I’ve had more replies to that than any other essay, including from my mother, who worked many jobs over the years - local retail, home help and running a taxi company with my father. I didn’t want to speak for her experience of any of that when I wrote it, but when she read it, she called me and said, “I hated it all.”

Work is emotional. Our culture seems to demand it now. Some of the replies I received made my heart ache. This one, in particular:

“My self worth was so intrinsically tied up in my career that I quite literally fell apart when my job fell through.

“I had no idea who I was if I didn't have a job to point to that validated me.

“It was the most important wake up call I have ever had. I think I'll always struggle with it but now I'm aware of it.”

(This person is warm, smart and the most amazing connector of people. What hope is there for any of us?)

Or the woman who has recently made the leap into self-employment but is finding her internal machinery is off when it comes to boundaries.

“I went self-employed recently and it's showing me how much I connect my self-worth with my work. Now I'm not full time 9-5 'hustling', I feel guilty. Like I'm not good enough. Even though this is the life I want! I don't want work to be overwhelming and I don't want it to rule my life, but I still want to enjoy it (which I do).”

If I could ban one word from the English language, I think that word would be ‘hustle’. It’s poisoning our contentment, and it’s horribly misleading for our children. Teenagers thinking they’re losers if they don’t have their own t-shirt line while still at school. No one has hobbies anymore. They have ‘side hustles’.

She feels guilty because we’re conditioned to think work is the only acceptable use of our time, and rest, relaxation, play or anything else that doesn’t turn a profit isn’t valuable.

(You are good enough, more than. You are perfect and loved. Read that out loud, very slowly.)

Or this person:

“For me, I think a part of what you highlighted is about injecting human emotion into work, and in that way, it goes beyond just promoting a brand. It can help us not to get too caught-up with work, if that makes sense.

“I suppose it's how I try to be outside of my role, too. More human.”

Injecting human emotion is helping this person connect to what they spend their days doing, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

(That last sentence though. Trying to be more human. You don’t need to try. You are totally whole, right now. Seek nothing. Just be.)

Fuck no.

I spoke to my brother about this. He’s a recovering anarchist and the only other person in my life who knows what it was like to do your homework on a pullout sofa in a taxi office, swathed in second-hand cigarette smoke.

What we concluded is that there’s a world of difference between employment and work.

You can work yourself to the nubbins for something that grows your soul. Or you can wear yourself down to the wick in a job that pays your bills. Occasionally, you may find yourself in a situation where the two collide - something that pays you to do work that nourishes you and the world around you.

I don’t think anyone in the taxi office fell into that category. The drivers streamed in and out constantly for coffee, cigarettes and the thrashing out of personal gripes. I know my mother never wanted us there, astronauts in an adult world when she couldn’t get a babysitter. But it didn’t do any harm, really (bar the smoke). Often as a child, I had access to the adult world of work. I internalised that work was hard and no one liked it but that was the way it was for everyone I knew.

But one of my most abiding memories of the taxi office was climbing out of the window at the back of the building to sit on the flat roof of the shoe shop below. I liked the feel of the rough roof material against the chunky soles of my school shoes and the little puddles that gathered. If it was warm, I would sit and bask like a gecko. On a space walk between innocence and adult life.

I think I’m still on that space walk, even now.

Collapsing capitalism might be a tough ask, even for my witty emails, so if you’re struggling with internalised weirdness around work, the best advice I can offer you is to observe those tensions within yourself and be compassionate with them. Laugh at them. Be silly. Silliness is the antidote to all this.

Take a space walk between your deeply-held attitudes towards employment and the outer galaxy of important work that does more than build value for shareholders. You don’t have to be in an ashram to start imbibing your very important human existence with meaning in big ways and small.

“The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.” - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Easy!