Your Job Is a Paycheck, Not Your Family
Let’s stop pinning a pretty bow on capitalism. And start leaning into life outside of the office borders.
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They surprise you with a birthday cake. Confetti sprinkles, candles, and a card signed by thirty people. Playful memes in your inbox. Pats on the back are jocular, familiar. They ask after your family, know the names and ages of your children. Maybe they even know about the fertility treatments, the struggle and heartbreak, or your parent’s mind fading from view. The hospital visits where you’ve become a stranger to the person who held you tight and safe in her womb.
You spend eight, ten, maybe twelve hours a day with a group of people cobbled together because everyone has a defined role and function, and the alchemy is in the collaboration and creation, the finely-tuned engine chuffing and humming revenue. You’re part of this engine, with the idea being you exchange your talent and time for your employers’ money. It’s a simple transaction, made complicated by a society that tells you to seek nirvana in the Monday morning huddle. The bold and brilliant lie that your work is your family.
Until profit spirals and your family calls you into a room and hands you a slim packet. It’s a business decision, nothing personal, your family tells you. Your family has generously given you one month’s severance and three months of laughable COBRA and you reckon you’ll need the insurance for the invariable heart attack that ensues when you get your monthly bill as a newly-minted member of the unemployed.
How quickly your family has forsaken you.
When I resigned my agency job in 2013, I was depleted. My body was ravaged and all the verve and optimism I had diminished. I used to be a woman who said yes to things, but that year all I wanted to do was sleep. It takes one job to wreck your health, life, and identity — if you allow it.
In the years since, I refuse to set foot in an office because I know what most people don’t want to hear — your job doesn’t care about you. You’re a line item on a P&L — an expense, one that is manipulated and recalibrated when profits go south. You are replaceable for a cheaper, younger cog in the machine or the desperate who are willing to do twice the work for the reward of having an income.
Your employer doesn’t care about you. Before you stomp your petulant feet, of course they might care about you as a human being, they may have empathy, and they may even hang on to you for a little while longer knowing the profit they’re sacrificing, but ultimately, you become weight they’re desperate to shed. It amazes me how much of your “family” remains in your life after your gone.
Would your family toss you out on the street during one economic downturn?
This “we’re family” nonsense is an anesthetic — a bandaid over a fragile dam ready to burst — along with the happy hours, ping pong tables, and Ad Age Best Place to Work of the Year. All conveniently obscuring the fact that pensions have nearly disintegrated, 401K matching is a unicorn, and salaries have stagnated. The American worker has always been disposable, where layoffs have become a strategy of first, not last, resort in business. During COVID, a recent study revealed that 1/3 of Americans feel disposable in their jobs.
The only difference is employers have become savvier marketers. Adept storytellers spreading their fiction of family like a sickness. Telling you you’re valued out of one side of their mouth, and out of the other instructing security to walk you out of the office when they fire you.
Can I say goodbye to my coworkers? you ask. No, because that’s a liability.
This isn’t new news in America, where “‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’ popped up all over the place in the 1980s and nineties, along with the unpaid internship, the busting of unions, and campaigns to cut taxes on capital gains.” (source) This isn’t new news when compared to our peers in Western Europe, we don’t guarantee parental leave, sick, and vacation days. And this certainly isn’t new news because we’re a nation working ourselves to death.
Work has failed us. We were a nation was determined to flee its roots where work was one aspect of your life, not the whole of it. Not our identity.
Not a means to die in your car because you’re working three shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Our society teaches us to chase cash above all else. The harder you work, the more money you make — this is what I heard growing up in the 80s. But purpose? Finding meaning in your life? Crafting an identity beyond your title? Looking at work as one part of the equation, but not the whole? Having relationships that don’t revolve around office gossip? These ideas were waved away with the kind of condescension that makes you want to pummel stuffed animals.
I’m not suggesting that finding purpose in one’s life will solve systemic racism, the egregious economic imbalance in this country where we revere the rich and revile the poor, where celebrities get showered with finery and teachers have to crowdfund basic materials. It won’t change the greedy CEOs and their pretty parachutes and lawmaker lobbying because a $15/hr minimum wage to them is downright criminal. If they provided a living wage, how would they fuel their private jet?
But starting with asking why you’re here, what you actually want from your brief, beautiful life will give you perspective, it forces you to see beyond your borders and consider the bigger picture. Because on your deathbed you aren’t going to lament about the office you missed, the voicemails ignored, the spreadsheets unopened.
Perspective goes beyond than the work you do every day. It goes deeper than money in your bank account.
Why is this important? Because we need to stop buying into the big lie that we have to love what we do. That our job should be the pinnacle of fulfillment and we’re nothing without it. I’m not saying not to do what you love or pursue what lights you up — what I’m saying is don’t believe your job will make you whole & complete.
You have family, friends, hobbies, passions, a life outside of the office (and possibly a side hustle, since working multiple jobs has become the norm and a means of survival) — why does your job, your place of employment, need to usurp what you already have in your life? We’re no longer spending lifetimes at one company, slowly working our way up, so why must we pretend that our job is our church and tabernacle?
Why must we spend more time with the people we already spend too much time with? Why does being part of a family mean we need to conform or not make waves, which makes it difficult for BIPOC, the disabled and neurodivergent, those who suffer from mental illness, or simply someone who’s not interested in upholding the status quo that got us here in the first place.
Don’t beat yourself up because you have to take a job to pay the bills because you don’t have the luxury or privilege of following every fleeting passion. There’s nobility in providing for your family. There’s nobility in having a job that leaves you enough time to pursue other aspects of your life that bear more meaning.
From a New Yorker article, “What’s Wrong With The Way We Work”:
“In 1974, Studs Terkel published “Working,” a compilation of more than a hundred and thirty interviews with Americans talking about what they do all day, and what they think about it. It was a study, he explained, of Americans’ search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
This put me to thinking of this Katie Couric’s interview with Denzel Washington.
“Denzel, are you — do you feel — you know some people say Hollywood folks should stick to acting,” Couric asked.”
“I don’t know what Hollywood folks are, first of all,” Washington replied. “Hollywood is a town that has some stars on the sidewalk. I don’t know anybody from there. So, I don’t — that’s like saying — calling you a type of folks. I’m not a Hollywood folk. I don’t know who they are.”
Couric followed up, “OK, all right, well, let me rephrase the question. Are you one of those people that — ”
“Ah, there you go. Am I one of those people? Hmmm, isn’t that interesting?” Washington interjected.
“Oh, stop, stop, stop,” Couric said.
“No, don’t stop. I heard what you just said. ‘Am I one of those people?’ No, I’m not,” Washington replied.
“No, are you an actor who would rather not — ” Couric continued.
“No, I’m not that either,” Washington said. “I’m a human being. My job is acting.”
Denzel Washington’s words remained with me. He’s one of our most gifted living actors and he identifies first as a human. His gift is his trade, his means to pay the bills, not who he is. Clearly, he loves it. He’s passionate about it. He’s magnificent at it.
His gift doesn’t define him — it’s one expression of his identity.
And that’s where I think I fell short at the fancy agency job where I was an equity partner and for many years since — basing my identity on my work, whether it was marketing or writing books. And if those things failed, I was a failure.
Our jobs are one aspect of our lives. Our employers are not our family — they are people running a business. Our work is not who we are, but what we do.
We need to detach our worth from the results of the work and use it as fuel to get really fucking good at what we do in all areas of our life — not just work. We need to consider the whole of our lives and how each part contributes to the whole, or if any piece is greedy, devouring everything else that matters.
