What work could feel like: a manifesto
We need work to be enlivening again.
Culture has moved from quiet quitting to quiet cracking, girl boss to girl moss – but what we’re avoiding in the process is that our relationship to work is fundamentally broken.
We’ve created a society where we need to work to live – yet for so many people, the work being done is deadening on the inside. This is the paradox we are trapped in – we need to pay bills, but the thing that’s paying our bills is draining us to the point where we don’t have the energy to free ourselves. Feeling trapped by work that doesn’t fulfil is a privilege in its own right, but even that line of thinking is a kind of cage. The best way to honor privilege is to use it to create conditions for everyone to thrive.
What’s changed in the past couple of years is that we’re more aware that we’re encaged than ever. We know that what we’re clinging to is a false sense of safety. We know that the rewards are no longer what they were. We know that there is a quiet voice nudging us, telling us ‘this isn’t it’ or ‘there must be a better way.’ With one foot in an old way of being and one foot that wants to give it all up entirely, we’re doing a split so wide – we get stuck.
And in the process, we’re doing a grave disservice to work and ourselves.
Work fundamentally needs a rebrand. We need to recontextualize what it’s for and why we do it. We need work that allows us to live out who we are and have that be its own measure of success, rather than being rewarded for contorting ourselves into boxes so small that the only way we know to recover is to buy bigger houses and more expensive watches.
When humans are engaged in their work, the amount of work is rarely the problem.
It’s when they are not truly engaged in their work that phrases like “burnout” and “sunday scaries” start to dominate a conversation. It’s when they are not valued that they start to disengage. It’s when their input is repeatedly ignored, their well-being denied, or pathways to aligned growth repeatedly blocked that they start to ‘crack.’
Often, discussions go back and forth here on whether the onus is on the individual to leave or the organization to do better. But both miss the point. The society we live in has abstracted our agency and made money and status the ultimate virtues. Both the individual and the organization are victims of that. We sacrifice agency and individuality, rest and care, joy and vitality – at both the individual and organizational level for these false symbols of worthiness.
Work should come from worthiness, not the other way around.
We need work that doesn’t just allow us to survive, but come alive. Work that allows us to flow, to dance with the mystery of things only we can create from the conditions of who we are and what we’ve experienced.
Work that recognizes that who we are is exactly by design, and therefore, we are exactly suited for what we are being tasked with. Work that doesn’t ask us to prove. Work that doesn’t extract but instead unlocks.
We need work that teaches us what we are made of, and what we are made for.
It’s this type of work that will lead us out of the split and into this new paradigm that is taking shape. It’s this type of work that will allow us to grieve old ways of being as new ones make themselves known. But it will only do so the more we allow ourselves to go there, as individuals and as organizations.
To allow our experience, our evolution, to be more enlivening, more alluring, more worthwhile than whatever pretense of safety or validation we might leave behind.