Millions, if not billions, have thrived following this path. It worked so well, and for so long, that people stopped thinking about why they were doing it.

I want to argue that the meaningful lives that resulted from this were accidental rather than a result of following a certain path and that today, following this path might undermine one’s attempt to live a meaningful and happy life. Across the world, people are following this path and coming up short. They are doing what is expected of them and what they thought would make them happy. Yet their lives are filled with anxiety, stress, and a life lacking meaning. Why?

This is my accidental meaning hypothesis

Accidental Meaning Hypothesis: The meaning derived from a default path of doing what everyone else was doing was accidental and an outcome not of working in a certain way, owning a home, and so on. It was the result of strong economic tailwinds, strong community spirit, more two-parent households, and unique financial and social circumstances where far more people felt like they were doing better than the previous generations. Today people aim at these same external markers of success (home, family, stable full-time jobs) but are not finding their lives meaningful at the same rates that previous generations were.

We Want To Do Better Than Our Parents

The key part of the default path was not only that you succeeded by doing what everyone else was doing, but also that you did better than your parents. John Steinbeck captured this sentiment in his book America and Americans in 1966:

No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible change from father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national.

For more than 50 years people have gone into adulthood with the idea that they should achieve more than their parents while still following the same general path.

When Steinbeck wrote that, a gold rush was underway. The US economy was still in the early days of a period called the “Great Boom” and anyone working in the US or other advanced economies was set to cash in on the enormous dividend of a global industrialization effort that would last well into the 2000s.

In addition to this, the baby boomers entered a workforce in the 1970s with little to no competition, as the biggest generation at every point throughout their entire careers and stayed in senior leadership positions at most companies longer than anyone expected. As the economy has slowed to 2-3% growth per year, it has meant that current generations can no longer simply show up to work and know that everything will work out.

A central “fixed-point” as Venkatesh Rao puts it in the American Dream is owning a home. In 1975 the median house was around 500 square feet per household member. Now, it’s closer to 1000, and this is with smaller families, which means that people are buying bigger houses than previous generations despite having fewer kids. The cost of homeownership has also gone up as regulations, increasing financialization, and delayed housing purchases have all put pressure on a purchase that many adults had achieved by their mid-twenties.

Women have also entered the workforce to a massive degree but what this means is that less of life is built around local communities and more are built around accelerating a career. Instead of relying on local energy to solve problems, people now rely on outsourced providers and services to meet their needs to keep their career dreams going.

So people are working hard at working their way towards success but not realizing that they are not developing the skills or mindset that might help them learn how to live a life worth living.

People Have Stopped Having Faith In This Story (But Don’t Have An Alternative)

People have stopped believing that if they “work hard” and do what their parents did that they will earn the same rewards. While economists will argue that the following chart should be adjusted for household size, many young people now generally agree with the takeaway from the following graph:

They don’t trust that they will get what they think they deserve. As Seth Goding says, “the educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.”

Another reason people have stopped believing this story is that the story has split into three different paths.

Research from Pew (see below) has shown that the middle class has been shrinking since the 1970s while the lower and upper classes are increasing. This means that more people than ever have entered the upper tier of the economy, and many people are falling back into the lower-income tier of the economy

This has taken the “American Dream” and turned it into three unique stories, each with its own flaws.

The American Dream was historically a middle-class dream. One where the differences between people were not as pronounced and it seemed that if you were working hard along with everyone else, that it was a fair game. However, that changed. Morgan Housel argues that things started changing in the 1980s and since then,

The economy works better for some people than others. Success isn’t as meritocratic as it used to be and, when success is granted, is rewarded with higher gains than in previous eras.

In a sense, the “American Dream” split into three different stories, all with their own issues.

1. Upper Class (20% of people): People in superstar tech companies are building their lives around expensive convenience and trying to distance themselves from the rest of society and finding that they have achieved the traditional American dream on paper, but are having trouble finding the important things that enrich their life.
2. Middle Class (50% of people): People in the middle class who either envy the people in the new elite or are happy with the middle class but finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet let alone do better than their parents
3. Lower Class (30% of people): People in the lower class think that they don’t have a damn chance working in their service economy jobs of ever achieving the American dream and the data says they are right.

Shifting economic conditions have nudged people to build more of their life around work and put shift away from local communities. Everyone still wants to do better than their parents but it requires a lot more mental energy devoted to work. Derek Thompson called this new ethic Workism and observed that it was a perfect “blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion.”

Lack of meaning is channeled into an endless search for the dream job that doesn’t exist.

As people put more emphasis on finding meaning at work they move away from the things that seem to matter: relationships, community and connection. Social capital gets built but the playgrounds, once maintained by stay-at-home parents, people with time after work, and opting-in to a different kind of social ethic, remain empty.

Increasingly, much of the middle-class has moved away from the stable foundations that made up the middle class for long and are sensing that they too should orient more of their life around work so that they don’t too fall out of the middle class and at best they can get a taste of that upper-class luxury experience, if only for a little bit of time.

This leads to a vicious cycle.

Many of these people are still tied to the idea that if you work hard you’ll be taken care but are frustrated to find that unless you are working in the tech economy or in an elite city hard work isn’t all that helpful and that if you end up rich and working all the time, you might not find your life all that meaningful.

Accidental meaning doesn’t work anymore

We need new scripts for how we think about work. I’m not sure what this looks like but hard work and full-time work for the average person no longer delivers the goods. While new dreams are being hatched in the promise of the creator economy, the results might be even more polarized than the traditional economy.

Right now you own your own meaning and you’ll need to take steps to make sure that you are actively designing your life. This is the advantage anyone who has taken a break or dabbled with self-employment knows. Everyone is operating in the gig economy carving their own path but the knowledge of this is not widespread. The 2020s will be the decade we stop believing in the work hard and you’ll be taken care of script.

Meaning doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It only happens when we figure out what matters.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Accidental Meaning: How The Baby Boomers Misled Us About What Leads To A Happy Life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

A review of the first 30 years of the data in 1996 highlighted a fascinating shift in values.

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement

You can see a visual representation of this swap in the following graph.

While “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” seemed to drop steadily from survey launch, the goal of being well off financially didn’t seem to take off until the early 1970s.

The other interested thing from this long-term data is how consistent the other values have been. I looked at the top 4 values from 1970 – 2015 and found that despite the two above mentioned values changing place, the other three values remained remarkably consistent.

Those three things?

1. Raising a family
2. Helping others who are in difficulty
3. Becoming an authority in my field

Essentially, take care of the people in your life, try to help others and be good at what you do.

These seem like a good recipe for like and aligns with the wisdom and research on what leads to a meaningful life.

But still, why did college students become so obsessed with money and why has it remained so central?

Could it be due to how school has become about test scores and grades?

A Harvard study from 2014 highlighted the gap between what parents claim to care about and what children thought their parents cared about.

According to a 2012 study, 96% of parents surveyed viewed developing moral character in children as “very important, if not essential” and highly valued their children “being honest, loving, and reliable”(Bowman et al., 2012). Research suggests that most parents across race/ethnic groups value caring or “benevolence” more than achievement and are far more likely to value “benevolence” over “power” (Suizzo, 2007).

When you ask parents what they care about they say that they want their kinds to be kind people with integrity.

But what happens when you ask their kids? Here is the results of a survey of 10,000 students asked to rank what their parents value:

Hmmm. Who you going to trust, the parents or the kids?

I was lucky not to have parents that cared a lot about grades but it was still clear that getting good grades was the best thing you could do in school. If you were not getting good grades, parents often were quite concerned about that person’s future. The social pressure to achieve was clear at an early age.

Its easy to see children raised into this environment looking for the next metric they can optimize for after college. There may not be any grades in life but your compensation is is the next best thing.

But What Does Society Want?

Almost everyone seems to have an opinion of what “society” wants and this seem to be very different about what people report about what they really want.

Partly because of my own experiences earning less money and partly because of a fascinating survey from Gallup called the Success Index. In their survey they ask people two questions:

1. How do you personally define success?
2. How do you think others define success?

Take a look at the main section of this on status:

Almost everyone thinks success is about being good at something you care about while at they same time they think that almost everybody else only cares about being rich and famous.

How can this be?

Either most people are lying about how they define success or people have a terrible understanding of the motives of other people.

My guess would be that it is a bit of both. It’s very easy to delude ourselves into thinking we are doing things for the right reasons while assuming that others are in it for the wrong reasons.

What I think this survey tells us is that even if people do have good motivations for doing whatever they are doing, they feel that they will be judged by a different societal standard.

A different section of the survey shows this in an even more dramatic way. It asked people to rank 76 different elements that are part of their personal definition of success. Similar to the survey with college freshman we see that having a family is an important part of people’s lives.

However, when you ask the same people about their perception of broad societal definitions of success we see the lowest ranked value from above jump all the way to #1 and to a dramatic degree.

It seems that most people assume there is a broad societal benchmark of “success” that mostly has to do with how much money, status and fame one has. Despite this, most people also seem to proclaim very different definitions of success.

What does this all mean?

Could it be that people still care about what it means to live a philosophically meaningful life and that they are too ashamed to share that?

Or have money and fame overtaken everything else as the de facto aim of life for most people?

It’s worth looking back at the start of the original data set. Who were the people answering the survey in 1966?

William Whyte’s book titled “The Organization Man,” which detailed the new trend of young people moving to suburbs and large corporations, gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a college student in that time.

While they talk little about money, they talk a great deal about the good life. This life is, first of all, calm and ordered. Many a senior confesses that he’s thought of a career in teaching, but as he talks it appears that it is not so much that he likes teaching itself as the sort of life he associates with it—there is a touch of elms and quiet streets in the picture. For the good life is equable; it is a nice place out in the suburbs, a wife and three children, one, maybe two cars (you know, a little knock-about for the wife to run down to the station in), and a summer place up at the lake or out on the Cape, and, later, a good college education for the children. It is not, seniors explain, the money that counts.

William Whyte, The Organization Man

In the book he shares how it was genuinely shocking how little risk young people wanted to take compared to previous generations. They saw the chaos of the war and did not want to repeat those days. With this backdrop it might make sense that developing a meaningful philosophy of life might become a central goal of one’s life.

Over time, however, young people started to care more about money until it became the most important metric in their life. This was furthered by the common knowledge that everyone knew that everyone else thought getting rich was the prime aim of life.

Revisiting the American Freshman data, the #1 goal of students was has remained “being very well off financially” for almost 50 years and throughout that time has only become more important. In 2019 it reached one of the highest levels on record with 84% of students said that being well off financially was essential or very important.

Despite this, all of these surveys share some very consistent themes over the past 55+ years. People still see having a family, being helpful to others and being good at what you do as things that are centrally important to a life well lived.

It doesn’t appear that money is losing its grip on our imagination but it might be a relief to consider the fact that many people only conform to these goals because they think everyone else thinks this way.

I for one don’t have wealth as my #1 metric of success and I officially give you permission to abandon that as a central aim of your life as well.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Why Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

• Unpaid internships to get experience
• Going into debt for credentials to get access to certain jobs or industries
• Opening up your network to help people so you’ll be helped in the future
• Taking a certification course for credibility (see MBTI, coaching, Yoga, Six Sigma)
• Doing favors for “successful” people to earn social capital for favors to be named later

All of this behavior operates on the assumptions of what many have called a “prestige economy.” Kevin Simler gives us a good working definition of this kind of system (or hierarchy):

If dominance is the kind of status we get from intimidating others, prestige is the kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits or skills.

When you start to understand these dynamics, I believe they can explain a lot of behavior. I would also argue that the assumptions behind our prestige economy has also come to dictate the conventional wisdom on the best way to live a life – at least in the western world.

Put simply: pursue prestigious things…keep doing it…eventually you’ll be respected and rewarded (financially, but not always)

The Prestige Economy Is Undermining Itself

At the extreme ends, the payoffs to prestige-seeking are still very high. I would be crazy to recommend against anyone attending Harvard.

However, many other examples are less clear cut.

While writing this article, I went over to LinkedIn and searched “MBA MS BS” and in the first result found something that highlights the logical outcome of this system. Someone with four degrees, yet still searching for the payoff to their investment in the prestige economy.

Journalist Sarah Kendzior’s thoughts on the prestige economy are a good example of a growing school of thought about the modern economy:

Success does not matter because, in a prestige economy, success has nothing to do with employability. Achievements are irrelevant in a system that rewards money over merit, brand over skill.

Put more simply….the game is rigged!

When I tell people that I still think I would have learned more by staying at my job and not attending MIT for grad school, they look at me like I am slightly insane.

Skills aren’t the ultimate arbiter of success in a prestige economy. The appearance of skills is good enough.

Kendzior’s argument is that the prestige economy is undermining itself. By taking the appearance of competence as a proxy for competence and using money as a way to gain access to these prestigious institutions, people will eventually lose faith in the whole thing:

Institutions that use unpaid labor are hastening their own demise. They are sinking in quality and destroying their own reputations, which is what they bank on to hire unpaid labor in the first place.

Another word for the prestige economy is the meritocracy, which David Brooks calls out as one of the fundamental lies of our current culture:

The myth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love, you can “earn” your way to love. The anthropology of the meritocracy is you’re not a soul to be purified, you’re a set of skills to be maximized. And the evil of the meritocracy is that people who’ve achieved a little more than others are actually worth a little more than others.

People have started to lose faith in the traditional recipe of prestige. But that does not mean it was even the recipe that everyone wants.

Some People Are Opting Out Of Traditional Prestige Economics

If we are not aware of the nuances of prestige economics, it would be easy to assume that prestige is universal and translates to different domains. People will often say things to me like “you can travel the world because you worked at X.”

While my past experience has helped me create new things, I’ve entered these new communities having very low status. Luckily, many of these communities trade prestige for things other than money or things that can be bought:

• Maker communities: technical competence, sharing your journey & lessons
• Digital nomad communities: generosity with connections, & technical know-how
• Online content creators: # of followers, originality of ideas, ability to bring people together
• Gift communities: Time bank communities, coliving communities operating on what you are uniquely suited to offer

These are examples of still relatively new communities and I think that is important. Eventually some of the status within these communities will be standardized and eventually sold (will Lambda school be the Harvard of maker communities?), but they are all founded on new stories.

Enabled by digital communities, people are coming together from around the world and aligning around new values – things like competence, generosity, care, citizenship – and granting prestige to the people that embody these values.

Money still matters, but it isn’t central.

Who We Admire Determines Who Gets Status

If I think about my family, I think instantly about my grandmother. She is turning 90 this week and has a tremendous amount of status. This status is not a result of dominance, fear and control. Instead because she is respected and admired. Simler makes this same point in his essay:

So  admiration, rather than prestige-seeking, is the lynchpin of the prestige system.

It doesn’t matter is someone seeking prestige has good or bad intentions. All that is required for them to reap the rewards of prestige is that people admire them.

But outside of a closed system like a family, how do you figure out who you admire? Scott Alexander makes the simple but powerful point that there isn’t really much thinking behind this other than accepting the wisdom of our peers:

…since it’s hard to figure out who’s good at things (can a non-musician who wants to start learning music tell the difference between a merely good performer and one of the world’s best?)  most people use the heuristic of respecting the people who other people respect.

This is a sensitive topic for me. Since leaving my consulting job, many people seem to be confused about why I would give up all the prestige that I had earned.

When we get past the BS, they ask me directly: how could you give up the money?

It doesn’t make any sense and is a hard conversation to have until you understand that we have different definitions of prestige.

For me, I want to shift to a groups where generosity is a bigger factor than my title and where helping teach others is more important than how much I earn.

We are obsessed with money as the sole indicator of people’s success. Economic growth has given us many good things, but many people are craving a different story.

Next time someone is talking about how much money someone is earning, perhaps we inject a story of an amazing person that has contributed to the world in a different way.

Aren’t those the kind of communities we want to live in anyway?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The Future Of The Prestige Economy: Who Gets Status? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Tash Walker is the founder of a firm and spends her Fridays making marmalade.

Before instituting a four-day workweek at her firm, The Mix, she barely had time for her relationships.  She decided to start doing research about different ways of working.  There had to be a better way than the default options of “Summer Fridays” and “flexible work,” that never seem to make less anxiety or stress-ridden.

In her research, she discovered many examples of Swedish companies embracing 4-day workweeks and also found that when they instituted it, they often helped improve productivity.  After bringing the option to her team at The Mix, they decided to do a three-month trial.  They didn’t even tell their clients.

The funny thing?  The clients didn’t even notice.  Even better, when they shared it with their clients – they weren’t offended.  They were curious to learn more and impressed that they had prioritized their people.  While many quickly reflex to “well that can’t work here,” Tash and her team went forward anyway and have shown that a 4-day work week can work and it can work in professional services – an industry where many take for granted the fact that you should always be available for your clients.

Beyond improving the lives of the people at the firm, they achieved some incredible results:

• Revenues up 57%
• Absenteeism down 75%
• Productivity stayed the same
• Doubled the number of clients
• Client referrals up 50%

Want to learn how to make this happen at your company?  You can download their “4-day week“ report which is one of the best reports I’ve seen on the future of work.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Tash Walker On Why Companies Should Adopt A 4-Day Workweek appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

When I was little I wanted to be a professional basketball player. My backup plan was to be an accountant, mostly because I liked math and thought my Aunt, who was an accountant, was cool. It seems bizarre reflecting back on this that I had such a decisive answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

As a child, one can ignore the world’s obsession with work and getting a job, but it is always looming around every activity. For every child playing on the playground, there is an adult nearby trying to assess each child’s confidence, curiosity and interests to assess what they might do when they grow up or how their confidence might translate into getting accepted into top schools and companies.

As that child grows up, they are expected to become responsible for those same worries, reshaping their personalities away from their natural curiosities towards becoming “employable.”

I might have already triggered some uncomfortable emotions in you and I want to ask you to come with me on a journey. I’m going to argue that those emotions you are feeling are because of deep beliefs we have about work that have existed for a long time, but no longer suit what we are trying to achieve through work.

I do not want to argue against work, but I do want to argue that we tend to take work too seriously, that is has become too central to our culture, our conversations and the manner in which we live life. I want to walk you through ten key points which highlight the hidden suffering and the enormous human potential we repress by having an overly simple model of work and the beliefs that are attached to it.

Why do I care?

I believe the stakes are enormous and I think many are blind to the tremendous suffering caused by work. As someone that writes about work for the past five years, I have been in the unique position of having weekly conversations with people who share their suffering with me. They share their anxiety, discomfort and shame with me and in some cases, haven’t told anyone else in their life about these emotions.

If you dig beneath the surface, you start to see that some people are losign their lives because of work. In 2013, an intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch died after working 72 hours and having a seizure in the shower. Yet, everyone involved in the case was hesitant to blame work for this outcome. Here is the coroner:

He was a young man living life to the full and he was clearly enjoying his time in London and, whilst it’s possible that fatigue brought about the fatal seizure, it is also possible that it just happened. And it is something that does just happen.

It takes an extreme degree of mental gymnastics to completely absolve work of all responsibility. Why are we so scared of blaming work for suffering, even a little?

In Japan, there is no pretending. There is a well known work for death from overwork — karoshi. In 2015, there were 1,456 cases in Japan files dainst employers that referenced “karoshi.”

While it is clear that we should not want work to kill people, it is less clear the destructive damage that our modern conception of work has on our world and on the average “worker”.

Our modern conception of work is based on a flawed conception that work is and can be a full-time job that is stable, provides meaning, community, purpose, comfort, pays for your healthcare and retirement.

If this conception of work applied to everyone, perhaps it might be a great thing. For everyone unable to secure such magical employment, they are left to deal with the unintended consequences of our unquestioned faith in work.

“Work is the master of the modern world.”

This quote from Andy Beckett captures today’s reality.

Work is our master and to question work is akin to admitting insanity.

Nonetheless, I’ve spent my whole career secretly trying to avoid or limit work. While most Americans do not take all of their vacation days, I was negotiating with employers to take extra days, to work remotely, to take time off unpaid.

A couple years ago, I finally realized I should stop playing the full-time employment game and create my own game. I took the leap to freelancing. Others told me I was courageous. “Wow, that’s risky,” they said. To me it seemed the only way to live a life I was proud of and yes, one with less work.

Alas, one of my goals was to work less, and likely make less.

When I tell people this, they do not believe me. Surely there is a better long term plan?! You’ll make more money down the road right? This is some temporarily fit of insanity! Right?!

Over the past year, I’ve experimented with long stretches of what I will call “non-work” — extended travel, time with my grandmother and fun creative projects like this very article.

“I wish I could do that”

Perhaps you can, but first you will need to grapple with our culture’s deep obsession with work how that impacts your own relationship to work.

I want to argue three things before offering some hope for the future (and I am optimistic!)

1. Our conception of work causes immense suffering in the world
2. Some people have interesting work, but many do not
3. Work undermines community, pride & stability of our culture

#1 Our modern conception of work causes immense suffering in the world

We ignore more than half our country.

Only 155 million people, or less than half, are classified as “employed.” Approximately 38% of Americans have coveted full-time jobs. Yet, most of the discussion about public policy, the American dream and success in life are framed around the full-time job (and one with good benefits to boot!):

There is a bunch of data manipulation that happens to determine who is part of the potential workforce, but the total “participation rate” is a good start to look at long-term trends in employment. Despite increases in the participation rate from the 1960’s to about 1990 (due to increasing numbers of women in the workforce), the participation rate has been decreasing for about 30 years:

If we double-clickon “prime-age” workers, we see that it has been increasing since the recession in 2008, but there appears to be a hard cap around 80% of prime-age workers.

Again, a lot of the increases here are due to women entering the workforce and the discrepancy between this chart and the previous one is an increase in mostly the number of elderly population as well as the number of people on disability. Hidden by this increase is a steady decrease in the number of men in the workforce. This is driven by a number of reasons:

Economists have struggled to explain these long-term trends with any sort of single bullet explanation, but they show no signs of slowing down. With so much focus in public policy and the general conception of the “American Dream” centered around the full-time job, we avoid stepping into the messiness of the reality of employment.

When we position work as a way to extract meaning, we make people feel worse

Hate your job? Just try to find something you are more passionate about. Quit your job. Move to a different company. Invest in a personal development retreat. Read this e-book.

Heck, even take a year off. As long as you can sell that year off as “work” on yourself — a personal growth and a journey that made you more valuable to workers — then it works. Just get back to work.

The roots of looking to work with such profundity comes from the Protestant view of work as a “calling.” Philosopher Andrew Taggart details this philosophy:

The “Protestant view of work” is based on the idea that work is just about the best sort of thing that one can do with one’s life. Protestants describe work as a “calling,” a harmony between the individual’s work, whatever this might be, and the divine purpose.

The desperate search for meaning is perhaps a side effect of our modern culture. The German philosopher Eric Fromm, reflecting on the increased individuality of modern society, notes that it came with a trade-off:

Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.

While finding meaning at work sounds great in theory, it is likely only achievable for a small minority and for the rest, it creates an incurable anxiety or emptiness from the fact that many jobs are “bullshit jobs” and that a lot of jobs and work exist mostly to fulfill our ideal of employment for all.

The people who love work are “educated” and working more

Overall, people are experiencing more “leisure” than in the past. However, it is not distributed equally. Economists Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst showed that there has been a steady increase in the amount of time people spend in leisure:

However, they showed that the amount of leisure among the “highly-educated” has actually gone down!

The more surprising discovery, however, is a corresponding leisure gap has opened up between the highly-educated and less-educated. Low-educated men saw their leisure hours grow to 39.1 hours in 2003–2007, from 36.6 hours in 1985. Highly-educated men saw their leisure hours shrink to 33.2 hours from 34.4 hours. (Mr. Hurst says that education levels are a “proxy” for incomes, since they tend to correspond).

A similar pattern emerged for women. Low-educated women saw their leisure time grow to 35.2 hours a week from 35 hours. High-educated women saw their leisure time decrease to 30.3 hours from 32.2 hours. Educated women, in other words, had the largest decline in leisure time of the four groups.”

Future of work though leader Jacob Morgan shares a common refrain in the public discussion about work.

work is life and life is work. We spend a majority of our adult lives working, which means what you do is not just a job, or a career–it’s a part of you.

This quote is the scary realization of an idea put forth by German Philosopher Josef Pieper called “total work” which is the “process by which human beings are transformed into workers and nothing else.” (HT: Taggart who helped popularize this idea and has a compelling newsletter on total work).

While meaning, purpose and fulfillment from work sounds like a great idea, it has the unintended side effect of calling more attention to the fact that many jobs suck, millions of people struggle to meet their basic needs and many more lack the stability to quit jobs that lack meaning.

I may seem that the antidote to work that sucks is making it “meaningful” — but I will argue that’s a false dichotomy. The opposite of meaningless work may seem like it should be meaningful work — but that devalues the work and lives of too many people.

In fact, we find that the people that work the most have the most education.

Work has been transformed into something that the well-off and well-educated use as ways to express themselves and create meaning for themselves. However, in assuming this is how everyone should do it, they likely lead to a destruction of meaning for the broader society.

There is immense shame tied with not having a job

Being unemployed or laid off has been linked to adverse health effects, loss of relationships and even in extreme cases, suicide.

Harvard Business Review reinforces the shame of being unemployed but does not question our obsession with work. Instead, they recommend “pushing yourself physically,” followed by making ”“10 networking calls a day”

This shame may be justified. Research from the University of Stirling found that becoming unemployed can lead people to “become less friendly, less hard-working, and less open to new experiences.”

#2 Some people have interesting work, but many do not

We have 9.5 million people deemed the “working poor”

In a country where politicians talk about the importance of work, there is a disconnect between the effort people are willing to give and our collective ability to meet their needs. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 9.5 million people are classified as “working poor.”

In 1996, bipartisan welfare reform was passed that tied many benefits to having a job. While having some initial benefits, the World Economic Forum declares:

“The new work requirements haven’t reduced the number or percentage of Americans in poverty. They’ve just moved poor people from being unemployed and impoverished to being employed and impoverished”

Reforms like this may work if people were interested in working. However, a study from the American Enterprise Institute showed that of 15.3 million people in poverty, less than 10% were looking for work and could not find it:

Perhaps the non-working poor have no interest in giving up time with their family or other activities to become merely “working poor” and spend less time with their family. If work is so important, perhaps we should think about eliminating the absurdity of the idea of “working poor” rather than merely getting more people to work.

Our “middle class” jobs that help people build a sustainable life are disappearing

This extensive (and well worth reading) post on “technological employment” talks about the long-run trends in our economy around jobs and employment. In the post he quotes economist David Autor, who notes that our economy is bifurcating into good jobs and low-paid ones:

“…computerization of “routine” job tasks may lead to the simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage jobs at one end and low-education, low-wage jobs at the other end, both at the expense of middle-wage, middle education jobs”

This is a global trend:

This trend is not going away with increased use technology, but it will lead to two profound questions:

1. Is it really worth it to have millions of people in low-paid work for the sake of having job?
2. Why don’t we value the emotional labor of some people (retail, artists, cashiers, restaurants) while simultaneously valuing the emotional labor of others highly (coaches, therapists, consultants)

The “future of work” is great for some, but mostly a misnomer for the destruction of good jobs

I am one of the lucky people operating within the context of a talent ecosystem where I have some market power and control over the work I do. However, the data shows that the current realization of the “future of work” is mostly people struggling to make ends meet and companies exploiting their current workforce and magically transforming stable jobs to lower-paid contractor jobs without benefits.

Since 2005, the labor force has grown by about 9 million people and all of that growth has been created in in “alternative work arrangements.” These are not freelancers like myself — they are people who are being fired and re-hired by their employees or just can’t get hired as a full-time employee.

The story of Diana Borland brings this trend alive:

The representative told them it wouldn’t be a big change, since the contractor, Nuance Communications, would rehire them all for the exact same position and the same hourly pay. There would just be a different name on their paychecks.

Borland soon learned that this wasn’t quite true. Nuance would pay her the same hourly rate — but for only the first three months. After that, she’d be paid according to her production, 6 cents for each line she transcribed. If she and her co-workers passed up the new offer, they couldn’t collect unemployment insurance, so Borland took the deal. But after the three-month transition period, her pay fell off a cliff. As a UPMC employee, she had earned $19 per hour, enough to support a solidly middle-class life. Her first paycheck at the per-line rate worked out to just $6.36 per hour — below the minimum wage.

I thought they made a mistake,” she said. “But when I asked the company, they said, ‘That’s your paycheck.’

#3 Work undermines, pride, community & stability of our culture

We only value that which can be quantified in GDP

If a parent decides to stay at home with their children and raise them, there is no impact on GDP. If they decide to work and pay for daycare, GDP goes up, unemployment rates go down and the economy is doing “better.”

With our absolute belief in work, we are making value judgement about what work is valued. With our unquestioned belief in work as the absolute aim of all adults, we are explicitly saying that someone that wants to stay at home and raise their kids is less valuable than someone who works. No one actually holds this belief, but we reinforce it by failing to question our conception of “work.”

In 1996, both political parties arrived on a comprehensive welfare reform package that tied many more benefits to having a job. As we showed before the reform did a fantastic job of moving unemployed people in poverty to employed people in poverty. It also led to an increase in the number of employed single mothers. Given that benefits are tied to working this is an expected reaction, but is this good for society? Who is watching the kids?

Andrea Komlosy recently published a book looking at the last 1000 years of work. Her research found that before our modern version of work, we did value that effort at home as work:

“One particularly startling aspect is that before 1750 women had more status than they did in the following two centuries. Their housework and caring for the family was seen in the context of a wider contribution to the household, while a man would contribute through his artisan job. “Each contribution [to the household] was valuable,” says Prof Komlosy.”

Today’s conversation talks about how we can “value” work at home in the context of “work” — which is headed in the wrong direction. It seeks to place a value in money on something that cannot be valued.

Work reinforces an obsession with education (see: degrees) and reinforces class divides

All work is not created nor valued equally. A family member of mine once applied for a job and was told that given their past experience, impressive resume and cover letter, that they were “clearly the best candidate for the job.” However, they could not hire her. She lacked a degree. I’m still angry about this not because of the policy, but because the policy signals that some people matter less than others.

The way we pay people reflects this trend. Adjusted for inflation, the median earnings of non-college graduates has fallen over the last 50+ years:

A counterargument could be that companies are paying for skills and that college graduates are clearly more skilled than non-graduates. This argument doesn’t hold water.

HBS and Accenture recently published research showing that there is a massive “credentials gap” in our current economy. This means that the percentage of job postings requiring a degree is much much higher than the actual makeup of the workforce holding those current jobs.

This chart shows the drastic disparity.

Our modern conception of work says that the most valued work is the kind that results at the end of a four-year college degree.

This obsession is no better shown than the recent report published by Georgetown University. Rather than look inward at the rising cost of college (tuition and fees alone just topped $50,000 a year this year at Georgetown), the university takes the bold stand of instead trying to simplify the value of education down to one metric: salary:

“In order to be educationally adequate, a post secondary program must provide its graduates with economic self-sufficiency. We propose that, to be recognized as leading to such self-sufficiency, a program must leave its graduates earning more than $35,000 per year ten years after they have completed it.”

Later in the report, we are given a history lesson (un-ironically it seems) about how education has led to inequality:

T. H. Marshall foresaw the growing contradiction between education as an equalizer and education as a source of inequality. This contradiction has only become more pronounced over time, with the strengthening of the sequential alignment between access to higher education, choice of field of study, occupational choice, and individual earnings

Yet, in this entire report, there is no question about the question of the disappearance of good jobs for most without degrees nor the unintended side effects of tying educational success to employment and salary.

Less than 7% of the population has access to benefits like paid maternity leave.

The people that are most fervent supporters of things like paternity leave, sick pay and generous healthcare benefits get them. Netflix offers 52 weeks paid paternity leave to their employees. They employ slightly over 5,000 employees.

Most people? Don’t have them. Pew estimated that only 14% of workers have access to things like paid family leave. Remember, this is 14% of the employed or approximately 21 million people.

Our modern conception of work says that we should solve our societal problems through work. That works for a small minority with good employment and good jobs, but for millions, stable employment and benefits are disappearing. We need to question our deep attachment to work and think about how our beliefs may in fact improve our own lives while also leading to instability, insecurity, and shame for many more.

To Conclude: Is Post-Work Possible?

I stumbled upon this article on the idea of “post-work” and the author interviews two self-proclaimed “post-workists” — it appears that people have no idea what to do with their time but work:

The first:

There’s no boundary between my time off and on. I’m always doing admin, or marking, or writing something. I’m working the equivalent of two jobs.” Later in our interview, which took place in a cafe, among other customers working on laptops — a ubiquitous modern example of leisure’s colonisation by work — she said knowingly but wearily: “Post-work is a lot of work.

..and the second:

James Smith was the only post-workist I met who had decided to do less work.“I have one weekday off, and cram everything into the other days.

So there it is — our future conception of work — the four-day work-week.

We can do better…

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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