You Are Not Crazy for Hating the Idea of Work
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
About a year ago, my friend texted me at two in the morning: “I hate my job. I am going to do it. If I don’t quit soon, then I am going to blow my brains out.”
A natural worrier, I asked her to call me, and we entered into a conversation that lasted well into the early morning. She had been at this position for over three years, and she claimed to have hated every single day. She couldn’t stand it anymore, and in her mind, the decision before her was to either off herself or quit.
“Is this all there is?” she asked tearfully.
I was able to talk her off that ledge, but this has been by no means a one-off experience. I have been receiving a lot of these calls recently, and they have been happening, paradoxically, when millions of Americans are unemployed and need a job more than ever.
If you are like me, then you probably blame yourself for your work-related unhappiness and anxiety. This is a facet of the human condition, you tell yourself, and so there must be something profoundly strange and irregular about you. Everyone else is doing fine. You are the one who cannot get your act together.
The more I have read about work and talked to other people about it, however, the more I have learned that this feeling isn’t an irregularity, but a normal condition of working. Few people I know have admitted to liking what they do at first, if ever, and that speaks to something profoundly disturbing about the nature of work: it’s a deeply unhealthy way to organize our society, and you are not crazy for hating it.
The first thing I want to validate is that your feelings of hatred, anxiety, depression, and alienation towards your job are entirely normal. There is a lot of shame surrounding this topic because unemployed people are often considered lazy, parasitic or worse, but your dissatisfaction with your work is a common one. This trend has been going on for the majority of the American workforce for decades.
As early as 2019, Gallup released a report titled Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States that claimed that 60% of Americans believed themselves to be in bad or mediocre jobs. This type of finding was not new for the polling organization. In 2017, Gallup released its annual report titled the State of the Global Workplace, which found that only 15% of employees worldwide (and closer to 30% in America) were engaged at work. “Low engagement” is defined here as either having a negative view of the workplace or only doing the bare minimum to make it through the day. Half a decade earlier, in 2013, that same annual report found engagement was similarly at 13% worldwide, and 29% in the US and Canada.
To say that Americans dislike their jobs would be an understatement. We have had a disengaged and unhappy workforce in this country for a long time, and it’s not a phenomenon confined to the 2010s. We have seen similar headlines resurface every decade or so. The release of a 2001 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 70 percent of Americans wanted a different job, with many expressing burnout and stress. The ‘90s had rising complaints of downsizing, burnout, and an overall loss of meaning. The ‘80s saw headlines such as the LA Times article Survey Finds Ambivalence on Workers’ Satisfaction.
Overall satisfaction was reportedly higher before the 1980s, but this was an era of even more pronounced work-related nationalism in daily life than today. It was during the Cold War when critiques of work could very quickly get you called a communist or worse. Elites routinely depicted labor organizing as the first step towards communism and chaos.
Source: New York Evening Telegram — Cartoon “Step by Step” by Sidney Greene (1919)
This had a chilling effect because dissent could be conflated with a failure to uphold fundamental societal ideals. There was a lot of pressure to conform to the life script of the working man (and honestly, there still is). And yet even during this period when job satisfaction was reportedly high, many specific complaints still lingered. As Bob Baker wrote in the LA Times in 1989:
“Every poll since the late 1950s has found job-satisfaction levels between 81% and 92% despite simultaneous responses indicating that only about one-third of all workers are satisfied with issues like job autonomy or the assistance they receive from supervisors.”
The whispers of dissatisfaction have been there for those willing to look, and it is not something simply found in polls and reports. We can observe it in the bedrock of our culture.
Popular songs about hating your job, for example, have existed for over half a century. Singer Lee Dorsey lamented about the soul-crushing work of a coal miner back in 1966, singing: “Five o’clock in the mornin’. I’m already up and gone. Lord, I’m so tired. How long can this go on?” We would see this musical trend of grieving work reoccur throughout the decades: such as with Johnny Paycheck’s Take This Job and Shove It in 1977, Lou Reed’s Don’t Talk to Me About Work in 1983, The Flaming Lips’ Bad Days in 1995, the Cursive’s Dorothy at Forty in 2006, JbDubs’ I Hate My Job in 2011, Twenty-One Pilots Stressed Out in 2015, and many, many more.
The bad workplace is an entire genre in media. The most prominent example in the modern era is The Office (2005–2013), which is primarily about the aimless shenanigans of employees at the Scranton Pennsylvania branch of a paper distribution company called Dunder Mifflin. The underlying humor centers on the utter pointlessness of the work being done there, and the incompetence of the branches’ boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell). The Office is itself a reboot of a British show of the same name, and there are many similar ones lampooning off work such as The IT Crowd (2006–2013) and Workaholics (2011–2017). There are also movies and musicals about the absurdity of corporate culture such as Office Space (1999), Horrible Bosses (2011), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), and Promises, Promises (1968).
Of course, the most prolific cultural gripe is the “I hate Mondays” meme, perhaps best personified by the cartoon character Garfield. While this meme is sometimes used to reference the cartoon cat’s own distaste for the weekday, more often than not, it’s brought up in offices around the world to complain about the start of the workweek.
Source: Teepublic — this is a fast-fashion shirt design you can buy online right now.
At this point, ‘I hate my job’ might as well be our national anthem (followed closely by ‘why aren’t you employed yet, you bum’ and ‘how dare you be so ungrateful with the complaining’). Your feeling of dissatisfaction over your wage job is not unusual or strange. It is part of a mundane, albeit ill-spoken of tradition in American life. We talk about it through whispers, jokes, and asides, but never directly.
Millions of people have struggled with this feeling, and yet we still often believe ourselves to be unique in experiencing it. We think that we are crazy for thinking this way because we have been led to believe that the alienation of our working lives is a solitary burden.
Worse, when we finally dare to tell people we are unhappy with working, the answer we receive is that our thoughts go against the very fabric of reality.
Defenders of the working order will often wax poetically about how this system of work is the best way to structure society. Everyone from Pope Paul II to Benjamin Franklin has praised the dignity of work. It was President Bill Clinton who famously extolled the virtual of wage jobs as a justification to sign a piece of legislation that rolled back safety net programs in favor of work requirements.
“We all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our lives.”
The problem, and the reason so many of us feel crazy, is that this conception of work is a fabrication. Humans didn’t walk out of Africa with a suit and a desire to meet their scrum targets. Many hunter-gather societies weren’t performing the long sprints typified by modern work. An analysis of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia found their workweek to be around 15 to 20 hours, and its not the same type of labor we are familiar with. Academic Peter Gray. for example, described in his Play Makes Us Human series for Psychology Today how a lot of these societies engaged in work that was complex, community-driven, and self-directional.
Modern work can, in many ways, be more taxing and limiting by comparison. One study out of the University of Cambridge found that when hunter-gathers in the Philippines converted to farming, they worked an average of 10 hours more per week (i.e., they moved from 20 to 30 hours on average). This workload is far less than the packed schedules of fully “developed” societies. The average American employee works 44 hours per week, and some Americans can get up to 70, 90, or even 100 hours a week.
Source: MotherJones — illustration by Mark Matcho for article ‘Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans’
We see here how societal progress has not necessarily led to greater leisure. We have, in fact, largely moved away from the less stressful work environments of pre-agricultural societies towards ones that are more atomized and laborious. These more demanding schedules, as we have already seen, have led to a lot of workers being depressed and unhappy with their jobs.
I want to stress that this is not a call to return to that state of “pre-civilization.” I happen to like penicillin and cat memes. Life then was hard (though if you could make it past adolescence, not as short or as brutish as some assume), but I bring up this research to highlight that our ideas of work have very much been in flux over the millennia. The modern job, in particular, is somewhat new. Some people trace it to the chemical corporation DuPont during the 1910s.
The era of the modern wage job is tied to Industrialization. The loss of leisure and independence that came with a paycheck was something that greatly concerned many self-employed, predominantly white Americans during the 19th century. Labor was primarily seen by that segment of the population as a transitional activity you did until you had the capital to open up your own shop. As Abraham Lincoln said at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee in 1859:
“In these free States, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.”
We are now far removed from that world — and it’s essential to bear in mind that it was one never accessible to many women, people of color, and poor whites. As Industrialization started to take root in America, the people who did live that life, however, became bitter about its end. Organizations such as the Knights of Labor would sometimes refer to a waged position as “wage slavery” because you were tied to the capital of your employer and not your own.
To be fair, Industrialization did make the life of the average worker a lot worse before it got better. Workers in American factories could be expected to pull ten or twelve-hour days, six or seven days a week. The labor of the standard American factory worker was often done in appalling conditions where accidents and even deaths were alarmingly common.
During Industrialization, this exploitation was based heavily on the classist idea that work was the proper place of all men. As Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle summed up in his inaugural speech as the new Rector of the University of Edinburgh on April 2, 1866:
“Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.”
This rhetoric was more than an inspirational quote to put up on posters. Elites in both the United Kingdom and America believed it was their proper place to push back against the overly entitled poor. This often meant scaling-back protections to hold the poor “responsible” for their lot in life, and in some cases, sent to prison for their debts (see Debtor’s Prisons).
Source: Department of Justice — A building in Accomack County, Va., which served as a debtor’s prison from 1824 to 1849.
While the fight for better working conditions and benefits is retrospectively depicted as a march towards higher productivity, the truth is that the early twentieth century was a time of intense mobilization from the working class. Henry Ford, for example, is often given credit for the five day work week because he standardized it for his employees on September 25, 1926, but the history of the Ford Motor Company was filled with violent clashes against its workers. One of the darkest periods in its history occurred six years later when a ‘Hunger’ March led to a confrontation with police and security guards that claimed the lives of four protestors. Ford Motors would end up being one of the last major automotive manufacturers to recognize the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or UAW for short, and let its employees unionize under them.
As we can see, the movement towards unionization was not an ‘objective’ attempt to wrangle more productivity out of workers, but an intense series of engagements — both physical and political. These efforts (and the countless like them by other organizers in sectors across the country) led to many of the labor protections we enjoy and know today. Everything from the eight-hour workday to employer-sponsored healthcare can be traced back to the labor movement. By the 1950s, their efforts had become an ingrained part of US society. As President Eisenhower said of unions in 1952:
“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
For a long time, there was an uneasy truce between the employer class and their fortunate employees. This state of government-backed, employee-protections, however, was not any more natural than the classist worldview of Carlyle or the Libertarian mindset of Lincoln. These were rights hard-won through political mobilization, and over the past couple of decades, we have seen them chipped away. Unions have been on the steady decline due to both anti-union legislation like right-to-work laws as well as companies engaging in regular union-busting. The very welfare reform legislation Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 detrimentally added more stringent work requirements to those Americans drawing on the government for help.
For the longest time thought to be backward and archaic, the Victorian work norms of the 19th and 20th centuries have once again permeated our culture. We right now exist in a time of a scaled-back safety net, and insecure employment. Conservatives now want to undo the employee-employer bargain entirely, and they aren’t subtle about it. During a segment for the Fox Business Network about how many Americans can no longer afford to retire, Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics, Donald Luskin, had this to say:
“What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working … This is a great blessing! You should embrace it.”
If Thomas Carlyle were alive today, then it would take little imagination to see him calling America’s insecure state of employment a blessing as well. Luskin would go on in that interview to mock leisure activities done during retirement as uninteresting and dull when compared to work. We see here how the managerial class is more than willing to call you crazy for wanting to be protected from their exploitation.
In fact, it’s their first line of defense against all dissent.
When employee engagement or happiness is discussed, employers often point out superficial justifications for why so much of the workforce has been dissatisfied for over half a century. For example, when considering that widely read State of the Global Workplace report we mentioned earlier, the Chairmen of Gallup, Jim Clifton, blamed ill-equipped bosses as the primary cause, writing:
“Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees — especially the stars — join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager’s fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce.”
In other words, it’s middle-management who’s to blame, not the system.
Listicles and opinion pieces are very keen to keep workplace dissent in the realm of individual reform. The conversation tends to never go beyond learning how to up-manage your boss or polish your resume. When breaking down a similar Gallup poll two years later, for example, the HR website StaffedSquare listed five major reasons why employee engagement was so low. These were: your boss, your colleagues, type of work, commute, and stagnant career growth. Notice that none of these points touched upon systemic problems such as poor pay or diminishing labor rights, and some of them were downright demeaning. In one suggestion, the editor mentioned that worker attitude could be a factor, writing:
“A poor attitude from the employee can create a bad air at work. If they aren’t willing to try to be happy, they never will be.”
These suggestions make it sound like most workers are suffering from an individual misalignment issue. If only they got the “right” job, boss, or weren’t such sticks-in-the-mud, then they could indeed be happy.
The reality though, is that many times the employer, not the employee, is to blame. There has been, for example, a lot of reporting in the last couple of years about how bad warehouse jobs can be. Amazon, in particular, came under fire in 2018 when it was discovered that some employees were peeing into bottles to meet tight deadlines. We have since learned that the floors of Amazon warehouses can be a grueling environment where workers are pushed to meet punishing quotas in exchange for meager pay and little benefits.
Source: MarketWatch — JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Amazon is by no means the only type of company with such a terrible environment for its employees. Warehouses across the economy receive similar complaints. Similarly, many fast-food settings are also negligent in treating their employees, who, on top of erratic schedules and non-livable wages, routinely receive burns and other preventable accidents. The underclass of Americans who have “low-skilled” jobs (a derogatory term used to devalue certain work) often have to endure terrible pay, irregular shifts, and mediocre benefits.
Even Americans with “good” jobs are still suffering longer hours, stagnating wages, and decreased benefits when compared to their peers in other developed nations. Paternity leave and robust, government-financed healthcare are privileges enjoyed in nearly every industrialized economy on the planet, but not in America, where two-thirds of all bankruptcies cite medical issues as a chief financial reason.
We should want to improve upon these sub-optimal conditions, but rather than systemically address them the number one response from employers is to blame employees for their own suffering. Companies such as Amazon will routinely deny the complaints of employee organizers as being directed by outside influences. Some entities will be far more direct. Warehouse consultant Rene Jones wrote a condescending article titled Career Advancement Tips for Warehouse Employees back in 2006 in Electrical Wholesaling, and his advice was:
“No one wants to be miserable at work. If you feel you have been slighted by the organization, that is your problem. Either do something about it, talk to your supervisor, or leave.”
To suggest that someone’s unhappiness with their warehouse job is because they are professionally misaligned is insulting to their humanity. Yet, that’s the first and only piece of advice most people receive. Many of these workers are experiencing subpar or even abusive working conditions, and that cannot be resolved by a simple heart-to-heart with their manager.
This solution obscures the real problem at hand. A company does not stumble into longstanding, abusive workplace practices. It’s a purposeful choice, and changing it is something that often has to happen in spite of leadership. When Amazon workers recently staged a strike on May 1st, this year, they weren’t protesting better lines of communication with their bosses. They wanted materially better protections and benefits, and Amazon denied there was even a problem. The company blamed the strike on the “irresponsible actions of labor groups spreading misinformation.”
By individualizing systemic problems, this mentality blames many workers for their own oppression, and it makes a lot of us feel crazy. When breaking down her personal experience as a warehouse worker, Emily Guendelsberge, talked extensively about how such jobs impact your mental health: “It’s making us sick and terrified and cruel and hopeless.”
As workers, it’s not enough to overcome the gaslighting of our employers. That’s the easy part. We also have to silence the oppressor inside our minds.
When you start to critique the state of work, the first thing you notice is how hesitant people are to engage in this topic at all. Many workers do not feel like they can even have this conversation. During the 2008 recession, for example, Gallup’s Lydia Saad released an article with the title US Workers’ Job Satisfaction Is Relatively High, which strangely placed complete job satisfaction among US workers at almost 50%.
When looking at this data more closely, however, something peculiar happens. Workers in that 2008 study may have indicated a high amount of general job satisfaction. Still, as the article would go on to note, the same could not be said about their “job stress (only 27% completely satisfied), pay (28%), company-sponsored retirement plans (34%), chances for promotion (35%), and health insurance benefits (40%).” Everything was okay, except when it came to the little things like being stressed, and having enough pay, and proper health benefits. (Note: in the survey, most workers still noted some satisfaction in many of these areas.)
There is intense pressure to always express gratitude for having a job in the first place. When describing his work-related angst in the article 3 Things You’ll Only Understand if You’re in the “I Hate My Job” Club, the writer Richard May repeatedly expressed feeling “lucky to be employed at all,” and mind you, this was for an audience of people dissatisfied with their employment. This internal monologue is ever-present for most people, and yet as we have seen, it exists alongside a reportedly growing dissatisfaction with the nature of work.
Source: idlehearts — a widely circulated quote of actress Cameron Diaz from an interview she did on the 2006 film ‘The Holiday.’
There are many reasons for this dissonance. I have written in the past about the social stigma that occurs from even broaching this topic (see The Stigma of Not Working). Another thing that deserves to be highlighted, however, is that employers hold a lot of leverage over their employees’ standard of living. As Lydia Saad described condescendingly in the Gallup article above:
“To some extent, this [high satisfaction] may reflect a heightened appreciation on the part of some workers for having a job at a time when they realize good jobs are hard to come by, and when being out of work is no picnic.”
It’s only alluded to here, but that “no picnic” is the starvation and homelessness that results from a loss of income. While some people do genuinely enjoy what they do, many more are afraid that tomorrow will be the day this all ends, the day they will be left starving on the street. When describing the view of his career in the video Moving to LA during a nervous breakdown, breakup, BLM protests, & a pandemic, YouTuber Tarek Ali had this to say:
“I am just a huge planner, and I have the worst anxiety when it comes to making decisions because I feel like nobody is there to catch me, and if I mess up, I’m going to be on the street.”
I see this fear reflected everywhere, and it can cause people to enter into terrible working relationships. A 1993 study released by the Families and Work Institute found that: “conflicts between work and family tend to be resolved in favor of the job, usually to the detriment of the family and the worker.” A 2009 Pew Research poll found that the primary reason nine-in-ten Americans’ work was to support themselves or their families. When reporter Emily Guendelsberger talked about her experiences at several fast-food jobs, she remarked on how providing for one’s families was how many workers found themselves trapped in dead-end situations. Her manager at a McDonald's told her to ignore the harassment, saying:
“You have a family to support. You think about your family, and you walk away.”
If you don’t have a job, then you and your dependents are denied the tools to live. I think we have to be honest with ourselves about how that hold over our subsistence plays a massive role in why we take a job in the first place.
One of the best descriptions of this bind might come from Heike Geissler’s autobiographical novel Seasonal Associates (2018). Early on in the book, Geissler describes her justification for taking a Holiday shift at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany, in 2010.
“You don’t want this job but you’re sensible and you have kids who want things every half hour, and your boyfriend wants things occasionally, and you want things of your own as well, although you hardly ever want anything and you usually pretend you need the things you want. You simply need money regardless of the time of year, you’re just like everyone else in that respect…”
This is the paradox of a lot of jobs. They are unhealthy. Your body physically and mentally wants to be someplace else, but you cannot leave because you need the money to survive. You are torn between the cruelty of having to stay and the psychological desire of wanting to go anywhere else. You dream of leaving, but in your mind, there is nowhere else to go free from exploitation. You start to go crazy because everywhere people tell you that this is normal, and yet everything you experience tells you that it is not.
This leaves you in the precarious position of not only having to fight for better labor conditions and a more livable salary, but also having to fight against the oppressor inside your own head.
You find yourself asking: Is that all there is?
The famous jazz singer Peggy Lee released the song Is That All There Is? (written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally performed by Georgia Brown) in 1969. The song is about a narrator reflecting on her life, and her amazement that there is nothing more to major milestones such as marriage that she has been told hold intrinsic significance.
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is
Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics reflect a deep nihilism with social constructs. Under this interpretation, the things we think matter do so more because of the psychological power we as a society give them. Marriage is only a big deal because people say so, and the same can be said of work.
I bring up this song because I see this feeling a lot with new workers. Many people will enter the labor force after being told grandiose or even mythological stories about how meaningful their participation will be, only to realize that that vision does not align with reality. You are not doing some intrinsic duty. You are filling out spreadsheets or lifting boxes to pay the rent.
After a fair amount of anger and depression, they will start to ask the question, ‘Is that all there is?’ and something that saddens me is that for many people, the answer is yes. I have known too many friends who have lost people to depression and anxiety over the past few years. Suicide is, by some accounts, the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and among Millenials and Gen Zers, it’s far higher. I have been there myself, standing on the roof, asking myself if it really would be so terrible to jump.
For me, it took taking a break from work to get a better hold on my mental health. When I hear people dismiss other’s criticisms of work, my experience tells me that they are making a call on whose lives they think do not matter. I hear a match being lit as the word crazy is formed before it’s ever spoken.
And some people do end up jumping.
There has been a lot of talk about burnout and depression these past few years. Our work culture has been called unhealthy everywhere from The Atlantic to the ever-business friendly Forbes, and I think its time to start asking if the status quo is worth it.
Do we really think the current system is truly worth all of this unhappiness?
Is it worth us doubting our own sanity?
Is it worth all the lives of those we have lost?
Is that all there is?
Yes, people do like doing “things.” People wrote, farmed, made art, built buildings, advanced science, and created communities before the emergence of the modern nine-to-five. Those tasks, however, are not the same thing as earning a wage for labor you may or may not want to do, on a schedule you may or may not control, with people you may or may not like, for a person who dictates what you can and cannot do.
A job is not the same thing as your labor.
I do not doubt that a minority of workers are happy. I am friends with a few of them. I see their Instagram posts. I read their comments on my articles as they complain that I just don’t see reality as they do. They do seem content.
I also do not doubt that these people are a minority. They are the winners of this bizarre system. They are often more prosperous and more powerful than everyone else, and we should not pretend like their satisfaction is a thing experienced by the majority of humanity.
It is not.
We must embrace that this is a bad system. It is something that actively makes many around us unhappy.
And you are not crazy for hating it.