Is there a "good enough" Job?: 5 Things Podcast

On today's episdoe of the 5 Things podcast: Is a job meant to be a calling or is it just a means to an end? And where are the lines between work and life anyway? They might have been clear before the pandemic, but now? Not so much. Zoom calls that never end and bosses who now think you are available to respond at any time of day or night have made people rethink their relationship to their job. Is it even possible to have a healthy relationship with work? Journalist and author Simone Stolzoff contends that it is.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Taylor Wilson. It's Sunday, May 7th, 2023. Today we're talking about work and whether it's even possible to have a healthy relationship with it. Journalist and Author Simone Stolzoff thinks that we can. In the good enough job, Stolzoff aims to get readers to deeply consider what role work should play in their lives and then suggest ways to make that happen. Simone, thanks for coming on the show.

Simone Stolzoff:

Thanks, Taylor. It's great to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

Is it possible for people who identify with the mission of their work, let's say a journalist like yourself, like myself, to have a good enough job?

Simone Stolzoff:

I think yes, and it was a process for me to get to this point. I've had a little meandering career myself. I spent my twenties looking for a proverbial dream job. I worked in tech for a few years and I worked in advertising and I worked in journalism and I worked in design. And I think coming into the writing process of the book, I might have had a bit more of a hot take, which was, we work too much. Work is bad. But I think through the reporting process and through my own lived experience, I've come to something a little bit more lukewarm, which is to say that work is important. We do it more than we do just about anything else in our life.

It can be a great source of identity and meaning and purpose, and yet I think it's risky when it is the sole source of identity or meaning in your life as so many people have found out during the pandemic due to furloughs or being laid off or just having to reconsider their relationship to their job. If your work is your only source of identity and meaning, it can be a perilous game to play.

Taylor Wilson:

Let's define what you mean, Simone, when you reference a good enough job.

Simone Stolzoff:

I define a good enough job as a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be. It's sufficiently vague at this point, but I think part of why I like the framework is because it is subjective. So you get to define what good enough means to you. Perhaps it's a job in a certain industry, perhaps it's a job that pays a certain salary or a job that gets off at a certain hour so that you can pick up your kids from school. But whatever your definition of good enough is, I urge you to recognize when you have it. And being a millennial, I was sort of raised on these scripts about how there is this one perfect dream job out there, and if you don't have it, you should never settle. You should keep searching. And I think that mentality creates a lot of room for disappointment. It creates massive expectations about what a job can deliver. And ultimately, if you are looking to your work for self-actualization or transcendence, it can be a job that our jobs are not designed to bear.

And so, this framework of a good enough is not resigning to the fact that work must be a necessary evil or the sort of romanticization of putting a dream job up on the pedestal, but really thinking about what is your definition of a life well lived and how can your job exist to support that vision of your life as opposed to the other way around.

Taylor Wilson:

I'm wondering, how did we get here? Why do we, Americans in particular, put so much pressure on work to deliver some kind of meaning and purpose?

Simone Stolzoff:

If you want to start at our country's foundation, the Protestant work ethic and the history of capitalism are sort of the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA, then there's factors like, the way in which our healthcare is largely tied to full-time employment in this country. But I think the foundational reason, and the one that I harp on most in the book is this sort of subjective value that Americans give to work. We live in an incredibly individualistic country where we're told that jobs are not mere paychecks, they're callings and vocations and means for self-actualization. And because oTaylor Wilson:

This book is coming out at a particularly interesting time for work. There's been this major shift toward remote work. We've also seen some power shift back to workers amid this so-called great resignation moment. Where are we now in terms of thinking differently perhaps in the wake of this pandemic and some of these changes about work?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I mean, I started reporting this book before the pandemic began, and I did not know that a global pandemic would thrust this conversation about work into the cultural zeitgeist and the way that it has. I think there's been a lot of awakening. I think that's a great word. I think people, as I mentioned, that were treating their work as sort of their be all and end all saw their riskiness of that as they lost maybe the social communities that they had at the office or maybe lost work altogether. We also saw some experiments with what it would mean if our frayed social safety net was better knit. And so, we saw experiments like the child tax credit in the last few years or the sort of what I call a universal basic income light in the form of pandemic, really response and unemployment benefits expansion in the past two years.f that, the sort of culture of work centricity or what my colleague Derek Thompson calls workism, is on full display on this country. It's created this culture where work is sort of the central access around which the rest of our lives orbit.

But more than anything, the pandemic forced not just this great resignation moment, but a great reconsideration. As millions of Americans started thinking differently about what is the role that they want work to play in their life. I think some people saw how other parts of themselves have been neglected, given how much time and energy they give to their jobs. And the resurgence of people who took up at home hobbies to find identity in that way, or parents who were able to spend more quality time with their children. We saw people who recognized that their jobs weren't good enough and quit at unprecedented rates. And I think it's important to keep in mind that the majority of folks that quit over the course of the pandemic didn't just quit to retire or quit to sit at home, but actually found better jobs with better protections and often better compensation that better fit their needs.

And now, I think more than anything, we're having this societal wide conversation about; what is the role of work? And yes, some people work doing what they love, but other people work doing what they have to do so they can do what they love when they're not working. And in the past, say decade or two, I think we've really revered the former category, the people whose identities and their jobs neatly aligned. And I think in the past three years, we've really come to a place to understand that actually treating a job as a means to an end is not something to fear. It actually can create a sense of expansiveness to become fuller versions of ourselves.

Taylor Wilson:

Simone, I know this isn't a book exclusively about economic theory, but can there ever be a healthy relationship with work under capitalism?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah. It's an interesting question. Definitely depends on who you ask. I think one of the risks of this hyper capitalistic society in which we live is that we internalize the logic of the market. I definitely saw this even over the course of reporting and writing the book that on days where I hit my writing goal, I felt good about myself. And on days where I didn't hit my writing goal, I felt a sort of depletion of my own self-worth. And regardless of whether you are in a job that feels like a means to an end or a job that feels like an end in and of itself, capitalism is still sort of the water that we're all swimming in. It's impossible to live in the United States and not see the way in which our output and our work are so tightly bound. Here, productivity isn't just a measurement, it's a moral good. And I think capitalism for all its pros and cons is the cause of a lot of the way that we think of ourself and our worth in this world.

Taylor Wilson:

How does telling people to follow their passion potentially reinforce inequality?

Simone Stolzoff:

In this section of the book, I talk about sort of dispelling the myth of following your passion as being great career advice, and there's a few different ways in, one of them is this kind of inequality angle in which I rely on the research of this professor at Michigan State University named Aaron Czech. And Professor Czech's research focuses on how the same message to take a risk to follow your passion, to follow your heart, lands very differently depending on the opportunities people have available to them. And so, following your passion is great advice, frankly, for people that can afford it. But often if you don't have that same network or those same, as what she calls springboards in order to parlay your passion and to gainful employment, it can actually reinforce inequality. It can expand the economic disparities between the haves and the have nots.

An example is maybe someone who follows their passion to pursue a graduate degree, and in doing so, has to assume a lot of student debt, and it's a graduate degree that they might feel passionate about, but might not actually lead to job prospects on the other end. I know this firsthand in my field, in journalism, a lot of the entry level internships and opportunities pay less than a living wage, and so they... It's great if you're passionate about journalism and there might be an opportunity to get your rent subsidized or if you can afford to live at home for a little while, but those opportunities aren't available to everyone. So, this sort of blanket statement of follow your passion and the rest will work out doesn't actually mean the same to different people depending on where they are economically and where they are in their lives.

Taylor Wilson:

This reminds me a little bit of the librarian that you spoke with, who used this term vocational awe. Can you explain what that means?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, it's one of my favorite concepts in the book, and essentially vocational awe refers to how certain industries like teachers and librarians and healthcare workers and nonprofit sector workers, these industries have this perceived righteousness, this sort of halo effect that the industry of education is inherently good. Or, if you work in nonprofits, you don't get into that line of work for the money.

And the problem with these messages and also just the halo effect of our education system, more broadly, is that they allow these problems to seem like they're the result of individual choices as opposed to systemic issues that have to be addressed at an institutional level. If you just sweep something under the rug and say, "Oh, this is just part of the cost of working in the field that does good in the world." Then it prevents us from having a real conversation about what does it mean to have a living wage in some of these industries, what does it mean to support workers and give them the protections and compensation that they deserve.

Taylor Wilson:

Simone, I have a feeling a lot of listeners are hearing this conversation and nodding vigorously and thinking that a lot of these themes apply to them and apply to their lives, but they may be wondering how to find a real solution. So, how do you recommend that people begin to see their jobs as good enough and how can they extricate themselves from this kind of hamster wheel to really be able to see it?

Simone Stolzoff:

In the book, I talk about solutions at the policy level, solutions at the company level or the firm level and solutions at the individual level. I think it's really important to think about these different concentric circles because I do think there are limits to individual interventions in some of these cases, and there are also limits to structural interventions. The big thing that I advocate for is for people to diversify the sources of identity and meaning in their life. So, what does that mean? That means actively taking a role in investing in a diversified identity for yourself. So, whether that is carving out time each week to invest in your friendships or joining a local social or community organization or cultivating a hobby that is not something that you need to excel at or necessarily treat as another enamel pin to put on your jacket of identity, but is just a part of who you are.

I think by diversifying the sources of identity in our lives, we're able to put work in perspective and the research backs this up. Research shows that people that have greater levels of, what they call, self complexity are more resilient in the face of adversity. They are ultimately more well-rounded and fulfilled, and that makes sense. If your job is something that you are sort of rising and falling on the rollercoaster of your professional accomplishments, all it takes is one bad performance review or a message from your manager to throw you into an existential spiral. But when we have a more diversified sense of ourself, when we understand that we are not just workers, but we are neighbors and citizens and friends and siblings, then we can develop a sense of self that no market or company has the ability to sway.

Taylor Wilson:

Beautifully put, The Good Enough Job hits shelves on May 23rd. Thanks so much, Simone.

Simone Stolzoff:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks to Simone Stolzoff for joining me, and to Shannon Ray Green and Alexis Gustin for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of 5 Things.



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