The End of our Work
How we really feel on the other end of our webcam
Recently, editor Diana found a piece published by New York Times Magazine called “The Age of Anti-Ambition.” I’ve linked here in a way that should let you bypass the paywall. In the article, the author Noreen Malone reflects on the current state of work culture, making use of a central metaphor of “Busytown:”
I used to think of my job as existing in its own little Busytown — as in the Richard Scarry books, where there’s a small, bright village of workers, each focused on a single job, whose paths all cross in the course of one busy, busy day. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I would see the same person at the Myrtle Avenue bus stop several days… I’d buy coffee from a rotating cast of the same baristas at the cafe on the third floor of my office building, where I worked as an editor at a magazine. I’d stop to chat with another editor… sometimes, she would motion for me to shut the door, and we would say what we really thought about some piece of minor professional gossip, important to at most about 3.5 people in the world. I would watch my boss walk toward a meeting with his boss and wonder whether their chat would wind up affecting my job.
We all mostly worked on computers, typing in documents and sending emails to the person on the other side of a cubicle wall, but there was a bustle to the whole endeavor. It was a little terrarium where we all spent 50 hours a week, and we filled it with office snacks and bathroom outfit compliments and after-work drinks. Even on a day when nothing much happened professionally, there was the feeling of having worked, of playing your part in an ecosystem.1
Of course, this ecosystem is composed of many distinct parts: broadly, the people who inhabit the space doing the work and the office spaces themselves facilitate the work. How office spaces are designed is the subject of a lot of deliberation and thought and was chronicled in a way I found interesting recently in an episode of 99% Invisible.
But as we’ve reflected on many times, even as we envision ourselves as the shapers of our environments, they shape us back, making us into the types of people who conform to our environments. Malone continues:
…When the pandemic hit, the people with those… jobs had to keep going to work. Their Busytowns rolled on. And actually, those jobs got harder.
Everyone else has lost all touch with theirs. They log on to Slack and Zoom, where their co-workers are two-dimensional or avatars, and every day is just like the last one. Depending on what’s happening with the virus, their children might be there again, just as in March 2020, demanding attention and sapping mental energy. The internet is definitely there, always, demanding attention and sapping mental energy. A job feels like just one more incursion, demanding attention and sapping mental energy.2
Malone reflects:
The act of working has been stripped bare. You don’t have little outfits to put on, and lunches to go to, and coffee breaks to linger over and clients to schmooze. The office is where it shouldn’t be — at home, in our intimate spaces — and all that’s left now is the job itself, naked and alone. And a lot of people don’t like what they see.3
Malone goes on to describe what she sees as the current state of work, and I think the whole piece is worth a critical read. But what I’m most interested in here is how the recent shake-up in how we think about office spaces impacts us and our work. When work is “stripped bare,” what are we left with? If someone employs us, and we lose all the perks and benefits, we’re left with the mere transaction of our time for money. How does the math work out? I believe work is worth pursuing, but it’s worth reflecting on what is the end of our work.
I believe this is the core question being pondered by Malone. She never, in my estimation, arrives at an “answer,” but I think the reflection is the point I take. As we’ve asked a lot lately, what’s the picture of the good life we are pursuing, and how does our work fit it. I don’t think the answer is that the “work product” or output of my labor must in and of itself be fulfilling. But I do believe that the work I’m doing should, in one way or another, be moving me towards the picture of the good life.
So the question for us today (that’s been the same question for a bit, but I think it’s an important one, so I ask it again): What is our vision of the good life? What do we imagine we are doing in the world, and how do we align where we spend our time to the vision?
Thanks for joining me today, and I look forward to talking again soon.