Why Modern Work is Hard for All the Wrong Reasons
Why we’re looking in all the wrong places, and set up to fail
I was lucky to get to witness and take part in the powerful progress of technology while I was working on my doctoral and master’s degrees at Stanford University, and helping teach in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Living in Silicon Valley is a powerful experience, and it’s hard not to come out a little bit changed. You realize how vital it is for us to see beyond just what we can do with technology, but also to see what technology is doing to us. My studies and experience focused in many ways on the modern human relationship with technology, and how it has changed in recent human history. We spend most of our waking lives at work, ye almost 90% of workers do not feel engaged with their jobs. We should be talking about this a lot more than we are. Let me explain how we got here, where “here” is, and what it means for our lives, with the hope of helping us take the first step towards something much better.
For most of human history humans were the masters of their technology. We made tools that allowed individuals to create things in a better way. With the advent of the industrial revolution the machines took over much of the work and we began to become just small parts in huge processes, specifically, we filled whatever role was harder to automate at the current level of technology. We transitioned from being masters of technology, to supervisors of technology, to co-workers with technology, and finally to competitors with technology, and it’s changed the way we live, the way we work, and how we think about ourselves.
This, for instance, has impacted how we see time (as very important, down to the minute), how we see our life’s purpose (career achievement, rising up), hot to make everything better (optimize it!), how we see money (a sign of how well we’re doing at life, and thus how worthwhile we are), and how we work and even socialize (like machines). In many areas we are still competitive with, and are actually beating, the machines that work alongside us, or at least we can be with enough money and training. The latest OECD report predicts that even in the short term one in two jobs are likely to be significantly affected by automation, but being replaced by machines might not be the biggest threat.
How we got here
It’s been just long enough since the beginning of the industrial revolution for us to take our jobs, careers, and work for granted, and thus fail to see the unsustainability of such an arrangement. It’s beyond typical in our era to experience time as “pressure,” and then to lament or brag about the “stress” of it all. A lot of this is the price of broad coordination, and the pressure is real.
Alfred Chandler, the Pulitzer prize-winning professor of business history at Harvard, explained that the new tools of the industrial revolution made production possible at vastly grander scales, thus dividing up the work. The processes of production are now split across multitudes of different workers and machines housed at locations all over the globe. This creates an army of task specialists and creates new, and very high, demands for coordination. If any tool, human or machine, fails to meet its scheduled output then the process is broken and that tool will be repaired or replaced. In many ways there is very little functional difference at this point between the human and the tool. Humans are largely the semi-autonomous cogs of the greater production and distribution processes.
Humans don’t mind working hard, but we hate the loss of autonomy and flexibility (machines don’t care). Covid has given us clear evidence for this. Remote workers are working more hours than they did before COVID-19 lockdowns, yet Harvard Business School found that a whopping 81% of workers do not want to ever return back to the “normal” of working in the office full-time. The number one reason? Flexibility.
Becoming Machines
The historical, sociological, and technological record is abundantly clear, the advent of mechanization had a profound impact on what it meant for us to be human. It’s not just a story of how much we are now able to accomplish as a species, or what new feats the technology has made possible, though that is a vital part of it. It is also a story of how we came to see ourselves and the purposes of our lives.
Max Weber, a founding father of both management and sociology, explained how these new technologies led to the modern idea of “bureaucracy.” He showed that before the industrial revolution, work, or the making of money, was primarily based on whatever was necessary to provide a comfortable life. Weber predicted and explained the processes that would lead modern workers eventually to be feel trapped in what he called an “iron cage,” where the only sense of personal worth, indeed the only meaning left to find in life, would be the mirage of career achievement for achievement’s sake. Over 100 years later his predictions are prophetic. Our social and economic systems are built for and around career achievement, whether that is actually proving to be meaningful or not.
We seek after higher and higher education, more and more career success, making money for money’s sake, and always striving for the elusive next peak of career achievement and success. Yet, as mentioned above, in all of this, Gallup, who has been performing rigorous studies of the workforce for decades, finds that 87% of employees do not feel engaged at their work. Further, Daniel Kahneman and Sir Angus Deaton, both recipients of the Nobel prize separately, show in broad and powerful studies that within the United States no increase in subjective well-being (life happiness) can be found associated with incomes above about $80,000 annually. Money matters, but only to a point. Status is also a hollow prize. The late, great, Clayton Christensen rocked Harvard business school and then the world with his profound seminar, and then book, “How Will You Measure Your Life.” This sprung out his observations of how utterly miserable his fabulously successful (career-wise) Harvard MBA classmates were a decade down the road.
Between industrialization, the bureaucratization of work, and the emergence of the iron-cage of achievement for achievement’s sake, without deeper meaning, we have an entirely different crisis on our hands. Our competition with machines has led us to answer fundamental questions about what we are even doing on this earth and how we should live our lives, in ways that are quite different from the eons before us.
Despite consistently rising standards of living and per-capital GDP, American happiness has been in decline since at least 1976. We’ve been trying to out-machine the machines. We can see this in the rise of math scores as a central marker of our national educational achievement, the prizing of punctuality as equating to professionalism, and the manic obsession of so many to pride themselves on how much they overwork and how little time off they take.
In America, for instance, which already has the least amount of required vacation days in any industrialized country, most workers don’t even use all of their paid vacation days, and that number is actually getting worse every decade! A record 768 Million U.S vacation days went unused in 2018. This is good for nobody. A multitude of studies show that taking vacation days is associated with higher and better productivity and performance for companies and individuals. Whether consciously or not, we’re comparing ourselves to machines, and we see any human differences (such as relatives, refocusing, rest, and recuperation) as shortcomings. Evidence for this can be see in the fact that most US workers actually report feeling guilty about even taking their vacation time. As Rachel Sugar explained, we often live as though, “If you’re going to have the audacity to have family obligations, you can at least have the courtesy to pretend you don’t.”
In much of our current culture, burning out is a badge of honor. The rat race has been rebranded “owning your moment.” “They’re a machine!” is considered a compliment, and higher praise can rarely be given than to say that someone produces “like clockwork.” Yet a study by Ashley Whillans at HBS found that the happiest recent graduates, even years later, were the ones who said at graduation that their top priority was finding jobs that provided flexibility and free time to spend with those they loved instead of money, titles, or even advancement opportunities. There is hope, but recognizing the problem is the first step. In future articles I will focus on the next steps of how we can seek the right jobs, plan to thrive, and build a life not just a career.
