It’s no secret that the last few years have been pretty tough for me on the work front. Two months after starting a brand-new gig at a respected local environmental charity, I was in the ICU recovering from life-saving surgery.
Though I’ve told the story many times it’s no less shocking to me — after the 25lb tumour was removed from my abdomen, the surgeons had to clean up the mess, and literally stitch me back together again. Then, because it had been such a mess in there the first time, they had to go back in a second time to make sure I had a working viscera again, causing further complications that now leave me expecting my bile duct will fail, at some point in the future.
Not surprisingly, this health crisis, which brought me to the brink of death, has entirely transformed the way I look at work, at employment and a career. It’s transformed the extent to which work can no longer be an end itself, something to be done out of moral duty or responsibility to one’s loved ones, but instead takes on a new form, ultimately centered on my health and well-being, and the health and well-being of those I love.
I’ve come to see some simple truths about my personal self-determination and the myth of linear progression of history:
- There is no going back to what life was like before I got sick.
- The life I wanted before my illness, marked by overwork and the cult of busyness is not necessarily the life I want “on the other side” of illness.
- More to the point, there is no “on the other side of the illness.”
- Hurrying through illness, however much I want to, is a really bad idea.
- My health is what it is, and must be taken as it is.
- Health concerns must always form the basis of personal decision making but they do not define my identity.
- To that end, I have a responsibility to self-care that I must take seriously
- Illness and struggle is often a catalyst for growth; it asks us to take big, bold steps when we don’t feel those steps are possible.
- Big bold steps often challenge the status quo
- Taking big, bold steps requires razor-sharp focus, persistence and determination through fire
- Taking big, bold steps also means recognizing that often things happen for no reason. They just happen, forcing us to confront our life wherever it is we are at.
The common view of history as a linear progression sometimes makes it easy to forget that history is way more complicated. Instead of being about personal actions and their causes/effects, history is actually made up of lots and lots of chance encounters, interacting with personal actions, causes/effects.
Contrary to the belief that success is opportunity meeting preparation, the things we often define as ‘successful’ are more often than not related to random chance, interaction with our actions and their causes/effects.
When we begin to think that we control our destiny through our own efforts, through our hard work, through the work we do with our hands, fingers, shoulders, head or back, we willfully choose to neglect entire swathes of random events that interact in so many different ways with our actions.
There is no world in which I can take any blame at all, for anything that happened to be. It was chance, the wrong kinds of cells in the wrong place, and at the wrong time.
I just got sick. My body grew a tumour. It just happened.
Even now, as I write this, I’m on a full dose of Prozac, high doses of which are regular frontline treatment for PTSD. The drugs, coursing through my veins are what is allowing me the ability to get out of bed, and sit here and write.
Just as I claim no blame for my illness, I can take no credit for my paltry success.
Life happens, whether we want it to, or not.
The more powerless I feel about the world around me, the more I begin to realize that powerlessness isn’t a bad place to be. It’s almost cliché, but it is true what they say — it is when you are at your most vulnerable, when you willingly surrender your power, that you are at your strongest. And yes, mom, that might involve the submission of the will to God.
While listening to Tim Ferris being interviewed on the Ezra Klein Show, I was struck yet again by one of the overbearing realities of life with an illness. Describing a time in his life when he suffered from Lyme Disease, the productivity guru and author of the business bestseller 4 Hour Work Week, Ferris said,
Making health number one is a binary decision. If you say my health is number one but you compromise 20% of the time, [on an important call, whatever,] you’re going to compromise exactly when it’s important that you don’t compromise.
Continuing, he finished his pitch on prioritizing health:
In that state, I didn’t know how I was going to feel a week later, much less 6 months later. So I said no to effectively everything: anything that forced me to look at a calendar in the future, I said no… Conceptually it’s easy to say for us to say at the start of the year, “This year, I going to say no to more things, health is number 1” but when you translate that into day to day behaviour and expectations, it’s very, very difficult.
“So where does this leave you now, as a person deeply impacted by the severity of your near-death experience, limited in your ability to ‘produce’ work, at least as it comes to the definition of the word?”
I’m glad you asked!
Here’s my new mantra:
Now please, hear me out.
Inspiration for this new mantra comes from an episode of Tapestry, one of CBC radio’s most vibrant threads, in which a professor of history at Rutgers talked a little bit about his new book “No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea.” Per the author, “The working title of the book was F**k Work, and I sold it and sold it and sold it and my editor tried to sell the book in-house and he couldn’t because Amazon wouldn’t feature the book title if it had the Eff word in it!”
And yet, as far as I’m concerned, that just might be the right kind of message for my life right now.
Over the course of the episode, the host Mary Hynes asks Livingston about the prevailing perspective on work; work itself is a moral good, something men and women were made and designed to do, and in which there can be attained some moral standing.
The Protestant Work Ethic
Known as the Protestant Work Ethic, so-named after a critique by the influential sociologist and philosopher Max Weber in the early 20th century, this view attaches a deeper spiritual sense to work, in which one’s labour becomes imbued with moral virtue itself. On this view, often but not exclusively seen in rural communities across North America, work is what we were made to do, and working for work’s sake is a desirable moral end. Very often appeals to scripture are made, the most common one being the ubiquitous “If you shall not work, you shall not eat” repeated ad nauseum, ensuring that its meaning swallows compassion whole. On this view, moral value is found in the extent to which someone commits themselves to their work. In cities and in white collar jobs this can be seen in the perpetual cycle of working for the next promotion, looking forward to the next big car, the next property under my control, or the next vacation I can take. Work-as-moral-imperative quickly becomes work-as-duty, and when we do things out of duty instead of joy we rarely reap the benefits, even when that action looks to be, on the face of it, productive.
How then will you live?
Livingstone cites the stats about “people living on the dole” already, those in the United States and in Canada who already live off some kind of government stipend. There are various reasons why we judge the moral imperative to work not to hold, and though we would like to see ourselves as compassionate to begin with, nearly all of these reasons have been recognized after tough, long, hard fights with the powers that be.
From retirement benefits to food stamps in the States and social assistance here in Canada, from people living, like myself, on a disability cheque, to those of us on employment insurance, Livingston makes the point that we have already divorced ourselves from the work-as-moral-imperative perspective in many cases. As the interview continues, he suggests possibilities for a Universal Basic Income, a form of government assistance that has the potential to replace our antiquated sense of work-as-moral-imperative. While his argument for its financial viability is admittedly flimsy (and this may be a consequence of the medium of radio; I’d check out the link above for a much more fulsome discussion of UBI), his argument that we must get serious about a post-work world is not.
Let’s be real here.
- Jobs lost to India, China, Mexico, Thailand and elsewhere are not coming back.
- Jobs lost to robotics, innovation and tech advancement are not coming back.
- Technological advances in agriculture are increasingly making human labour obsolete, while the oil and gas sector is facing a reckoning as we begin to grapple with the consequences of climate change.
- If anything, as these and other technologies improve, even cheaper labour markets will shed jobs, as factories in the developing world catch up to with the latest in production and global shipping technologies.
It should come as a surprise to no one, then, that the way we approach the workforce has to change.
And so for my part, my focus on my health above all means a radical re-imagining of what it means to work. Where past versions of me may have been content to critically engage with the Protestant Work Ethic, the version of me that I am becoming recognizes that the Protestant Work Ethic paradigm no longer works. Instead, by taking big, bold steps into the future, and by focusing on my health, and the health and wellness of the people I love, I recognize that for me, work is not the be-all-and-end-all that it has become for so many.
The next chapters of my life will no doubt be difficult. Afflicted with PTSD, my nights are plagued by nightmares that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, and my days are spent at the mercy of cannabis, opioids and neuropathic chronic pain agents. I still have good days, and I still have bad days. I don’t know when the desmoid tumour will return, but it probably will. And I expect that I’ll eventually need a stent in place of my bile duct.
Through this all, I’m left staring my own future in the face, recognizing that there is nothing normal about my world.
I am grateful for every uncertain step I take, for, as the glorious Arya Stark always reminds me, I have stared death in the face
“What do we say to the God of Death? Not Today.”
Now I could choose to live in fear of that uncertainty, or I could use it to my advantage, plying random events into something of purpose, creating a beautiful wall-hanging out of chance, refusing to participate in the expectations of work-as-duty that leave so many dry and cracked, bereft of life.
I’ve got the unique opportunity to make my world into what I want it to be, recognizing that at my most powerless and vulnerable, at my weakest and in my deepest pain I am best able to develop the kind of character and perseverance required to push forward.
