Pursuit of Joy
Reframing my relationship with work
My discontentment with work comes in waves. During the first few years, it was like the Pacific ocean. The waves were calm and passed quickly. To tame the obstinate ones, I just had to change the team. I was introduced to Adam Smith when I complained to a friend about how mindless my work appeared less than a year into my first job. My work wasn’t giving me any fulfilment.
Unlocking the door for unbounded wealth creation, Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations:
‘One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands.’
Thence started our slog to create pins; not as a craft, but as a mundane task to draw out the wire or straighten them. It was never intuitively clear why we did what we did; we seemed to trust in a master pin-maker to know that and determine the right set and priority of work for the lesser mortals.
But as years progressed, and I climbed into the underbelly of middle management, my uneasiness became a permanent fixture. I realized how there was no master pin-maker; we just improvised on the go. In order to manage the innumerable employees that draw the wire, straighten them, cut them and grind them at the top, we needed more employees — the managers or supervisors. To co-ordinate among those managers and their teams and to report the status elsewhere, we needed even more employees. All these managers and reporters needed managers of their own. But even when the managers manage someone, it’s never clear what that means. What exactly is the work expected of that manager? With myriad meetings to discuss pointless topics, the day quickly becomes a performance to smile and wave. It’s a great job if I don’t introspect much. It gives power and money, and it offers one the ladder to climb up as they please. But once you ask yourself how you’re spending the majority of your waking hours, you lose your mind.
I had several days and months of depressed anxiety at having to leave my bed and show up at work. Adding to the spiritual crisis was also the stress associated with the job. It’s difficult to articulate what that stress is. It isn’t that someone has put a gun on your head and asked you to do the impossible. And yet, the situation gives you a dread of fight or flight. It’s the stress about the deadlines, the expectations, the ego of countless individuals, the unspoken threat in the event of a failure. For those like me, with the life of an expat on visa, the life in that country is also tied to their performance at their workplace.
I had lived with this inarticulate feeling of purposelessness and subdued discontentment for a few years when I read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs — “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.” Graeber presents a compelling and coherent analysis of the white-collar workplace which values bureaucracy, paperwork, and meetings over fulfilling a purpose. Even in jobs that are essentially meaningful, like a nurse or a volunteer at a refugee camp, one spends over 60% of their time on paperwork instead of carrying out the job they had signed up for. Reading the book was a cathartic experience. To know that I wasn’t being a thankless brat for feeling unfulfilled at a well-paying job, and to know that it wasn’t a unique torment, was liberating. I was ecstatic to know that I wasn’t crazy. His lines:
“Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.”
— just as the rest of the book, spoke directly to me. The jobs that do serve meaningful purpose, such as a nurse or a teacher or a musician, are paid pittance. It felt like a therapist had uncovered my deeply concealed psychological scars and presented a comprehensive analysis.
Diagnosis was only the first important step. What about its cure? This is the only job I’ve held in my life. My pragmatic pessimism reminded me it’s unlikely I could start a new one and become good at it. So, how do I regain my sanity without having to solve the tumor of bullshit jobs for the entire world?
When my friend, Ghulam Memon, went through life altering events and reckoned with existential crisis, he sought a purpose in his life. Having struggled with depression himself, he quit his cozy, well-paying corporate job, enrolled in higher studies on Synthetic Biology in his 40s, and hoped to work on initiatives that address depression. He was a great motivation for anyone who thinks it’s too late to start anew. But what he had, and I didn’t, was determination and will-power. I didn’t see myself being able to pay my bills, let alone be successful at it, by choosing a career in Alzheimer’s research or pursuing a career in writing.
That’s how Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work popped on my radar.
As David Graeber called out, “We have become a civilization based on work — not even ‘productive work’ but work as an end and meaning in itself.” Work was defining us and I was feeling less than complete. Reading Stolzoff felt like a sequel to Graeber:
“The modern ideology of workism asks two distinct pursuits — money and inner fulfilment — to coalesce. These pursuits are not always aligned, and yet we increasingly look to our jobs to satisfy both”.
As he rightly pointed out, my mental torment and agony was because I was seeking fulfilment and enrichment from my work, the place where I spend half of my waking hours. That wasn’t a job which completely aligned with my interests; yet I was desperately trying to make it into my passion.
But pursuing my passion as a full-time job would have been no assurance for a fulfilled life, either. Instead, there was a higher likelihood of my becoming a starving artist. So, I learnt to reframe my situation — I have a job which pays well and in which I excel at fulfilling its expectations. The job allows me the money and leisure to travel and read. I have a good enough job, and I was ready to put it in its right place.
Since I started working on Oct 5, 2009, I haven’t taken a voluntary break from work that extended beyond a 2–3week vacation. So, after over a decade of the daily drill, dealing with its disillusionment and existential crisis, I decided to take a sabbatical. Left to fester, the crisis kills your joy and makes you a complacent zombie; I could already see traces of that within myself.
I’m going on a sabbatical for 3months for which I’m grateful to my employer. I want to slow down and not have to consider each moment as a precious crystal ball in which I’m a failure if I haven’t been productive enough. Travelling, reading, writing, visiting family are all in the cards. But this time, I play it by ear.
As the Dalai Lama says, “joy is in fact our birthright.” And I look inside, embrace the moment, relish the day and seek the evasive joys of life.
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