Life as work / at work
David Whyte’s consummate work, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America, offers a powerful perceptual shift for how we understand our lives at work, and in our work. It’s the sort of book that should be enjoyed like a fine scotch: slowly and with great attention. One quote in particular has been particularly resonant for me of late.
The point is that we eventually come to the realization that it is injurious to the soul to remove portions of our life from exploration, as if, at work, certain parts of experience suddenly lie out of bounds. We simply spend too much time and have too much psychic and emotional energy invested in the workplace for us to declare it a spiritual desert bereft of life-giving water.
We cannot merely set aside time for our full selves only on weekends or during vacations, he goes on to say,
“Whatever strategy we employ, or whoever we choose to speak with, we are eventually compelled to bring our work life into the realm of spiritual examination.”
Whyte addresses all of us in this powerful statement — and it rings true. However, the ways in which we may each grapple with it seem to me dependent upon our individual roles in the business world, as well as our gender and class.
To start with defining the essential framework of corporate America, let’s (crudely, but I believe accurately) divide the business world into three classes. At its base are the “worker bees,” that talented group without whom we would have no product. They are the editors and copyeditors, the programmers, manufacturers of all stripes. The ultimate 9 to 5'ers — they check in, complete the tasks at hand, and keep things rolling. Despite the skilled nature of their work, they are frequently — and unfortunately! — dismissed as automatons or “butts in chairs” as if they are not the building blocks at the foundation of every company. In the abstract, their jobs are discrete, finite, and ruled by the gods of efficiency and speed. The expectation that one’s whole personhood be checked at the door in the morning is pervasive, if unspoken. Not always, but often one’s ability to succeed is measured by the ability to completely mask any sign of a messy or dynamic life.
Then there are the middle managers, who are expected to worship those same gods of efficiency and speed while also bringing a human component of “leadership” to their work. As the bridge between the worker bees and the other class, the business mavens, they are presented with some of the most Sisyphean tasks: they must somehow protect both “the team” and “the company vision” even when the two are decidedly at odds with each other. Perennially over-worked, stuck in endless meetings, and frequently exhausted, their job demands more creativity, more humanity, more energy each day, while simultaneously presenting a deeply impersonal requirement to actively demonstrate one’s own value to the company.
And at the top of the hierarchy comes the category of the business mavens, in which I’m also including founders and entrepreneurs. How strange that the work/life split is so different for this group! However difficult the situation may be for the worker bees and the middle managers, there is generally the assumption that there is — or should be — time and space for family and personal development outside of the organization. But at the very top, life and work become one. Skills that are understood to be learned and cultivated in other roles are more likely to be attributed to personality and to a person’s true nature when one is an executive, or a founder of a company. We write hagiographies or damning critiques of the great business leaders of our memory (Steve Jobs comes to mind) and we conflate their worth as business leaders or visionaries with the health of their essential selves. Failure in one realm is equated to the failure in the other, which is the easiest way to send a person’s creativity running for the hills.
I see a magnification of this dissonance in discussions around men and women and their careers. We rarely ask men how they balance their work and personal lives, because our culture is primed to assume men seek their joy and purpose outside of the home. In doing so, of course, we ignore the (many) voices of those men who find their joy and life’s purpose outside of our culture’s narrow definition of success (patriarchy hurts men, too). I have noticed a trend encouraging men to bring more balance to their professional and emotional lives (especially in tech) because of a sense that it will lead to better work, and more productivity. Men are rewarded for grappling with David Whyte’s assertion to bring their “work life into the realm of spiritual examination.”
But with women, our dysfunctional relationship to work and emotional selfhood is on magnificent display. Centuries of ingrained beliefs that women are inherently more emotional, and more identified with personal, home-centered successes than professional ones are difficult to rub out. We vacillate between arguing that women can succeed as well as men in the corporate world as it is today (Lean in, ladies! Show them you’re no fragile flower!) and proposing that there are qualities inherent in woman’s nature that make them superior as leaders or managers (Women are better listeners, more compassionate!). Each woman must ask herself which philosophy she will adopt this year, this week, heck even this day, all depending upon the particular culture she must work within. Usually neither of them adequately match an individual’s own personality and strengths. As a woman at work, sometimes you will be rewarded for stifling anything resembling the fluid, receptive, or emotional aspects of life. Other times, you will be expected to bring all of the above, even if that isn’t in your nature at all.
In closing, I’d like to touch upon the illustration at the beginning of this article, an illustration by poet, artist and lover of psychedelic drugs, William Blake (1757–1827). In his writings, he created a visionary philosophy, featuring Urizen (pictured above), the emblem of logic and reason, and his complement, Los, the emblem of creativity and imagination. According to Blake, there cannot be the light of reason, without the fertile darkness and chaos of imagination. It is the same for Whyte: we cannot have the shining rationality of the business world without the mess of human emotion and creativity. I welcome a new way of working that allows for both — but I also caution that we as a culture be aware of how pre-existing biases may distort its implementation.
In the end, whatever stratum of business life with which we self-identify, there should be space for our selves, messy though they may be. From the worker bee who is allowed no self to intrude at the office, to the founder who must commit her whole self to a given enterprise, we are all being short-changed.
This article was written as part of INITIATE, a project sponsored by CoshX Labs to find new ways to explore business and entrepreneurship. You can follow us on Twitter, and visit our website to learn more about our efforts.
