Workism, attachment to outcome, and lack of peace

Our way we view work is a little warped, but it's changing.

Image: TED.com

In this TED talk, a hypothetical scenario is posed to a research group about a person whose job is made redundant by automation, despite having three years left on a paid contract. The question was asked “Would you keep working even if you were paid through the end of the contract, or decide to stop?”

Half of the participants in the research group heard the story of the person deciding to stop working, while the other half heard the story of the person continuing to work, despite their job being redundant.

The group who heard the story of the person continuing to work despite the redundancy of his job found him to be less competent, BUT warmer, more moral, a “good person,” and more virtuous.

The study was conducted by Azim Shariff who is a Psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, where he studies morality. He and his collaborators have recently been focusing on work with regard to morality, and in study after study, they have found that people attach more worth to effort, regardless of what that effort produces.

I have a massive problem with “Workism,” which is the belief that employment is not only necessary for economic production but is also the centerpiece of one's identity and life purpose. This is not inherently bad, but when it’s a culture, as Azim Shariff notes also in the TED talk, we all get forced to participate.

If you need to familiarize yourself with the concept, the term was coined in this article in The Atlantic - “Workism is Making Americans Miserable.”

The whole system functions in a way that we constantly feel the need to prove to others that we’re not only hard-working but harder working. And to what end?

Many of you know that I’ve long held an issue with the way we do “work” in America. I find “the grind” and “the climb” to be byproducts of this warped idea of Workism, and those things do not fit all trajectories.

Someone who knows their life path might be just fine fitting into that paradigm, but others might assemble 40 years of “living” before they can carve out an understanding of who they are and what they’re doing here.

When I worked in the service industry, I almost tattooed “I am not my job” on my arm, because my family harshly emphasized how insignificant the work I was doing was. They called it “menial.” I wasn’t doing it because that was who I was.

I did the work primarily for a paycheck, and I had no desire to “climb the ladder.” There were avenues to management and upper management I could have chosen to pursue if I wanted, but they didn’t pay more money, and they were not congruent with my ultimate desires.

The real byproduct and payoff of that work was just the amount of time I spent in it.

I told someone last week when noting some things I noticed about someone’s behavior “When you work in the service industry for as long as I did, you’ve seen everything. It’s not just the guests. You work with all kinds of people with all kinds of problems. Drug addiction. Pathological liars. You see it all.”

The experience in every now moment was what it was truly about. The work didn’t have the illusion of a “ladder” to climb to an imaginary place where peace would eventually exist, and all life would be magically good.

In my piece “If you really knew me”, I wrote that I’m not really ambitious. My favorite times of the day are waking up, eating, and running. I enjoy the movement of my body and the pounding of my feet against the earth.

People say they understand this concept of “nowhere to go,” but many of them are just saying words, like when you sing a song in another language. The words flow effortlessly from your tongue but you’re not really grasping what it means.

Can you imagine someone whose native tongue is one of the beautiful romance languages, innocently singing the song “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam?

“At home drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top
Lemon yellow sun
Arms raised in a V
And the dead lay in pools of maroon below” 🪓🩸

That’s how it is when many people say the words “there’s nowhere to go” or “the point of life isn’t your work.” They say the words but the meaning is not present.

What is the meaning?

This is it.

Right now. Right here.

If you’re chasing something, when you finally get “there” to the place where all of the people “are” who have been doing “whatever” for “however long,” you will feel the exact same as you feel “here.”

There’s a neediness to be “elsewhere” in Western culture. It’s not now- it’s “when I get there.”

There is no there. Not when you make more money. Not when you have more “whatever.” The there is not coming. It’s here.

I believe we use work as an identity piece because it complements the idea that we’re getting “there,” wherever “there” is. The harder we work, the more we create the illusion that there is coming faster, but there is no “there.”

We even receive incentives and rewards for getting “there,” falsely building bricks on the road to “there,” and yet…. It’s here.

“When I/Then I…”

…never works only 100% of the time.

Now that’s not to say that we should all be sitting on our asses.

It is noble to work. Both are true! It’s even noble to work hard, but not for the sake of one-upmanship.

The Bhagavad Gita explains a concept called Karma Yoga, which is doing our duty without attachment.

Here in the West, we often attach.

“I write this piece on Substack to get ‘x’”

Why not just write it because your duty is writing? You write because that’s what you’re called to do. You write because you received the ability to arrange words in a way that others cannot. You write because that’s your place in the order.

When I write, I write now and then I release it into the world. My duty is complete. The outcome doesn’t matter. The duty was writing. Anything following is not for me to attach to.

For example, I had an interview this weekend about a story I wrote in a book called Gender Crap. Earlier in the week, Mac Bogert (the main author of the book and organizer of the compilation) read some of my piece as a story teaser for the interview. I was shocked.

“I wrote that!? Wow! That’s good!”

I was in awe about it because I wrote the piece and I never thought of it again. It was just out in the world, existing for someone in whatever capacity. Whatever comes of it is not for me to decide. I did my duty, which was the writing.

We can’t be inactive and not “do.” Humans are going to be doing and that’s not escapable. It’s the attachment that causes our lack of peace. It’s also the “climbing” and the desire for more reward for more work, as reinforced by this bigger system that also falsely folds in our morality.

For me, Workism and “working yet harder than the next person” wouldn’t make my craft better. If anything, it would rob me of my ability to do it. Every piece of writing that I put into the world is the byproduct of deep reflection. That can only occur in inaction, not in working for the sake of working.

Energetically, complete inaction doesn’t work either, because our system is cause and effect.

So, for example, I may say my ideal life is sitting by the river watching the water, but that’s not the whole truth. I live in a building that’s maintained by a company. I use electricity that’s maintained by a service provider. I live on the internet which is maintained also by humans working for a service provider. I eat food that is grown and harvested by farmers. And, because I don’t have a kitchen (fun facts about Andee,) is also cooked by other humans. (This is why my food is more expensive unless I were to just start eating garbanzo beans from a can.)

So, all of these things are dependent on others. If I didn’t do any duties, I would be someone who takes and doesn’t give. That doesn’t work in the order of things.

This is why work is, in fact, important. It’s important for us to do our duties.

And, we are not more moral because we grind more, or do things that are redundant.

We are not more moral because we do work we hate.

We are not more moral because our effort is harder.

We are not better people because we dump more into the system.

We are going to continue to do work, AND the nature of our work is changing. There will be massive redundancies that happen to what we think of as “work” as technology progresses via the Law of Accelerating Returns. (Here’s an article from 2015 about it. This is not new stuff. This conversation has been being had for a while now.)

It’s just a matter of if we decide to become human-centered through this process and allow a little of this “work for the sake of it” to die off.

We can allow people to do their duties without a grind. Work does not create morality, and truly, there’s nowhere to go.

We’re just here.