Work and workism
Work has always served as the great American barometer of worth and identity. Our occupation is the number one socially approved means of justifying our existence, and not just the type of occupation but our performance there. When we talk about success or failure in life, it’s assumed that we’re talking about work, which means that a job is never just a job, but an identity. It is where we locate our enoughness and, as such, the spring from which our strictest pieties flow.
May Day is a good time for some reflections on work, which brings us to the above passage from a book called Seculosity by David Zahl. The book posits that although religious affiliation is on a steep decline in America (see graph below), the religious impulse hasn’t disappeared. All of us, religious or nonreligious, have a common desire for meaning, purpose, validation, belonging, rightness. If we’re not finding that at church, there’s a good chance we’re finding it elsewhere: in our politics, in our families, and often in our work.
Zahl isn’t the only person who’s noticed this phenomenon. Writing for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson wrote about the gospel of workism, which he defined as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
Like so many aspects of our society, our attachment to workism has been exposed and amplified during the coronavirus pandemic. In its most twisted form, this ideology tells us that we must work at any cost, even if that cost involves human death and suffering. When conservative pundit Glenn Beck — recording from the comforts of home, I should note — calls on Americans to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy, that’s workism at its deadly essence. “I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working,” Beck said. “Even if we all get sick, I’d rather die than kill the country.” When work is your religion, a world without commerce is worse than death.
It’s worth thinking about how we reached this point, where work is so central to our self-worth that we’re willing to die for it. (Or, more accurately, tell other people to die for it.) Drill down in the American psyche, and eventually you’ll hit a bedrock belief that guides both our public policy and our individual attitudes toward work. This is the belief that a person’s worth in society is directly related to his or her ability to generate material value. As a nation, we cannot stomach the idea that someone, somewhere is receiving something without working for it. Even during a pandemic, when there’s a clear public health benefit to keeping people at home, we feel this psychotic impulse to get back to work, as if work is our natural state and any interruption is a betrayal of our national ethos. Instead of giving people the support they need to ride out the virus in isolation, our leaders are looking for ways to incentivize a return to work as quickly as possible, even if it results in preventable deaths.
Before going any further, I feel obligated to say: Work is not bad! Many people are risking their lives to perform essential labor right now, stocking shelves and caring for COVID patients and making the things we need to survive. In a just society, we’d reward these people much more richly than we do. By any historical definition of work, the rest of us — those of us fortunate to have non-essential jobs that can be done from home — are ridiculously lucky. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hard work; to the contrary, hard work is essential to a flourishing society. Like any other misguided religion, workism starts with something good and twists it into something abusive or manipulative.
Toxic religion takes sincere faith and exploits it for someone else’s cynical gain. In the same way, workism exploits our intrinsic desires for purpose and meaning to create a type of bondage. Cults operate on a kind of self-entrenching logic: The thing you see as a path to freedom is actually pulling you deeper into the trap. So too with workism. We convince ourselves that if we just work a little harder, become a little more productive, achieve a certain level of status or recognition, then we’ll feel satisfied — even though we never do. Take a look around, and ask yourself who benefits from our culture of endless work. It’s rarely the people shouldering the heaviest burden.
So what would constitute a healthy relationship with work? No matter how you answer that question, it’s important to acknowledge that for many people, work is not a matter of lifestyle preference. Our markets are not equipped to value human happiness over profit, or to separate the work we do from its material worth. That’s why, today, we have people choosing between going back to work or losing access to basic necessities. For those in more privileged positions, I’d argue that a healthy view of work encompasses not only the work we do ourselves, but the work we ask others to do for us. It could affect what we buy, where we buy it, how much we pay, how we value certain types of labor. It could lead us to be more charitable toward people who can’t work, and to see our own work from a different perspective: not as the ultimate measure of our identity, but as a means of fulfillment, provision, or service. Workism says you’ve never done enough; a healthy understanding of work lets you know when to stop.