This note is not based on a personal story or conversation. Rather, it’s a reflection and recap of many conversations regarding the nature of work.

The Goal: Taking Work from Something We Dread, to Something We (Partially) Enjoy

Until humanity reaches a post-scarcity economy, or we all voluntarily lock ourselves inside the Matrix, all of us will have to work. We will always need food and shelter, and if those things are scarce, we will have to provide some kind of value to other people in exchange for food and shelter.

So we all have to work. The problem is, most people feel a sense of dread or stress when contemplating the idea of work. And given that most of us will spend at least a third of our lives working, I think it’s worthwhile to look for a way to feel differently about something that we have to do. I certainly do not want to spend a third of my life feeling low-level, persistent stress or dread if I can possibly avoid it.

As my own attitudes towards work have begun to change, I’ve realized that the shift is a product of three forces:

1)      Awareness of the underlying emotional dynamics: Stress

2)      Awareness of the underlying emotional dynamics: Joy

3)      Adoption of mindsets that help me to feel differently

This piece will mostly focus on #1. The next two weeks will cover #2 and #3.

Stress: The Dominant Emotion

Stress is the dominant emotion that most people feel when the topic of work comes up. It often manifests as avoidance—we want to move away from the source of stress.

This workplace stress can take many forms. Here are some I’ve heard:

1)      A toxic environment

Essentially, this is the pain associated with emotional dysregulation. A work environment with “toxic” people is an environment where people are constantly going into fight-or-flight states or vacillating between fear and anger. A law firm where the partners scream at associates would feel like this—hard to imagine that people can get their best work done when their nervous system is constantly geared for survival.

I don’t think there is much of an antidote to this type of environment other than leaving. Life is too short to voluntarily spend so much time with cancerous people. I believe it’s possible to do great work in spaces where the primary emotional motivator is not humiliation or fear.

2)      Time commitment

People sometimes feel dread or resentment at devoting so much time to work—time that could be allocated to family, leisure, personal health, or other pursuits.

I don’t have an opinion on how a person should rank-order their priorities, nor do I have an opinion on how much time a person should spend working. I only offer that it’s possible to feel better about investing time in work than we currently do, either by working on things that are more inherently fun or interesting to us, or by connecting our work to things that are worth sacrificing leisure or some amount of family/health time.

3)      Fear of making a mistake / fear of failure

This is the big one for a lot of the “insecure overachiever” types.

I have been lucky in that I haven’t experienced what I consider a truly toxic work environment (and I worked at McKinsey and Skadden Arps). I’m also grateful that I’ve mostly chosen to work in fields that have some degree of inherent interest to me.

But when I feel dread or avoidance about work, it’s mostly connected to this. Even writing these notes, which I take a great deal of pride in, produces feelings of avoidance in me because I really don’t want to write something bad. A current example: I’m procrastinating about making the pre-recorded lectures for my introductory finance class. Why? I love talking about finance. I love being on camera. But I can’t stand the idea of making a bad video, so I’d rather dither on YouTube for the entire afternoon than do something where the inherent activity is actually something I enjoy!

(The paradox—after I produce the article or the video, I usually quite like it. It’s the fear of doing a bad job itself that stops me.)

4)      Work is a bad deal

This is anger.

This is another one that I hear a lot and have felt at times. This is resentment about the idea that what you are being asked to give up or contribute is out of balance with what you are getting in return. One of my early emotions & finance conversations with a startup software engineer drove this home for me—he said that getting a meager salary and the ethereal promise of stock options, in exchange for 60+ hour weeks and the emotional tension associated with a narcissistic and mercurial CEO, was “just not a good enough deal.” This is the same feeling we have when we feel we are being taken advantage of.

If you are an employer, your first reaction may be “well, my employees don’t deserve more than what I already give them”—your own version of anger or being taken advantage of. I don’t get into whether one source of anger is more valid than the other. My baseline attitude is that whatever emotion a person is feeling, they are justified in feeling it. Only after accepting whatever the emotional state is, can we move towards processing, solutions, and release.

For now, I simply point out that anger, frustration, and resentment about not getting a “fair deal” is something that a lot of people feel with regards to work.

There is also a type of fear associated with not getting enough material reward in exchange for one’s work. It’s the idea that “if I stay on the trajectory I’m on, I still won’t be safe and secure.” That’s also stressful—the fear may resonate with you more than the anger.

5)      Work is boring or draining

Nobody likes to do stuff that is boring.

If work is boring, dull, or tedious, it makes sense that people will avoid it. For me, the boredom usually shows up in administrative tasks, e.g., “get FactSet installed on my laptop,” “print QR code for campus parking,” or “set up faculty e-mail on my phone.” For other people, the core work itself might be monotonous in some other way, like data entry or cold calling people to sell car insurance or whatever.

Tedium can be draining, but work can be draining in other ways as well—especially when we have to give a lot physically or emotionally. A physically demanding job where our body is in pain at the end of the day is draining. A chaotic or emotionally toxic workplace can also be draining, as can work of a personal nature like social services or therapy. People who work in those fields often feel gratification in directly helping others, but the negativity and suffering in the lives of the people being helped also takes a toll on the practitioner.

If work was always fun, we wouldn’t call it work, we would call it play. Still, there are degrees of drain and tedium we are willing to tolerate in exchange for getting other things we want—such as money or gratification. For now, I simply point out that boredom/drain are reasons why people may feel stressed about the idea of working.

Moving Towards Joy

At the end of the day, work is work, and it’s not always going to be fun. I do think that most of us can move towards making work more fun than it currently is, and that starts by taking an inventory of the things we don’t like about work. Once we do that, we can start to take an inventory of the things we do like about our work.

After we do the inventory, we can fix the things that can be fixed (escaping a toxic environment) and learn to accept the things that can’t (administrative tasks). Paired with a better mindset about why we work in the first place, I think we can get to a place where we don’t feel low-level stress during 1/3^rd of our waking hours.

We’ll continue that journey over the next two weeks.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Inquiry

What connection do the words “work” and “stress” hold for me? Do I look forward to working, or do I view it with a sense of dread or avoidance, however mild?

2)      Describing and Naming

Can I name or verbalize the stress I feel associated with work? Did anything in the note strongly resonate with me, or is my stress associated with something else?

Say it out loud or write it down.

How does it feel to name it?

3)      Brainstorming

If I wanted to change my situation to feel less stress, what would I change? What might a less stressful work environment look like?

A more painful question: What do I already know that I need to do, that I’m not doing?

Listen for the resistance, the things you don’t want to do! This is the pain of personal growth. If it was easy, everyone would do it. We didn’t go to the moon because it was easy, but because it was hard!