Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of a Work-Dominated World
TLDR. My personal reflections and ongoing research about agency in a work-dominated world.
Spoiler alert: You are more than your job.
We talk so much about “connecting the dots,” but most of the time, we’re only talking about external things like work-related information, gossiping about who said what to whom and when, or fantasizing about solving the puzzle for our favorite true crime shows.
But connecting the dots for our own stories is oftentimes overlooked. If you’ve had the privilege of going to therapy, then maybe you are familiar with the complicated process of understanding the “why” and the “when” to relate it to the “who” and the “what.” Well, I’ve had the privilege of going to therapy, the privilege of undergrad studies in clinical psychology, and the privilege of choosing a graduate program in strategic design. All of these experiences intersected and contributed to the person I am today, a person who likes making sense of the world and connecting dots.
Please don’t be fooled by the fancy words here, it’s not an easy task, and I get it wrong all the time. But I’ve learned to enjoy sitting with problems and thinking of them in both playful and painful ways. Sometimes I come out of the ambiguity with solutions or action items, and sometimes with even more questions, but always with more clarity and understanding, which in itself is an emancipatory process that informs my future decisions.
I’m here to share four dots I recently had the chance to connect, which somehow led me on this fascinating journey of trying to make sense of this work-dominated world. I don’t know where this will lead me yet, but I know I’ll have plenty to share, so consider this as an introduction to my exploration of the field of “work.”
Dots one and two: My parents shaped the way I think about work
My dad was fired from his job when I was about 11 years old. Around that time, he and my mom also got divorced. So many things were happening at the same time for all of us, but I remember seeing my dad going through very dark moments while unemployed. He was in his 40s, which was still young for retirement, but he had absolutely no idea of what to do next. Because of his ego, he made very bad decisions that led him to mismanage his money and lose all of his work connections.
Losing his job triggered a huge identity crisis, and I remember thinking to myself that the lesson I had to learn from that was that life is so much more than the job you have or the work that you do. No matter how good you are at it, no matter how satisfying, life is so much bigger than a job. And there are so many other ways and spaces where you can find meaning, where you can feel seen, appreciated and held.
My dad never liked studying. He barely finished high school and dropped out of college to work in sales. He didn’t like the structure of academic institutions, but he was very hard working and found his “mojo” as a salesman. So he built his whole identity and social life around that specific area of his life: his job. He was the classic family man that worked long hours, who was able to afford things his parents weren’t able to afford when he was a kid, who his childhood friends looked up to when he went back to his childhood home all suited up, and the one everyone could rely on financially.
No matter how good you are at it, no matter how satisfying, life is so much bigger than a job. And there are so many other ways and spaces where you can find meaning, where you can feel seen, appreciated and held.
My mom also didn’t go to college. Actually, my grandfather didn’t even allow her to work. She could “help” her brothers if she wanted, but she wasn’t allowed to pursue a profession. Fortunately, she did encourage my sister and me to get an education. My sister studied engineering, and I did my undergrad in psychology. But I can’t even tell how many times we’ve tried to explain to her what we do in our jobs. I remember one time I told her I wanted to apply for a Learning & Development position, and she asked me to explain to her what was it about, so I explained that I would do some sort of gap analysis to propose training programs, and she replied: “Oh, is that a job?” I remember my first reaction. “Oh my god, she doesn’t understand. Why do I even try?” But then I also remember taking a second and listening to my own words, “I will analyze gaps…” and thinking “What does that even mean? What is the problem with me? Why am I not making the effort to simplify my language?”
The job that pays for that delicious meal I’m able to enjoy with my mom is not relevant for me to develop a meaningful relationship with her. If we end up just talking about the groceries we got at the supermarket instead of about all those little details that — according to me —make my job interesting, then that’s okay. That’s more than okay. Connection is what matters.
I had the privilege of having an academic degree, and yes, sometimes nuances are lost when we oversimplify language, but what is more important? Being intelligent and sophisticated or being empathetic and connecting with another human being? I remember realizing at some point that the simple truth is that it really doesn’t matter. It’s just a job.
Connection is what matters.
Dots two and three: It’s just a job, but we live in a work-dominated world
I’m currently pursuing a master’s degree in design (MS SDM), and one of the courses I’m taking is Design Research. At the beginning of the semester, my research partner and I had to come up with a topic to do research for about 15 weeks, so we brainstormed many ideas, and there was one that somehow piqued our interest: hobbies you suck at.
It all started with a playful idea. I saw an Instagram story of a person I know — who has given me more than one great piece of advice — where she basically said that we were allowed to choose and enjoy hobbies just for the sake of enjoyment, without necessarily having to be good at them. I flirted with the idea, but the research evolved into leisure theories and into free time and its inevitable relation to work, which took us into exploring notions of work and capitalism, and finally transformed into a formal research topic focused on how to reclaim our human agency through leisure.
We’re still in the middle of the research process, but we’ve already learned so much. The information we are getting from conducting interviews is interesting and stimulating, and we’ve discussed an array of topics, from very simple ones like hobbies and pastimes to very complex and existential ones like work and capitalism.
In a work-dominated world, everything seems to have been intentionally designed to perpetuate the hegemonic capitalist system. We worship productivity and despise idleness, we avoid boredom, and too much enjoyment is seen as irresponsible. We always need to plan for the future, to save for later, or in other words, to accumulate. We need to work first and enjoy later, and a job well done is not only done — but performed — so that public rewards can be justified. In a work-dominated world, you have to love your job, you have to find it fulfilling, you have to attach it to your identity; because if you don’t, then how do you explain the amount of hours and emotional energy you dedicate to it? How do you explain saying “I can’t go, I have to work” to your friends, to your parents, to your kids, to your partner? How do you justify to yourself not being present or mindful on your free time because work leaves you so exhausted?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to rant about work. Yes, work can be satisfying, fulfilling, purposeful, or even fun! And sure, you deserve it. But don’t we all?
It’s great to have a “cool job,” but no one ever loves everything about their job. And those things that you don’t like about working are probably the same ones I don’t like, and the same ones that the people that pick up your trash everyday also don’t like. The problem is not that some of us have the luxury of liking our jobs, the problem is that the neoliberal narrative wants us to forget the things we dislike, it wants us to ignore the exploitative aspects — the exploitative nature of work under capitalism — and portray work as a path to self-actualization, luring us into attaching our identity to work and romanticizing it to justify the sacrifices we make. On top of that, meritocracy is added to the rhetoric, as if people in low-income jobs deserved having the “uncool jobs” that no one else wants.
In a work-dominated world, you have to love your job, you have to find it fulfilling, you have to attach it to your identity; because if you don’t, then how do you explain the amount of hours and emotional energy you dedicate to it?
Dots three and four: Agency in a work-dominated world
I grew up in a conservative family where there was a lot of restriction. I was raised to respect the authority, to be obedient and submissive, but to do so in an agreeable way so that we could avoid conflict and just be and look like a happy family. It had to look like I was allowed to be free and independent, but that it was my personal choice to think and act exactly as the expectation they had from me.
As a natural result, I’ve always avoided conflict, and for a very long time I got used to silently disagree. The problem with silent disagreements is that most of the time you either forget about it, or end up convincing yourself that the smarter thing is to “pick your battles” and just agree.
When my research partner and I were in the brainstorming phase of the research, I insisted so much on using the word agency. It really mattered to me because I was interested in exploring notions of power and identity.
Last week in therapy, I talked about how I’ve been slowly learning in the past few years that conflict is important for change to happen, and of course, she pointed out the word agency and connected that dot for me. I realized that I’ve been constantly looking for ways of reclaiming my own agency, and I’ve been able to do that through my relationships, through art and education; and through living in different places, cities and countries. And though work allowed me to have financial freedom, I only saw it as the means — as the enabler — not as the end in itself.
In a work-dominated world, reclaiming our agency is relevant for us not only as individuals but also as a society. If we change the way we approach work, if we reclaim our identities and fight the commodification of our time and personal qualities, if we find a way to detach the self from the values that capitalism has assigned to human potential, we may be able to imagine a better way to live and work.
No, we are not going to “abolish” work, we are not going to change capitalism tomorrow, and we are not going to take down systems that have existed for thousands of years, at least not with this one design research class. But we can’t fall into inertia, we can’t just accept that things are the way they are because “that’s how it works,” or because “that’s how we’ve always done it.” We need to do better, and we need to create psychological and emotional conflict to produce change. We need to dream wild of alternate ways of approaching work, of ways of exercising our agency to design a human-centered life where work is just a part of it. A world that values care and enjoyment instead of wealth and consumption.
There are so many possibilities for design interventions. There are opportunities around community building, physical spaces, and even work itself! But no, I’m not talking about “re-imagining capitalism” or thinking of “win-win” strategies. It’s never a win-win strategy because power is not equally distributed under capitalism. Real change demands institutions and organizations — which are made up of real human beings — to acknowledge that work is done by other human beings. It demands for employers to “lose” a little by slowing down the “machine,” because the ugly truth is that it’s not a machine what’s behind the never-ending wheel. It’s human labor.
In a work-dominated world, reclaiming our agency is relevant not only for us as individuals but also as a society. If we change the way we approach work, if we reclaim our identities and fight the commodification of our time and personal qualities, if we find a way to detach the self from the values that capitalism has assigned to human potential, we may be able to imagine a better way to live and work.
Future dots
When we first presented our research topic to our Design Research professor, she said “I don’t know where this is going, but in any case, it probably works for a Medium article.”
Well, I still don’t know where this ongoing research will take us, but I do have a lot to share about work and identity. I aim to balance with writing academic articles and personal essays around these topics. Hopefully, I’ll inspire you to connect your own dots, and think about your own agency and beliefs around work. And if you’d like to talk about this topic, please reach out, and let’s have a chat!
Some of the books I’m currently reading and highly recommend.
- Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
- Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism by Amelia Horgan
- The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks
- Work: The Last 1000 Years by Andrea Komlosy
- Time for Things: Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption by Dr. Stephen D. Rosenberg
- Capitalism and Leisure Theory by Chris Rojek
- Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
- Towards a New Manifesto by Adorno and Horkheimer
- The New Spirit of Capitalism by Boltansky and Chiapello
- Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
- Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work by Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cea
- Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey
- Productivity is for Robots by Corey McComb
