Monthly Book Review: The Good Enough Job
The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff
It’s somehow already the end of July, which means it’s time for another book review, this time on The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff. (Have a suggestion for future reads? Next up will be a review of Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide by Christopher L. Caterine, but I’d love your suggestions for others. Message me at the link below —and don’t forget to also leave your anonymous questions for my Ask Me Anything series here! I’ve got one on deck to tackle next, but need many more! Anything even tangentially connected to DEI, leaving academia, and contemporary workplace cultures goes!)
The Good Enough Job book landed on my to-read list the moment I heard the title, as it resonated deeply with a yearning I had long before leaving academia: a job that was just a job —one that paid the bills and gave me some padding to live comfortably, but also let me leave work at work (even if virtually). As an example, I sometimes said that I just wanted to be a mail carrier: a job that let me perform a useful function each day that was over when the task was complete, paid decently enough, and came with good benefits. (I’d go on to learn that, like many jobs, my perception of this career didn’t at all match the reality; I never did pursue it!) Suffering in academia under mounting expectations and diminishing returns, a job that was only a job felt like it could be so freeing. Was it possible to actually have “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what we will?” What could I do with 8 whole hours of my own every day —and with entire weekends, too?!
Told in chapters structured by vignettes, Stolzoff’s book uses both narratives and secondary research to wrestle actively with the question of how “to define your relationship to your work without letting it define you.” In too many modern careers, in the professoriate and beyond, work becomes our identity, our community, our religion, our purpose, the source of our most important status, and so much more. In this way it also tends to swallow our capacity for those same things, growing work’s role in relation to the rest of our lives.
This is certainly true for many academics, but it is also true for many doing mission-driven work in not-for-profits, knowledge workers across many industries, and many who have climbed through the ranks in their corporate careers, perhaps especially in industries like tech which have capitalized on work-life integration in order to support long hours and devotion to the workplace. It makes asserting work-life balance (or a healthy integration, if that’s your thing —Stolzoff calls these buckets of people “segmentors” and “integrators”) even more challenging to achieve. It also makes the loss of one’s job not only economically dire but also personally, perhaps even existentially, catastrophic. And it encourages us to pour ALL of our selves —our time, energy, focus, commitments, and passions, into our work. As Stolzoff writes, “Our livelihoods have become our lives.” (Similarly, Esther Perel, in her work on relationships of all kinds, notes, “Too many people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home.”)
And who benefits most when we do those things? Our workplaces —and if they are for-profit entities, their bottom line. (If they are not-for-profit entities, there’s a good chance workers therein are exploited by vocational awe.) Who does not benefit? Our families, health, communities, and sense of ourselves as a full human being. In short, our (most-)whole lives.
Functionally, we are at greatest risk of such pitfalls when we succumb to enmeshment with our work —the conflation of our own independent self with that of another, such that boundaries become blurred or disappear altogether. When we’re enmeshed, it becomes hard to see, let alone manage, our relationship to work because we ARE our work. In clinical settings, it’s easy to diagnose this as a form of trauma: without boundaries we experience low self-worth, anxiety, dissociation, inappropriate guilt and responsibility, and an inability to care for ourselves in healthy ways. But when we bring those same behaviors to work, it’s often celebrated —because it’s the organization, and not the workers, who benefit from this system.
This is why, as Burnout (last month’s book review choice) also suggests, it’s critical to get clear about our actual, individual values. Sure, getting that promotion or publication can feel good —we all love a gold star. But it’s no accident that gold stars benefit those same systems that hand them out —you get rewarded by organizations that value what you do… for them. Even in mission-driven work, this can still grind us to dust and diminsh our impact, nevermind our quality of life. If we can move from an extrinsic to an intrinsic reward system, sure, we can do a good job for a role that we like, and feel good about doing it, but the core rubric is an internal one: does it meet our needs? We’re not asking if we are good enough; we ask instead if the work is good enough. And that’s a radical shift.
Granted, not everyone is in a position where we have the privilege to make big changes -a point Stolzoff is clear about in his book. But we all have the ability to change our expectations about what work can and cannot do for us, to remember that jobs are simply exchanges of labor for money. As Stolzoff writes, “I found that those with the healthiest relationships to work had one thing in common: they all had a strong sense of who they were when they weren’t working.” We can all, he argues, work hard and go home. The benefits of more leisure are clear, and they include, incidentally, positive impacts on our productivity and creativity. But that’s not why we should fight for them. We should fight for them because we, our selves, our families and communities and the other efforts worthy of our energy and devotion, deserve them.
Achieving this is no small task. It takes, critically, structural changes running the gamut from universal basic income to more human-centered workplace policies, and the commitment to cultures that support it, like those that actually value paid time off. But while we work together for those changes, we can also individually define “good enough” for ourselves, and begin to align our time, commitments, and boundaries to reflect those intrinsic values.
Deprioritizing work is prioritizing life. You aren’t what you do, important as that may be. And so what, and who, else do you value?
What are some ways you have found to move your own inner compass in that direction? I’d love to read and think together about it in the comments.
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As an American living in France, I think about this daily. Most, not all, French people have mastered the idea of 'working to live, not living to work'. Even though I am surrounded by this culture, and I have been working at unhooking my identity from my work for several years, I still find it extremely difficult. It is so engrained into the American way. I find myself creating business side projects in all of my hobbies, or trying to be semi productive on my vacation by setting personal goals like running or writing in a journal. In order to truly appreciate life, we have to learn how to just be. It is not always simple. Walks help.
I’m wondering how medical professionals deal with their professional vs personal identities. Med students, residents, fellows and other trainees are routinely and explicitly exploited but those ridiculous hours and demands are allegedly built in as a necessary skill in their training.