Self-Worth at Work

It’s important to note the only reason Cinderella had a dress worthy of going to the ball in (as far as Walt Disney is concerned) is that Cinderella’s birds and mice fixed it up for her while she was off working.

As part of the rallying cry to get the job done, Jaq laments: “Cinderelly not go to the ball. You’ll see. They fix her. Work, work, work. She’ll never get her dress done.”

Does Cinderella have a “pleaser” personality? Or is she letting her work define her? Maybe that’s what the allegorical nonsense is all about.

What’s not nonsense is what Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about the religion of work.

As I read Thompson’s essay, parts of it rang true as I consider my own attitudes toward the Work=Fulfilment Complex. This is almost me, for example:

Some workists, moreover, seem deeply fulfilled. These happy few tend to be intrinsically motivated; they don’t need to share daily evidence of their accomplishments. But maintaining the purity of internal motivations is harder in a world where social media and mass media are so adamant about externalizing all markers of success. There’s Forbes’ list of this, and Fortune’s list of that; and every Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn profile is conspicuously marked with the metrics of accomplishment—followers, friends, viewers, retweets—that inject all communication with the features of competition. It may be getting harder each year for purely motivated and sincerely happy workers to opt out of the tournament of labor swirling around them.

I’m not sure I worship my work. I mean, I’m happy where I am. Much happier than when I was a journalist and was proved incompetent. I do what I do and I enjoy it and I’m good at it. And because we need the extra money, when I’m done with the full-time job I go home to the part-time job, and am just about as happy doing that as I am doing the full-time job.

I have hobbies. I don’t think much about the full-time job when I’m home. And I look at my interactions on social media and while I may occasionally feel a twinge of professional jealousy when I see friends who have turned a hobby (creative writing) into a published endeavor, for the most part I enjoy the time I spend on social media.

I suppose I’m lucky in my contentedness. I could be of the Millennial generation, of which Thompson says:

There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror* labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

I’ll admit on the surface I appear to be beholden to sloth and laziness. That’s only partially true. I’m a great believer in the Peter Principle, which says workers tend to rise to their level of incompetency, then rise no more.

I did that as a journalist. Have not yet done that as a technical writer nor as an online English instructor. So I have little incentive to want to progress up those ladders, particularly as their combined length seems to be getting me where I’d like to be.

I’d like to reach my level of incompetence as a fiction writer. Need to get back to Doleful Creatures. Or is this a sign I’m already at my level of incompetence in this arena?

Still, it’s good to have these little reality checks. And even better to know that my identity and worth are not tied exclusively to what I produce. Because most of what I produce literally goes down the toilet.

*Never seen the show. Have not even heard of it before this.