“WHAT do you do?” It’s simultaneously the most common and least elegant way to begin a conversation with a stranger. But it sure gets to the rub. Our work permeates our sense of self. Often that begins with our names: if you are an English Smith, a German Schmidt or an Italian Ferraro, you are just one of many with a brand identity determined by the employment your ancestors took.
How to win at work
Make your work work better for you – from dealing with pesky colleagues to taking the perfect break and doing less for more money
In the rich countries of the world, where switching jobs is often routine and opportunities for self-expression and development outside of work are greater than ever before, you might expect this identification with work to be diminishing. Not so. In a 2014 Gallup survey, , a figure that rises to 70 per cent for college graduates. In an increasingly automated world where the nature of work is in flux, that could present a problem. But it is also an opportunity: start to unpick the reasons why what we do means so much to us, and the effects it has on us, and we can begin to make work work better for all of us.
In doing so, it’s important to first realise how that work has meant very different things at different times. We have evidence for employer-employee relationships stretching back thousands of years (see “The past of the pay cheque“), but the concept of working in a distinct profession for a set number of hours each week is a relatively recent one. Even in medieval Europe, when the rise of differentiated professions led to the invention of surnames, our sense of belonging was more likely to be determined by our family, religion or the place we lived, says , who studies the history of work and leisure at the University of Iowa. It was only with the rise of paid employment in the 19th century that the notion of work as an end in itself – and a source of identity – begins to crop up, he says.
Advertisement
Wind forward to today and one thing is for sure: work does fill a lot of our lives. Although in rich countries the average amount of time people work each year has declined over the past half-century – from around 2100 hours in 1960 to below 1600 hours in 2005, according to a 2011 OECD report – factors such as the rise in paid leave account for a lot of that. For white-collar workers not on vacation, work dominates. In 2005, the proportion of high-skilled people in the UK working at least 50 hours a week hit 20 per cent. That has since gone down a bit, but an analysis published last year shows that such extreme working hours have been in the US, Canada and Europe since 1970.
Even when we aren’t at work, it can feel like we are. Smartphones mean white-collar workers are connected to their jobs at all times. “Modernist distinctions like home-office, work-leisure, public-private and even self-other no longer hold fast,” wrote New York University sociologist in his 2009 book Elsewhere, USA. Since then, the proliferation of mobile technologies means this always-on culture has spread enormously, he says.
It’s easy to see that as a bad thing for ourselves and our relationships with others. And sure, work can be long, stressful, boring and just plain hard. But it’s not all bad.
“The miserable effects of unemployment are pretty well documented by social scientists,” says David Frayne at Cardiff University, UK. That goes beyond simply the poverty that usually accompanies unemployment. In 2005, , then at the University of Manchester in the UK, and his colleagues looked at 485 previous studies of the relationship between job satisfaction and health. They showed that people who were happy in their jobs were more likely to be healthy, and in particular were less likely to experience compared with those less satisfied with their jobs. A review carried out for the UK government in 2006 showed that by the problems of not having a job.
Live to work?
That tallies with an idea first articulated by the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in the 1940s. While held in concentration camps during the second world war, he helped fellow prisoners endure the horror around them by getting them to focus on the lives they might later lead. In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that these future lives could hold meaning, and that one way of finding it was through work. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment,” he wrote.
Life after work: What we’ll do when robots can do anything
Prepare yourself for the future of work with our special report
In 2014, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and at West Virginia University set out to test this relationship between purpose and well-being. They used data on over 6000 people, captured in the late 1990s as part of a US longitudinal survey. They had been asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with three statements: “Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them”; “I live life one day at a time and don’t really think about the future”; “I sometimes feel as if I’ve done all there is to do in life”. Following up on the participants’ subsequent life histories, the researchers found a strong link between mortality and the way the volunteers had answered the questionnaire. , even when other psychological and health conditions were accounted for – and the trend held for people of all ages.
Why that should be remains unclear. Hill thinks having a direction, something work provides, may give people a reason to take better care of themselves and thus lead them to adopt healthier lifestyles. It may also help us cope with stress. “People who have a strong sense of meaning in life view stressors differently,” says Neal Krause, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “They are more likely to see them as challenges rather than unwanted and painful setbacks.” So although work may be a source of stress, it might also help us face whatever else life throws at us.
Work to live
Meaningful work seems to stave off cognitive decline, too. A study led by at INSERM, the French national health research institute, showed that for every extra year someone works before retiring, . This follows a previous study by researchers at King’s College London and elsewhere that found that people with dementia who had worked beyond age 65 for every extra year worked.
This is not just about staying cognitively active. Patricia Boyle, a neuropsychologist who works with Alzheimer’s patients at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, says a sense of purpose appears to make older people more resilient on many levels, perhaps because it improves immune function and decreases the risk of vascular diseases – though the biological mechanism is unknown.
All this presumes we can find meaningful employment that allows us to enjoy work’s positive psychological benefits. Brent Rosso at Montana State University has come up with a list of six attributes that make work meaningful, based on years of academic surveys. Almost any job can (see “Find your meaning“), although Rosso reckons that an individual’s culture and personality will influence which ones they find meaning in.
One important point is a sense of belonging: identifying with the people you work with has been shown to increase not only job satisfaction, but productivity, too. Alex Pentland of the Massachussets Institute of Technology, for example, has shown that the more cohesive and communicative a team is – the more they chat and gossip – the more they get done.
As the nature of work changes over the coming years, its effects on our psyches will no doubt continue to evolve. The key will be to change work so that we can continue to find meaning in it – because not all work is made equal. As the American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said: “It is not enough to be industrious. So are the ants.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “I work therefore I am”
