Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: Our unhealthy relationship with work and how I think we got to this point.
I’ve noticed a problem in… well, I was going to say mostly in the adults in my life, but I’ve seen this in my peer groups and friends as well. The problem centers around work. Work-life balance, managing expectations, etc. What I’ve noticed is that people, myself included, have an unhealthy, dare I say toxic, relationship with work. For some people, this presents as overworking yourself and not knowing when to say no or what is too much, and for others, it presents as being so overwhelmed that you don’t do any work at all. Everyone reacts to this differently, but I think it all stems from the same basic issue, which is our society’s perception of work itself.
Let’s do a history review for some background information. Picture this: you’re a man in your 20s living in New England around 1800. You have a wife, several children. You’re trying to be a farmer, but you’re poor af because farming is hard and your kids are too young to be particularly useful. You’ve heard talk of textile factories opening in a nearby city, with machines powered by coal and jobs for every man, woman, and child. You think about your finances – yikes, looks like someone’s parent or grandparent was an indentured servant and hasn’t made any money since. It’s time to move to the city.
The Industrial Revolution is taught in several history classes throughout a student’s schooling years, and it’s portrayed as this period of time where technology and inventions proliferated all over the world (i.e. Europe and the USA) and triggered a chain reaction where the US turned into a world economic power. It solidified the South as the agricultural producer of raw materials, powered by the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, and the North as the high-class manufacturer of finished goods, also powered by the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans. The Industrial Revolution is seen as such a powerful catalyst for this sudden urbanization and economic growth of the country that the words “developed nation” and “industrialized nation” are synonyms. Of course, the only way the wealthy white people in America knew how to make money was by heavily exploiting other people, and factories gave them a nice new way to exploit all the poor people around them. And oh boy, were they exploited. Working conditions for the common laborer were really horrendous, and it’s difficult to imagine today because of just how horrendous it was. 16 hour work days of hard, repetitive, physical labor and no breaks for extremely little pay. As a point of comparison, one source reported that, in Britain, men were paid 10 shillings per week, women 5, and children 1. A shilling in the year 1800 would be somewhere around 8 USD today, so if you had a man, woman, and child all working for the family at once, you’d end up with around $128 at the end of a week for a combined 240 hours of work, estimating a 5-day work week.
Now, if we’re using those numbers as a baseline, we can say that children were the most exploited of them all. Because adults were paid so little, children were needed in the factory to help support, even a little. Another way of saying this is that factories paid adults very little so that the children had to work at those same factories, so the factories got extra labor at an extremely reduced cost, and the laborers had no way out. Again, easily exploited.
Obviously, I’m no historian, but my theory is that the Industrial Revolution was so effective at being a revolution because of how easily the factory model made it to receive immense amounts of labor at very little cost. High production with few expenses… you get the idea.
I’m not bringing this up to say “ohh, it’s a shame those people were treated so poorly, but we couldn’t have created such a great economy if we didn’t treat them so badly, so we had to do it that way!” I’m trying to say that we should reexamine the way wealth works in this country, because if the only way to be deemed successful is to have immense amounts of wealth, and the only way to amass that much wealth is to make decisions that benefit you at the expense of all the people doing the actual work, then maybe we need to stop deeming those people successful.
I know this has been a lot of the Industrial Revolution, but I think history is important to understanding how we got here and where we go from here. That said, one of the major ways that the Industrial Revolution impacted our mental relationship with work is that factory labor changed work from task-based to time-based. Before this rapid urbanization and migration to cities, work was solely based on the tasks you needed to complete. You needed to plow the field, so you did. You needed to milk the cows, so you did. You needed to make dinner for the people in the inn, so you did. But at factories, tasks didn’t just end once you did them. The repetitive nature of mass production means that you’re never finished. So what happened is this switch to time-based work, and so came the 40-hour work week we all know so well. You go to work, you clock in, you do your repetitive actions until your hours are done, and then you clock out. When we say how much we work, we say, “I worked 16 hours this weekend” instead of “I did this work and these tasks.” To me, this devalues the labor we put in. If all work is labelled by time, then none of it is recognized or valued for the work itself. If two people both said they worked 8 hours yesterday, it sounds the same, but if one spent those 8 hours putting in bushes and installing a fountain and the other spent it referencing spreadsheets and doing payroll, those are very, very different tasks. Not to say one is more valuable or more worthy of recognition than the other, but they are different jobs, and evaluating them both as “You worked 8 hours, here’s your 8 hour paycheck” feels inadequate.
So this leads in to what I feel is a central piece of our unhealthy relationship with work. The numbers, the hours and the dollars, tell us one thing about our worth and the value of the job itself. The more the job pays, the more value the job has, the more bs you should be able to put up with because you’re being compensated. On the other hand, the messages we most often get from bosses or supervisors are still very task-oriented. We’re given an assortment of tasks to do and we’re told to get them done in our allotted time. The worker and the employer theoretically agree on how many tasks can be completed in the allotted time, but this almost never works out because a time-based value system does not align with task-based work. Everybody completes tasks at a different rate and in different ways. Additionally, most workplaces, from schools to delivery companies to modern factories, are focused on speed. Cram in as much work in as little time as possible. Do a huge number of tasks in your allotted time. And what happens is that either you have people working to exhaustion on those tasks outside of hours because those people want to do the task until it’s finished, or you have people who don’t work outside of hours and tasks pile up and become overwhelming. In a school environment, you either rush through content without fully grasping any of it, have extra class or review sessions outside of normal school hours, or you don’t finish the content for the year. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.
So what happens to the worker, to the laborer, under this kind of system? Well, there’s a huge variety of things. The term “workaholic” comes to mind – people who feel compelled to work long hours and complete things, even if it’s unpleasant. People feel guilty for taking or even considering taking sick and vacation days. On the rare days they do take off, they worry about the work that will await them when they return. I remember planning for the day of a relative’s funeral and attending a half-day of school that day so that I wouldn’t miss the classes I deemed most important – AKA, the classes that had the most work and took up the most time. The classes I was most afraid to fall behind in. Even after I left school that day, worry crept in about the classes that I did have to miss, wondering how I would make up work.
Sometimes, we come to expect having a set number of tasks to complete, but some tasks are never over or don’t have a clearly marked end point. We struggle to decide when is enough. When have we studied for this test enough? When have we edited this document enough? When does this code run well enough? When is this art piece finished? Of course, some things of this nature don’t need to have an end. They can be a process of constant refinement. But the way we conceptualize work is that it either has an end dictated by time or it is a task with a set end point. So when presented with things that require labor but are not so clearly defined as work, we feel compelled to work perpetually and struggle to decide when enough is enough. It’s hard to think of a good example… maybe this. My mom is a database programmer, and she’s constantly doing maintenance and fixing problems and answering questions and changing things. Some of these things, like “fix this bug” and “answer this question” are tasks that can be completed. Some of them, though, are essentially never-ending, so it can be hard to decide when something’s finished.
Honestly, coming from the perspective of a student, it’s hard for me to truly understand why some other people feel guilty for taking days off. I can imagine, certainly, but I do not know. For me, I fear taking days off because I fear getting behind and losing the part of my identity that is “good at school.” Realistically, that wouldn’t happen if I missed one or two days, but the fear is there and it is loud. I imagine it’s different at every workplace and in every position, but perhaps some people fear burdening others with work they missed. If you work on a team and you miss a day, perhaps you fear giving extra work to other people when you know they’re in the same boat as you are. Perhaps you fear losing your job entirely, if your workplace is particularly cruel. In my state, there’s no law requiring employers to provide sick time or vacation time, so it is entirely plausible, depending on your employer, that you could lose your job for missing even one day.
There is, of course, a different, but perhaps also unhealthy, relationship with work. These are the people who are confident and assertive enough to claim their sick days and vacation days, but because of a toxic work environment or where coworkers and supervisors aren’t on that same page, it becomes a breeding ground for resentment and bitterness to build up and create a greater divide between the laborer and the employer. A person may take a vacation day, provided by the employer, which is completely in line with the actual rules, but coworkers who are also overburdened may gossip and harbor resentment towards the person. A supervisor may make a snide comment about the person’s work ethic or question their commitment to the job. The person may feel pressure to not take any more time off, or they may feel equal amounts of resentment back for the treatment they perceive, rightly, in my opinion, to be unjust. Everyone ends up unhappy.
When people feel pressure like this to overwork themselves, or they feel resentful of their job, it impacts other parts of their lives as well. We expect people, especially women, but men also, to do everything. Work 40+ hours a week, take care of children, take care of a home. Put food on the table financially and physically. Maintain social relationships, perform acts of self-care, have creative hobbies. Everything everything everything. And then there’s the modern start-up, the side hustle, everybody’s an entrepreneur. In your precious off-time you should be sewing masks or freelance programming or becoming a social media influencer or becoming a brilliant investor. A second job, maybe, if you aren’t creative or motivated enough to make your own job, you loser.
Clearly, there’s a lot at play here. Uneven expectations, unregulated time-off policies, a society-wide obsession with valuing people by their numbers alone. I haven’t even gotten into the minimum wage debate (it should be higher) or employer-funded healthcare and benefits. And somehow I’ve made it this far into the podcast without labelling what I think is the actual root of the problem. I texted my friend five minutes into research on the Industrial Revolution, and I said, “you know how this podcast is about our unhealthy relationship with work? Turns out it’s not about that, it’s about capitalism.” And my friend, ever patient with me, said, “who could have guessed.”
Because yeah, I think the root of the issue comes down to a capitalist economic system. The government doesn’t regulate the market, which theoretically gives the consumer a certain amount of power over corporations because of competition. Of course, the government also isn’t particularly worried about worker’s rights or social welfare programs, so that makes it considerably worse. But under this capitalist system, everybody’s goal is to make as much money for themselves as possible. While this is meant to drive creativity and innovation, what ends up happening is that a few people figure out ways to make vast amounts of money, and to do that they need vast amounts of labor, but you have to pay for that labor, unless you don’t because you’re the single largest employer in the whole county and the government doesn’t regulate you at all. So those few people exploit who they can and hoard what they can, and constantly try to come up with ways to hoard more wealth and increase production without losing wealth to the labor that powers their dragon’s hoard of stocks. It’s like we haven’t moved on from Industrial-era factories.
It can be hard to talk about different economic models in America because the general society is so aggressively pro-capitalism, and the schools teach that to us, so it makes sense. One argument I hear a lot is that no economic model has ever worked perfectly, so we should just stick with our own bad economic model because others wouldn’t be better. Setting aside the fact that I fundamentally disagree with various parts of this argument, my typical response to this is something along the lines of: “then why don’t we make a new one?” Which either sparks a really interesting discussion about possible new and different economic models, or it causes both of us to fall back on our own preferred economic models and we get nowhere in the conversation. I don’t have an answer for this, and I’m not going to try to give one. One of the many things I have learned over the course of making this podcast is when I should talk about something I don’t know that much about, and when I should definitely shut up and learn wayyyy more before I try to talk about it. So that’s my current goal. Learn more. Think more. Write more, probably, in some capacity.
The bottom line, for me, is that the system of capitalism as it exists in America makes it so that the rich profit off of your unhealthy relationship with work because they profit off of your uncompensated mental, emotional, and physical labor. A question I find myself asking a lot these days is “who profits from this?” Who profits from college applications being hard? Colleges, mainly, which is why there’s no motivation to make it better. Who profits from taxes being hard? Tax lawyers, accounting firms, CPAs, the IRS, the whole industry is built off of taxes being hard. Who profits off of giving you too much task-based work in a strange time-based system? Your employer, mainly, or they have so much work that needs to be done but can’t afford to hire enough people to do it, which is a related but separate problem altogether. If there’s a societal-level problem that most people agree is bad, but the typical reaction is, “well, that’s just how it is, I guess,” then there’s someone with a lot of money and influence who profits off of you not challenging the existence of this problem.
If you have an unhealthy relationship with work and you recognized your experience at some point in this podcast, believe me, you’re not alone in this experience. And in being not alone, it’s also not your fault. Your relationship with work is the result of a system that taught it to you, and the system is going to have to unlearn that just as much as you will. Try to have compassion for yourself and don’t let yourself think about your value in terms of numbers. Do what you have to and know when that ends. If your job runs you ragged for its own gain, it leaves you nothing for yourself. It sucks, and I’m sorry, and I want it to be better, and I hope that the many people working to make it better succeed, and I hope to be one of those people.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can tell where my mind has been recently based on the weight of the podcast’s subject matter. It’s been quite the week. This is Callie, signing off.
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