We Really Love Working Here — Really…

There was a comedy game show on television not so long ago called “Whose Line is it Anyway?” The tagline was:

Where the show is made up and the points don’t matter.

I always thought that tagline could have been an insightful summary of the North American workplace. Was it not likely that you really have no purpose, no meaning and will make no lasting contributions? If so, is it so bleak and depressing or has our psyche been a little manipulated?

I have been working for — oh, my god — FIFTY years! Over that time, I’ve seen many tectonic shifts, but the change I want to focus on here is that of our collectively having bought into the notion that the workplace is somehow interwoven with our personal fulfillment.

Now It’s Personal

Although I am far from an expert in the social history of the workforce in North America, I can point to some significant moments or movements in recent history.

Of course there is the Industrial Revolution, Watt’s engine and other momentous events, all of which are well-plowed fields. There is Ford and his production line. But perhaps, within this context, the New Thought Movement is worthy of notice.

New Thought developed or perhaps better expressed as “coalesced” in the early 1800s. It saw the merging of various movements, religious denominations, writers and various persons, all of whom began exploring metaphysics with a slant toward “positive thinking”, the “law of attraction” (and here you might have thought that Rhonda Bryme in her fluffy bestseller “The Secret” had an original thought), healing, and personal power.

From this coalescence was spawned Prosperity Theology — a movement still very much active and influential but too involved a sidetrack for this essay.

Another corollary was that of personality brokers, led by Myers-Briggs in 1917, whose testing entered the workplace during World War II as a tool to better integrate women into the workforce and to better manage them (poor, unsuspecting Rosie the Riveter). Aside from inflicting personality assessments on employees, I believe that this shift in the workplace in some way heralded the notion that workers were toiling for a higher purpose — work was patriotic.

After the war, how could industry continue to fan the flames of fervour? Of zeal? An emotional commitment to the factories? Of course, money was a huge carrot, but imagine dressing the carrot in garments of devotion?

Meanwhile, in 1928 William Moulton Marston (who was also the polyamorous, utterly fascinating creator of Wonder Woman and early developer of the lie detector test) first packaged up his DISC system of personality assessments. In addition to the US military, these tools were more generally applied to business in the 1950s and continue to be widely applied today. Marston is quoted as saying:

A person is most happy when they are submissive to a loving authority. It is essential that a person submits to an authority willingly that it is their idea.

It is worth keeping this quote in mind as we move forward.

Moving into the 1960s in California, we saw the emergence of the Esalen Movement. Initially rather fringe, over the subsequent decades this new thinking began swimming more into the mainstream with EST, the Forum, Lifestream, Outward Bound, and other “experiential” gatherings, all of which have been and continue to be embraced by corporate America.

To lend myself a little credibility, in addition to five decades of working outside the home, in the 1980s I was a sales representative for personality profiling services and management training materials. Among various selling features of these services was a strong emphasis on how these tools help a company to “manage” their staff, how much the employees enjoy the process and respond with gratitude and devotion. All very true; moreover, quite self-serving and on the edge of nefarious in some ways.

Sometime and somewhere along this ride, a rather newfangled notion congealed into the zeitgeist.

It was no longer sufficient to do your job competently and have some sense of loyalty to your employer. Your job must now be part of your identity, a source of fulfillment, and a vocation. You are not to merely “settle”. It should be a calling. It was now your job: Not just to do your job, but to imbue it with deeper meaning.

It’s Not Us — It’s You

The shift is not really all that subtle.

Motivation and positive thinking used to be a sideshow, but now it is under the big tent.

If you do not find meaning, fulfillment and purpose in your job — whatever that job might be — YOU are the problem. You have failed both yourself and the company that employs you. Your enthusiasm, your devotion and your commitment to the organization should appear like nothing less than a tent revival for born-again Christianity.

One corporate trainer (read “shill”) advises to either change jobs or:

Learn to find aspects of your work fulfilling (helping customers solve problems or colleagues improve, or figuring out how to work more efficiently).

More professional advice:

Don’t settle. Your job is your vocation, your career gives meaning to your life.

Somehow a quote from the book Gone Girl comes to mind:

Shall I remove my soul before I go inside?

The Problem that has no Name

Several decades ago, way back in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote a book entitled “The Feminine Mystique”. In that book, Friedan defined a “problem that has no name”. Her belief was that women (at that time) as housewives, suffered from a hidden unhappiness; she opined that the root of this unhappiness was the false idea that women could only be happy as wives. She suggested that women should expand their world and get involved in having careers outside the home.

In my view, looking back over subsequent decades, there is a profound irony. Women are in the workplace and now they — along their male counterparts — are suffering a different “problem with no name”. Many people now seem to find themselves gripped by a type of imposter syndrome, which is now a clinically recognized condition. Briefly, employees at all levels find themselves at odds with their perceived success, believing deep inside that they are imposters, not deserving of the esteem in which they are held. They awaken in the night in a panic: someone will discover them, they will be outed, like a secret apostate dutifully attending services every Sunday.

Personal Growth and Personality Survey

Returning to the subject of personality tests (or “surveys” as they are often more gently called) or corporate retreats, experiential courses, Outward Bound weekends, trust falls: All those sorts of things do have meaning and do have merit. But, and it’s a big “but”, personal development is just that: Personal.

Do I believe that corporate entities purposefully and maliciously usurped these tools for their own profit-making purposes? No, I don’t. I’m not inclined towards complicated conspiracy theories, especially when in order to put Machiavellian practices into motion there would need to be high levels of theoretical and philosophical dexterity. Although possessing many skills, business people, in my experience, just don't have those types of smarts.

What I do however believe is that, over time, more and more institutions and businesses saw a happy edge in being “supportive”. Gradually the advantages of exploiting this somewhat new direction where people seeking “more” out of their lives and somehow attempting to address the seeming meaninglessness of their work would provide employers with yet another tool to “manage” their workers.

And let us be cognizant of the shift in terminology. “Workers” is considered a passé and now somewhat suspect leftist term, redolent of Unionism. Now it’s more fashionable to say “associates”, “team members”, “colleagues”. Just look at job postings where companies are seeking “enthusiastic self-starters” to “join the team”.

It Wasn’t Always this Way

The 1994 movie Swimming with Sharks showed the psychotic progression of an overworked underling upon whom is heaped much verbal abuse. The boss is the clear and obvious villain, and the associate underling eventually snaps. He kidnaps and physically tortures his employer.

Here is a sample of the dialogue between the boss, Buddy, and his employee, Guy. Buddy asked Guy to fetch him a package of a specific kind of sweetener (Sweet-N-Low in the pink packet) and he is brought something different (Equal in the blue packet). This provokes the following exchange:

Buddy: What I am concerned with is detail. I asked you go get me a packet of Sweet-N-Low. You bring me back Equal. That isn't what I asked for. That isn't what I wanted. That isn't what I needed, and that shit isn't going to work around here.

Guy: I, I just thought…

Buddy: You thought. Do me a fucking favour. Shut up, listen, and learn. Look, I know that this is your first day, and you don't really know how things work around here, so I will tell you. You have no brain. No judgment calls are necessary. What you think means nothing. What you feel means nothing. You are here for me. You are here to protect my interests and to serve my needs. So, while it may look like a little thing to you, when I ask for a packet of Sweet-N-Low, that's what I want. And it's your responsibility to see that I get what I want.

Yes, Buddy is horrid, vulgar, and crass, but somehow I find him refreshingly honest. Expectations are clearly stated. There is no psycho-babble or quasi-religious fervour. Just clarity. 

Another work-related movie is The Big Kahuna, a film from 1999. It is a profoundly good movie, based on the play Hospitality Suite. Among other things, the characters address meaning, or lack of it, in the corporate world. One of the characters rather darkly remarks:

Sometimes you gotta chew your own leg off to get out of life's traps.

And:

Here's to the profound religious experience that comes from doing a job well and being grossly underpaid.

Is Etymology is Part of the Answer?

Sometimes I try to get a sense of meaning and direction by exploring the history of words. In this new world (a chemically fascist one where employees are often subjected to mandatory drug tests – but that is fodder for a much longer dissertation), we find much use of these words:

• Vocation
• Passion
• Fulfillment

Fulfillment originally meant only one thing, and that was something that any Amazon “associate” will know: Fulfillment of an order. Over time, it became the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted. Much more motivational, right?

Passion is an interesting word. Most dictionaries cite its meaning as a strong and barely controllable emotion, often related to sex, love, hate, or other strong emotions. But passion didn’t start there.

Way back in 1200, it referred exclusively to “the sufferings of Christ on the Cross; the death of Christ”, from the Latin pati (“to endure, undergo, experience”) which is itself a word of uncertain origin, but is thought to have referred to “that which must be endured” — like a workplace Christmas party.

After a few centuries, in Middle English, “passion” meant something more akin and yet the opposite of “passive” — in other words, a state where a person is affected or is acted upon by something external (hmm, are we onto something here?).

At the same time the meaning expanded to indicate an affliction or a disease, but more associated with an inclination or intense desire to commit sin. It also became a word indicating “pathos” and suffering, especially when sexual desire was mixed in. But it wasn’t just about sex; it also referred to a lasting, controlling and dominating emotion such as zeal, sorrow, rage, hope, or joy.

Powerful stuff.

The more current meaning, which leans towards a strong liking or enthusiasm, dates from the 1600s, and the notion of passion towards an object of great admiration or desire only is documented by the 1730s.

Vocation is strong, heady word, perhaps more properly consigned to religious orders, teachers, and medical professionals.

In English the term came into being in the early 1400s and meant a spiritual calling, a summons or an urging towards a specific activity, with a flavour of a calling, consecration or profession. This, in turn, came directly from the Latin where the root word meant literally “to be called” (“vocare”: to vox, to voice).

By the mid-1500s the word was used in the sense of one’s occupation (not just a professional occupation but also a mechanical trade).

OK, yes, I’m digressing quite far from the crux of the matter; yet the path to the heart can require some travel.

These words: fulfillment, passion, vocation — words you see in performance reviews, job postings and career development packages are truly powerful and imbued with meaning. And here we are, diminishing their potency by applying them to any number of trivial or even “important” occupations.

Am I saying that we shouldn’t seek passion, fulfillment, and your true vocation? No, not at all. But what I am saying is that they should not be part of a job requirement.

If you work (as many of us do) to pay the bills, support the family, provide food and shelter, and what extra is used to buttress passion, fulfillment, and possibly vocations elsewhere, then good for you!

No, It’s Them After All, Not You

You are not an imposter, you are not a shoddy associate. You are not a spiritual slacker, with a shrivelled soul who has committed the crime of “settling”. You are making your way through the world like an adult. Don’t let yourself be told otherwise.

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