While packing up my childhood home for a move, my parents presented me with a remnant of my first pay stub. It showed that I was 12 years old when I began punching a time clock as an after-school gymnastics assistant. Considering my best move was the somersault, the stub was a testament to my drive to be part of the workforce.
By my early 20s, nonprofit colleagues were calling me “Scrappy” because of the side hustles I had going alongside my full-time job. At 30, I co-owned and was consumed by an architecture practice. My departure from that firm 20 years later is a saga unto itself, so let’s just say there were “creative differences.” As a result, I sold my share of the business and blinked for what felt like the first time in decades.
Since the end of the world as I knew it, I have been uncomfortably bumbling through responses to the question, “What do you do?”
I frequently recall the incredulity of a Bosnian former boyfriend whenever he was asked by my American friends what he “did.” Prior to our relationship, he had been living in a Franciscan monastery where he had constructed an entirely different relationship to work. When I first glimpsed him in a rural village outside of Sarajevo, he was in a field praying over a potato crop and dispensing some practical advice to the farmers. To this day, I am not sure if that qualified as agriculture, therapy or spiritual advising.
In defense of my friends’ questions, I explained to him that Americans often use questions about career as a proxy to understand more about a person’s identity. He was deeply bothered by this shorthand form of inquiry. “If you want to understand someone,” he’d say, “ask who they are, not what they do for work. Ask, what interests you? What makes you laugh? What is a great piece of advice you’ve received?”
Taking this suggestion to heart, I long ago replaced my standard question about what people “do” with a question about what people like to do with their time. The resultant conversations sometimes arc toward career talk and sometimes not. I like dismantling the assumption that our monetized time defines us best. And yet, for myself, I am still conflating paid labor with personal value. In my mental file cabinet, I may have misfiled “societal contribution” under “job,” and there it has stayed.
During my first few weeks unplugged from an office, I experienced a twitchy withdrawal from deadline adrenaline and the illusion of necessity. While the physical separation was swift, the mental one was more protracted. With distance, I began to see that work issues had been continuously running in the background of my thoughts, like browser windows that never closed. Soon, whole new expanses within my mind opened up. It wasn’t merely that I could “do” more; it’s that I could think more.
My friend Suzanne also finds her middle-aged self in the same unmoored, unjobbed boat as me after selling her business. She says we are having a gap year. I alternate between elation and panic that this could mean gap years — or a gap forever. My teens side-eye the sawdust in my hair from building a greenhouse shed; they ask in worried voices: “Shouldn’t you be at work?” I look at my indexed to-do lists and think, “I am at work.”
The proclivity for attaching one’s value to one’s paycheck is particularly pronounced among my college-educated, Generation X demographic of working mothers. Gen X’s defining characteristic of “not selling out” may have been taken to the extreme of zero compromise and doing it all. According to a 2008 study in the American Sociological Review, the full-time, year-round employment rate of Gen X professional women with young children was higher than any prior generation, as was the percentage of women working more than 50 hours per week. Today’s working moms are also reported to spend as much time with their children as 1970s moms who worked fewer hours, even as they continue to perform most domestic labor. These statistics hit home and give me the sense of being bamboozled.
Were I to go back to the births of my children, I would burn the work files I brought to my hospital bed and bury the peeler I used to make a peach pie upon my return home. I would say to my younger self, “Dear One, you just did something very common that was also very difficult. There is no shame in taking a nap.” Myriad versions of this pep talk have arisen since I left my career. They go something like this: “Dear One, you did some nice work today rebuilding that lovely Danish chair you pulled out of someone’s trash. It is OK to jog instead of sprint.”
One might argue it is better than OK to slow down, especially materially. For a brief and profound COVID moment, we could see, hear, taste and feel the effects of planetary stillness as the smog over Los Angeles lifted and the very crust of the earth quieted. Our impact was laid bare in startling ways and scenes of nature in recovery were often regarded with bemused curiosity. I, however, cannot shake these images, which feel as though they were sent for my eyes.
A decades-old scene keeps floating into my conscious thought. I am on a canoe outing gently sinking into coastal pluff mud as we stop to eat lunch. I am introduced to an environmental attorney who is describing how she capped her hours and her salary to avoid becoming an overworker and overconsumer. Was this evolved person a mirage? At the time, I remember both admiring her and knowing I would not be her.
In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, the writer Judith Shulevitz discussed research about the ethical implications of a sprinting, deadline-oriented lifestyle. At Princeton Theological Seminary, social psychologists observed students to understand what compels a person to help a stranger in obvious distress. As part of the experiment, subjects were given tasks, some with a tight timeline and others with a relaxed timeline. En route to completing the task, each subject passed a stranger in distress — an actor who was part of the study. The researchers concluded that factors of personality, cultural conditioning and education were not at play in determining who stopped to help the person in distress; rather, the common factor was time to spare. They wrote, “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”
Were I to plot a graph of the frequency with which I support friends and strangers against my productivity toward work deadlines, the curves would indeed be inverse.
Caught between the allure of — and my revulsion to — having fewer demands on my time, I became taken with rest-as-resistance art forms and political statements as captured in Casey Gerald’s New York magazine essay, “The Black Art of Escape”:
While you wait for the whole universe to come, the whole world comes in its place, demanding a response, demanding action, demanding sorrow, tears, and blood. Don’t take the bait. Perform your civic duty, yes. Vote. Help those in need. Weep with those who weep, as the Pope once preached. But the most radical act we can commit is to be well. . . .
The frequency with which I pulled up Gerald’s essay may have primed my search algorithm to send me stories about the “lying flat” movement taking hold in China as a noble struggle against the cultural and political forces of overwork. At first, I was charmed by this romantic notion of checking out entirely. However, logical extension of the concept did not hold up. Taken to the anti-consumerist extreme of Diogenes the Cynic, lying flat is not a scalable solution. It doesn’t take long for people to require food that isn’t begged and shelter that isn’t a human-sized Diogenesian clay pot; these needs connect back to some level of necessary consumption and production. Yet when we can reduce both consumption and production, we see positive outcomes for individuals and ecosystems.
Nested between Lying Flat and Sprinting Consumerism, I am interested in a Purposeful Striding movement. Can we rewire the two-way switch of career (money-making) and retirement (leisure) into a sliding dimmer? We tend to be a culture of all or nothing, of zeros and ones. We work full bore so we can retire and recreate all day. Neither side of this equation feels right to me. You can’t simply retire a sheepdog once it has no more sheep to herd, or she will chew the leg off a couch. Yet the dog does not have an ego to contend with, and she can happily herd pups in the park without spiraling into an existential abyss about her contributions to the gross domestic product.
Maybe I’m projecting a bit.
The human ego is indeed a trickster and often has us working against ourselves. Funny story: In my newly unscheduled time, I decided to become a working member of my local food co-op for fun — and for a grocery discount. On a generic Tuesday, I was assigned to the bakery department, where I cheerfully redesigned the packing workflow and, I don’t mean to brag here, was killing it! As I crouched on the floor humming to myself and restocking cupcakes, I heard someone say my name. I looked up and saw an employee of the firm I formerly owned squinting at me as he asked, “Jenn, what you are you doing here?” He was at the store to interview employees toward the creation of an architectural master plan, and I was stocking cupcakes. My immediate thought was, “Yeah, what am I doing here?” quickly followed by an internal eyeroll as I realized that what I was doing was the same thing I had been sanguinely doing 20 seconds before my ego showed up.
Transition states are messy, and they don’t lend themselves well to small talk. More than ever, I chafe at “What do you do?” as a shorthand for “What do you get paid to do?” What I do for paid work is not the encapsulation of my personhood. As I adjust to this dawning recognition, here is the question I prefer to challenge myself with each day: “What are you accomplishing?”
Today, I will put my seedlings in the ground, and Dear One, that is just fine.
Jennifer Rezeli lives and writes in Philadelphia.