A Condition Worse than Burnout
Anne Helen Peterson’s 2020 book Can’t Even asks, “How Work Got So Shitty.” She notes the strange fact that more and more of us work longer and lonelier hours as temps, adjuncts, freelancers, and subcontractors. She adds that the demands of the gig economy are forever metastasizing so that now even people at the top of the professional food chain are devoured by their own work schedules. Although the gig economy seems to provide everybody with materials to build out the self, what is actually happening is that the gig economy is burning out the self in stupid deference to shareholder profits.
Peterson argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies used to hire long-term employees, and those employees weren’t always so eager to surveil themselves and signal their ninja status to others.
Thanks to clear and artful prose and a rather disarming candor about Peterson’s own overwhelm, Can’t Even makes for an addictive read. It takes some serious skill to move this adroitly from personal confession and mordantly funny memoir to sociological analysis.
But Peterson’s blend of Augustinian confessionalism and organizational anthropology does narrow the reader’s options for response. I can’t help feeling that the oscillation that the book performs between individual agency and systemic abuses is too narrow. Peterson is surely right to say that notions of the Hero’s Journey in the contemporary workplace are misguided. She’s wise to disabuse the reader of thinking that by grinding hard anyone can achieve personal flourishing. She is also right to note that our workplace structures are often viciously inequitable. But what finally concerns me about overwork today is not just that it’s cruelly naïve (it is) nor that it’s fawningly obsequious (it is), but that it’s oblivious to the unobvious resources that circulate among us in our workplaces and neighborhoods.
I’ve spent a lot time over the past few years talking with overwhelmed professionals about their spiritual practices at work. What’s often impressed me in these research interviews is that organizational spirituality need not be preoccupied with cultivating wellness within individuals so that they can resiliently stick it out through all the ups and downs of the economy. In fact, managers who seek that sort of spiritual health sometimes leverage their employees’ wellness to get more work out of them.
Let me share a quick story that I think highlights a fresh negotiation of the personal and the structural in today’s often forbidding economy. In the depths of the summer of 2020, Jon Berbaum and Tyler Etters at Highland Solutions were dealing with evaporating business and profits. Their internal problems would be instantly recognizable to other small-business owners. How might they keep up morale? How might they encourage overwhelmed team members? Both administrators have a highly empathetic manner; both are remarkably candid about their struggles and fears. They are full capable of playing the role of on-the-job counselors. But Jon told me that he quickly figured out that what the company’s employees needed from the leadership wasn’t just therapeutic help. No, they needed meaningful work. So, instead of sitting down and practicing compassionate dialogue or a commiserative silence, he and Tyler and the rest of the team went to work designing projects that would direct their employees’ energies to purposeful and generous enterprises, especially through offering free services to other struggling companies.
Highland Solutions ended up outlasting the pandemic and pulling in new clients from these projects. I doubt that Jon or Tyler would say that they found flashy success or even that they’re wholly out of the woods. A company of their size tends to do its work on the edge of precarity. But what strikes me most about their experimental entrepreneurship is that Jon and Tyler were spiritually minded in the workplace — but not in an inwardly focused way. They were instead practicing a spiritual attentiveness for vital social and economic possibilities circulating in their ecology. Such attentiveness tallies a kind of spiritual capital that, yes, contributes to inner wellness, but also exceeds such wellness.
The problem with the self-focused, self-making, self-signaling, self-surveillant work habits that Peterson’s book powerfully critiques is not just that such habits cause us to burn out, but that they also cause us to miss out. If we obsess on the personal, or if we despair of the structural, we can all too easily miss the unobvious, and maybe at first glance, unimpressive possibilities that circulate in our workplaces and their communities. To learn to discern these opportunities is not a species of naivete or cynicism, but a kind of shared resourcefulness in which can’t even becomes why not.
