Who am I outside of my ability to work?
Maybe I don’t want to know. Let’s let that be OK.
“Who am I outside of my ability to work?”
Journalist Anne Helen Petersen called out this question on a recent episode of the Culture Study Podcast, posing it as one millennials at large are facing as we age, as we navigate post-pandemic life, as we learn from Gen Z’s anti-work and quiet-quitting culture.
Asking who we are outside of work has always been an important question for life under capitalism. This culture measures our worthiness by our ability to produce or labor for profit, and we internalize that gauge in our innate self-judgment. As more and more of the fruits of our labor are captured by fewer and fewer corporations and less are distributed to us, our families, our cities and our communities, the cry to identify with anything other than work seems to be growing louder and louder.
The cry is especially persistent for millennials in this moment, as we’re in about mid-life, mid-career, mid–child rearing. Our 20s were consumed by a hustle culture prompted by recession-era fears about money and our ability to succeed (read: advance) at work. The early pandemic years brought much of that hustle to a screeching halt and encouraged many of those who could to step back, rest, recover and re-evaluate how we were using our time.
For many of you, this shift probably meant deprioritizing work, valuing time with friends and family, enjoying moments with your children (while rejecting the optimization of parenting), accumulating less stuff and more experiences, or getting off of social media. You were called to slow down.
My early pandemic years? I worked more and earned more money than I have at any point before or since.
I launched my freelance writing business in 2020 and enjoyed long, uninterrupted days of writing at home. I spent my evenings and weekends consuming audiobooks and podcasts that shaped my approach to money and everything I was writing. In 2021, I launched this newsletter, and I built out a (short-lived) version of my business that employed a network of freelance writers. In 2022, I defined the concept of budget culture and landed my first book deal.
The pandemic didn’t call me to slow down.
I didn’t slow down after my most recent layoff, either. After being laid off from my staff writing job in October, I spun up a new side hustle as a VA and kept working. (I made a logo, a brand and a draft of a website and everything, but I’ve learned enough from 15 years doing online business to rein it in and not publicize half-baked ideas too quickly. Especially during moments of crisis, when I cling to new ideas for sanity.)
When I ponder “Who am I outside of work?”, I sort of come up short.
I mean — I’m a partner and a daughter and an auntie and a reader and a political volunteer and obsessed with The Office and I still play the flute I kept from high school. My life isn’t empty outside of work.
But I don’t feel the pull I sense from other people to elevate some other part of my life above work. Work for myself or for someone else or for a company, work on a book or an article or a piece of marketing collateral — they add different things to my life, but work in any form tends to be my favorite thing.
I feel like I should be ashamed to say that.
In the course of working alongside other humans, I’m often asked about my hobbies. Any big plans for the weekend? What did you do with your holiday break? I’ve always dreaded these questions, because what I do in my free time is write. I write for my job, and I write other things outside of my job. When I’m not writing, I do rest and take care of myself — but no one wants to hear that I spent my weekend taking walks and watching The Office, when their stories are about the cute new thing their toddler learned to do or the trip they took to visit family.
(I take trips, too! My favorite thing to do is be in a hotel or a coffee shop in a new city and… write.)
This feels crazy.
I’m getting images of women in shoulder-padded suits from movies of the 1980s and ‘90s, usually the evil stepmom from the city who just doesn’t get why her chill new husband and his sticky children are always laughing; she wants to ship the kids off to boarding school to get their messiness out of the way so she can focus on making partner at the firm or something.
But I’m not that ambitious. I wouldn’t know what to do with power. And, if you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’m hardly motivated by money.
I just like to do the work.
This is my happy place. When I’m stressed, I design businesses and plan projects. That’s my version of doodling or knitting or watercolors. A nice outline calms my nervous system. I’m much more likely to impulse buy a domain than a pair of boots.
Am I a broken person?
All the messages I get from our culture tell me workaholism is something I’m supposed to fix about myself. That work is eating away at my soul and I have to discover what truly makes me happy to counteract that effect. That over-identifying with work is some kind of Type-A, Enneagram 1, INTJ, eldest daughter, hustle culture symptom to be treated.
But I cannot imagine what a cured version of me would be. I don’t want something else.
Maybe I am broken. Maybe the Great Recession and the 2010s millennial hustle snapped something in my brain. Maybe a working class upbringing twisted my sense of self to rely too heavily on work. Maybe my parents implanted a fear of scarcity or failure in my soul. Maybe autism prompts me to turn every special interest into work — and to find my special interest in any work I do.
Maybe there are 39 years of unrealized gardening, birdwatching and Galentine’s Days boring ulcers into my stomach.
But I don’t think so. I feel fine. I’ve been like this my whole life — whether I was serving coffee or giving lectures about money. I haven’t found myself chugging antacids so far.
It’s kind of a weird position to take, to be an anti-capitalist who’s obsessed with work. I enjoy doing my job well, for my own sake, but that also makes me inadvertently good at helping companies make money. (I should submit this essay with my next job application!)
I don’t actually think I’m a workaholic. That would require overwork to be detrimental to my life. I get plenty of rest and relief (note two references to watching The Office already in this essay). I’ve never dealt with extended overwork or work-related stress, and I’ve never experienced burnout from too much work. Quite the opposite; good work generally energizes and rejuvenates me.
My Values Bridge summary names my No. 1 top value as “workcentrism,” which means wanting work to be the organizing principle of your life. It also says “eudemonia” — wanting a life organized around pleasure — is among my top values, and it tells me, “For most people, true balance between these values is elusive.” It seems to assume work is at odds with pleasure and leisure. But what if work is fun and leisurely itself?
I think about work in the way author
describes in her (fantastic) book, Today Was Fun:“All I want is to spend my days with funny, creative, inspiring people who are lovely to hang around. And while we’re hanging out, a fun thing to do is create value for others and money for ourselves.”
There are lovely ways to have work in your life that don’t allow it to chew up your soul.
I’ve always taken that idea as a given, or even a requirement. I’m not immune to taking on less-than-perfect work to make a living, but I never extend that kind of work beyond its usefulness. I have no tolerance for bad work just for the sake of working (that would be workaholism, maybe?).
I think this is why I don’t feel the need to find out who I am outside of work. I’m completely happy with who I am inside of work. That person rocks. I want to be her more. I want to learn from her and bring her into other parts of my life. I want to be better at showing friends, family and neighbors who I am among colleagues, coworkers and rough drafts, not the other way around.
I know who my authentic self is; she’s the one who shows up at work.
I am, indeed, Type-A, Enneagram 1, INTJ and an eldest daughter. I am a grumpy stepmom who prefers the city and will never understand how children can be so sticky all the time.
Galentine’s Day looks like a sensory nightmare, and birdwatching sounds like a lot of chores. I can tolerate a couple of hours of planting annuals to keep my hands from forming into claws at the keyboard, but I don’t know what the flowers are called and I cannot stress enough how little I care. But I made it through a bookkeeping course no one asked me to take, I got a self-guided certification as a financial educator, I show up to group coaching calls every week, I publish this newsletter regularly and I wrote an entire book by deadline with no guidance from an editor.
These are my hobbies. These are the things that fill the time around my job. (That is, when I’m not — here it comes again — watching The Office.)
My life feels full, and my days are satisfying. Is it OK that I get that from work?
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