Decoupling my Personality from Productivity
When I was 12 years old I started my first job — older, undoubtedly, than some, but younger than many of my peers. I was weeding gardens and picking up rocks on a local farm for $5/hr, chipping away at the bill for a broken window (an unfortunate casualty of 12-year-old shenanigans). When I was 14, I spent nearly an entire summer working on a roofing crew in the blistering heat, riding around in the back of a work van with my younger brother (13) and a group of Latinx immigrant laborers. I did the same for the following four summers.
During the school year, the work didn’t stop. On top of my some ~10~ clubs and 2 sports, I tutored (volunteer and paid) and hosted trivia at restaurants in the evenings while continuing to roof on the weekends. I was doing all I could to build the perfect college application while still making my own money. I felt like a machine, but one that didn’t need oil or maintenance to function properly — 4 hours of sleep was plenty.
Not only did I work all the time, but I talked about working all the time. Looking back on it now, I feel sincerely bad for anyone that was around me and subject to me rambling on about how many things I had done the previous day or how many I had to do in the next. In high school, I had developed a personality that was entirely dependent on how hard-working I was, and when you stripped that away, I was left a dissociated shell.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was setting myself up for failure down the road. Because I focused so much energy on school, work, and generally proving my capabilities in today’s high-paced world, I was never able to develop an actual, dare I say, personality. And when I was forced to question what all that work was for, why I needed to go to college, and why I was setting myself up to work away half of my consciousness on this Earth, I was left at odds. A simple question could be extracted from all of this: Why am I working? And I had no good answer.
The most general answer to this would be that I need to work so that I can have money and pay for things that I need in life. Isn’t it intuitive? Nothing in life is free. Goods and services don’t produce themselves. We have to do our part and so does everyone else so that we can all have the resources that we need and no one lays around and reaps the benefits of others’ work.
And yet, our world does not quite work that way. It was upon these assumptions that John Maynard Keynes predicted, in the 1930’s, that we would be working 15-hour workweeks by now. Innovation should, over time, be able to eliminate or drastically reduce the burden of unskilled jobs. Working hours per worker, though, have not substantially declined in the past 20 years despite plentiful innovation to nearly eliminate unskilled labor. I, personally, have seen a janitor come behind a robot and do the same job on the same day.
Additionally, our world is full of people that sit around and collect checks while others do their work for them. We call them CEOs and corporate shareholders. Some people work 60 hours/week and barely scrape by while others don’t work a day in their life yet can afford superyachts and designer clothes.
Why, then, are we working? The more accurate answer is that we live in a system that unneededly necessitates that everyone works despite its contradicton to livelihood and survival. Work emerges, then, as a form of downward power under which one is allowed to live only because they dedicate their life to work. If they are lucky (and frugal) they may be able to eventually have a higher standard of living themselves or reach a position where they, too, can dictate the survival of others.
Not only do we accept this as status quo, but we reinforce it daily by doing so. Though it is explored more thoroughly in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, the point is that we have become entirely complacent within a work structure that is inherently unnatural. The link between the work we spend our lives on and our survival is an indirect one at best. In a world where people are paid millions to post selfies on Instagram, others die from starvation despite farming the very food that is integral to our existence.
These conditions are not new and the most successful people in the world realize them undeniably. They are, after all, products and reinforcements of them. For me, however, realizing these things and questioning the nature of work and the nature of living had left me, as aforementioned, a dissociated shell. I had internalized the notion that the more I worked, the better I was at being human (and I was doing great). Because of that, however, I was left feeling entirely inhuman when I realized that it was a sham. Our lives, in fact, and our humanity is not and should not be determined by our ability to accumulate capital.
For me, the past two years, and especially the last year, have been a journey for me to claim the personality that I was robbed of by work — to determine what my values are, what I enjoy, and what I am interested in. When I entered college, I described myself as “hard-working” or as a proud “self-starter”. I was a first-generation, lower-middle-income boy from Tennessee that was making something of himself. That’s all I could afford to be.
Today, however, I find myself consumed with thoughts of the aforementioned nature and often become demotivated from my work because I don’t feel any meaningful connection to it. And so I ask myself, why am I working?
I don’t have the perfect answer yet, and I am not sure that I ever will, but identifying my passions, my motivations, and my personality has been futile in my journey to do so. Though I haven’t stopped working (Like many, I can’t afford to), I have learned not to attach my personality to my work and have been doing my best to separate my work from my worth. Rather than “hard-working”, I choose to identify myself with adjectives like “passionate”, “resilient”, or “introspective” and “explorative”.
Though labeling is not always necessary and, in fact, those took me a minute to come up with, the fact of the matter is that I feel more self-aware and more human than ever. The challenge that arises from this, as I said before, is managing to continue getting work done. For me, creative and academic work are especially exhausting because I put too much pressure on myself for it to be perfect. However, it doesn’t need to be. And there is always going to be room for further revision.
Now, I work for the sake of knowledge and I put that into everything that I do. I have realized that I could never be happy doing something that is not engaging or stimulating and I have chosen to aim at learning about things that I am passionate about rather than settling for less. I am taking classes and a major that fits the bill, and seeking future employment that will as well.
What is key here, is that I have learned to align my work with my interests and my values, rather than aligning my values and my interests to work. While my own existence in this world is real and natural, the idea of capital and capital accumulation has been socially constructed as a convenient truth to maintain control of large populations. Though there are few ways that I, individually, can change this, what I can do is utilize my own well-being as a motivator to fit within this constructed narrative.
Decoupling who I am from my ability to complete work and make money has been extremely important to me and, though it is surely a work in process, I feel that I am not “consumed by my work” as so many call it. As such, I would encourage everyone not only to question the nature of their work but also what keeps them motivated and whether or not it is sustainable. We must also question what we can do, long term, to change these structures and create a world that doesn’t require privilege to take the day off.