from childhood to adulthood.
We call it work precisely because exertion is required. Work is defined by the presence of mental or physical exertion and is often about achieving some desired outcome. There are obstacles to be met, frustrations faced, and failures to be had. It takes work, as my 15-year-old son can tell you, sometimes just to pull the covers back and get out of bed. It takes work, as my 13-year-old son who has dyslexia knows, even to read these words on this page. It would be easier to do nothing, to ignore the needs of the body, of the bodies who depend on you, than to do the heroic task of exerting effort against inertia and leaving the garden.
The Five Distortions of Work
The Buddhists teach of “right livelihood,” which is the belief that work enhances our well-being and strengthens our capacity to love. And yet work that is meant to make us into who we are, enhancing our capacity to love, can become twisted and distorted. Through my experience and in my research, I believe that work can become distorted in five ways: 1) through anomie and alienation, where workers become automatons instead of whole humans; 2) when one part, IQ, is prized over our whole, which includes our emotional intelligence or EQ; 3) through our hierarchies, where one group of people is subordinated to another; 4) when we overwork, and work consumes the space where rest and leisure belong; and 5) when the exchange of labor for pay is inequitable and does not recognize the value of the human performing the work.
Work becomes distorted when we separate our humanity from our labor. Things that would be unacceptable in the personal sphere we accept and normalize in the professional sphere. In the corporate workplace names are replaced with personnel numbers, seeing humans as nothing more than “full-time equivalents,” or FTEs for short. Workspaces are turned into cubical farms. Efficient transactions are rewarded over authentic relationships. Perhaps that is why 40% of us feel the need to check parts of our identity when we cross the threshold of work. We hide our personal self behind our professional self, just like I hid myself and my feelings up in that tree in my grandmother's garden.
More than 120 years ago, French sociologist Emile Durkheim named this distortion of work “anomie,” the dichotomy of self-worth and work. It is the alienation of self in bureaucratized work that keeps us unaware of our most fundamental human desires. Karl Marx described the theory of alienation as dividing people from aspects of their human nature. The typical workplace institutionalizes a divide between professional and personal. The nerdy part of me that majored in sociology in college got excited when I read this. I picked up a copy of Eric Fromm's, The Art of Loving, written in the 1950s. He wrote, “Automatons cannot love.” Yes! That was it. I had been working my whole life, but I had become alienated from my ability to love myself or others, particularly in the workplace. No wonder I still struggled to feel worthy of love. I had spent my life working, to become a better worker, with feedback forms and performance-related bonuses to prove it, but in doing so, I had learned that my worth was only as valuable as the next paycheck or the next round of feedback from superiors. Perhaps that is why only 38% of us currently feel safe to be vulnerable at work, and why 75% of us want our companies to place more value on human worth. We have for too long been familiar with the feeling of Durkheim's anomie, living as Fromm's automatons, experiencing Marx's alienation from our work and in need of something more human, something more worthy, something more loving.
Work becomes distorted when we prize our intellectual quotient (IQ) over our emotional quotient (EQ), our head over our heart. In To Love and Be Loved, Sam Keen, a philosopher and psychologist, bids us, “Consider the lopsided amount of attention we have paid to the definition, measurement, and cultivation of intelligence, in contrast to our failure to investigate the many modes of love.” There are customer or workforce personas, not individual personalities of humans with personal stories of love and loss. We learn, erroneously, to value people's worth based on their production and to value different people differently, often with biases that are unconscious. There are so many kinds of bias: physical appearance bias, attribution bias, gender bias, affinity bias, racial bias, confirmation bias—the list goes on.
We value love and connectedness in our personal lives, but often leave our humanity at home when we go to work. In Love and Profit, James Autry asks where we got the idea that there is an “acceptable separation of intellect and the spirit,” and where all “this hiding of emotion” behind a “cool mask of macho detachment” comes from. We need to stop wearing the mask both for our own sakes and for the sakes of others around us. Indeed, 77% of the 6,000 people surveyed want to bring their whole selves to work: both head and heart, both IQ and EQ.
Work becomes distorted when we do the very natural thing of forming our workplaces into hierarchies. Why do hierarchies form in the first place? Why did computational networks, corporate networks, and neural networks all follow the same patterns? It turns out that hierarchies arise whenever there is a cost for networks to connect with each other. When there are no costs in transacting, hierarchies do not form. The natural world—including biology, neurology, ecology, and genetics—all evolve more efficiently when “like items” are grouped together in modular format and subordinated into a hierarchy. Imagine a group of tribespeople, or perhaps a group of kindergarteners all trying to talk through and resolve a problem with a warring kindergarten class over the use of the swing set at recess. It would be so much more efficient for opposing tribes to appoint an elder to represent their views than for all members of the community to try to resolve a conflict one-on-one. Hierarchies thrive on efficiency. They can be seen as necessary to reduce transaction costs and create order. However, hierarchies become distorted when they exert power over, as opposed to power for, a specific nondominant group. And they become distorted when they reduce the diversity in organizations to a single normative type of any homogeneous group, such as White and male.
Work becomes distorted when work becomes the whole of life, as opposed to just one piece. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. And the International Labor Organization states, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more than British workers, and 499 more than French workers.” Work consumes us and leaves many of us feeling depleted.
Overly long working days combined with our hyperconnectivity in the digital world is making us feel less and less emotionally connected. We can work from anywhere now as more work shifts to virtual environments, but our rootlessness has only created a deeper desire for roots.
Work becomes distorted when our labor is exchanged for money, but different work is valued differently. Money becomes the reward for the work and can be a signal of its value beyond its intrinsic value of shaping and defining us as humans. Working for pay can also have a distorting effect, because not all work is valued equally in our society. Nor, we know, are all people valued equally who do the same work. According to PayScale.com, in 2020 women were making $.81 for every dollar a man makes. Black men earn $.87 cents for every dollar a White man earns. And Hispanic workers earn $.91 cents compared to their White male counterparts. It's worse when you look at the pay gap for Hispanic and Black women. According to the National Partnership for Women & Families (www.nationalpartnership.org), on average Black women who work full time, year-round, are typically paid $.62 cents for every dollar paid to White non-Hispanic men. And a variety of studies by organizations such as civilrights.org and nationalpartnership.org point out that Hispanic women are paid even less, typically about half what their White non-Hispanic male counterparts earn. What we are willing to pay people for their work is often taken as a proxy of their extrinsic worth. Persistent gaps in pay based on gender and race belie the fact that pay is an objective measure of worth.
Some have argued that perhaps we are expecting too much from our places of work to deal with
