What am I working for?
I was recently contacted by a headhunter about a job that seems tailor-made for me. And it got my stomach tied up in knots. I’ve been in my current job — or some version of it — for almost 19 years. What would make me consider leaving? Am I happy in my position? At this point in my career, what am I even looking for? How important is more money? These are questions I haven’t seriously considered for at least eight or nine years.
According to career search platform Zippia, “Successful people change jobs every three to five years.” Apparently, on average, US workers make a career change every 4.1 years, with the average American holding 12 jobs throughout their careers. Men change jobs more frequently than women, but the largest disparities are by age. In the US, people between 18 and 24 have an average of 5.7 career changes, while people between 45 and 52 years old change jobs about 1.9 times. One reason is younger people have fewer ties and are more willing to relocate, but there’s also been a major cultural shift in attitudes about employment. While job-hopping was once viewed as a red flag on your resume, it is now widely accepted as beneficial for the economy as well as for an individual’s personal and career growth. And the pandemic only accelerated these trends. An astonishing 65% of the US workforce is actively searching for a new job at any given time.
I have had some kind of job for almost as long as I can remember. My first real job was when I was 10 or 11 years old, signing guests in at our community swimming pool. Later, my summer jobs continued to revolve around the pool. For a time, I worked at the pool snack bar and subsequently ran it myself when the community association wanted to shut it down because the margins were too thin. I kept frozen meats and fries in my freezer at home, shuttling back and forth on my moped, and managed a handful of employees, including kids older than I was. I learned how to change CO2 cylinders for the soda machine and how to clean a grease fryer. I learned how to manage people, and I learned how to manage my money and cover the bills.
By 15 or 16 years old, I spent my summers as a swim instructor, coach, and lifeguard. During the school year, I worked at Marshalls. While at college, I worked in the mailroom, and I had two summer internships at First Atlanta Bank. After college, for a few weeks between graduation and starting my first real job in New Haven, I lifeguarded at Compo Beach in Westport, CT.
Without hesitation, I can say that I am more financially successful and secure in my life than I ever thought possible. From my first job out of college making $21,500 — about $56,000 in today’s dollars — I have worked, saved, and invested in my education to arrive at a level of job satisfaction and financial stability that I could not have dreamed of as a kid. My wife has been a huge part of our mutual success, but even on its own, my career has brought me success that my middle-class upbringing couldn’t have imagined.
Amidst this soul searching, I watched Barack Obama’s Netflix documentary series Working, produced by his company Higher Ground. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s 1974 book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a seminal oral history based on interviews with a wide swath of Americans, the series sets out to explore what a good job actually is. Terkel’s Working investigates the meaning of work for different people under different circumstances, showing the personal nature of an individual’s connection to and conception of work itself. Terkel believed that while work can be difficult, it still provides meaning for workers.
Obama’s series attempts to narrow the scope of Terkel’s work by focusing on interviews with people across the income spectrum of three organizations, ranging from low-wage or working-class people to today’s middle-class worker to the highly-educated knowledge worker to the CEO. The beauty of the series is in the stories of the people who are interviewed. Each is poignant and compelling and focuses on the meaning they find in their work. It’s classic Obama, really. Uplifting and inspiring. Humbling.
I’m surrounded by people whose story is… unbelievable. The minute you scratch the surface, everybody has something interesting and that’s what I love about New York. Then we feel like, this is actually not my story… I’ve always felt like… my story didn’t matter. It is a thousand stories… five hundred stories, actually. I feel a level of responsibility. All these customers, all the people I work with, I mean, it’s all of them…
– Francois, general manager, Pierre Hotel
A weakness of the series is its failure to adequately explain what happened in the intervening 50 years. Are conditions and opportunities better for workers than they were in 1974? What role does income inequality play? How can we effectively bring dignity and meaning to all workers and improve engagement and job satisfaction for working people?
While it’s common to focus on the top 1%, Obama also highlights the 9%. While the top 1% of Americans own over 32% of the nation’s wealth, and the bottom 90% own just over 30%, the 9% control more than either. Depending upon where they live, these workers often consider themselves middle class. While they control the middle third of the country’s wealth, they hardly represent the middle of the country’s family income distribution. But it does highlight how much the needle has moved regarding the perception of wealth and success in America since Terkel’s book was published and having a color television was a sign that you had made it.
Obama identifies Milton Friedman and the rise of Reaganomics in the 1980s as an inflection point, when a fascination with free markets came into the mainstream, when Gordon Gekko declared that “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” and when Robin Leach ended each episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with the catchphrase “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
Capitalism was no longer just the best form of economic organization for optimizing efficiency, innovation, growth, and societal wealth, but it became synonymous with American freedom itself. It was viewed as entirely just, democratic, and self-regulating. We stopped talking about the abuses of monopoly and monopsony power, the limitations of short-termism and materialism, the human costs of excessive inequality, and the dire effects of deadly environmental externalities. Government regulation, on the contrary, was increasingly viewed as the problem as opposed to a necessary part of the capitalist ecosystem. Obama only hints at all this.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. — Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Obama focuses on the hopeful narrative that we’re all in this together. Everyone featured in this series speaks eloquently about the role of work in their lives and in society. We meet Tika, pastry sous-chef at The Pierre, who astutely observes, “If there’s no middle class, you’re taking out levels of society that are needed to uphold the top and pull up the bottom. It’s the middle class that the burden is on. It’s us taking care of those who have less. And it’s those on top of us that benefit from the work that we do for them. But have it so that wherever someone is in society, they can do their best.”
From At Home Care Mississippi, we meet Sheila, who supervises more than 100 home care aides, and her family. Sheila’s daughter sees the meaning of work and life this way, “A good life is doing half of what you want and everything that you need. That’s what I think is a good life.”
And Natarajan Chandrasekaran, or Chandra, the CEO of Tata, India’s largest conglomerate, expressed perhaps the clearest vision of humane capitalism in the series. “Two-thirds of the profits from the companies flow back to Tata trusts, one of the largest philanthropic trusts anywhere in the world. The founder, he said, ‘What comes from people should go back to people multiple times over.’ Hopefully, [we] play our part in solving some big societal problems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. At the same time, delivering value to the community and to the shareholder. And it’s not difficult. Sometimes you just have to ask yourself an extra question. Is it the right thing to do?”
What comes from people should go back to people multiple times over. — Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, founder, Tata Group
I see myself and my colleagues in many of these people. These stories remind me of the many connections I feel to my work and the people I work with. And they make me consider why I work? And who or what am I working for?
Time Magazine suggests there are three pillars of job satisfaction: economic stability; economic mobility; and equity, respect, and voice. It sounds like more than three pillars, but I think it efficiently covers the bases, at least for me. Employers seem obsessed these days, at least superficially, with surveying job satisfaction and measuring employee engagement. We just finished our own employee engagement survey — 20 minutes’ worth of questions about our feelings about work. Do you feel supported? Do you feel respected? Do you feel proud? Do you feel well-compensated?
According to Zippia, you know you should change careers if you don’t enjoy your work; your workplace or coworkers are negatively affecting your mental health; and you don’t feel fairly compensated. It might not require all three, but usually, some combination of these factors means that it’s time for a switch. My major job changes have clearly and specifically been about money and career growth.
The last time I actively considered changing jobs, I was motivated by the negative impact my job was having on my mental health. I have always felt closely identified with my work so when it was bringing me more stress and frustration than fulfillment, it quickly bled into my personal life. I was less happy all around.
Instead of leaving, I ultimately decided to dissociate from work, to a degree. I actively sought fulfillment and validation outside of work. I joined the board of a non-profit. I joined the editorial board of a professional journal. And I joined the board of our apartment building. These moves really helped me feel valued and appreciated for my skills. Building on that success, my wife and I bought and renovated an investment property. And I started writing.
While I still get a high from concluding a difficult negotiation, and I still get stressed when a deal goes south or when my boss is upset — and I still strongly identify with my career — I’ve significantly reduced the impact that work has on my self-esteem and well-being. Those things feel external to my happiness and self-worth. So now when I think about my job, and I consider the questions about whether I feel supported, respected, proud, or well-compensated, those questions are generally caveated with the qualifier sufficiently. Do I feel sufficiently supported? Do I feel sufficiently respected?
This all brings me back to the headhunter — and this dream job. Notably, I hadn’t been offered a job, I’d only been approached about one. But as discussions proceeded, I really needed to consider what would make me consider changing jobs. It wouldn’t be because I was unhappy, unfulfilled, or poorly compensated. It would have to be because this new opportunity would offer me a degree of personal and professional growth that’s not possible — or simply unlikely — in my current job. And that growth would need to be worth the disruption that would come with it, uprooting my life in ways I hadn’t contemplated since I was in my 20s.
In the abstract, this is an ideal time in my life to consider such a change — just weeks away from being an empty-nester, still young enough to have the energy for such a challenge. But in reality, it feels like an extremely difficult thing to contemplate. Having moved every two years throughout most of my upbringing, I’ve appreciated feeling settled here, feeling rooted. Pulling up those roots wouldn’t be easy. Could the excitement of taking on a new challenge outweigh the anxiety of starting over? Fundamentally, am I looking for this kind of change in my life? And what would make it worth it?
Ultimately, it’s not going to be this opportunity. It’s good, but just not good enough. And maybe at this point in my life, there isn’t any new job opportunity that would be worth it. But I guess, we’ll see.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. — Walden, Henry David Thoreau
