The Persistent Myth That Most Americans Are Miserable at Work
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
So the writer chooses to start out right away with the obvious fallacy that people can't be both happier than in decades and also miserable.
A. They may be gate-keeping the word "miserable" to omit the mundane misery of working for a living at something you don't love (or at least don't 40-hours-a-week love).
B. It's very hard to empirically measure "how happy are US workers". Surveys are useless (people have all sorts of reasons for responding in a way that doesn't communicate their true feelings), and second-order indicators are fuzzy. This ambiguity also makes it very easy to get the answer you want.
C. Many people right now are obviously miserable because they don't feel they are getting the same rewards per effort as what they feel previous generations got (which is probably a mix of truth and bias).
D. Even if we ignore the variability of C, the universal constant will always be there: The availability of types of work will never match the availability people who enjoy each type, and even when the universe could pair a person with a position they would like, a lot of luck is involved. It's a fundamental problem of work that will probably not be solved until the far sci-fi future (if that ever comes). This is an uncomfortable truth. Most people who are happy at work are not happy because of the work, but simply because they get to socialize with people they enjoy socializing with. Employers of course prefer to push the message of this article's thesis instead.
As an aside: In addition to socializing, there is now a second source of non-work-related happiness: Working from home. This increases happiness for both introverted people, and also extroverted people who happen to be in a work environment where they don't really click with their coworkers personality-wise, which is a lot of people - maybe most people in a 21st cen. culture with so many diverse personality types. Luckily you can make both groups happy by allowing both modes of work, since the latter group were mostly not contributing to the social happiness of the former group anyway.
Edit: As pointed out, extroverts can also be fulfilled by in-person socializing at home. Also, both extroverts and introverts can fulfill or supplement their happy dose of socializing virtually (usually via text, which counter-intuitively is a better vector for socializing than video calls).
Until we eliminate scarcity or come close, not everyone can be at the self actualization section of the hierarchy of needs. And fighting automation doesn't get there faster. We need to take care of people independently from employment. We also need people who were in those jobs to at least try to pitch in on the stuff we haven't automated yet including automating things. If that isn't possible due to ability mismatch, then idelness is a mental health issue, so some help engaing on tasks that are in the self actualization realm would be great. This is all a naive pipe dream with human nature being what it is, but a nice one.
You are making the (unfounded) assertion that there is some absolute scale of misery and so someone could be less miserable than they've been in decades and yet still be "miserable" because they haven't hit "happiness" on the absolute scale. But there is no such absolute scale. If someone is happier than they've been in decades they can't be miserable because that's just a term describing their personal low.
IME, >50% focus on what they don't have - which is why they complain so much.
Maybe we should find some spiritual leaders or other to hear from. At least Oprah might at least have some distant memory of what it was like to be poor I suppose.
Oprah is arguably the single most self-made billionaire in the history of the US.
She was almost literally dirt poor for her entire childhood, and was basically poor until her late 20s.
I think she gets a free pass here.
Pay, sure, but pay doesn't make happiness. Working conditions? I doubt that. But that's a subjective thing, so it's hard to really measure.
Yet pay is the point of work, wouldn't you say?
> Working conditions? I doubt that.
As I noted, work conditions vary. But non-physical labor, remote possible, pushing the upper boundaries on vacation (unlimited vacation which isnt a scam), family leave, health insurace, etc. I think you really have to cherry pick to beat tech.
That doesn't mean we can't be miserable (and I've gone through a few bouts myself) but it's a great field right now.
Unlimited vacation would mean that you go to work never yet you remain on the payroll.
Obviously this is impossible. So “unlimited vacation” really means that there is a limit, but your employer either doesn’t know what it is or won’t tell you, and you don’t know what it is. So you have to worry about how much vacation to take because there is a limit, it’s just not definitized.
Always a 100% complete scam.
If someone actually thinks unlimited means working is optional, that's on them.
"Unlimited" means "without limit", which obviously can't be the case with vacation time, so it's deceptive to call it that. "Generous" would be better.
It has deceptive potential if someone has no knowledge beyond the literal words, and assumes that there are no other restrictions, which I don't think is the appropriate reference. Anyone actually involved with unlimited vacation is provided the full context on operation.
A policy name not being self contained and fully self explanatory does not constitute deception.
I think it is reasonably descriptive. There is no policy limit to the number of vacation days. It is discretionary. I think it is a bad deal for most, but don't think anyone is being tricked
“Unlimited vacation” is wantonly and aggressively inaccurate and is, therefore, a scam.
If that's what I thought about work, I would be quite depressed.
Fortunately, I find meaning in my work that has nothing to do with pay.
Of course, if I didn't get paid, it would be a problem -- but pay is very much not the point. (Especially because my needs are met.)
However, I don't think it says anything definitive about if the job sucks or not- There are far too many other factors. It says a lot more about life choices , priorities, and compromise.
Don't get me wrong, some jobs suck, but a lot of people also work great jobs they personally hate. For example, some people hate programing, corporate environments, and living in the bay area but do it for the $$$. That doesnt mean the job sucks, just that they have traded money for work they don't like. No amounts of employee perks is going to turn a programing job into being an artist, or whatever, if that is what someone actually enjoys.
Well, yes. I don't think there are many jobs that objectively suck. For almost all jobs, there are people who will be miserable doing them and there are other people who live for it. I should have said the "job sucks for them".
I could and would happily fill the rest of the week with a fire hose of my other obsessions.
Outside of that, I find my work to be meaningful in and of itself.
I wonder if many of the ills in our society are related to this: Many people don't see any dignity or meaning in their work. Maybe they're right. Maybe not. Either way, that's a big problem.
>I wonder if many of the ills in our society are related to this: Many people don't see any dignity or meaning in their work. Maybe they're right. Maybe not. Either way, that's a big problem.
I tend to think it is a central problem too. I think a big part of it is driven by individual overoptimization around the wrong the wrong parameters and a culture of commodification. The general sense I get is that most people spend their life doing meaningless work that makes them unhappy in hopes that they buy enough crap to net happiness. Im guilty of it too, but the older I get, the more confident I am that this simply doesnt work. You can't buy enough crap to break even. Moreover, I'm pretty suspicious of hedonism and the pursuit of happiness in general. I dont think happiness can be sought directly, but is only a byproduct of living with other objectives.
I had to take like 45 of those (the rest way convertible into money). I usually like time off more than money, but I couldn't find the time to plan those 60+ days (and I also was obese and on a very bad ankle, so hiking and 'cheap' vacations were harder to plan :/)
It is one of the purposes of work, but not the only one (if the job is a good one, anyway). But that's orthogonal to the point. An income is necessary to live, but it isn't what brings happiness.
> I think you really have to cherry pick to beat tech.
I think it depends on what you value. I've had plenty of low-wage manual labor jobs, and a couple of those had far better working conditions than most of what I experienced as a developer.
Previous job I was an Army officer in a tank unit. It's certainly not a bad job. National surveys consistently showed military officer as the second most respected profession behind medical doctors by the general American public. Camaderie is great. Sense of purpose is there. But the material work conditions? I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage. You think stack ranking is bad in the tech industry? In the military, you have a hard deadline that puts you in a cohort where you're up for promotion, and depending on personnel requirements at the time, you either get one chance or two to get promoted, and you're out of a career otherwise. There is no other military you can apply to if you get laid off. People are fired if they get fat. Your boss is not only allowed to verbally abuse and publicly humiliate you, it's basically expected and normal as a motivational tactic.
It's very hard for me to imagine considering what I'm going through now to be bad working conditions.
>I regularly worked 100 hour weeks, got an hour or two of sleep a night, sometimes outdoors when it was -14 degrees, sometimes outdoors when it was 130 degrees (both Fahrenheit). Inhaling diesel fumes all the time. Doing ridiculous nonsense like carrying telephone poles up and down a bunch of hills at 1 AM for 20 km to earn the right to wear silver spurs on my boots on Fridays. Couldn't see my family for months at a time. Ended up with ten screws in my spine from all the bodily damage.
Surely you understand that this anecdote is the worst possible evidence of your thesis. Describing your before-vs-after delta as "statistically extreme" would be an understatement. This is like the most hyperbolic possible version of the "how can you complain when kids are starving in Africa" fallacy.
Personal experience as well as talking to other devs. I will caveat my assertion, though, by acknowledging that different people prefer different working conditions.
When I say that working conditions as a dev are poor, it's mostly because of the requirement to work in cube farms (or, worse, in an open-office layout) where you're constantly having to struggle to get things done amid a sea of interruptions and distractions.
> What other jobs have you held?
I've been a janitor, a hotel maid, a roofer, a ditch-digger, and various fast food positions.
As it is, I'm almost 100% in-office which I prefer, but that also goes to liking my co-workers and company as well.
Yes, I absolutely have, on multiple occasions. It's truly no fun.
Of the dozen people I know affected by the layoffs, only the ones without degrees are still without work. In fact two of them have not had a single interview beyond HR phone screen in months of looking, even with 7-10 years experience.
Note also that most of these people don't have CS or other relevant degrees, just degrees at all. Programming now seems to fall under the same rules as other white collar professions.
In fact, it may be the opposite - that huge tech companies are more likely to drop that requirement.
Building a network is absolutely key, people who enjoy working with you remember you and at some point you just become set
Yep, having a sibling working in healthcare who’s having to take classes now so they can keep doing what they’ve been doing. The classes of course have no direct relevance to the job being done.
Which government? That is manifestly not the case at any of the national governments I've worked with. I know engineers that didn't even finish high school that have done business with the US government in almost every employment arrangement possible.
If you're talking about the US government, this isn't true. It is true for certain specific types of contracts, but not most of them.
I've always suspected journalists can get a biased impression from sources like social media, because normal people don't go on social media to brag about how good they have it or say how much they love their employers (except perhaps on linkedin).
If my waiter buddy posts about how he's had a shitty day with rude customers and his boss cancelling his holiday because they're short-staffed? I might say "oh man that sucks - work, amiright?"
I'm sure as hell not going to chime in and tell him I'm highly paid with interesting work and great conditions.
I can easily see how a journalist, viewing Twitter or Reddit or Facebook, could come to the conclusion that everyone hates their jobs.
Have you seen LinkedIn? people get sacked without warning and still praise their former bosses/companies.
Not because they necessarily liked either (maybe they did) but because there is a fear of being seen as negative when trying to find another job.
> I'm highly paid with interesting work and great conditions
Isn't bragging the main thing people do on Social Media?
Even when we don't set out to brag, we still end up doing it often...
start following more interesting people
Where there's a strong incentive to lie so as not to endanger employment prospects.
Worse, I think, is that it sells to tell people how bad off things are. Which seems to be driving even worse moods and outlooks along the way.
I remember talking to my grandad who went from WW2 trenches, to famine, to working on the farm for 16+ hours/day and raising 10 kids, about purpose and fulfilment through work, whether all that hard work made him depressed, and he said that thought never occurred to him, that he never had any time to feel depressed or unfulfilled, he just did whatever had to be done to survive without thinking about fulfillment or purpose, but that he never really felt unhappy from any kind of work.
IMHO, looking at what's happening globally and what my grandad went through, it's a sign of incredible prosperity to have the luxury to think about fulfillment needing to come from work.
> It would be much cooler for al of us to be musicians, painters, astronauts and F1 drivers.
No, it would be cool if we were fully fledged human beings and shared some of the shitty work that needs doing more fairly, and stopped exploiting each other. Between those two things you'd quell a lot of "complaints". It's not about doing grand things, anything can be grand if you have the heart for it, and put your heart in it.
> Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
-- Noam Chomsky
But you can't put your heart into being a cog. I don't even think you can put any real heart into being powerful and using people as cogs, that's both a failure state of how to human IMO.
Depends who is the "we" here. Much of the lifestyle and perks of living in the developed west are dependent on other less fortunate people being exploited: cheap cocoa and cheap coffee grown in the poorest African nations, cheap bananas, asparagus and other fruits and vegs in your supermarket, cheap electronics made in China with mineral mined by kids in Africa, cheap clothes made in the poorest SE Asian countries, cheap semiconductors etched in Taiwan, etc.
Entire industries and supply chains we take for granted in the west as being commodities now, depend on what is basically modern slavery and environmental destruction we intentionally turn a blind eye on.
So if all those exploited people were to be be less exploited and have the prosperity to choose other careers than to work in mines, farms or sweatshops to supply the wealthy west, then those "we" would be much better off, but then the westerners "we" would be less well off as now we wouldn't be able to afford those commodities we take for granted at the new non-slavery prices.
>No, it would be cool if we were fully fledged human beings and shared some of the shitty work that needs doing more fairly, and stopped exploiting each other.
And who gets to fairly decide the global sharing of that shitty work? Because I don't know anyone who would like to scrub toilets for a living, or collect minerals form piles of scrap, mine uranium and lithium, etc. Do we draw straws? Or the more likely scenario for humanity, have a world war, and the victors get the nice comfy work and the losers the shitty work.
Yes, it would be cool if the human race would give up on the greed driven self enrichment and exploitation of others, and reach a utopic enlightenment where all the shitty work would be done by robots instead of the desperate people of the poorest countries, but we're very far away from that.
A good first step, let's start properly taxing our 1% wealth hoarding corporate elite who thrive on the human and environmental exploitation (cough Saudi Aramco, Nestle, Exxon, cough) while amassing more wealth than the 99% could spend in a lifetime, tax free in offshore heavens.
But since we can't even collectively crack down on that simple thing, I don't have any hopes we'll be able to solve the rest of humanity's issues without any major world conflict and decimation resetting the monopoly board.
The key thing is: we can redistribute where all the wealth generation goes to. At the moment, the lion's share goes to a very few very rich people - obviously people can't afford good quality, fairly priced food any more.
There used to be a time where one middle-class income was enough to feed a family of four, live in a decent house in the suburbs, have a car and go to vacation once or twice a year. We need these times, this wealth distribution back.
But that goes back to the taxation issue I already mentioned. We can't redistribute wealth if we aren't taxing that wealth the top 1% hoard.
Curent redistribution just means robbing the ever shrinking middle class to give to the lower class and pitting them ageist each other for votes, while the like of Bezos are laughing all the way to their islands on their platinum Yacht.
>There used to be a time where one middle-class income was enough to feed a family of four, live in a decent house in the suburbs, have a car and go to vacation once or twice a year. We need these times, this wealth distribution back.
Those times are not coming back unless you undo globalization to the post-WW2 boom levels when offshoring middle class work abroad was not yet a thing.
Today's middle class is doing office work instead, at often enough pretty high productivity (i.e. corporate profit per work hour) rate. There's nothing preventing the world's largest employers to pay their employees an actual living wage.
Only if you work for some of the wealthiest companies in the world does your individual productivity scale that well, but unless you work somewhere like Luxembourg, the Mittlestand most likely works for averge companies.
>There's nothing preventing the world's largest employers to pay their employees an actual living wage.
There is: Lack of wage legislation and/or poor market competition so you're forced to accept any wage or starve.
Just because somebody is doing something that you personally can't imagine doing doesn't mean that they're exploited. "Exploitation" is how Asia was able to lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. A country of 99% subsidence farmers doesn't get antibiotics and electricity by tugging at their own bootstraps. They get it because they made their countries attractive places for capitalists to make a profit. Even leftists will suddenly acknowledge this when they blame socialists countries' lack of economic development solely on trade embargos.
It's not about that, work should yield some result and it should do so within a timeframe that doesn't make you lose yourself and your mind in a multi decade process, and also while team work is amazing beyond a certain treshold the less people necessary to yield the result the better.
Modern day jobs are all about ass kissing on a massive scale and massive projects that require 5-10 years to yield what was laid out in the first meeting, and by the time you get there you fail to extract any satisfaction from it because you are a completely different person and so much water has passed under the bridge that it feels very anticlimatic.
Cutting wood or hunting with 2 or 3 guys trumps 99% of desk jobs and I also suspect driving an F1 car considering that you see those guys now but they started practicing for that when they were 8 year old.
The pinnacle of work was when we discovered fire for the first time, or discovering that pointy stones would hurt wild animals when thrown at them. Whatever you do you'll never reach the same level of work satisfaction as our ancestors when they first discovered the fundamental physical realities of our world.
As a hobby or as job? Because 99% of desk workers wouldn't survive if their livelihood would depend on chopping wood and hunting to survive, keep warm and feed themselves.
That's why the office work life is so luxurious and desired despite the lack of fulfillment. You're safe and comfy and use money to pay people to do the uncomfortable and dangerous jobs and you have the free time to chop wood and hunt as a hobby not as if your life would depend on it.
There's companies in my area offering wilderness survival retreats for office corporate workers where you get "kidnapped" in a black van, have your smartphone taken, and dropped in the middle of a unknow forest with some basic tools and supplies and have to survive the weekend. Most come out destroyed and appreciating their depressing office jobs.
That's the problem, any self respecting man needs some danger in the form of physical harm or the potential of physical harm from the Natural envioronment around.
That's so that the brain can produce those delicious juices once you manage to evade or avoid such harm. If you stay so far away from the harm that you don't even feel it or see it (as a matter of fact you don't even know that it exists), then you don't get the brain juices, hence the crisis of depression, loss of meaning etc.
> > not as if your life would depend on it
The brain isn't stupid, when you put it in a controlled environment AKA a petting zoo it won't release the brain juices and you are back to square one.
> > Most come out destroyed and appreciating their depressing office jobs.
Maybe because there is a disconnect or a significant time delay between when they sign the contract and when they experience the actual pretend kidnapping. Anyway it's not something that would last because the 2nd or 3rd time around the brain realizes pretty quickly that it's in a petting zoo. Anyway the fact that they are seeking such experiences means that they are at least aware of the office domestication problem and the WFH domestication problem is even more serious!!
Filing TPS reports? Idk what that is, but I'd imagine that feels a lot less satisfying than mowing a lawn or trimming some hedges.
Boy, are you out of sync with the cultural zeitgeist, or you're too young to have caught this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w
>but I'd imagine that feels a lot less satisfying than mowing a lawn or trimming some hedges.
Satisfying it may be, if it's done as a hobby, but good luck supporting a family today by trimming hedges.
Companies yeah, they make bank. How much do their employees make?
>I know a lot of people that support their families by trimming hedges, planting flowers, mowing lawns, etc.
Ah yes, the highly lucrative job market of lawn mowers, wonder why not more people are joining it.
But hey here's a novel Idea - Any average Joe can run his/her own company and then he doesn't have to be an hourly employee. This is true of many trades : garbage disposal, painting, electrical work, carpentry, etc.
In one job there was a window overlooking a grass field. Every week the guy would be riding the mower for a couple hours rocking out on his headphones.
There’d always be one or two guys staring out the window, enviously watching him.
Unlikely. Kids for him and everyone back then, were just cheap labor for the farm and someone to take care of you at old age, according to my dad. It's mostly in the last 60+ years that people mostly have kids for fulfilment.
I think rather that family and children were a cultural expectation, and people derived purpose and satisfaction from fulfilling that expectation. This goes back basically to the dawn of history.
In that sense, is/was a matter of personal goalsetting and meeting those goals. That is to say, people have always have had goals an motivations, even if they werent very explicit. Thats why they keep going through the motions instead of sitting down and starving to death.
In many countries, people don't really expect fulfillment from their jobs, they just expect to get paid so that they can find fulfillment elsewhere.
What I learned from reflecting on 2 such instances is that what makes for a great workplace is not ping-pong tables or lots of cash. It is that I need to feel like I am entering a trustworthy environment day after day. This is also perhaps why vets enjoy talking about their time in service because the environment is not sustained punitive - even if it is a tough job. You can trust everyone (and especially your boss) to have your back.
A sustained entry into an untrustworthy environment (read: talking to your own manager might be dangerous) really takes a toll on me. Ever since this realization, I have started to look for honest and trustworthy environments for my jobs. And it has worked great for my mental health.
With hundreds of millions of workers in the US, I'm sure every persistent myth is true for someone...
Let’s compare breakrooms. Anyone?
Just to take one small example: Thompson cites as an example of happier workers a poll question showing that there was a 20% increase in people saying that it's "a good time to find a job.” But what does that mean? That there are lots of openings because people have in fact left their jobs they were unhappy with? Turnover means people are happier with their jobs?
Or take this: 35% of people say "that opportunities abound for them to do 'more of what they do best.'" so the other 65% of people don't matter? Maybe it's unchanged since 2013 but is that a good benchmark? Are people thinking of other opportunities?
Another elephant in the room is whether the happiest are happier, and the unhappy are less happy. This might or might not be the case, but talking about these survey respondents like they're a large homogenous group is problematic. It may be that there are areas of the economy that have in fact gotten much worse for large segments, even as they have gotten better for other segments. Focusing on the happy doesn't talk about the unhappiness of the unhappy, which is in fact what Thompson is trying to rebut.
Finally, I've grown distrustful of these surveys in general. It's not clear to me that what people say in response to a pollster reflects anything meaningful about their actual behavior and emotional state in the way people want them to mean. I do not want to be dismissive because people should pay attention to them, but I'm not sure I've seen convincing evidence that aggregate survey responses track with societal trends in a way that suggests their unbounded validity. Even the figure tracking job satisfaction since 1987 — which I give credit to Thompson for posting — hides a lot. Sure, you can see the Great Recession in that figure, but if you didn't know about it, what would you make of it? What about the drug epidemic and declines in life expectancy? Should we be incorporating birth rate declines into the conversation? Are people unhappy with their jobs, or with some things about society in general?
I bring that up not to say "life sucks for members of society right now" but rather, it's not always clear to me how you should use measures of things like "societal happiness" or what that even means. In some place as heterogeneous as the US, given all the problems we've had as a country, is it insensitive to have these kinds of discussions at all until we're more attentive to the worst off?
1. Clicked on the link.
2. Got pay-walled.
3. Remembered that I had access to the Atlantic through Apple News+.
4. Opened the News App on my phone.
5. Went to Magazines.
6. Found the latest issue of The Atlantic.
7. Found the hidden link to go to the magazine's "channel," since this article was not actually in the magazine.
8. Thankfully, this article was the most recent thing posted.
9. Read the article hunched over my phone while the still-paywalled version was looming over my head on my computer screen.
Somebody has to figure out how to fix this.