Reading Notes: The Good Enough Job, Part 1

My top highlights and insights

Welcome to the very first edition of Reading Notes!

If you’re anything like me, burnout is no friend to your reading habits. Thanks to the effects chronic stress has on your brain, it’s more difficult to absorb new information while burnt out, to say nothing of maintaining attention or thinking critically about what you’re reading.

That’s where Reading Notes comes in. Think of it as a Cliff Notes for burnout — if you’re operating at a deficit of time and energy and don’t have it in you to process an entire book, I made the TL;DR version for you.

This month, I’m sharing Part 1 of my reading notes from The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work, by Simone Stolzoff. I interviewed Simone, who writes

The Article Book Club

, back in May when the book was released, after getting my hands on an advance reader copy earlier this year. You can purchase your own copy through the Anti-Burnout Bookshop.

A few housekeeping things to note:

• Highlighted portions of the book appear as block quotes. Bold text within a block quote indicates my own emphasis.

• My own notes and comments appear as italicized bullet points.

• This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Purchases made through these links may earn me a small commission.

Introduction

The United States’ mantra might as well be “I produce, therefore I am. … In the United States, how we make money is shorthand for who we are. Our livelihoods have become our lives.

American work culture and management systems are cultural exports as much as Big Macs and Levi’s jeans.

Themes of this book: that workism is particularly American, though it certainly exists in other places, too; that workism is especially common among the privileged, though it also exists in communities of less privilege; and finally, that workism is a relatively new phenomenon, more common among my generation than my grandparents’. The modern ideology of workism asks two distinct pursuits—money and inner fulfillment—to coalesce. These pursuits are not always aligned, and yet we increasingly look to our jobs to satisfy both.

Throughout history, wealth has been inversely correlated with how many hours people work. The more wealth you have, the less you work because, well, you can afford not to. But in the last half century, the highest earners are responsible for some of the greatest increases in work time. That is to say, the same Americans who can afford to work the least are working more than ever.

• Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Do high earners have fewer other sources of meaning because they have worked so hard for so long to become higher earners, or did they work so hard to become high earners because they never found/made other sources or meaning besides work?

While conventions around how, when, and why we work have since become standardized, they are neither natural nor fixed. They were negotiated before and can be negotiated again.

In the 1950s, one in three working Americans belonged to a union; by 2021, that number had decreased to one in ten, leaving many workers without a collective bargaining apparatus to demand better conditions.

There is a growing expectation that work ought to be a source of personal fulfillment and meaning. Call it the new American work ethic.

the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering. … Globally, more people die each year from symptoms related to overwork than from malaria.

• Friendly reminder that stress is a contributing factor in more life-threatening conditions that you probably want to know about

And yet, the antidote is not as simple as to not care about your job. The average person will spend a third of their life—roughly eighty thousand hours—working. How we spend those hours matters.

A life completely consumed by work crowds out other aspects of ourselves.

Much as an investor benefits from diversifying their investments, we, too, benefit from diversifying our sources of identity and meaning. Meaning is not something that is bestowed upon us. It’s something we create. And as with any act of creation, it requires time and energy—the time to invest in nonwork pursuits and the energy to actually do so.

Developing a healthier relationship to work is not as simple as quitting your job or taking up knitting. Not everyone has the ability to dictate their hours or choose their profession. What we can control, however, are the expectations we place on our jobs. We can choose to subordinate work to life, rather than the other way around. It starts with a simple acknowledgment: you aren’t what you do.

Chapter 1: For What It’s Worth