Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. If someone were to ask what are you? How would you respond? Would you say you're a parent, a partner, a friend? Well, if you're in the United States, chances are you would identify yourself by your job title. Rather than identifying with being a New York Liberty fan, or playing guitar maybe, you might feel that your job as a banker, a journalist, whatever, is what defines you.

This is workism, an ideology predominating over the United States that "asks two distinct pursuits, money and personal fulfillment, to coalesce." That's according to our guest, journalist Simone Stolzoff, who argues for the separation of these two pursuits more in a new book called The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Simone, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on.

Simone Stolzoff: Thanks, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: What is a good enough job? Why should we accept a good enough job as opposed to a dream job, or something in which the work itself fulfills us?

Simone Stolzoff: Yes. You hear the phrase, and you might think it's a slacker manifesto, a good enough job, something that I can do just to skate by, but in my view, a good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be. For some people, it might be a job that pays a certain wage that allows them to, say, live in New York City, for others, it might be a job that lets them get off work at a certain time, so they can pick up their kids from school, but more than anything, it's a vision of a world where our lives are the predominant thing that our careers support as opposed to the other way around.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can open up our phones on the question, do you have a good enough job as opposed to a dream job? I'm sure many people listening right now are looking for a job like one or the other, tell us what is your good enough job, and how does it allow you to fill your life with other things that the job leverages rather than your life leveraging your job, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or text us at that same number, or reject the whole concept and argue with our guest who wrote the book called The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, 212-433-9692.

Simone, throughout the book, you focus on the stories of white-collar American workers, folks many of us would deem successful if we were to see their resumes. Why focus on this demographic as opposed to maybe blue-collar workers, or folks with jobs that we called essential workers at the beginning of the pandemic who may not be as fulfilled in their work, or is that a stereotype?

Simone Stolzoff: I think the culture of workism is pervasive. It touches every single economic class, but the reason why I chose to focus on white-collar workers is because first and foremost, they are least likely to have other sources of meaning and identity in their life. If you look at trends like the decline of organized religion or neighborhood and community groups in the United States, they're particularly pronounced among the highest earners. Second, the question of what do you want to do is a question that necessitates a certain level of privilege. For people that have options where they're choosing between different job paths or different careers, and looking to work for self-actualization, this affliction of conflating who they are with what they do is most pronounced.

Brian Lehrer: Each chapter of your book, I will tell our listeners, is focused on dispelling a myth that we learned from our workist culture. Let's go down that list a little bit. The first one is we are what we do. That one is pretty straightforward. Why shouldn't we identify ourselves with a job when we spend so much time doing it, and in the white-collar context, where people grew up thinking, I want to be an X, and maybe going to college and grad school for many years to become an X?

Simone Stolzoff: Of course, yes. This is particularly true to my own life as well. I grew up looking for a vocational soulmate, for a job that would help be the perfect version of who I am. In reality, I think there's nothing wrong with looking to work as a source of identity or a source of meaning in your life, it just becomes problematic when it is the sole source of identity and meaning for you. As so many people found out during the pandemic, if your job is your identity, and you lose your job, what's left?

I think there are also some other pernicious risks with conflating who you are with what you do. For one, it creates these sky-high expectations that you have to find this job that will help you self-actualize, and if you haven't found it yet, then you can keep searching. If we think about happiness as the difference between our expectations and our reality, it creates a lot of room for disappointment.

Lastly, there's a risk of neglecting other parts of who we are. You and I both know this. Even though we're journalists and our identity and our jobs are very close, we're not just journalists, we're also neighbors, and citizens, and friends, and parents. If we are just giving our best time and our best attention to our work, it can allow those other parts of who we are to wither.

Brian Lehrer: Matthew in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Matthew. Let's see. Do we have Matthew? Matthew, can you hear me? No Matthew in Jackson Heights? All right. Let me try Daniel in Brooklyn. Daniel, can you hear me?

Daniel: Yes, I can. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Hi, there. You're on the air.

Daniel: Yes. I was just telling your screener, and I've just heard the tail end of your guest's comments. I just got laid off after 35 years. As I was saying, I'm in my early 60s, and I'm ready to retire, and all of a sudden I met this sense of dislocation due to, as your guest said, too much of my identity was wrapped up in what I did. I was just curious, what's your counsel for that considering all this change in the economy? It's just very surreal for me still. Still processing it, I guess, emotionally and mentally.

Brian Lehrer: Totally. I'm sorry that happened to you. Here's somebody who's been thrust into that position involuntarily, Simone, of having to revalue the balance between how they value their work or how they identify with their job versus how they identify with other parts of their life. Is it different for people who are laid off and thrust into it involuntarily than it is for people who maybe read your book or have some other impetus to rethink?

Simone Stolzoff: Yes. With many of the people that I profile in the book, there was some sort of destabilizing event, whether it was a layoff or a health scare that really helped put work's role in perspective. I'm so sorry to hear what happened to you, and also, I know it's a common story these days, where people were going above and beyond for their jobs. They were really identifying with not just their profession, but with their employer only for that rug to be pulled out from underneath them.

The way I would advise you to think about it as you move forward is in addition to this job search, and trying to find what your next professional chapter will entail, also thinking about ways in which you can cultivate other sides of yourself. Much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying our identities and the sources of meaning in our life. As you go through this next phase of exploration, and job searching, and thinking about what your next livelihood might be, also think about ways in which you can cultivate other aspects of your life.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel, I hope that's somewhat helpful. Good luck out there. Check in with us if you want to. Now, I think we have Matthew in Jackson Heights back who has a story, I think, from the opposite perspective. Matthew, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Matthew: Hi. I worked for 38 years at the Smithsonian, the Cooper Hewitt Museum. I had a three-day a week job. I put up their shows. I solved problems. It was a very involved job, but I did it so I could keep working on my paintings. I always dreamed of trying to make a living from making paintings. When health forced me to stop at the museum because I didn't want to put extra burden on my fellow workers who I had worked with all those years, I was able to now come and work all the time at my paintings, but I always wanted a job that was good enough. I didn't want the job to be too good to draw me away from my dream. You want the job to be good enough, and so that's what I did. I kept at the job at the museum.

It was a wonderful place, incredible objects, beautiful things to touch and be around. I am so fortunate to know people who love their job so much. They love the heck out of helping people see these wonderful, incredible objects, these marvelous things. These jobs are marvelous for these people. I loved being around them, but I'm also still trying to make pictures.

Brian Lehrer: Mathew, great story. Really in a way, Simone, he's the poster child for your whole book, which is called The Good Enough Job.

Simone Stolzoff: Yes, very much so. I think there's an important thing to underline in Matthew's story, which is, we live in a society that loves to revere people whose identities and their jobs neatly align, the podcast host, or the astronaut, or the painter, or the social entrepreneur. I think Matthew brings up a great point, which is that some people do what they love for work, and other people do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they're not working. In many cases, situations like Matthew, where people are actively cultivating fulfillment and meaning outside of the office, can be a more sustainable long-term strategy for happiness.

Brian Lehrer: Do you deal in the book with the inequality and equality question here? I think we live in a time when, as people other than, let's say, white men, try to catch up, that parents are encouraged to say to their children, who are Black and brown, and female, and other things that, "You too can grow up to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a director, or an astronaut." Does it put up an obstacle in the way of the quest for equality, to be defining happiness down in a professional sense in the way that you do?

Simone Stolzoff: Another question. In the book I rely on the research of this woman at University of Michigan named Erin Cech. She writes about how the rhetoric of following your passion in a world where "passion jobs" are not as evenly distributed, can actually exacerbate inequality. If we tell everyone to follow their passion to do what they love, but those jobs aren't as accessible to everyone, it can create opportunities where following your passion works great for people who have the privilege to be able to weather the precarity of doing so. As a mentor of mine, Anne Helen Petersen, likes to say, often all that passion will get you is the excuse to be paid very little.

I think a lot of times in industries that lend themselves to passion, things like education, or healthcare, where workers are supposedly doing it for more than just a paycheck, it can actually obscure a lot of the inequality that exists within these different fields. We're seeing this right now with the WGA strike in Hollywood where a lot of people get into a field like screenwriting because it's a passion, it's an opportunity for them to live out their interests.

The rhetoric that there's a line of people out the door that would happily take your job, or no one gets into this line of work for the money, can actually cover up a lot of the structural problems that exist within these different industries. In thinking about the types of passion and care jobs that have been most pronounced in the last few years, things like nursing and essential work in its various forms during the pandemic, when we call this work essential, and yet we don't give them adequate compensation or protection to honor the severity of the work that people are doing, all that framing it as a passion or a vocation or a calling does is obscure a lot of the problems that exist within these different fields.

Brian Lehrer: Kay in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kay.

Kay: Hi, how are you? I just wanted to call in. I'm a stay-at-home mom and my husband works full-time in a high-level position in a law firm. We're on opposite ends of the spectrum from each other in terms of a good enough job, but I feel like, in some ways, I have the good enough job. I had to give up some of my career trajectory to be a stay-at-home mom, but I definitely depend on him to make it possible. We're navigating this question in a different way in our own home. Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Proving that you are not lying about being a stay-at-home mom, another baby makes their radio debut. What's your kid's name?

Kay: Eunice.

Brian Lehrer: Eunice, thanks for making your radio debut. See, now, I should say be quiet while your mom's on the radio but I'm not. I'm going to say I love how you squealed. I love the vocal inflection. Did I make her laugh? Did she understand that?

Kay: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Kay, does your husband ever fantasize about changing places, like maybe he has the only good enough job because he has to be out there in the rat race or doing whatever he does, and that you have the ideal job?

Kay: Sometimes we have disagreements about this, but actually, for the most part, I don't think we would trade positions. I think we both appreciate--

Brian Lehrer: Either of you.

Kay: Yes. I think we both appreciate that the other is doing a lot of work that we wouldn't want to do ourselves.

Brian Lehrer: Kay, thank you very much for your call. Bye, Eunice. Simone, how gendered is the theory of workism that you develop in the book, and what does Kay's call represent to you?

Simone Stolzoff: In many ways, I love the example because it shows that a good enough job is subjective. For Kay, a good enough job is a job that allows her to spend time with Eunice and to be able to use her labor towards growing and supporting her family. Whereas maybe for her husband, a good enough job is a job that makes a certain salary so that he can pay for some of their material needs.

I think from a gender angle, a lot of times when we think about jobs that are seen as passions or dream jobs, they are a holdover from a lot of these care jobs and service work that were predominantly done by women, and therefore they are still devalued in a lot of ways, where we had a gender pay gap, and we're seen as doing this type of work in service of others and not to make a living.

For example, my partner is an elementary school teacher. During the pandemic, she was told out of one side of her mouth that she was doing God's work. Then out of the other side of her mouth to just make do with what you have and put the kids first. I see a lot, a lot, a lot of this hypocrisy when we're talking about work that is service-oriented or care oriented and often feminized by the nature of the demographics who are performing this work, is that when we frame a job as a passion, or as a labor of love, it can often cover up a lack of compensation or fair protections or security or benefits on the other end.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few more minutes with Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Sarah in White Plains, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I am looking for a little bit of advice today. I definitely work in an industry that typically the jobs are all-consuming. I feel very passionate about my work. I feel it's very impactful, but it certainly is all-consuming. I go to sleep thinking about work. I wake up thinking about work. I just don't know how, because I am so passionate about my work, I don't know how to walk away.

Brian Lehrer: Do you get this question a lot? Before you actually give her whatever advice you have, Simone, we have a number of callers who are basically calling in hearing your theory, which is more of a sociological analysis, I think, and saying, "Give me some advice. I want to be more like that, but I'm not."

Simone Stolzoff: Of course. Well, I'm a journalist, first and foremost. I'm always wary of being too prescriptive, but I do believe that it's hard to say care less about your job. For someone like you, Sarah, instead of thinking about ways in which you can deprioritize work, I would try and think about ways in which you can prioritize other things that you care about in your life, instead of letting your job crowd out some of your other interests. Are there ways that you can carve out time where you are structurally preventing yourself from working? The benefit of going on, say, a run is that it's not something that you can multitask while you're doing.

In this current age of knowledge work where we have offices in our pockets, so many of us exist in this perpetual state of half work, where we're always keeping one eye on our emails. I would wonder how you might be able to find communities of others that can reinforce an identity of yours that has nothing to do with what you do for work, people who could care less about how you did on the last performance review, or whether you're meeting your quarterly goals. Through cultivating those other communities and those other sides of yourself, maybe those other identities that are laying dormant within you will have the opportunity to flourish.

Brian Lehrer: You also note, and, Sarah, I hope that was at least somewhat helpful, and maybe this will be too, you also note in the book that employers or managers can play a significant role in perpetuating a healthier relationship with work amongst their employees, but why would that ever be in their interest?

Simone Stolzoff: If it's a long-term strategy, if you're trying to think about how your company or your team can be sustainably productive, it's incumbent on you as a manager or as a boss to model the type of culture that you want to create and find ways that you're not pushing your workers to the brink but actually creating the opportunities for them to be fully present at work and fully present when they're not at work.

Often we think if we just push through this sickness or if we just work a few more hours this weekend, then we'll be able to rest on the other side, but in actuality, rest is not the opposite of work. It's an integral part of being able to be sustainably productive. We all know this, if you're on our 11 of a 12-hour day, you're not firing on all cylinders. Not only will the companies and the teams who have developed a better approach to protecting workers' life outside of the office attract the best employees and retain the best employees, but I think they'll also be able to cultivate the best workers too.

Brian Lehrer: One more good enough job story. Leah in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Leah.

Leah: Hi. It's such a pleasure to be on. I called in because I made a big job transition a number of years ago from a very high profile, fully encompassing job because I felt really inauthentically aligned in my life much like this book outlines. I kept thinking about the pie chart that was my life and how my job took up the whole pie chart, but the tipping point was really noticing as I was watching community and electoral participation go down, I realized I wasn't being a good neighbor, I wasn't as civically engaged at home as I wanted to be, and in my neighborhood and in my community and county.

I kept feeling like that was the case with a lot of my neighbors who we commute from Westchester into the city or to work and are very busy with our jobs. I wondered if that was a contributing factor to being less engaged and showing up less in community meetings and local county elections and things like that. For me, it was a conscious shift to realign and make my work a smaller part of the pie chart, but a tipping point was definitely noticing what I thought was this less active participation in community. Really appreciate what the author is pointing out and I'm curious what they found when they looked at civic participation and being a good neighbor.

Brian Lehrer: Great context for it. Simone.

Simone Stolzoff: Leah, thanks for the question. Esther Perel, the psychologist has this great phrase where she says, "Too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work and then bring the leftovers home." That really rings true for me. I can feel it resonating in my bones. It's that not only do our jobs often take the best hours in our day, but our best energy as well. If we want to find fulfillment and meaning in other aspects of our lives, we need to water them with our time and our attention. It sounds like you found that through civic engagement and as you have participated more in your local community and local politics, I'm sure it has given you a lot back in return.

That's the point that I really want to underscore, is that on the other side of prioritizing work is prioritizing life, prioritizing other things beyond work. They can still be sources of labor or fulfillment or interest or something greater than yourself, but we exist on this earth to be more than just producers of economic value. The more activities and behaviors that we can participate in to remind ourselves of that, the better.

Brian Lehrer: Last question in our last minute, you also have some policy ideas in the book for the government that would better our workist culture, as you call it. What are you recommending?

Simone Stolzoff: The bottom line is that we have to separate our basic human needs from our employment. Part of the reason why our relationship to work is so fraught here in the United States is because the consequences of losing work are so dire when, for example, the majority of Americans' healthcare is tied to their employment or if you're an immigrant and your ability to stay in this country is tied to your visa and your employment status.

On the whole, I was very encouraged by some of the measures that were taken during the pandemic that re-knit our freight social safety net, things like the child tax credit, and expanded unemployment insurance. Just with a modicum of government support, we saw how thousands and thousands of Americans were able to leave jobs that weren't good enough for them and actually find jobs that were better.

Brian Lehrer: In France, they're having riots so people don't have to retire two years later than they do now at 62. Pretty big national difference. That's where we leave it with Simone Stolzoff, journalist and the author now of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Listeners, thank you for all your stories and questions, and Simone, thanks for an interesting conversation.

Simone Stolzoff: Thanks for having me on.

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