Productivity and the Perfect Worker
A new longread from Amy Rose Spiegel breaks down the modern workplace, piece by piece.
If you’ve got time today—or maybe today and tomorrow, because it took me two days to read this piece—I recommend reading Amy Rose Spiegel’s “Oversharing at Work,” published this week at Jezebel.
On Monday, I wrote about Facebook’s concern that we had stopped providing it with lucrative (to Facebook) personal content; Spiegel opens her essay by explaining why she hesitates before sharing her personal life:
I can’t imagine the disgrace I’d feel if I were sad in public, and especially online. I have to be operational — better than operational — productive, which means visibly and readily capable and on call — at all times, at work or elsewhere. My livelihood depends on it.
Then she begins to break down the modern workplace, piece by piece. She cites Pew Research Center data indicating that Millennials are currently the largest component of the American workforce, and yet we are still treated, both in the workplace and the media, as some kind of anomaly who doesn’t understand how the “real world” works.
Spiegel writes:
I wonder how a piece about “my generation” would read based on the night I’m having. We are actually posted up in bed alone on a Saturday, exhausted from the work put in this week at two full-time jobs, and trying not to feel bad about taking a break from projecting sunny wellness, skill, and gratitude into the world for a few hours, plus not go into the tailspin of mental equations about loans, taxes, and rent that we recalculate instantly, by rote, whenever our brains are almost about to idle for a second.
In other words: we understand a lot more than people give us credit for.
If you read the whole thing—and I hope you do—you’ll see Spiegel deconstruct lifehacking (“the time for proper training and two-way generational edification was sapped by a professional climate rife with slick shortcuts to just about everything”) and the personal brand (“you are expected to build your own very specific version of success while simultaneously homogenizing it into an asset companies can use”). She discusses contracts that bear no relationship to the actual work required, the growth of commodified self-care as personal-brand-friendly antidote to workplace dissatisfaction (gotta Instagram that Blue Apron), and companies that still ask people from marginalized groups to behave “perfectly, which here translates to silently.”
What’s left? Results, of course—the one thing it seems like we can control, until we can’t:
Productivity was everything. The work, and so progress, I made was the sole thing I knew was mine. I protected my work and used it as protection. Now, productivity controls me, and I feel I have to protect myself from capitulating to it.
In a world where a person can be discredited for being a Millennial or being a woman or tweeting about feeling sad, the work you generate becomes your armor, the one aspect of your life that cannot be argued against.
Except even that isn’t enough, as Mircea Vlaicu wrote this morning:
30-Something Worries: Will I Survive Another Layoff?
I was fully expecting that I would be the one to get laid off, but not because I hadn’t been doing good work. Quite the contrary: In the last few months I had done some of the best work of my career.
And there isn’t a good way to combat that except by trying to become even more productive, which puts us right where Spiegel begins her essay: at home, wondering how to balance life and work—and wondering if it’s even possible, anymore.
If you’ve made it through Spiegel’s essay, what did you think of it?
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