Eat, Pray, Work, Work, Work

If you are hanging on to Trumpian coattails, lapping up the religiously driven zeal of a majority of Donald Trump’s base, you just may be on the wrong side of history. Aside from an innate rising tolerance of diversity from younger generations, there is an increasing “great divide” between older and younger generations: the priority by which they see and describe themselves.

“According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 83% of Americans over the age of 40 have some sort of religious affiliation, and 57% say religion is very important to their lives. At the same time, only 66% of those under the age of 40 are affiliated with a religious institution, and only 51% say religion is very important to their lives.

“According to Jobvite’s annual Job Seeker Nation survey, 42% of American workers define themselves by the jobs they perform and/or the companies they work for, and that number rises to 45% among those under the age of 40. Furthermore, of the 42% who say that they define themselves through their work, 65% say it’s ‘very important’ to who they are as people.” Jared Lindzon writing for FastCompany.com, May 21^st. When you ask for specifics among younger demographics, you get a notion among many that their religiosity is less recognition of a formal, mainstream faith but more a notion of “spirituality” and a sense of a natural moral code. They’re not exactly Fox News followers.

With 59% of Millennials having some college, a percentage that seems to be rising among Gen Z, the nature of the work they do is often a movement away from blue toward white collar jobs. Issues like student debt, overpriced housing, job impermanence and a belief that few of their ranks will ever achieve a standard of living equal to or higher than that of their parents define their fears and aspirations much more than the belief in a higher being. With mechanical and routinized tasks migrating towards automation, the new world of work, at least for the top half of Y’s and Z’s, is a lot cleaner and more cerebral. Oily, gritty, sweaty, dirty work with your hands is decreasingly defining work in America.

We work longer hours, far longer than the global average for even such notoriously over-worked developed cultures like Japan. Younger workers tend to build social lives around their jobs, where internal social communication is encouraged. And most of those jobs are in cities where job communities are more relevant than extended families. We can track old friendships on Facebook, Instagram, etc., but in-touch, in-person tends to revolve around work. Add the fierce competition for the highest levels of compensation, the falling birth rate with the postponement of marriage and having children necessitated to pay the increased burdens of student loans and you have an entirely new culture defining the younger half of our nation. But is a society driven by work-related competition really good or even socially sustainable?

“‘We have spiritual lives, we have physical lives, we like to have intellectual stimuli in our lives, we have our communities and our families and friends; humans are complex, and to have a really healthy balance, it requires all of those components,’ says Rachel Bitte, Jobvite’s chief people officer. ‘Expecting all of that to come from your work could be an unrealistic expectation.’

“For the vast majority of human history, work was generally considered a burden and a means to an end, while leisure was considered not only the reward of work, but the basis of culture and society. As a result, many predicted that individual wealth would lead to more leisure time, while societal wealth would decrease the length of the workday, eventually eliminating it entirely.

“Instead, the exact opposite happened. In 1980, the highest earners worked the fewest hours, but by 2005, the richest 10% of married men worked the most hours on average, according to research compiled by Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson for a recent article, ‘Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.’…

“‘I was always curious about this phenomenon; why were the rich choosing to buy more work, given that they can buy whatever they want?’ Thompson tells Fast Company. ‘It occurred to me that they were placing work at the top of the pedestal, and this group of American elites, who is among the most secular cohorts of American history, had essentially replaced an old-fashioned definition of God with a new definition of God, which was work.’

“Thompson adds that this concept of pursuing passion through work can be beneficial to many–and he includes himself among them–but a majority aren’t able to pursue meaningful work, and the expectations placed on work are often unrealistic.

“‘We expect to realize our full humanity in work, within the job, rather than other parts of life. That is new,’ says Benjamin Hunnicutt, professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa and author of Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream.

“Hunnicutt adds that the fear of automation replacing human labor would have been unimaginable to the philosophers and thinkers who questioned the meaning of work throughout history. ‘Before, the promise of technology was labor-saving devices,’ he says. ‘Now it frightens us. We can’t imagine an alternative to work.’

“Hunnicutt, however, fears that a society based around work is inherently flawed and bound to fail, as it prioritizes short-term individual gains over long-term, shared prosperity… ‘Work by definition, in the marketplace–which is a place of competition–is hard as a place it seems to me for cooperation, for generosity and giving, for realizing our full humanity,’ he says. ‘By definition, even the best of our jobs are about competition, of outdoing the people around us.’

“A society that praises work, according to Hunnicutt, is ruthless in its regard for both the natural world and for others, and studies suggest it’s the culprit behind a range of negative trends afflicting millennials and workers more broadly… Recent studies have found that employee stress levels rose nearly 20% in the last three decades, and a majority feel that work is having a negative impact on their personal relationships. Today, 8 in 10 Americans are afflicted by stress, according to a recent Gallup survey, which suggests one of the primary causes is work.

“Furthermore, the National Institute of Mental Health found that more than 7% of American adults and 13% of those aged 18 to 25 experienced a major depressive episode in 2017. Workplace-related stress has also been linked to less sex, more loneliness, and higher rates of career burnout among millennials.” FastCompany.com. Stress. Competition. Uncertainty. Rapidly changing everything. Try and tell a Millennial to slow down and take it easy. Listen to the response. It’s scary.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and the rush and acceleration of modernity, the  uncertainty of rapid change, seem to have pushed too many Americans into a grinding world, where looking over your shoulder is a common routine.