The Good Enough Job: What We Gain When We Don’t Put Work First

Fobazi coined a term for this—vocational awe—and wrote an academic paper about its prevalence in librarians.

Anne Helen Petersen in her book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, “we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”

At the beginning of the 1500s, the new profession of the merchant capitalist emerged. Merchants purchased foreign goods cheaply and sold them to the European aristocracy for large profits. They persuaded craftsmen to sell them their goods and then traveled from town to town in search of the best price. This meant that craftsmen now competed with ot

Karl Marx theorized,9 labor under industrialized capitalism alienated workers from the products of their

do-gooder industries such as the nonprofit and public sectors, where the “privilege” to do

should—find a job in which you could work hard. That is to say: you should find your

I found that those with the healthiest relationships to their work had one thing in common: they all had a strong sense of who they were when they weren’t working.

Workers began to search for self-actualizing work—and industries quickly cropped up to help them find it.

This makes intuitive sense. If your identity is entirely tied to one aspect of who you are—whether it be your job, your net worth, or your “success” as a parent—one snag, even if it’s out of your control, can shatter your self-esteem.