RETHINKING WORK

We've been trained to see our waking hours as currency: time is money. And, by the same token, time off is a wasted earning opportunity. But what if you decided that time was worth more to you than money?

- LIESL ROBERTSON

For years, we’ve been trained to ‘rise and grind’. To ‘hustle harder’. Sheryl Sandberg told us to lean in. Sophia Amoruso turned #girlboss into a thing. (How condescending, by the way – show me one male CEO who has been called a #boyboss.) Labelling yourself a ‘workaholic’ became a humblebrag. And at some point, the notion of work shifted from being a job (a necessary evil, a way to pay your bills) to a career (a key part of your identity, a status symbol) to a calling (your life’s purpose).

When we meet someone for the first time, one of the first things we usually ask is, ‘So what do you do?’ Or we’ll ask a 4-year-old, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’, smiling indulgently when they say ‘ballerina’ or ‘fireman’, knowing full well their parents will eventually nudge them towards something with better billable hours.

Work has become inextricably linked with identity. Millennials, especially, were brought up on the notion of the dream job – the one that fulfills a passion and hardly even feels like work in the process. ‘Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.’

Every ’90s career counsellor in the world had that quote framed on their office wall.

While she was writing Can’t Even, her book on millennial burnout, Anne Helen Petersen spoke to hundreds of people who had been sold on the idea. ‘Even an obscure talent or an interest in a rarefied field like museum studies could turn into your life’s vocation if you just went to the right graduate programme, got the right certificate and hustled 18 hours a day to make it a reality,’ she writes. ‘In reality, it mostly brought debt and burnout.’