A generation ago, our parents loved their jobs.

Or at least, they didn’t hate them. They weren’t switching from place to place every two years, and often stayed with one company for their entire career.

Yet today, scores of people absolutely loath their work. And for some reason the whole “Millennials are entitled and have unrealistic expectations of work” thing, never seemed to capture truth of the matter.

To me, that response was nothing more than a shallow reply to a far more systemic, and intriguing problem.

An Integrated Life

This is your beautiful life.

It’s a harmonious cluster of experiences. Your health, your work, your family, friends, and relationships all bundled up into one. It’s beautiful and chaotic, but most of all, it’s human.

Each piece of your life spills into the next.

Your health spills into your relationships; your work spills into your friendships. All of these things touch in some unique way. And it’s the overlap of these things that makes life interesting. 

The overlap is where things get messy. Where the lines begin to blur, and where our lives find their individuality and meaning.

The overlap is where you fall in love with your neighbor, you go to the gym with your dad, you meet your best friend at church, and you get your exercise from a hard days work.

The lines aren’t neat, and that’s the point.

Soul, serendipity, and sensuality—are found where the borders blur.

But sometime ago, I reckon just about two generations back, something curious started to happen.

The Great Disintegration

Things began to change.

The elements that made up our lives started drifting apart; they began to disintegrate. And it all started with our fixation on two words:

Productivity and Efficiency. 

When these two hit the scene, life became about squeezing the most from the least. And so birthed The Great Disintegration.1

Microwaveable meals took all the mess—and time-consuming inefficiency—of cooking out of the equation. (After all, food should be food, not work. Right?)

Companies like Orange Theory and Peloton cashed in, by reducing exercise to burning the maximum amount of calories in the minimum amount of time.

Email razed armies of secretaries, typist, and mail rooms into rubble. As a result, I easily get 100 times more work done in a single day, than my great-grandfather did his entire lifetime.2

Productivity and Efficiency granted us superhuman powers.

But there was a cost.

In exchange for our new abilities, we had to sever each part of our lives into their respective pieces.

No longer could we afford to do things that didn’t serve our ultimate goal. In order to reach unimaginable heights, we had to cut the dead weight tethering us to the ground.

So exercise became about exercise.

Work became about work.

And family became about family.

We took the chaotic, and tried to tame it. Taking the human elements, and sanding down their rough edges.

But the thing is, when we split ourselves into parts, we lose all the messiness and inefficiencies. All the serendipity and silliness.

By doing this, we become something quite different.

We become a robot.

In breaking the bonds of our life, we become a bit less human.

We adopt a more utilitarian approach to life. Each area, and each task, is just another program to be run, discrete and separate from all others.

And that brings me to work.

Why we hate our jobs

Our relationship with work is…complicated.

It’s something that we very often look at as a binary experience. It’s either a cloud that hovers over everything that we do, or something we try to forget the moment we clock out.

The fog of work

When I’m in the gym, I’ll occasionally check my email to see if anyone at the office needs me.

When I’m with my partner, we may be watching a movie together, but my mind is replaying how I completely blew a client meeting three weeks ago.

For a certain set of people—myself included—work is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Instead of living harmoniously with the other pieces of our lives, work colors everything that we do. It’s a faint background noise, running all day. A tortuous tune that we can never turn off.

The only escape, is to leave our current situation, and start anew somewhere else. Praying that the ghost of work doesn’t come back to haunt us once again.

Cutting ties to your work

And then there are folk who do just the opposite.

In an effort to free themselves from the fog of work, they compartmentalize it. When they clock out at 5pm, work is but a distant memory. It’s as if they are two separate people, living two separate lives.

The problem is, when you do this, you’ve marked work as the enemy.

When we completely exiled work, we’ve done a dangerous thing. As a result, the work piece of our humanity begins to rot.

The thing about work is, it’s not the bad guy. It’s not something to be eliminated from our lives at all cost.

Work has been a primary source of meaning and fulfillment for millennia. It has a purpose. It teaches us about ourselves. Giving us a sense of belonging and mission, that is rarely experienced in other parts of our lives.

To let work die, is to allow a bit of ourselves to die.

Reintegrating work

When we’re living in disintegration, our body knows.

Our work starts feeling more mechanical—and we hate feeling like robots.

We hate having our watches remind us to stand. We hate moving data around in spreadsheets. We hate having an app ping us, and tell us what to do.

So you get mad, or depressed, or you can’t sleep well. You’ll very often experience a whole host of adverse reactions.

That’s because our spirit, our mind, our hormones—whatever you want to call it—revolt against this insult.

There is, however, a solution.

It requires reintegrating the disparate pieces of our lives.

Healing our relationship with work requires finding a bit more messiness, a bit more soul, and a bit more humanity in our tasks.

To heal our relationship with work, we must once again become friends with our coworkers. We must see people face-to-face and rediscover our long lost love of water coolers.

Healing ourselves—and our relationship to our work—requires taking the robotic, and making a human again. 

The Takeaway

If you’re the type of person that lets work cloud all other areas of your life, be mindful of that. Work is a piece of life, but it is not the whole.

If you are the type of person who isolates work, be mindful of that as well. This how we come to resent great careers, and is the quickest route to burnout and quiet quitting.3

Work is an important—and inescapable—part of our existence. Living an integrated life means sacrificing a bit of productivity, to get back a piece of our soul.

Remember, work is a part of what makes you human. 

—Zac