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- The pandemic brought on a great reckoning with what work should look and feel like.
- While many learned not to make work our identities, we can't help but value productivity.
- If you're not sure how much to care about work, or what it means to you, you're not alone.
The other day I was in the office, enjoying lunch with my coworkers, when I found myself with a persistent thought: I could be at home right now doing dishes instead.
Immediately, I was saddened by my own impulse: There is value in spending time with your coworkers, and gossiping over a very large sandwich. But all of a sudden, what was once a 2019 norm felt unproductive. Like many white-collar knowledge workers, I grew accustomed to working from home during the pandemic — and doing my laundry, washing dishes, and running errands on the clock. Work blurred into life, and life blurred into work, suddenly making my personal errands the same as work.
"The common phrase you hear is, before the pandemic, I organized my life around work — and now I want my work to be organized around my life," Anthony Klotz, an associate professor at the University College London School of Management and originator of the phrase the "Great Resignation," told me.
In the wake of our existential reckoning with work, some office workers flipped the script, making life their full-time job and work a part-time pursuit. The trend garnered all kinds of new names — a Great Reckoning, quiet quitting, a lazy girl job — it was all about workers wrestling with what their daily lives should look like, and how big a role work should play.
But today, the labor market isn't as ripe as it was at the height of Klotz's aptly named Great Resignation. Instead, there's an increasing number of what we've termed "grumpy stayers" — people who are stuck in their roles because they can't afford to completely quit amid layoffs and inflation. And as all the life-shaking events of the pandemic settle, and interest rates, rents, and prices rise, work is once again taking more of a center stage in our lives.
What we don't know is what that looks like anymore. It's the awkward adolescence of the evolution of work. It's not quite in-person. It's not quite remote. It's not supposed to be your source of identity anymore, and you're not supposed to ask people about it at parties. If you don't know how to navigate it, you're not alone.
Lazy girl jobs and a window of opportunity
Right now, we're in the "uncomfortable" middle of work, as Klotz calls it. Many people know for sure what they don't want out of a job, whether that's a long commute, strict hours, or even feeling isolated by remote work.
"Coming out of the pandemic, it seems like we have a very low tolerance for things from the work world that waste our time," Klotz said.
But, as the window to job hop closes a bit and work starts to settle down from pandemic and recovery-induced disruptions, it's time to start thinking about what we do want. Chris Bailey, a productivity expert who's written three books on the topic, told me that the pandemic gave us a moment to consider "whether our work deserved to be a part of our identity."
Ultimately, "in a lot of ways it didn't change how we work; we're kind of back into the rhythms of things — we need to earn a paycheck," Bailey said. "But at the same time, it did allow us that opportunity to step back."
Looking at the numbers, we have been working less in our return to the new normal, whatever that looks like. Workers' average weekly hours tanked and then skyrocketed throughout the thick of the pandemic; they finally began tumbling down again in early 2022.
"I think what's happened in the US with the pandemic has been an epiphany, kind of a wake up moment for a lot of people to say, frankly, why the heck am I working so hard?" Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and work-from-home expert, told me.
"We have some evidence that Americans are working a little bit less hard. And I actually think that's maybe quite a rational choice," Bloom added. "As an economist, at some point you have to think, there's only so much TV you can watch and only so many expensive meals and iPhones and cars. There's a limit of what you can spend your money on and at some point you think, why don't I just work a bit less?"
That resonates with the step back that Bailey describes. For some, an eagle's eye view of work meant embracing things like "lazy girl jobs," low effort roles that pay well and don't heap on stress. Those in "lazy girl jobs" are happy to not aspire to more, and eager to work less. For them, work has perhaps settled into a more tenable place. Americans have shifted their time since the pandemic. The amount of time spent on housework is up 3.6% since 2017, and the amount of time spent on work dipped, went up, and then stabilized.
For others, though, it's meant feeling trapped in roles and actually hoping to get more out of work — the grumpy stayers who would like to care more about their jobs, or have a healthier balance, but find their bosses or work circumstances stymieing. That's a reality that both workers and employers need to confront.
"A lot of the time when I would talk to leaders during the Great Resignation and they'd say, 'You know, when the economy slows down, resignations are going to slow down with it,'" Klotz said. "And I said, 'Yeah, I'm sure that's true, but that actually creates a bigger problem for you. Would you rather have unhappy employees leave, or stick around and be unhappy in the job?'"
For employers, that could be giving workers continued flexibility, or giving them the space to voice their complaints. And for you as a worker, that might mean treating your work setup not as a given, but as an ongoing experiment. The opportunity to job hop may be dwindling, but that doesn't mean work has to settle into 2019 norms.
"I hope this window stays open long enough and the companies are open-minded enough to say let's try these different ways of working, rather than just assuming that the ways that we were working in 2019 were optimal," Klotz said. "I think the window is closing, but I knew that we would for a while be in this uncomfortable middle."
Are you trying to figure out what works mean to you? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@insider.com.
Correction: August 10, 2023 — This story was updated to reflect that the chart depicts percent changes in how Americans are allocating their time, not how much time they are spending on certain activities.