Redefining Work (The Great Resignation, The YOLO Economy and The Burnout Epidemic)

General Knowledge, Self-Reflection
February 2, 2022

Introduction

In August 2021, the United States met the highest rate of employees quitting their job, a whopping 4.3 million!

We have come up with terms such as The Great Resignation, the ‘turnover crisis’, or the YOLO economy to describe this phenomenon of employees leaving their job that has been spreading like wildfire across the globe.

Tons of videos entitled ‘I don’t dream of labour’, the subreddit ‘Anti-work’, and discussions around the nature of work that is starting to take a shift, where once work was used as a means of survival, now has taken on a more spiritual meaning, whereby more and more people are starting to believe that work is something that should fulfils you, not only as a means of income. Over the years, we are starting to see more and more unconventional types of jobs — youtubers, social media influencers, trade and cryptocurrency, NFTs etc.

Healthcare Sector

Since I myself have resigned from being a junior doctor, how is the healthcare sector doing in relation to this crisis?

According to the Malaysian Deputy Health Minister, Datuk Dr Noor Azmi Ghazali, more than 1,700 government doctors resigned over the last four years. From January to November 2021, 514 contract medical officers resigned their posts. The change in hiring system from permanent to contract system is also partly to blame, with benefits being cut off (childcare, sick or educational leave) and salary reduced while workload remains the same with their permanent peers (or more, especially with the pandemic), and not eligible for specialization training.

With all of this happening, how the hell did we end up here? Before that, let’s talk about what work is and the history behind work.

What is work?

Economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants. The dictionary refers work as “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result”. We can see work divided into two different categories: Functional and psychological.

In today’s context, work often refers to employment or your job or what you do for a living, whereby you as an employee trade your time, skills and talents for your employer or the company you work for, in exchange for money which is basically your income or salary. The employer reaps the reward of your labour from the increased company productivity and efficiency (functional). In the psychological sense, work is where we get our sense of value, sense of worth from the work we produce, it is our identity and determines our social standing among society.

An Economic Utopia

In his book “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time”, James Suzman talks about an influential economist, John Maynard Keynes, where in 1930 he describes the ‘economic utopia’:

“By early 21st century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills of an economic ‘promised land’ in which everybody’s basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than 15 hours in a week”.

According to Keynes, we passed productivity and capital growth thresholds Keynes calculated would need to be met to get there some decades ago. Most of us still work just as hard as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, and our governments remain fixated on economic growth and employment creation as at any point in our history.

Why Are We Working Harder Than Ever?

Our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95% of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history. The prevailing view of hunter-gatherers back in Keynes’ time was that life in primitive societies was a constant battle against starvation. However, now we know that modern time hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi in Namibia did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they are usually well-nourished, lived longer than people in farming societies, rarely worked more than 15 hours/week, and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also back then they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs.

So how did we end up here? How did work become the centre of our lives? How is our identity attached to the job we do?

Economists attribute this to the “The problem of scarcity”. We as a society have infinite wants or desires but the resources are limited. To economists, scarcity is what drives us to work to bridge the gap between our apparently infinite desires and our limited means.

In contrast, economic life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity.

Another factor could also be capitalism.

Capitalistic View of Work

In the capitalistic world, work is a means to produce profit, and making as much profit as possible is the ultimate goal. A capitalistic society incentivizes employees with benefits, compensations, leaves, allowances in return that they will work more for the company, to increase the company’s growth and productivity.

Our Typical Day of Work

Most of us have probably this experienced this: we wake up early to work, get ready, commute, arrive at work, do our work (or pretend to do our work), then come home feeling drained, we decompress from work with some Netflix, a few drinks, reward ourselves to expensive food, get our salary at the end of the month, treat ourselves with that new handbag from Gucci and repeat it all over again the next day or the next month.

I think we all have a feeling like something’s missing, there must come to a point when we question ourselves, “Is this is?” but because we’re so busy with work, we don’t even have the time to sit back and ponder upon this question. We just go through life on autopilot, sleepwalking through work, feeling numb through morning traffics, dreading the day and not feeling alive, but because everyone is going through the same thing and are not admitting it, we think this is normal, this is how is has always been — we normalize this dread for work, work = pain = NORMAL. Are we really making a living? Or are we making a dying? But what if it doesn’t have to be this way? What if we can do work that is fun, fulfilling and that makes us feel alive?

Albert Camus talks about this daily work-life routine in his book “The Myth of Sisyphus” that I think we all can relate to:

“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time”.

Vicki Robins illustrates this scene beautifully in her book “Your Money or Your Life”:

Earning a living was a means to an end, the means was earning and the end was living. But over time, our relationship with money: earning it, spending it, investing it, owning it, protecting it, worrying about it has taken over the major parts of our lives. Most of us spend more than 40 hours of the week of a total 168 hours of the month earning money. We must take time to dress for our jobs, commute to our jobs, think about our jobs at work, and when we are at home, decompress from our jobs. We must spend money to maintain our jobs: job costuming, commuting cost, food bought expensively at the workplace, with all that time and money spent on and around our jobs, is it any wonder that we’ve come to take our identities from them? When asked what do you do? We don’t say I do plumbing, we say I am a plumber.

“Do we come home from our “making a living” activity with more life? Do we bound through the door, refreshed and energized, ready for a great evening with family and friends? Where’s all the life we supposedly made at work? For many of us, isn’t the truth of it closer to “making a dying”?”

“We are essentially using up our life energy with hopes that it will bring us meaning, fulfillment and joy and happiness and money. Most of us say what we value most is our time with loved ones: family, partners, community, and yet a huge portion of our time and life is spent on our job”.

“The dreams we had of finding meaning and fulfillment through our jobs have faded into the reality of professional politics, burnout, boredom, and intense competition. That sense of wonder we had as children, that sense of mission we had in college, those times when love connected our hearts to all beings great and small are forgotten—all filed under “We were so young.”

“Along with racism and sexism, our society has a hidden hierarchy based on what you do for money. That’s called jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings, and even at home”.

Worker-Consumer Identity

Whether we realize it or not, we are being trapped in a perpetual system of a worker-consumerism cycle, whereby we work, to gain income in order to buy more stuff to increase economic growth.

Work -> Gain income -> Spend money (consumerism) -> Increase economic growth and productivity -> Increase company profit -> Pay workers -> Workers work –> Gain income -> Cycle continues

We work to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t care, we post our perfect, put-together lives on social media, in order not to feel left out or left behind in life. We work harder to earn more, but we are enjoying life less.

What Changed Our Perception of Work?

Since the pandemic, most employees are either retrenched due to economic downturn, or they are forced to work from home for safety measures. By working from home, they get to spend more time with family at home, they have more autonomy with their time, how they use it, be more productive in their own way, instead of going to the office everyday. Employees start to realize that the 9-to-5 lifestyle, the hustle and grind lifestyle is not suitable and sustainable, and most importantly, not aligned with their values of freedom — freedom of time to spend with loved one, for creative expression through hobbies or projects, for travel and immersed in new places and culture, freedom from being controlled over what to use with their time, what to work on, who to work with, how to do the work. Employees start to see a different perspective of work and how it can be. And by working remotely, they also realize that most works can be done remotely, from the comforts of their home.

Employees Are Quitting (The Microsoft Study)

In a report called The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work – Are We Ready?, Microsoft did a study called the 2021 Work Trend Index, which outlines findings of more than 30,000 people in 31 countries. It shows that 40% of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer within the next year, with 46% planning to make a major pivot or career transition, they’re likely to move because they can now work remotely. Microsoft found that as well as 54% of Generation Z workers, (which makes up 41% of the entire global workforce) could be considering handing in their resignation due to burnout. We are now facing a major shift as we are seeing a trend towards hybrid work — a blended model where some employees return to the workplace and others continue to work from home.

The Burnout Epidemic

Other than the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s another epidemic that is lurking: The Burnout Epidemic.

In her book “The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It” by Jennifer Moss, she describes the 3 signs of burnout:

Disengagement, disconnected
Cynicism
Exhaustion

Burnout syndrome is also recognized by the WHO as an occupational phenomenon, and is part of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

Universal Basic Income (but won’t people get lazy?)

One of the statements that is usually made about people quitting their job is that they perceive this generation as soft, and weak.

But I don’t think this is entirely true. I think it’s because right now, we have more abundance, and for most of us, life is not as challenging or scarce as it was back in the Boomer era. We have more choices and freedom to choose want we want for ourselves, and more time to think about those choices.

Especially during the pandemic lockdown, employees had more free time to do what they actually love and that they didn’t get to do when they were working a 9-to-5 job in the office. They had more control and autonomy over their time. There was a Twitter thread that I came across a few weeks ago, and it really made me question about my thoughts on work and the meaning of life. The Twitter thread goes like this:

And this was the case about most universal basic income (UBI) discourse that has been going on: If we just pay people to exist, we will not do anything, and that people are lazy and if we don’t have a job, we will not do anything. But this Twitter thread actually shows all the things that we as human beings have been yearning to do but are not able to, because we are so tied down to our work that we just have no space to do anything else.

In a New York Times article entitled “Welcome to the YOLO Economy”, Kevin Roose quoted,

A lot of news about employers having trouble findings workers because people just don’t want to work for a boss anymore.

Adam Reiner in The Restaurant Manifesto as he writes about the restaurant labour shortage:

“Because the hospitality labor force, like so many in the educational and higher ed and non-profit and public service and childcare and health care labor force, isn’t just exhausted, or burnt out. They’re demoralized — which is different than being lazy or temporarily burnt out — and that was true even before the pandemic.

Demoralization is what unites the underpaid, pandemic-unemployed worker, the adequately-paid, Covid-essential worker, and the more-than-adequately-paid, WFH knowledge worker”.

The Work Institute 2020 Retention Report

According to the Work Institute 2020 Retention Report, the results show that 20% of employees are quitting their job in search for career development (in other words, to find a better job, to better themselves); 12% aspire for work-life balance and 10% are quitting for their well-being.

Here, we can see that people are starting to take their careers in a more holistic approach, and not merely as a means to an end. They are therefore, taking their mental and spiritual health into consideration.

“Work to live, not live to work”.

Finland and Denmark — The World’s Happiest Country and What We Can Learn From Them

According to the World Happiness Report, economists have analyzed 6 major factors that they say attributes to happiness in a country:

GDP per capita
Life expectancy and health
Social support (Or relationship with others: have someone to rely on, someone to be there in times of need)
Freedom to make life choices (Can a person make important life choices? Can you shape life the way you want?)
Generosity
Freedom from corruption (trust in businesses & government)

Economist John Helliway (who edited the report) says that social support, freedom, generosity, and trust in institutions are actually the significant underlying factors for happiness in a country.

Even though they pay higher taxes, the people of Denmark and Finland are happy to do so for the great services and benefits they get in return: Free healthcare, free education: daycare, college fee, paid maternity leave (10-months paid parental leave).

The Way Forward

So, where do we go from here? What are some of the ways or changes that we can make in order to move forward?

I have a few suggestions:

1) Companies and employers should start taking employee welfare and work-life balance seriously

Create a plan for work flexibility, encourage to work remotely for tasks that can be done remotely

2) Rethink company culture

More inclusive, less of senior-junior hierarchical mentality, a culture that empowers individual skills for collective growth
Autonomy and freedom over how they do work, less micromanaging, encourage individual creativity and skills

3) Respect for employees life outside work

Not calling/texting about work outside work hours

4) Government and companies should rethink about monthly wages and whether it reflects the workload, taking into consideration global economy, inflation, price of expenses and cost of living

Have more discussions about universal basic income and whether it will benefit the country

5) Governments could look into the Nordic Model of Economy that implements socialist-capitalist mixed economy

CONCLUSION

Should we be afraid of mass unemployment? Should work be the metric in determining a person’s worth, identity or value in society? What are your thoughts in this new shift of our perception towards work?

Share your thoughts in the comments below, so we can discuss on ways to move the needle towards a better future for all.

Hello! I am Christal

I'm a doctor, trainer, coach and author of 'Should I Quit?'. I founded Awaken Academy, where we help doctors discover alternative careers that are fulfilling and aligned with their true Self.

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