Why Work Is More Than Just a Job

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As a society, we’ve been somewhat conditioned to dread Monday. Phrases such as “Monday blues” or “TGIF” send us a clear signal that the hours between Monday and Friday are not our own. They are times when we are obligated into something we’d rather not be doing, for people we’d rather not be doing it for.

And of course, this can be the case! I’ve certainly been in jobs where I got the Sunday night dread or have clock-watched my way to lunchtime and beyond. In the wrong role or at the wrong company, going to work can be incredibly draining. But just because work can sometimes be wrong doesn’t mean that it necessarily is.

Work is essential to psychological health.

It fulfills a number of needs, as found in research by psychologist David L. Blustein:

1. It gives us a mechanism through which we can accomplish things, which is essential to building our self-efficacy or self-esteem.
2. It gives us a connection to and a place in broader society, providing a community within which we can share and make sense of important moments in the world.
3. It gives us skills, which ultimately allow us to define the direction of our own lives and manifest the realities that we want for ourselves.

To see work as just an economic necessity is to miss so much of what it can, and should, give people.

And it is to dismiss the way that work can get under our skin and mean more to us than it ostensibly should. I’m not self-employed. If a project doesn’t go well at work, it’s not going to result in immediate financial loss for me. But that doesn’t stop me from getting frustrated or disappointed when it happens.

It is possible we have spent too much time trying to pretend that work is meaningless when, in fact, it has an awful lot of meaning.

The impact of work on your life stretches beyond working hours, and, unfortunately, pretending work is unimportant doesn’t diminish its importance. After all, careers are “a representation of reality.”

Why is it important to acknowledge this?

Because if work is essential to psychological health, it can also be detrimental to it. If it’s a mechanism to accomplish things, it can be a source of burnout when the things you are trying to accomplish are too much with the resources you have. If it gives a connection to a (non-digital) social network, it’s a source of loneliness when you don’t feel like you can connect. And if it’s an opportunity to define your direction, it had best be a direction that you want to go in, and not the direction work is taking you in.

My advice now is to realize that you can’t compartmentalize work from your overall psychological well-being. Start to think about the working life that you, the unique person that you are, want. Life after the pandemic represents a chance to shape working life that we’ve never had before and to let go of some of the constraints that may have held us back. Ask yourself:

• Am I accomplishing things that I think are important in my role?
• Do I feel connected to the people I work with?
• Am I on a bigger path that I’m creating for myself?

If the answer to any of the above is no, it may be that your work is not contributing to your overall psychological health in the way that it should be.

It is common to think of personal or professional development as separate from each other. It’s also common to think that those paths are predefined and that successful development translates to how far we move along them.

However, for development to have a greater impact on your own well-being, a better way to think about it may be in terms of how well you can continuously adapt to a changing environment. Now presents a great opportunity to take a leap forward in both our personal and professional development and increase our psychological well-being in the process.