What Work Is

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Today’s essay is part of a series on work that includes me,

Latham Turner

,

Bowen Dwelle

, Michael Mohr of

Sincere American Writing

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

. You may remember our past series about fatherhood and recovery. This week, all of us will wrestle with what work means to us. These collaborative series are a highlight of my life on Substack, and I hope you’ll keep tuning in this week. Let us know how our meditations on work compare to your own.

What Work Is

One day my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Sampson, tried to snap me back on task by quizzing me on the lesson while I stared at the ceiling, balancing a pencil on my nose. “What really chapped me,” she told me forty years later, “Was that you answered correctly.” 

It is a credit to Mrs. Sampson that she did not try to keep me in line by force or by shame, as many of my other teachers would do. Instead, she found new ways to challenge me. As a result, my dominant memory of kindergarten is walking out into the afternoon sun to meet my mother, trying my best not to smile because I wanted to surprise her with my prize: a Freddy the Frog sticker for best student of the week. 

I never could pull it off — long before I reached her, I always broke into an ear-to-ear grin.

For many years that memory explained a lot about my relationship with work. Freddy the Frog was replaced by grades, grades earned me scholarships and graduate fellowships, fellowships set me apart as a job candidate, and once I had the job, I chased other prizes like publications and teaching awards in pursuit of tenure, the ultimate stamp of approval, and finally the rank of full professor.

I was good at that game. But it made me vulnerable to the story other people told about me. Success meant winning their admiration more than satisfying myself. And so when approval was withheld, when my work went unacknowledged, I had no story to fall back on. Others held my worth in their hands.¹

To Mrs. Sampson, the boy balancing a pencil on his nose was headed down the wrong path. Freddy the Frog helped him get his priorities right. But I recognize that boy in my children, in how they teach themselves mastery through play, where the only why is pleasure or discovery. 

For my eldest daughter, this once meant crafting endless creations with nothing but cardboard, scissors, and a hot glue gun. She made herself a pair of shoes, a sword and shield, even a sleigh with curved runners. My middle daughter coaxed my mother into baking a pie during a recent visit, and watching them roll the crust out together reminded me of how cooking is, at its heart, a form of play. Let’s see what happens when we add this to the pot. My son doesn’t see his Lego sets as work, even though he follows the instructions to the letter. In fact, he disassembles the pieces almost immediately after matching the image on the box, just to see if he can do it again from memory. 

I’m struck by how often adults project work stories onto children at play. I fall into this trap myself, seeing a future as an accountant in my son’s sorting of colored pencils, or in the perfect lines he likes to make with his toy cars. His fascination with building must mean that he’ll someday be an engineer. It never seems enough to see pleasure or mastery as the end in itself.

The story we tell about school is the story we tell about work. Theodore Sizer captures it well in his classic essay, “What High School Is”:

School is conceived of as the children’s workplace, and it takes young people off parents’ hands and out of the labor market during prime-time work hours. Not surprisingly, many students see going to school as little more than a dogged necessity.

The reward for embracing school as work is...more work. In fact, that seems to be the only reason universities exist anymore: not to create knowledge or crucibles for creative play, but to turn the K-12 worker bee into the perfect industry drone. Not to question systems of commerce and power, but to mold oneself in their image. To genuflect before the marketplace. 

Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, captured this idea in a recent interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. Last year Gee slashed 28 undergraduate majors and graduate programs, terminating 143 faculty (many of them tenured), and completely eliminating the study of foreign languages at WVU. In Gee’s mind, academic programs exist to serve the “future needs of industry.”² Any form of study that does not translate directly to career outcomes is, in Gee’s estimation, irrelevant to the present time.

I was raised to earn my keep, to make myself useful, to take pride in my work. And those are values I want to pass on to my children. But I also want to protect my kids from the story about work that Gee and other industrialist presidents are telling, because I recognize that story as a different version of Freddy the Frog. Do what you’re told, and you’ll get this sticker. We will tell you what you’re worth.

The story about education qua work or about education as the training ground for working life³ requires increasing financial risk. Families who can’t afford skyrocketing tuition have to accept debt as the tradeoff for employability. This feeds Gee’s urgency to offer a clear return on that investment with industry-friendly outcomes. But even graduates who do everything right — get the best grades, choose the right internships, build the resume that lands the six-figure job — have to surrender decades of freedom to pay down their debts. It’s a great deal for industry, because employees who have college loans on top of their mortgages are not going to question the company line. They’ll put up with awful working conditions, shortchange their family life, do whatever they have to do to stave off bankruptcy. 

Yet the story that I see on LinkedIn sounds eerily similar to the one that WVU professors experienced under Gee. Those faculty were not failures — they had weathered incredible odds, often 300:1, to win their positions. They were experts in their craft and presumably brought their very best to the classroom every day. The profession simply changed around them. Their president decided they were no longer relevant. Not even tenure could save them. 

The same might be said of user-experience research (UXR). In 2022, almost anyone you asked would have said that UXR was the gold standard for linking academic skills to industry needs. UXR was one of those havens for PhDs looking to flee toxic workplaces in higher ed. But a year later, thousands of UX researchers were laid off, and job listings in that field dropped by more than 70%.

Boom and bust is the reward for Freddy the Frog. In exchange for allowing others to define your worth, you learn that industry doesn’t need you anymore. Who are you then? What kind of value proposition asks American youths to spend twelve years molding themselves for college and then four years molding themselves for professional life, only to live in fear of a market crash or a sudden wave of layoffs? 

I want a better story about work for my kids, and I expect that you do, too. 

I picked up a hidden curriculum at home that did not mesh easily with my public education. My parents built a home on twenty acres above the tiny town of Troy, Montana, and slowly transformed the acreage into orchards and gardens. My mother taught me to read before I set foot in school, which might have been why I sometimes seemed distracted. Following a lesson that seemed too easy, just because the teacher said so, never made much sense to me after following my own curiosity so ravenously at home.

On paper we were poor. My father didn’t make much as a land surveyor, and my mother brought in a little side money by offering piano lessons and selling eggs. But our freezers were full of wild game, our shelves were packed with canned goods, and we bought other necessities in bulk from a local co-op. We were also rich in time.

Our subsistence lifestyle instilled a powerful work ethic in me. I spent hours watering the garden, pulling weeds, mowing the lawn (cursing every apple and plum tree that stood in my way), caring for the chickens, and hauling pruned branches to the burn pile. In the spring and summer, I combed the mountainside from dawn to dusk for morel mushrooms and huckleberries, which my father sold to confectioners and chefs in Missoula at a premium. There were always raspberries to pick, mountains of green beans to snap, hundreds of pounds of apples to harvest.

But I also learned that the usual rules about work did not apply to me. There was no reason to flip burgers downtown when I could earn more by selling wild berries or hustling landscaping gigs with lakefront property owners. And why punch a clock for forty hours so you could afford Iowa-raised beef at the supermarket, when you could fill your elk tags, package the meat yourself for a fraction of what a meat locker charged, and eat better in the bargain?⁴ We didn’t live off the grid, exactly, but my parents taught me that the American Dream was not always the superior way. 

So I was prepared, from my earliest days, to question the notion that doing well in school was the price of admission into professional life, or that professional life was all it was cracked up to be. This was my parents’ story more than mine, and there were times when I wished I could fit in more. I did not love wearing homemade overalls and corduroy shirts or carrying my lunch in a leather satchel with fringes, like Daniel Boone’s buckskin coat, when the other kids packed lunch boxes featuring Mr. T and the Dukes of Hazzard. And I can still remember my face burning with shame one day at my teacher’s reaction when she discovered that my mother had packed a tiny jar of raspberry wine to ease my chest cold. Over time that feeling of marginality hardened into a core belief about myself as an outsider, the weird kid, the adult who could never learn the secret handshakes no matter how hard he tried. 

Academe was once a natural home for misfits like me. I rarely questioned the pay, because I understood that my parents had traded much of their earning potential for freedom, and for many years it seemed like a good bargain to me. My colorful childhood, which often felt alienating at the time, made for excellent illustrations in class. Who better to teach Emerson and Thoreau than the kid who grew up in the woods? As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.⁵

There were days when the impenetrable mystery of teaching made me forget all about the prizes beyond the classroom door, the publications and grants and awards that set me apart from my colleagues. There’s nothing I miss more than the challenge of walking into a roomful of young people who aren’t sure they want to be there and helping them gel as a learning community, watching sullenness brighten into delight. 

That kind of joy often made me feel like I was getting away with something, breaking the rules of working life. And I suppose I was, because the Gordon Gees caught up with me eventually. Academe is now overrun with Thomas Gradgrinds who have no patience for learning that doesn’t build work skills. These new industrialists (and that is what they are) don’t even have room for Freddy the Frog. The point is not to distinguish yourself, it is to demonstrate that you’re meeting the requisite benchmarks, progressing nicely along the assembly line in alignment with your peers, never stopping to question the premise that is leading you further into debt in service of industries that offer no promises of security and that would be quite happy to send you packing just as you’ve moved your family across the country and taken out a mortgage on top of your student loans. 

The corporate abuses of the 1800s fueled labor riots and stories like Jack London’s “South of the Slot,” where an anthropologist named Freddie Drummond (dubbed “Ice-Box” by his classmates and “Cold Storage” by his colleagues) assumes the disguise of Big Bill Totts, a brawling laborer and organizer, in order to conduct a scientific study of the working class. Only life on the wrong side of the tracks is so much more enjoyable that Drummond experiences a transformation reminiscent of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. By the story’s end, Drummond has permanently morphed into Totts, trading his privilege and title for real living. London writes: 

In the years that followed no more lectures were given in the University of California by one Freddie Drummond and no more books on economics and the labor question appeared over the name of Frederick A. Drummond. On the other hand, there arose a new labor leader, William Totts by name.

From The Saturday Evening Post

But you won’t learn about Jack London in many college classes these days. What point is there in studying a story that actively questions capitalism, when American colleges and universities are trying to outdo each other with brand messaging and industry-friendly programs? 

During my last years of teaching, few of my students had ever heard of Office Space, the 1999 satire of corporate America that has only grown more relevant with time. The point of the film is that office life sucks, that skills don’t matter nearly as much as popularity and power, that the work often doesn’t make any damned sense, and that what is good for the company almost never jives with what is good for human beings. Peter Gibbons, the young protagonist, enacts a Drummond-like transformation at the end, happily trading his cubicle for a construction gig. It is no coincidence that young men are mimicking Drummond and Gibbons, bypassing college altogether for trades that offer more freedom and self-determination than the future they foresee in white-collar work.⁶ 

Is the worried Peter Gibbons really what a college education is for?

I frequently host roundtables for academics transitioning to industry roles. If you’ve followed this series for long, you’ve also seen my interviews with people who have successfully reinvented themselves as professionals. The playbook is clear enough: interview enough people to zero in on a role you really want, translate your work experience with that role in mind, and then apply like hell for several months until you make it through the gate. And never stop networking.

This is a brutal, grueling process, at least initially. I might tackle it like a mountain of green beans on the kitchen table if I believed in the premise. But every time I browse a job board, I find myself questioning the tradeoffs more than the work required. How could I satisfy the demands of a role commensurate with my credentials and be a good dad to my kids? How do I model a healthy relationship with work for them? And how do I save them from industrialists who want to exploit their talents for as long as it’s good for the company, and no longer than that? 

For now, my story leads back to my roots. Earlier this month I founded an LLC: Big Sky Insights. It is as much an expression of dissent as it is a business venture. I hope to scale my coaching and editing practice with time, but it is also a way to work outside the workplace, to place my children firmly at the forefront of my life and schedule everything else around our time together.

You might say it is a version of the life my parents chose, one of freedom and simplicity. I think of it as the Alternate American Dream.

More in the Work Series

It’s only after we’ve quit everything that we’re free to do anything.

Earning my bread

The Curse and Necessity of Money

The Pretender

Going Big or Staying Home

1. I take my title from Philip Levine’s unforgettable poem of the same name, which redefines work in a way similar to my attempts here.

2. This really is an astounding philosophical stance, given that many academic disciplines exist purely for themselves or are defined, at least in part, in resistance to industry. Anthropology and sociology, for instance, mold some skills that can be appropriated for corporate work. But that’s not why the disciplines exist. In fact, one wonders what is “academic” about a program that explicitly seeks to serve the needs of industry.

3. I’m reminded of the many goads that college faculty use to urge students to care about documentation style or other tedious details in academic assignments. “Being professional” is one of them, but I never found that convincing. I asked my students to care about the little things for their own self-respect. You shouldn’t be careful with evidence in hopes that an employer might be impressed by your attention to detail. You should be careful with evidence because you care about your integrity and the integrity of the information you’re consulting. Such an ethic has practical byproducts, but it exists for itself.

4. I’m always amused when I see elk burgers and steaks on restaurant menus for $20-50+. There’s no better food in the world than what you can harvest with your own hands, right from the source. This, too, is a form of wealth.

5. From Walden, Chapter 2.

6. My grandfather took pride in his work as a lifelong union member at a sawmill in Libby, Montana. But his generation remembered the abuses of nineteenth-century industrialists, and he always kept his core identity separate from the company’s. That view seems to be cycling back through Gen Z. There is some affinity between the slacker mentality and the cautious view of working people a century ago who were careful not to spend all their strength on the job. A character in Willa Cather’s “One of Ours” illustrates the point. Claude Wheeler takes over the farm for his father and works himself ragged harvesting corn. But one day his hired man Dan explains why he doesn’t hustle as hard as his employer: "It's all right for you to jump at that corn like you was a-beating carpets, Claude; it's your corn, or anyways it's your Paw's. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a hired man's got no property but his back, and he has to save it. I figure that I've only got about so many jumps left in me, and I ain't a-going to jump too hard at no man's corn."