We're lonely because we expect jobs to do everything

The English-speaking world has also lost a lot of holidays our forebears got to enjoy

A Midsummer celebration in France in 1893.

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I’m going to try something a bit different today. Sometimes in this newsletter I’ll take a recent news article and write a response or analysis. But I have more links piling up than I’ll ever have time to respond to, so for this week’s post I’m going to do brief(ish) responses to several different pieces.

Institutional breakdown is making people lonely and ruining their jobs

Last month, the Intercept published a huge piece on how infighting is making progressive advocacy groups ineffective. The gist is that the staff at organizations focused on things like the environment, abortion, racial justice, etc. are spending so much time fighting about the culture of their workplaces that they don’t have any time left to actually work on policies that advance their agendas.

The nature and details of these fights is beyond the scope of this blog. But I was struck by this passage, which notes that some workers expect their jobs to be all things in their lives:

The environment has pushed expectations far beyond what workplaces previously offered to employees. “A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” said one executive director. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can’t say that, they would crucify me.”

In other words, instead of trading their time for just a paycheck, the workers in question here are arguing that their jobs should also provide for their social, emotional, and etc. needs¹.

Whether this is a good or bad thing, and how much support beyond money an employer should offer, is up for debate. That said, it does seem like there’s a downside as fights over these things have apparently hamstrung the ability of advocacy groups to fulfill their missions.

But what I really wondered after reading this piece is if the trend toward jobs having to fulfill every social and emotional need of workers has to do with the crumbling of basically every other institution. In my experience, a lot of professional class workers are not very religious, at least in the sense that they regularly meet with fellow members of their faith. There’s not a lot of involvement in formal clubs — think, the Rotary Club or the Lions Club or the Elks or whatever. Many folks lack a family support network that is bigger than two or three people.

People have friends, sometimes lots of them, but that has always been the case. In the past, most people also had a variety of other social spheres from which they could draw support. For a lot of people — and I’m definitely including myself in this category — that’s just not the case any more².

So, when the guy quoted in that Intercept story asks “can you get your love and healing at home, please?”, the answer for a lot of people is, definitely not. And so the only remaining formal institutional relationship that’s left — jobs — now has to fill a bunch of roles that used to be distributed across a bunch of institutions.

I don’t know what the solution here is. People are abandoning formal institutions for a reason, so the answer isn’t to just tell people to go out and join a social club or a church. But it also doesn’t feel like the status quo is working.

We’ve been robbed of our feasts and festivals

I mentioned above that historically people had social and institutional support that today is gone or fading. One dimension of that problem is the gradual winnowing of a once-robust calendar of feasts and festivals.

British journalist Ed West explores what we’ve lost in a recent blog post titled “Make England Merry Again.” He starts with Midsummer’s Eve, which used to be a big holiday for people in the Anglophone world:

There was once a time when people up and down the country would spend the evening around bonfires, drinking ale and generally being merry in that way I like to imagine medieval people. The whole community would get together and mark the passage of the longest evenings of the year before the arrival of the hot summer.

That sounds lovely. But do you know what I did for Midsummer’s Eve this year? I fell asleep while watching an episode of Seinfeld on Netflix. Which is to say, I did nothing³.

West goes on to note that there were lots of holidays that most people used to celebrate, but which have now fallen into general disuse. And that’s a problem because “humans are not just social mammals, we are ultra-social by the standards of other species; that’s why we need common rituals and why we’re chasing that religious feeling everywhere and can’t find it.”

Again, this is another dimension of the work problem discussed above. Without any feasts and festivals — or “common rituals,” in West’s words — jobs have to provide those things. But jobs really aren’t religions, so it doesn’t work and everyone is dissatisfied.

West’s solution is to bring back traditional holidays, essentially faking it till we make it with a pre-Reformation calendar. I’m not sure how effective that’ll be, but it seems like it’s worth a try.

The soulmate paradigm is inescapable

Finally, I wanted to highlight this piece from the Atlantic which ponders whether or not couples should merge their finances. What’s remarkable about this piece is that it’s all about money, but barely touches on the financial implications of merging or not merging bank accounts.

In other words, the piece is primarily concerned about the emotional impacts of merging finances — Will merging make a person happier? Will it bring two people closer — and not on which choices are likely to lead to greater financial prosperity.

The problem is that financial prosperity is a key part of the equation when it comes to happiness. So when thinking about merging finances, the question can’t just be “what will make us feel most connected?” It also has to be, “which option is most likely to make us financially prosperous, so we don’t have to be stressed out about putting food on the table or a roof over our heads?”⁴

I’m not criticizing the journalist or the piece itself. Rather, I’m holding it up as epitomizing the soul mate concept of marriage, or the idea that marriage is primarily about an emotional connection between two people. This idea — the history of which I explored in a previous post — is so entrenched that even conversations about money aren’t actually about money. They’re about emotional connections.

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1. While the piece is about people in political advocacy jobs, I suspect this is a thing beyond that field; I know people in tech and journalism (my own field) who have mentioned similar debates happening in their workplaces.

2. There are plenty of individual exceptions. I know lots of people who have been a part of churches, for example, or various social organizations. But I think the data on the decline of things like religion bears this out.

3. There are some people who are trying to bring back things like Midsummer festivals and feasts. It’s still a pretty niche thing, but I personally hope it spreads.

4. For instance, what if people who combine their money end up 10% richer 20 years down the road? Or 10% poorer? Wouldn’t those different outcomes likely have an impact on happiness? And wouldn’t that information be useful when deciding to merge or not merge bank accounts?