Wat mengs du? - Rethinking success: What does work really owe us?

This is not a call to pick yourself up by the bootstraps. I haven’t been in the United States long enough to buy into the adage that hard work and dedication alone are enough to get you to the top. I have seen people pick themselves up by said bootstraps only to get tangled in the sticky webs of self-actualization. This is not a call to reject the hustle either. After all, I am sitting here at my desk, with only a part-time job, trying my best to make my way in this world by putting pen to paper. Rather, it is a call to reconsider what work means to us, what we are willing to give it, and what we can expect from it.

No place represents the hustle culture more enthusiastically than New York City. When I first arrived, I worked in a café with people who were holding down multiple jobs – some to survive, others because it was in their nature. It's an infectious mindset, and soon I ventured beyond the bar to carve up my week into three different occupations. Eventually, the voice of my inner critic, parading as ambition but really just fed on a steady diet of corporate success stories, grew in urgency. So, I looked for a desk job – one where I would not have to rely on the whims of the customer and their tips to make a living. I found a position at a nonprofit organization and eventually started working for the private foundation of one of their backers. Philanthropy is a strange beast. Coming from Europe, I understood it to be complementary to the government, but because the American system privatizes so many community services, it is often individuals, rather than an elected body, who get to decide who deserves support. When I learned all I could, I quit that job too.

I entered the unknown territory of American unemployment and found myself on a parallel track with thousands of American government workers who lost their jobs. Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency set out to drastically reduce the number of U.S. federal workers. Organizations like Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for International Development saw their workforce slashed by 99%, and the Department of Education had almost half of its employees let go. I think of those fired federal workers when I hover my mouse over the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn. It’s you and me, I think, while half-heartedly clicking through yet another application for a social impact job.

My idea of success is shaped by my upbringing in Luxembourg. The tenets of job security and longevity, as well as the value placed on public service are deeply ingrained in my understanding of work. At the same time, I hold great respect for the makers and doers who choose less traditional career paths, both in Luxembourg and abroad. What strikes me most is the flavor of self-actualization that defines so many success stories. Was work always about entrepreneurship? In “Make Your Own Job”, Harvard University lecturer Erik Baker argues that entrepreneurialism is a work ethic that relies on people’s ability to create work, rather than just execute it. It carries the promise of something more, both financially and spiritually. Rather than striving to work hard and reap the rewards in the form of a rich social life unrelated to work, we hold ourselves to the standard of what he calls “intrinsic motivation” to transpose passion into a career. I relate to Baker’s assessment that it is an exhausting system.

With or without a clear vision of what success means to you, looking for a job is a thankless endeavor. You might start with a full tank of confidence in your skills, your experience, and your adaptability. But that tank empties quickly. With each application, you give a little bit of yourself away, and the empty space in the tank slowly fills with desperation. That is not always a bad thing – it can make you push harder and consider positions you might otherwise have ignored. In the best of cases, it teaches you things about yourself – new things, new interests, and new skills. But it does not always broaden your horizon; sometimes it retracts your world and it becomes so small that there is no room for mistakes.

Every conversation carries the potential of a professional opportunity, no matter how mundane the situation or the person you are talking to. Each application – and if you are lucky, each interview – becomes an exercise in personifying the perfect candidate. You cosplay perfection for every role you apply to, and you start to collect alternate versions of yourself – so many that, at the end of the day, you struggle to find yourself in that warehouse of identities you built. Open one door, and there she is: the better version of you, the one that wakes up early, works out daily and is a social butterfly. Step out, close the door, peek into another room: this version of you is living out her creative dreams, she is an artist, and she does not care what others think – the noble pursuit of art is enough to keep her head high. Take a look at the room at the end of the corridor: here sits the serious you, the one who took her degrees to all the right places. She’s a diplomat, she is an academic and she is the most damned of them all: a strategy consultant.

So what do I leave you with? Not a call to reject the system point-blank. I believe there are always small ways to make the world a better place, and I know many people who are doing it day after day. Not a call to blindly give in to the system either because it does not feel right to value capital over labor. Then, maybe just another question: Do you need to love your work? Or can you find accomplishment in capability – in showing up every day and checking off your tasks, no matter how menial or quotidian? What does it take to find value in work that is both fulfilling and has some kind of positive impact? Maybe pull on those bootstraps one day and stumble over them the next, and you might just reach a place that suits all your parts.