I sometimes ask in the classes I teach, which are made up of predominantly white, middle- and upper-class Christian college students, “Who do you think worked harder in school—the kid who grew up to be a lawyer or the kid who grew up to be a fast-food cook?” Usually only a handful recognize that kids who end up with lower grades or lower-paying jobs often work just as hard or harder than their higher-earning peers. Sometimes solving life’s problems takes more than hard work.
Our school system trains kids to think they’ll get ahead through a meritocracy of hard work, and so does much of the messaging in our churches, media, and families. Indeed, much research shows that when the level of effort people put into a task correlates to the rewards they receive, groups thrive and individuals stay motivated. Hard work is so foundational to Western concepts of achieving the good life that it can be hard to see any other options. But for many people in 2020, that narrative of hard work and the good life shattered.
Hard work is so foundational to Western concepts of achieving the good life that it can be hard to see any other options.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us to confront the narratives we took for granted. For some, the year brought beneficial possibilities like working remotely or new business ventures. But for many more, 2020 brought vocational struggle and disappointment. We faced rampant unemployment, conflicts between home and work, interrupted retirement plans, new reminders of the racialized inequalities in employment, and starkly disproportionate work-related health risks. In 2020, work got harder—we struggled amid a proliferation of rules, personal protective equipment, awkward technologies, uncertain futures, and clashing family priorities. And all that hard work didn’t necessarily seem to get us any closer to the good life.
For Americans on both sides of the political aisle, the simple graph above often serves as a go-to guide when facing personal and social problems. Liberals were quick to criticize Donald Trump for his hard-work narrative when he claimed that his fortune came from business acumen rather than a million-dollar “small loan,” but Joe Biden and nearly every political candidate for decades have played up the same story of their hard-working roots. Groups including immigrants, farmers, and the working class are all often pressured to prove that they deserve dignity and rights based on being “hard workers.” In our politics as well as our personal lives, Americans often equate hard work with goodness itself.
Which is why even as the pandemic called into question much about our working lives, Americans still tend to fall back on this same tired hard-work narrative in looking for ways forward. Surely, we think, if we didn’t value hard work, wouldn’t we end up lazy and unproductive? We idolize hard workers and defend ourselves from allegations that success comes from anything but hard-earned merit because at some level we want to believe it should be true—hard work should earn rewards.
But there’s much this narrative misses. Hard work won’t bring back factories from nations paying lower wages, or eliminate immigration barriers. Hard work won’t change the ways that US agricultural profits are structured around subsidies, indebted farms, and GMO patents. Hard-working individuals won’t singlehandedly undo the systems of racial prejudice, segregation, and inequity built over centuries. For many, social structures are set up such that opportunities for rewarding and enjoyable work simply don’t exist. Making hard work the centre of our explanations for who has or hasn’t succeeded can blind us to the deeply influential systemic causes of unequal career outcomes.
And relying just on the hard-work narrative also leaves people unmoored in their personal vocational journeys. Relying on hard work for our happiness can leave us burned out when we have jobs and emotionally distraught when underemployed. The hard-work narrative does not describe the actual rules of society’s success game, and neither does it describe the path to the good life God intends for us. A good life is richer and more complicated than trudging our way through checklists of tough tasks.
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Let’s take a step back and reassess what the good life is and what work has to do with getting there. What follows is an activity based on qualitative research techniques I’ve used to get people thinking about work and the good life. It’s designed to help you dig into your assumptions about work, and then recognize possible changes you want to make in how you approach your work and vocation. Think of it as a vocational audit for 2021.
Start Sketching
First, grab a paper and pencil and draw the following: a star somewhere on the paper to represent the good life, and a dot somewhere to represent not living the good life. (Notice the graph above includes these too.) Now draw some representation of how you believe you get from one to the other. Consider using lines, arrows, shapes, or simple figures.
Stop and complete this before you scroll on. If you’d like, also spend some time writing in a journal about how you chose the elements of your drawing. Better yet, ask someone to try the activity with you, and talk about your drawings together.
Think Wider
Once you’ve made an initial attempt to represent your beliefs about the good life, let’s look at some examples of how else people drew the path to the good life. Then read on for some questions to help you reassess your own drawing.
Read more here: qroseblog.com
In 2014 and 2015, I conducted over a hundred interviews with people in South Africa about their work and understandings of the good life, and I often asked people to use this drawing activity. I also put simplified versions of people’s drawings and ideas from conversations onto notecards, and asked people to talk about the drawings of others, choosing drawings they liked or disliked. The drawings are a great way to refine and identify beliefs about the good life, because you can interpret them in many ways.
For example, some people described the path to the good life like this:
In one South African Zulu saying, success is like a wheel that turns and turns, taking people to success at times, but eventually bringing back down the people who achieve success through unjust means. It’s a vision of the good life that involves a hope for justice.