Careers serve double duty in our society, providing people with meaning and direction as well as providing for their needs. The pursuit of a career helps you develop skills that are useful to others. But entwining your self-worth with your career leads to problems later in life. A job can be taken away from you at any time, and the ultimate goal of every typical career is to eventually stop working. Therefore, taking active measures to detach your self-worth from your career is vital to succeed throughout your life.
In my last piece, I discussed the importance of understanding your skill set and separating your skills from your industry. This separation gives you freedom to work on your terms and across a broader range of industries. Following on from this, the next step is to understand why we work at all.
Retirement brings with it an all-encompassing relinquishment of purpose, especially for full-time workers. Traditional retirement has us give up our career at the exact moment we need to hold onto it. This forfeiture of purpose creates a void that is difficult for those at the end of their careers to fill. The end result is depression, anxiety, and a lack of purpose.
I strongly believe that we should work for the sake of the work itself. Once money is no longer a driving force in decision-making, you can choose how you work. Caring for family, fixing things around the house, and volunteering are all types of work. All work has value, and detaching your self-worth from your career can help you do what makes you feel alive.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on how the glamorisation of prestigious careers causes people to choose goals that do not serve them.
Self-Worth & The Dangers of Workism
Self-worth is a feeling of being good enough, and deserving love, belonging, and respect from others. A positive self-worth is a vital perspective to have for a healthy mind. Unfortunately, the pressures of modern life force us to reject our self-worth and trade it in for workism.
Workism, or excessive devotion to one’s work ethic, is at the heart of our culture. It’s the invisible force that makes us feel like we need to work harder, or that we aren’t doing enough. Pursuing workism to its extreme creates a culture of arrogance, idolising an aspect of ourselves we don’t even own. We are more than our careers, but workism encourages us to think that our self-worth comes from the job title we have.
Feeling prideful about your successes is normal and should be celebrated. We accomplish great things through our work, and our entire society is built on the hard work of those who came before. However, challenges arise when people place undue emphasis on their titles, their status, or privileges arising from their work.
Climbing the corporate ladder might make you happy. Perhaps full-time work, and the ability to provide for your family makes you feel accomplished, strong, and relied on. But perhaps there are aspects of yourself or your life you are forced to neglect by choosing this path.
Who Are You Outside Of Work?
Imagine a business executive working long hours to provide for their family. Their expensive tastes acquired from continuously keeping up with their peers led to minimal savings. Their work keeps them from spending time with their family. Maintaining hobbies and friendships is similarly impossible.
Suppose this person retires, or otherwise stops working. What is left of them after removing work from their life?
They have no friends or community with which to celebrate their new chapter of life. They come home to a strained relationship with their family due to years of neglect. And giving up their work leaves behind a void of purpose.
Full-time careers, especially in high-intensity positions, require sacrifice. For many, the need to earn their “enough” forces them to work full-time, which directly leads to the sacrifice in question. This is especially true as the pressure to earn more and more increases.
It is impossible to discover who we truly are outside of work if we are trapped in a lifestyle where full-time work is necessary to survive. Foregoing this introspection and soul-searching robs us of the ability to understand who we truly are. This mode of living serves only to distract us from the highest version of ourselves.
What Connections Do You Have Outside of Work?
Just as we lose touch with ourselves when we work to extremes, so too do we lose touch with those around us. Placing too heavy an emphasis on work leads us to neglect our family and friends. The logical conclusion of this life is total isolation, which lead to the adoption of dangerous vice, poor mental health, or ultimate despair.
This outcome is unsurprising when we consider how much we work. When factoring in sleeping, eating, grooming, and commuting, a full-time job leaves surprisingly little time to live as we please. When full-time work is such a time sink, it’s natural that our options are limited. Connecting with others requires considerable effort – effort we are forced to use on work. This forces us to place a greater emphasis on the value of our work, as we are divorced from opportunites to find meaning outside of it.
Connections with loved ones forms the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. Navigating life without family or friends is a lonely existence, and is to be avoided. Therefore, we must work in such a way that we allow our relationships to thrive in spite of the work we commit ourselves to.
What is Your Purpose?
It can be problematic to make your work your primary purpose. Yes, it is important to Choose Work You Love, but your purpose should transcend your work. This is especially true when looking at traditional retirement.
If your job is your primary purpose, then the transition from full-time to unemployment or retirement become dangerous. Not only are you giving up your largest time commitment, but the void of purpose it leaves behind is vast. If you do work full-time, accomplishing goals outside of this is essential. But of course, you have limited time to work and focus on everything else you need to do.
This is the dangerous truth of devotion to work, and of the fruits that come of it. The pursuit of more money, prestige, or power robs us of our “enough”. We continue to idolise our jobs in the hopes that they give us what our life is lacking. In the process, we are forced to surrender the aspects of ourselves that don’t contribute to this work, amplifying the void we work to fill. Family, friendships, hobbies, and spirituality are all sacrificed to free up time to keep working. Worse still, that work may never reward you in the way you want it to.
Thankfully, there is a way to create meaning and purpose without giving up work.
The Importance of Meaning
Work in the modern day wants us to give up our pursuit of meaning to pursue what’s best for our employer. This itself isn’t an issue, but becomes one when the interests of corporations no longer align with those of people. It gets worse when people are forced to work meaningless jobs just to survive.
In the past, a career provided for your needs and allowed you to live well, afford a home, and care for your family. Unfortunately, this is much harder today, and many people across the world are opting out. This is exacerbated by a culture that suggests that these jobs are not good enough. It’s only natural that people would begin detaching self-worth from their careers.
Meaning doesn’t come merely from the things you do; it comes from understanding what matters to you.
Clinging to the belief that things will get better in the future is unwise. We cannot wait until our lives are in an ideal place in order to find meaning, as that future may never come. We must create that meaning for ourselves, right now.
You Are More Than Your Job
A job isn’t forever. It is just one aspect of who we are. We need to be more than our jobs, and also more than what our jobs make us. A retired CEO and a retired supermarket worker are both just retirees at the end of the day.
We don’t need reminding to focus on what matters. But our jobs can often force us to put aside the things that matter to us. We need a job to survive, but too much comes at the cost of the things that truly matter to us. If you do focus on work, try to find ways to keep yourself distinct from your job. After all, you won’t have your job forever.
Consider how you can use your skills outside of your job. Make time for your hobbies, and to think. It’s important that you not only understand what it is you’d rather be doing than working – it’s important that you actually do it.
Strive For Difficult Things
Most jobs exist because somebody needs something doing, and doesn’t have the time or expertise necessary to do it. The difficulty, unpleasantness, impact, and profit potential of the job influence how much an employer is willing to pay someone to do it. Solving people’s problems is valuable. But it’s also difficult.
Jobs are inherently difficult. Usually, this difficulty is because you’re solving problems. It’s important that your work challenges you, but if you don’t use this problem-solving in your own life then it becomes very easy to stagnate.
Doing difficult things is how we grow. It’s what makes us valuable. But your job shouldn’t be the only place you create value. If you build yourself up as a high-value person because of your job, you can easily entangle your self-worth with that job. And you won’t have that job forever.
Cultivate that strength outside of your job and use it to build a better life before you retire.
Serve Others
Humans are social creatures. When we are born, we have nothing. We need to be fed, clothed, and taught by those around us in order to survive. The only reason we are alive today is because we were supported by those who came before us.
Serving others is how we’ve made it this far as a species. So it stands to reason that we need to do this ourselves in order to feel like a part of the greater whole. This, to me, is a much healthier foundation upon which to live: be good and kind to others, in ways that enable them to also be their best.
Your job, upbringing, and interests will give you a unique way to help others. How you do that is up to you.
How To Detach Your Self-Worth From Your Career
Detaching your self-worth from your career is simple, but difficult. Everyone likely knows these things, but putting them into practice can be challenging. Life in the modern day has us struggle to find purpose, and to find profit. But that purpose must be found in order to live a fulfilling life.
We don’t have a choice as to whether to engage with this system or not, so we must become powerful enough to thrive within it. And we need to do that on our own terms, not by merging our value with a title we don’t own.
Wrest control of your identity from your job, or don’t. The choice is yours. But above all, be kind to yourself, and always avoid letting your self-respect slip into a negative state.
Find Your Reason for Being
A reason for being, or raison d’être, must accompany you on your journey. Without it, you become lost and meaningless.
Your career is almost always a bad raison d’être. It is transactional rather than personal, and your lack of control over your position places your self-worth on shaky foundations.
It doesn’t matter if you pursued a specific career intentionally. Your job was still assigned to you in a transactional manner; you were deemed the best person for the job, and so received it. We cannot “take” a job; we are always given a job. Therefore, it stands to reason that if your raison d’être must be something you cultivate yourself.
Find what truly motivates you to be better – family, friends, personal pursuits – and live for those things. Perhaps your work is a vehicle to allow you to live for those. But take care to avoid allowing your job to become what defines your value as a human being.
Work on Personal Projects
Not everyone enjoys their job; it is a blessing to be able to do work that you get paid to do. While trading time for money is necessary for most of us for the majority of our lives, we should find time to work on things that matter to us as well.
Everyone has problems in their own lives. A simple project might be to solve one such problem in your life. Not only does this directly improve your quality of life, but it provides its own purpose while you showing that you’re capable of solving problems.
Creative outlets also show you that you’re capable of creation despite your job title. You don’t need to be a chef to cook a healthy and tasty meal. Nor do you need to be a fitness instructor to get in shape. It’s the pursuits you choose to focus on that build your self-worth, and modern life is set on cutting us off from the sources that give us power.
Work that you are fully in control of can be an excellent raison d’être. Solving the problems of yourself or others in a manner that you control can elevate you much higher than a job ever could. All you need is the financial stability to do this.
Work Towards Financial Independence
The pursuit of Financial Independence enables us to cultivate meaning in life outside of our jobs. Financial Independence without purpose isn’t a fix in and of itself, however. Much like the rest of my philosophy, you spin multiple threads together to form something stronger than what they can achieve alone.
Financial Independence is one thread that allows you to cultivate self-worth. When your financial needs are taken care of, you gain the option to improve your life in other ways. Building community, learning new skills, or overcoming entropy are some ways you might do this.
Financial Independence provides you with options for how you approach your life. But it alone doesn’t improve your life. You do that, through the actions you take with the freedom you unlock incrementally by taking advantage of your diverse income sources.
I see Financial Independence as the most valuable piece of wisdom I ever learned. However, it alone will not offer you any more self-worth than your current life does. It does not replace your need for individuation.
Don’t Wait Forever
This goes without saying: don’t let your self-worth get so poor that you lose the ability to pull yourself out of it.
I waited until I was at a breaking point to find what mattered to me. My relationship with my work is a cautionary tale of what happens when you ignore the signs your body and soul are telling you.
My self-worth was at an all-time low, and even if I could see the impacts of my work in the day-to-day, the meaning of my work was lost on me. This was the spark that led me to quitting full-time employment 18 months ago, and I haven’t looked back, transforming my life and my self-worth in the process.
Don’t let your self-worth fade away in the same way. Do what you can, right now, to live the life you want to live.
Closing
I have written at length about the importance of work. Work itself is not the problem and should never be considered a negative aspect of life. We must all work, and suffer, to rise above the challenges that are put in front of us. The problem is that we are so willing to sell our souls for more money and more prestige that we take on a level of work that leads us to despair. A level of work that makes us hate doing difficult things.
Work doesn’t always pay you financially, and it’s important to understand that not all work should reward you in this way. Focusing on your career reinforces this connection between work and money, leading to your self-worth being linked to your career success. Thankfully, there are ways to unravel yourself from the all-encompassing clutches of your career, and carve out a new life for yourself from it.
When you detach your self-worth from your career, you realise why career accolades aren’t something you need to hold on to. Job titles and career prestige matter, but they can’t be the only thing in your life that matters. You can take rewards throughout life, and enjoy them for a time before moving on. A job title is the same: use it to get what you want while you have it, but continue to build yourself up independently of it.
Find self-worth through your direct action, not by going through the motions in your job.
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