In other words, I’m more than simply a worker. I’m more than a cog in the capitalist system that pays me for my labor. We all are, but we don’t always act like it, and I suspect that Helen is correct in her assumption that part of the reason is that we have prioritized work so far above and beyond the rest of our lives that we don’t have anything else to do.
That’s not a recipe for a healthy and balanced life.
The thing is, there are still so many people who look at a resume with a few different jobs in the early years and see someone who is unstable, all the while employers are designing these jobs to turn over, and then laying people off when they don’t turn over as much as they expected them to. So maybe stop worrying so much about whether changing jobs is going to look bad and focus on finding a place where you can do the work that you want to do.
As I said, I’ve seen this same research. More than once. I’ve talked about it here and here, and probably a few other times as well. On the individual level, acts of kindness toward others are beneficial for not only the receiver but the giver. As a peer, I can do what I can to give to my coworkers, but what does it look like to have a culture that encourages, rewards, and maybe even expects that kind of behavior?
The promise of working hard and being rewarded is hard to swallow when you’ve seen Gen X and Millennials work hard and get absolutely nowhere. Forced to start over again and again as successive organizations let them go, or went under, while the people who ran those organizations got paid millions.
Because really, not many employees are going to remain engaged if there isn’t much in it for them. If they sacrifice and put in the emotional work of being a fully engaged employee and doing the work that helps the company succeed, there’d better be more than a yearly 2% raise and a pizza party to celebrate. Especially when Don in the cubicle across from them left at 5 every day, did the bare minimum to keep his job, and got the same 2% raise. There had better be a path forward for all the hard work, otherwise, they’re just wasting time and effort here.
Well, this isn’t great.
“After sifting through more than 1.8 million pages identified as admin portals, researchers made a disheartening discovery — 40,000 of them used “admin” as its password, making it the most popular credential used by IT administrators.”