"Achievement-brain" made my heart an appointment book

BQE foundational works: Work Won’t Love You Back (part II)

This post is part of “Foundational BQE works,” an occasional series of reactions to what I’ve dubbed canon works for anyone developing their “Big Quit Energy”—trying to beat workaholism, set boundaries, fight back against work-humpers, or simply seeking better attitudes on work.

This is the second reaction to Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back.  Find the full list of foundational works and their respective reaction posts here. 

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There was a time when my friends and I would just hang out and do nothing.  We’d park our asses on a couch and watch music videos, wishing there was something else going on.  We’d bitch and moan about doing nothing, but nothing was still enjoyable, and it was enough.  

At least it was in retrospect.  At the time, I felt friendships that revolved around “nothing activities” lacked the deep mutual appreciation that I idealized in work-centered friendships on shows like The Wire, where people forged bonds by agonizing together in the warm fire of midnight oil.  

As I chased this deep appreciation, eventually all friendships became “active” (ie, talking regularly) only when we had projects together.  I leaned into this as a way to kill two birds with one stone:  using friendship as a “sweetener” to keep “accomplishing” while having lots of projects around as built-in excuse/habit for keeping in touch with people.

Problems arose, however, with people in my life with whom I had no projects.  These included romantic partners, my best friends from childhood, and my closest family—no one too crucial, amirite? Worse, I started to see time spent with these people as a diversion from my dreams—necessary and sometimes fun, like doing groceries or exercising, but not fulfilling what my accomplishment-brain told me my “highest” purpose was. 

This made me stingy with any extra time I had, often to ugly extremes—for example, replying to my college partner’s request for more time with “I will not let you get in the way of making my movie.”  

Needless to say, my friendships eventually became pretty barren.

The fear of being a “friends person”

It’d be a brazen copout to claim that I didn’t do this to myself, that it was actually done to me by a cabal of employers.  But without totally abdicating responsibility, I’ll admit that Sarah Jaffe encouraged me to grant myself a little grace when, in Work Won’t Love You Back, she argued that the structure of our economy makes it difficult to cultivate and maintain friendships outside of work.

To some extent, it poisons our psyche against the very concept, as Jaffe laments that “the shreds of the neoliberal work ethic have turned our hearts into appointment books.”  Our dominant work culture is distrustful of unrestrained friendship—even my own father, by no means a careerist, will call you “too much of a friend person” (amiguero) if he considers you too distracted by socializing to seriously commit to a craft. 

It also doesn’t help that jobs offer a low-effort approximation of friendship.  Of the types of relationships that Joseph Alder considers essential for existing as social beings (friendship, love, work), work ones are easiest to jump into largely because they dissolve and don’t require maintenance after the work is done.  

Maybe in America we overemphasize work because it’s the easiest way to relate to others, and we’re socially stunted because our overemphasis of work keeps us from engaging with more complicated (but more rewarding) relationships. 

Friendship is a skill

I’m very lucky, as my situation could be a LOT worse.  This is a testament to friends and a spouse who were relentless in keeping our friendship alive, putting in way more effort than they should have.  

One such friend gifted me a mindset shift when I complained, as many people do, that it’s harder to make friends as an adult. She responded that she doesn’t find it harder—just that most adults choose to channel their attention to other things and “become less practiced at it.”  Maybe this is something everyone else already knew, but it blew my mind to think of friendship as a skill that takes applied effort and practice.  Or, as Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) puts it, “a form of intelligence.”  

Today, I’m trying to redevelop this intelligence, hoping to once again be a person that calls just to call, hangs out just to hang out. This has been difficult as I struggle to re-acclimate to experiencing time with friends and family as indisputably joyful (NOT an imposition on my time), not unlike a newly-healthy eater redeveloping their taste for vegetables after years of processed food. 

Having regular family gatherings has been a helpful first step.  The idea of a weekly evening to…just like, BE there…is something I used to bristle at, but I forced myself to suggest it after we had a death in the family.  I also promised myself to not freak out if these get-togethers “dragged on” longer than scheduled.  Two years in, I notice these visits always leave me feeling good about life.  Goofing with children not yet captured by achievement-brain is especially energizing.   It’s sad and embarrassing that it took tragedy for me to relearn the joys of family, but life is weird like that. 

Of course, we need some balance and critical judgment.  Because our close friendships are very influential over us, it’s valid to examine the effects our friends may be having on our happiness.  We all have a healthy impulse to self-actualize, and giving yourself over completely to the influence of your friends and family might hinder that. 

I also still believe that shared projects form some of the nicest memories one can have with a friend.  At the very least, they’ve given me something I can always text them to say hello (“remember when we made this dumb thing?”).  It’s overvaluing this way of strengthening friendships over “less productive” methods that has given me trouble.  If friendships forged through projects were indeed the highest form, then so many wouldn’t end along with their projects.

The workplace’s sudden appetite for friendship

A central theme in Jaffe’s book is naming a recent threat to our non-market friendships, one which separates the modern workplace from what came before—its increasing demand for emotional traits which it used to see as unproductive (emphasis mine):  

“The [shift away from industry] in rich countries has resulted, strangely enough, in employers seeking those very human traits that industry capitalists had tried so hard to strip away.  Creativity, “people skills,” caring, and other human traits are what employers exploit…Our friendship, feelings, and love are suddenly on demand on the job.”

Our jobs’ growing depletion of our emotional energy makes our friendships even more barren.  Ironically, this creates demand for jobs to cope with that very barrenness—Jaffe mentions immigrant women (who often have left their own families) working as surrogate mothers for rich children, and even start-ups which contract people to pretend to be your family.  

Subtly but surely, our culture has repackaged employers’ demands for our emotional energy into the notion that we should love our work as much or even more than the people around us.  Beside helping squeeze us for more labor, this redirection helps keep worker power against employers in check, undermining solidarity:

“Capitalism must control our affections, our sexuality, our bodies in order to keep us separated from one another.  The greatest trick it has been able to pull is to convince us that work is our greatest love.

It’s widely accepted that we suffer from an epidemic of loneliness, and we love to blame the internet.  Aside from the fact that tech has arguably improved more than hindered human connection (most recently by enabling work from home), we’ve also failed to acknowledge how centering jobs as the most revered institution of our society has emptied the rest of our social existence.  

Achievement-brain just wants friends too

In closing her book, Jaffe reminds us that, at the end of the day, all the work we do has the ultimate goal of connection:  

“All the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame, and power, are really at bottom attempts to connect to other people.”

I’d argue that even money, power, and fame are things we chase because we’re desperate for connection. There’s a theory that people who obsessively seek fame do so because they think it’ll guarantee that the world will grant them love and acceptance that, for whatever reason, they didn’t feel from their immediate family and community.  From the School of Life:

“The desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect, in injury.  No one would want to be famous who hadn’t also, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant. We sense the need for a great deal of admiring attention when we have been painfully exposed to earlier deprivation.”

I can relate to that.  Up until recently, I wanted to achieve “greatness” in order to “earn” respect and love from certain family members and close friends who I felt didn’t see me as worthy of it.   My idiocy was that when other people offered respect and love “for free,” without having to achieve anything as a condition, I disregarded them as broken and “unworthy” like me—they MUST have been, if they were offering me “unearned” love.  A real feat of achievement-brain self-sabotage.

Lucky for fans of The Wire, the show provides an antidote to its own glorification of work friendships through Beadie’s powerful speech about how none of McNulty’s coworkers—or romantic conquests—will come to his funeral.  Twelve years later, Jaffe condensed this sentiment into one cutting phase: 

“Work will never love you back, but other people will.”   

Loving your work is unfulfilling and misguided.  But relying on work as the mediator for how we love other people is perhaps more dangerous because you can go decades confusing it with the real thing.  To build more balance into our lives and counteract our workaholism, we need to recalibrate how and where we build our friendships.  

Simply “doing nothing” may be the sturdiest foundation to build on.