Reproducing Cultures of Overwork
It’s January 12th 2022 and I’m facing my first zoom call of the year.
Three weeks of holiday break and I still feel depleted, not wanting to be on a zoom call, not wanting to plan, not wanting to commit my time to a client, I just want to push it AWAY from me. This goes way beyond zoom fatigue.
For the first time since I started working in purpose networks, I felt not only zero energy about retaking my professional activity, but rejection.
A few days later, I was on a call with a close colleague of mine planning my first workshop of the year, and I experienced physical pain as we were starting to design the workshop. My stomach was hurting, my brain shutting down, unfocused attention, thinking about ways to escape. My body was rejecting my being there in front of a computer, writing goals and building blocks of activities that seemed pointless, on an app I didn’t want to be using. What was the point about designing workshops anyway? Was there ever even any real outcome or impact? had I been losing my time for all these years?
I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be doing that. My body wanted to escape and I subjugated it once more. The dictatorship of the mind over the body.
The first time I did a zoom screen sharing in late January during an online session, I almost started to cry. That tiny act, just clicking the green button of the zoom bar and starting to explain something…that’s like nothing, isn’t it? Nothing I haven’t done thousands of times without giving any second thought to those tiny acts.
And I’ve felt like this — sad, apathetic, in physical pain — every single time I’ve started the use of any app or app-feature that reminded me of the self-chosen (?) exploitation I’ve been putting myself through these years.
From mid-January till today, I’ve had the same number of zoom calls per week (7–8) that I’ve been having per day during the past few years and, still, they feel like too many, unbearable, interrupting my thoughts and flow of the day.
I was lucky I didn’t get a burnout and, even if I have an anxious profile I have to take care of daily, I didn’t get any anxiety attacks. Several of my acquaintances haven’t been so lucky though and with the pandemic as a probable additional pressure factor, the number of people I know with anxiety attacks and stress-caused diseases has increased enormously in the past few months. I do feel lucky, but it does feel like I did fry some parts of myself badly.
In mid-February, I listened to one of the recent releases of Brené Brown’s podcast “Unlocking us” — it was about her methodology to operationalise values in organisations. I’m quite familiar with it, so I thought I’d skip it, but to my luck, I decided to listen to it during a walk. As a summary, the process goes like this:
- Pick your two top values
- Write down what behaviours support living by that value
- Write down what behaviours do not support the unfolding of that value in your life
My two top values had been connection and freedom for a long time. And it absolutely hit me. What an irony, how sad.
Freedom to work all day any day. To work a bit less on Friday, just to compensate for it on the weekend. Start working at 10am, so that I end my day at 1am including eating breaks in front of my computer.
Connection during zoom calls, which I wanted to finish the moment they started so that I had time to breathe. Making an effort to connect with others while being disconnected from my own needs.
I had always longed for freedom and I had given myself the illusion of it. First traveling to events and gigs and conferences up and down in Europe for five years and then two years glued to my screen “doing work I love”. During these years it was clear to me that I was exhausting myself. I had really believed that I used to recover during the Christmas and Summer breaks. It turns out I didn’t.
My body remembers the pain of all the times I wanted to go for a walk, do yoga, work (work!) from a café, enjoy a sunny morning outside… and I couldn’t because of back-to-back calls with clients, impossible deadlines and just too much work.
At some point, the highlight of my day developed into being able to get out in the morning to get a croissant and a cappuccino and eat that while going for a brief walk around the block where I lived, ideally, before my first call of the day. In my everyday (working) life, that gave me a sense of freedom.
How absurd.
My body is bringing up the pain I pushed down for so long. It is rejecting the processes that have brought me to suffocate my needs for years.
I wasn’t deeply aware of any of this till now, early 2022, when I started a PhD and stopped most of my collaborations. I hadn’t had so much “space” since quitting my corporate job 8 years ago.
It’s not that I was not doing yoga regularly before, journaling almost daily, spending time in nature…I was really trying to reflect on my life and connect to myself and my body. I guess I had just told myself that someday, this would stop? that I had to do it till I achieved stability? that I had a lot to learn? that I couldn’t say “no” because opportunities would stop coming my way? I don’t even know now what stories I was telling myself.
A few years ago there was a widely shared article that talked about how everything had become work-driven: reading a book, rest, play, meditation…professionals were engaging with all of this so that they could become better (the best) professionals. Subjugation to success. I haven’t found that exact article, but you can delight yourself with the horrors and bullshit of this one.
This is systemic.
The irony of life made it so that I started reading academic papers on the “discourse on flexibility” and the “internalisation of overwork” for my studies. In one of the papers, the authors (Bourne, K., Forman, P., (2014)) developed two expressions to describe a phenomenon they were seeing among women entrepreneurs: working lightly and working lite.
The former describes internal discourses to make work “feel better” by working during non-office hours (evenings and weekends) while telling themselves that it’s fun and light. Working in those hours also made the entrepreneurs feel better because it took their “guilt” away. I found something similar in one of my journal entries from 2016, back then I realised that the only thing that calmed my anxiety about my eternal to-do list was to keep working so that I could feel on top of things. And, at the same time, I knew that made no sense. It’s been seven years.
The other concept of this research by Bourne & Forman is working lite. It’s a term that describes situations in which “relaxation activities” (watching TV, drinking wine…) get mixed with work activities that are considered less demanding (basic accounting, typing, doing e-mails…).
I read the paper with a wide open jaw, eyebrows to the top of my skull, smiling at moments, feeling understood and less alone, but also more stupid. I have been working around spaces of counter-narratives for seven years. How is it possible that I had bought into the overwork culture so easily? (and a part of me still is).
The second paper was even more unsettling (Lupu, I., Empson, L. (2015)). The research question of the researchers is How and Why do experienced professionals, who perceive themselves as autonomous, comply with organisational pressures to overwork?
The explanation is based on two elements:
- The link between overwork and the autonomy paradox (secondary quote from Mazmanian et al., 2013; Michel, 2011) — which means professionals persist in believing that their intensive and sustained pattern of overwork is self-chosen.
- Illusio: They use the concept of author Bourdieu called “Illusio” by which individuals are invested in and taken in and by the game (secondary quote from Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 116) when the game represents competition among actors within a given field.
But in our networks, theoretically, there is no competition, is there? Well, some of us use the term “jungle” to describe them. Many of the networks I’ve been around have shown sooner or later to be meritocracies; some even are explicitly so. And I’m aware, I’ve benefited from it in many cases. There are some rules of the game, you learn them and apply them and, as the Illusio concept unfolds in the researchers’ paper: one becomes captured by the Illusio. You end up “embodying the game”. The game trapped you and now you can’t escape it.
This means that we are able to reflect and be aware of overwork and some of the challenges that it entails, but only to the extent that is “permitted within the rules of the game”. And so the ones that become successful at playing the game, they embody it and become a medium for the reproduction of the game.
I’m linking the concepts developed by researchers to my personal experience, but this is by no means academic. I haven’t studied if these concepts apply in the network and community contexts I’m a part of. But it’s a reflection that makes me realise even more of the hidden power of the systems within which we operate. It also makes me wonder how challenging it is to create alternative ways of working and relating in the here and now.
