Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.
William Arthur Ward
Harvard Study Questionnaire, 1979:
Q: If you could stop working without loss of income, would you? What would you do instead?
Over the next twenty-four hours, billions of people across the world will wake up and go to work. Some will head off to jobs that they’ve strived toward for their entire lives, but most will have little or no choice about the type of work they do, or about the amount of money they make doing it. The purpose of working, for most people, is primarily to provide for themselves and their families. Henry Keane, one of the Harvard Study’s inner-city Boston participants, worked in an automobile factory in Michigan for most of his life—not because he loved to build cars, but because it provided a decent living. He grew up poor, and he started working early in life. He did not receive the same advantages that Harvard-educated men like John Marsden (Chapter Two) or Sterling Ainsley (Chapter Four) received, and he didn’t make nearly as much money. Yet Henry was by any measure happier in his life than either John or Sterling. Like Henry, most of the other inner-city Study participants had fewer career choices, worked harder jobs, made less money, and retired at a later age than the Harvard men. These elements of their work certainly had an effect on their health and ability to flourish. And yet, Harvard-educated participants’ better pay and greater status was no guarantee of a flourishing life. There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held “dream jobs”—from medical researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner-city participants who held “unimportant” or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them. Why? What is the missing piece?
In this chapter we focus on one important aspect of work that many of us, regardless of what we do for a living, often overlook: the impact that our relationships at work have on our life. Not only because these relationships are important to our well-being, as we’ve discussed, but also because they’re aspects of our work lives that we have some control over, and that have the potential to improve our daily experience immediately. We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think.
Let’s imagine a couple of days in the life of a worker, we’ll call her Loren, who’s experiencing a number of common challenges the two of us see often, both in the lives of research participants and in our clinical work.
For the last six months, Loren has had a job at a medical billing office that handles several doctors’ practices. Her coworkers, seated in cubicles around her, are good people, but she doesn’t know them very well. Each day the thing she wants most is to finish her accounts and head home, where an entirely different set of challenges awaits. Unfortunately, ending the day on time has been difficult recently because her company has just taken on a new set of accounts, and for months her supervisor has been shuffling his own work onto Loren’s desk, giving her unrealistic deadlines and blaming her for working too slowly. Today her supervisor goes home an hour early. She stays two hours late.
When she gets home, her husband and her two daughters, ages nine and 13, are eating dinner. Pizza, for the third time this week. She actually enjoys making dinner for everybody, she enjoys the bustle and catching up with the kids while she cooks, but it hasn’t been possible this week, and her husband’s strategy is to do the bare minimum. She always asks him to make a salad at least. He hasn’t. She doesn’t mention it.
Exhausted, her mind spinning, and still in her work clothes, she sits down with them to get in a few minutes of family time.
Her daughters talk about school for a while; she barely hears them. Her husband is scrolling on his phone. She’s talked to him before about her looking for a new job—he’s for it—but nothing has changed since then, and she doesn’t have the energy to rehash that conversation tonight. She’s thinking about everything left undone at work and how she’ll probably have to stay late tomorrow. Her oldest daughter asks if Loren can drive her to Minneapolis this weekend to shop for… Loren cuts her off—“Let’s talk about that on Friday,” she says, “when my brain is working again.” After the pizza is gone, everybody leaves the table. She didn’t even get a slice. She eats some leftover crust and makes a bowl of soup for herself. It’s been a day much like any other day. Tomorrow the process will start over.
It makes sense that we think of our work lives and our real lives as separate things. Like Loren, many of us feel that the two things exist in entirely different spheres of experience. We work in order to live. Even those of us who are fortunate to be able to do work that we’re passionate about often think of the two spheres as separate, and we struggle to find the right balance between work and life.
But are we missing something here? Is the separation we perceive between work and life helping or hindering us in our quest for the good life? What if the value of work—even work we dislike—lies not just in getting paid, but also in the moment-to-moment sensations of being alive in the workplace, and the feeling of vitality we get from being connected to others? What if even the most ordinary workday presents real opportunities for improving our lives and our sense of being connected to the broader world?
The next day Loren’s coworker Javier seems stressed out. More than her, even. He sits at his desk with his headphones on, but she can hear him sighing to himself, and he keeps checking his phone. Loren and Javier aren’t close, but she asks if everything is okay.
Yesterday he was in a car accident. It was his fault. Everyone is fine, but his car is in bad shape, and his insurance only covers liability. There’s no way he can afford a new car, or even to fix this one, and the office is too far away to get there without a car. He’d gotten a ride from his roommate today, which is not a permanent solution.
“Does the car still drive?”
“Barely—I can’t take it on the highway.”
“My husband is a body mechanic and does rally racing stuff. If you can get it to my house, he’ll knock it together for cheap, at least make it drivable.”
“I don’t think I can afford it.”
“It’ll be cheap or free if you don’t care how it looks. You might have to buy a couple parts and a case of beer. Trust me, this man could build a car out of a pile of garbage. Bring it over. He owes me.”
They get to talking, really for the first time. They’ve worked beside each other for months but assumed they had nothing in common. She’s fifteen years older, he’s into video games, and mostly they’ve kept to themselves. Loren mentions how slow her work is going. Javier is a regular in the online forums that discuss the somewhat outdated software they are using. He asks what she’s having trouble with and immediately sees that a key part of her work can be automated using the software.
“Give me a minute,” he says, and sits down at her station. Ten minutes later, the software is handling work that would have taken her hours. Loren almost breaks into tears of relief.
It turns out they both have a complaint about the physical filing system, which is an entire wall of the office, and sometimes makes their work more difficult. Javier says he recently worked in a similar office where they did the filing differently.
Together they approach the boss and convince him that a change in the filing could make a big difference in productivity. He agrees and tasks the two of them with developing a plan for how to make it happen without disrupting everything. It will have to be done in stages, after regular hours, and it will be a lot of work. But if he okays the plan, they’d get some overtime.
The next day, when Loren comes into the office, a paper sack is on her desk. It’s a loaf of sourdough bread. Javier has a family starter that’s generations old. She’s shocked that this young kid bakes his own bread.
“There’s more where that came from,” he says.
That night Loren ends up working a bit late again, but not as late as she has been, so she calls her husband and tells him to wait on dinner—she’ll be making BLTs with the sourdough.
Several important things happened here. First, Loren turned a coworker into an unlikely friend. The teamwork that flowed from that budding connection, the shared experience, immediately diminished her level of stress. Now they were in the trenches together. She didn’t just feel relief from receiving help, she felt relief from offering help.
Second, a meaningful project developed. This livened up the daily routine, and the results of that project would make her own work life better and easier. She was now an active participant in her office environment, working toward a small goal of her own design. The events that unfolded also connected an achievement to a relationship. This is a crucial point. Achievement is most meaningful when it is relational. When what we do matters to other people, it matters more to us. We might do something as a team that gives us a sense of belonging, like Loren and Javier, or we might do something that directly benefits others; both are a kind of social benefit. There’s also the satisfaction we get from sharing our personal success with friends and family: another benefit.
Finally, Loren’s growing friendship with Javier created the possibility that her work could become a more meaningful piece of her life. The offer to enlist her husband’s help and the gift of bread may seem like one-time gestures, but in fact, such gestures open an important door between two worlds—a door that lets positive elements of life flow into work, and vice versa.
We rarely get to choose our coworkers. But while that might seem like a downside of work, it also creates new opportunities for people who may never have the opportunity to meet outside of work to forge unique relationships and a type of understanding that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Despite differences, coworkers like Javier and Loren can experience a meeting of the minds.
All over the world, adults spend a major proportion of their lives working. There are differences among countries because of economic, cultural, and other factors, but regardless of the country, work still accounts for a significant piece of most people’s waking hours.
On average, workers in the United Kingdom do not work the most hours each year (among sixty-six countries polled in 2017, that status belongs to Cambodia) but they don’t work the fewest hours, either (that status belongs to Germany), so individuals from the U.K. are good examples of the average worker. By the time the average individual in the U.K. reaches 80 years of age, he or she will have spent about 8,800 hours socializing with friends, about 9,500 hours in activities with an intimate partner, and more than 112,000 hours (13 years!) at work. People in the United States apportion their time in similar ways. At any one time, 63 percent of all Americans age 16 and over are part of the paid labor force, and there are many more who do important unpaid work like raising children and caregiving for loved ones. That adds up to hundreds of millions of hours of work every day.
When they reached their 70s and 80s, some Harvard Study participants expressed regret about how much time they had spent at work. There’s the old cliché that on their deathbeds, no one ever wishes they’d spent more time at the office. It’s a cliché for a reason: it’s often true:
I wish I had spent more time with family. I worked a lot, just like my father, who was a workaholic. Now I’m worried my son is one, as well.
James, age 81
I wish I’d spent a lot more time with my kids, and less time at work.
Lydia, age 78
I probably worked harder than I should have. I did good work, but it took a lot from me. I didn’t take vacations. I gave too much of myself.
Gary, age 80
This is something many of us struggle with. We need to work and to provide for our families, but work tends to pull us away from our families. You might expect a book like this to advocate leaning away from work to focus more on family and relationships, and in many cases, working less might be exactly what someone needs. But the complicated interplay among work, leisure, relationships, home life, and well-being suggests more nuanced solutions. Our time at work affects our time at home, our time at home affects our time at work, and it is our relationships in both places that form the foundation of that interplay. When there is an imbalance, the source can sometimes be found in the way we have been attending to our relationships on one side or the other.
Michael Dawkins, a construction engineer and Study participant, had that common experience of regretting the amount of time he spent working, despite the fact that he took great pride in his work and considered it the central purpose of his life. “I love to create and learn new things and to see changes in myself,” he said. “I find there’s meaning in finishing projects, and being recognized for what I do. It gives me a good feeling.” And yet, he lamented the way he spent his time at home, and the effects his commitment to work had on his marriage. “You don’t always notice what you’ve missed,” he said. “Even when you’re home, you’re preoccupied. Then one day you turn around and realize it’s too late.”
But other participants, also dedicated to their work, were able to thrive in the midst of this complexity. Take Henry Keane. Though he never told the Study much about the cars he made, he spoke often about how much he enjoyed the companionship he found at work; he thought of his workmates as a second family. His wife, Rosa, who worked in the city payroll office for thirty years, felt the same way about the people she worked with, and the two of them often hosted huge barbecues for everyone they knew from both jobs. It’s hard to imagine that at least one new happy couple didn’t come from those barbecues.
Or take Leo DeMarco, our high school teacher, who rejected several promotions to administrative positions in order to continue his work as a teacher because his connections with students and other teachers gave him so much joy. His family often wished he’d spent more time at home, but the time they did spend together was valuable, and the strength of their connection undeniable.
Rebecca Taylor, one of the Student Council Study participants, had a different and equally common experience of this complex interplay of work, home, and relationships. At age 46, circumstances had backed Rebecca into a corner, and she found herself struggling. Recently divorced after her husband abruptly abandoned the family, she was raising two children by herself and working full-time as a nurse at a hospital in Illinois. Her son, 10, and daughter, 15, were both devastated by their father’s abandonment, and Rebecca was doing her best to provide some stability in his absence. But between her efforts at home and her responsibilities at work, Rebecca was constantly overwhelmed. It seemed she never had enough time.
“Anything I do, I try to do absolutely as well as I can,” she told an interviewer, two years after her husband left. “But right now it’s just about keeping my head above water. I’ve been taking additional classes three times a week to get some additional certifications, so when I come home I only have enough time to make dinner, do my reading, and maybe do some housework before bed. I’m too short with the kids. I know they feel how stressed I am and that doesn’t help them. But the job defines my life right now. It has to, we need it financially. It’s not a dire circumstance, I don’t want to be too dramatic. But it’s nonstop and the money is just barely enough. Sometimes I just want to give up.”
But Rebecca’s kids were also there for her, and that gave her a modicum of strength in what felt like an impossible situation. “Sometimes I’ll come home and they’ll have already done the laundry, and taken out the trash and gotten dinner started. They’re both very active in that way. They know we’re all in this together. It’s such a relief that they feel that way, and it does make us closer. My son is only 10, so with everything going on he’s still very attached to me. He follows me around when I get home and we catch up on the day. He talks my ear off. I do my best to listen to him. Sometimes it’s hard if I had a rough day.”
The spillover effect that work has on our home lives is an especially common worry. We all have bad days at work. A disagreement with a coworker, a lack of recognition of our contributions, feeling discounted at work because of our gender or some other element of our identity, encountering demands that we can’t possibly meet—all kinds of things can lead to roiling emotions that we carry with us when we walk out of our workplace to head home. Or, if our primary duties are at home with children, negative emotions may linger after the kids are put to bed and our seemingly endless chores are ended for the day.
What effect do these daily emotional currents that emerge from work have on the other parts of our life? Our partners and families may have only the barest ideas of what we’re feeling when we leave work, but they are often the ones who bear the brunt of the emotion.
In the 1990s, just as his relationship with his wife-to-be was getting serious, Marc began to worry about his own work-life balance. He was working more than he ever had, and worried not only that he was losing time with the people he cared about, but also that the time they did spend together was affected by his emotions spilling over from work.
Inspired by these personal concerns—as often happens in psychological research—Marc began to use his time at work to investigate… time at work, and its connection to the rest of life. He conducted a study to try to quantify the effects of a difficult workday on intimate relationships.
Committed couples with young children filled out questionnaires at the end of the workday and at bedtime over several days. The study was designed to shed some light on the question: When we come home upset, how does it affect our interactions with our intimate partners?
The findings wouldn’t surprise many couples: rough workdays were linked with changes in nightly interactions. For women, a difficult workday was linked primarily with angrier behavior, and for men, primarily with withdrawing emotionally from a partner.
A number of the participants in the study, particularly the men, talked about how they usually leave the stress of work at the workplace. But the study showed that even if we think we leave work at work, our emotions carry over in ways that we may not always recognize. A curt reply to an innocent question, zoning out in front of the TV or computer, a conversation about someone else’s problems that is shorter than it should be—we might be surprised how much our emotions from work can color our life at home. When our partners come home upset, however, we tend to place the blame on the partners themselves with the familiar refrain, Don’t take it out on me!
When feelings from work spill over into a close relationship, there is nothing to do but face those emotions. Some of the techniques we’ve discussed in Chapter Six (regarding adaptation to emotion) and Chapter Seven (regarding intimacy) may be useful here. The cycle initiated by coming-home-upset often goes something like this: One person comes home upset and is less engaged or patient with family members; that person’s partner or children respond in a negative way to the altered behavior; this is followed by a negative response from whoever is upset; the evening goes downhill.
Arresting this cycle is difficult, but it can be done, primarily by directly addressing the emotions involved. We feel what we feel, but we don’t need to let emotions have their way with us. If we are the ones coming home upset, we first have to recognize and accept that we are upset and acknowledge that those feelings come from something that happened during the workday. Once we acknowledge these facts, taking a few moments purposely to sit with the emotions—in the parking lot outside work, during our commute, in the shower at home—and allow ourselves to feel them without judgment, can, counterintuitively, alleviate some of the hard edges. We don’t need to rehash all the reasons for the emotions, all of the wrongs that have been perpetrated, and fall into a negative thought spiral. And the opposite tactic—trying to ignore the emotions or hide them from our partner—often increases their intensity and our body’s arousal. Instead, our most helpful first step is simply to recognize the feelings and acknowledge them to ourselves.
Consider applying some of the lessons we talked about in Chapter Five (regarding paying attention) as well. When we come home upset, often the only thing on our minds is work. But at that point, there is likely not much we can do about whatever made us upset in the first place. To pull yourself out of an upsetting thought-spiral, try noticing your environment, its sounds, its textures. Ask your spouse, “How was your day?” and do your best to listen. Really listen. All of this is easier said than done, of course. It takes practice.
If it’s your partner who’s coming home upset, and you find yourself on the wrong end of irritability or inattentiveness, some similar strategies may help. If you can keep yourself from immediately returning the negativity, take a step back and be curious about what may be going on for your partner. Take a breath and again ask that simple question, “How was your day?” Or change the usual question to indicate that it’s not just automatic: “It seems like you had a hard day. Tell me about what happened.”
It’s inevitable that we will have hard days at work (or many of them in a row). But can we do something about the reasons we’re having those hard days? Sometimes these difficult emotions stem from the nature of the work itself, but just as often they stem from the nature of our relationships at work, whether it’s a challenging coworker, a demanding boss, or customers who never seem to be satisfied. Often, we think of these work relationships as set in stone. But they don’t have to be. Many of the techniques we’ve discussed thus far for family and intimate relationships can be applied to work relationships as well. The W.I.S.E.R. model for difficult interactions from Chapter Six can be very useful with workmates, too.
In the case of Victor Mourad, one of our inner-city Boston Study participants, the stress he experienced came not from difficult interactions at work, not from a demanding boss, but from a problem that is endemic in the modern workplace: a lack of meaningful interaction. In other words, workdays full of loneliness.
Victor grew up in the North End of Boston, the son of Syrian immigrants. His was one of several Arabic-speaking families in the Study. The North End was a heavily Italian neighborhood, a fact that often made Victor feel out of place as a child. In every interview over the course of his life, he struck Harvard Study interviewers as both highly intelligent and chronically self-conscious. In fact, he believed that he was less intelligent than almost everyone he met. When he was a kid, if a fellow student played hooky or ran away from home, he believed it was because that student was too smart for school, or more courageous than he was.
“Victor is a frank, open, and lovable boy who attends to everything around him,” one of his junior high school teachers told the Study. “But he’s a bundle of nerves.” After Victor worked a number of odd jobs through his 20s, his cousin started a small trucking company servicing New England and offered Victor a job. Victor declined, but after he married, and his cousin’s company began to do well and expand to multiple locations, Victor reconsidered.
“I figured, well, I like to spend time alone. Driving a truck doesn’t sound so bad,” he said.
After several years, Victor became a partner in the company, sharing in profits while continuing to drive. He was proud that he made a decent living and maintained a high quality of life for his wife and kids, but that pride did not mitigate his feelings of isolation. He would sometimes be away from home for days at a time and didn’t have any real friends that he interacted with on a regular basis. The one person at work he knew well—his cousin—had a short temper, and they often disagreed about how the company should be run. Twenty years after he began the job, he told the Study that the money he earned had prevented him from trying something else, but the job had become a real burden on his life. “If I had any guts I’d quit,” he told a Study interviewer. “But a guy like me can’t quit because of the economic bag I’m in. I feel like I’m on a treadmill to oblivion.”
Like Victor, many of us don’t always have a choice about the work we do. Life circumstances and financial need can diminish our options, and it’s common to find ourselves stuck in jobs that are not entirely satisfying. It’s no coincidence that many of the least satisfying jobs are also some of the loneliest. In the recent past, truck driving, night security, and certain kinds of overnight shift work have been some of the more isolating jobs. Now isolating jobs are also common in emergent, tech-driven industries. People who work for package- and food-delivery services, and other businesses in the gig economy for example, often have no coworkers at all. Online retailing is now a vast industry with millions of workers, but even packing and sorting in a fulfillment warehouse, where there are plenty of coworkers, can be lonely. The work is so fast and furious and the warehouses so vast that many workers on the same shift may not even know each other’s names, and there’s little opportunity for meaningful interaction.
And of course, there is the foundational and age-old work of raising children; a job that can be as difficult and isolating as any other. Hours of no adult conversation, every day, can be mind-numbing.
If we feel disconnected from others at work, that means we feel lonely for the majority of our waking hours. This is a health concern. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, loneliness increases our risk of death as much as smoking or obesity. If we find ourselves feeling lonely at work, it may be up to us to create opportunities for social connection to the extent that we can. For parents raising their kids at home, play dates or visits to a local park (which are often as much for the parents as for the kids) can be restorative. For warehouse workers, there may be opportunities to connect with people directly before a shift, or directly after. For a gig worker, small interactions with others can be opportunities for positive feelings and moments of relief from loneliness (in Chapter Ten, we’ll talk more about the importance of these “lesser” interactions). If we want to maximize our well-being at work, we may have to be thoughtful and intentional about it.
However, loneliness at work does not afflict only those who work in solitary jobs. Even busy people with extremely social jobs can feel incredibly lonely if they don’t have meaningful connections with their coworkers and colleagues.
The polling firm Gallup has conducted workplace engagement polls for thirty years, and one of their questions that has stimulated the most controversy is: Do you have a best friend at work?
Some managers and employees find the question irrelevant or absurd, and in some workplaces, good friendships at work are looked at warily. If employees are chitchatting and seem to be having a good time together, some think that means they’re not working and their productivity is probably suffering.
In fact, the opposite is true. Research has shown that people who have a best friend at work are more engaged than those who don’t. The effect is especially pronounced for women, who are twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs if they “strongly agree” that they have a best friend at work.
When we are searching for jobs, and looking at pay and health benefits, the question of work relationships doesn’t often appear. But these connections are themselves a kind of work “benefit.” Positive relationships at work lead to lower stress levels, healthier workers, and fewer days when we come home upset. They also, simply, make us happier.
Seeking positive relationships at work comes with its own pitfalls, however, and workplaces have historically come with added burdens and challenges for groups that have been marginalized by society. In the early part of the twentieth century in Boston, the marginalized included the immigrants from poor areas in Europe and the greater Middle East who made up a large proportion of the inner-city sample. It also included the women who were part of the Student Council Study, and today it includes women and people of color who face continuing barriers at work. It’s difficult to engage in authentic relationships when there are pervasive power imbalances and prejudices.
“I’m worried right now,” Rebecca Taylor, the Student Council Study participant mentioned earlier, told an interviewer in 1973, “because the hospital is about to let several nurses go, and I could be one of them. I overheard a conversation the other day among several male doctors, all of them agreeing that it was no big deal if they let any nurses go because they had double incomes with their breadwinner husbands at home. I interrupted them! I had to! I said, Come on guys! You have no idea what you’re talking about! You act as if we have no responsibilities at all, as if everyone’s situation is the same. That really infuriated me. This is the kind of thinking I have to deal with, and for all I know the administrators agree. I could easily lose my job. I don’t know what I’ll do then.”
As a female psychologist in a field dominated by men, Mary Ainsworth (the creator of the Strange Situation procedure used to illuminate a child’s attachment style that we discussed in Chapter Seven) had her own encounters with sexism in the workplace. In the early 1960s, she and her other female colleagues at Johns Hopkins University were forced to eat in a separate lunchroom from the men, and she did not receive compensation equal to that of her male counterparts. Earlier in her life she was told that she was not hired for a research position at Queen’s University in Canada because she was a woman. The field of psychology—and even this book—would look very different if she hadn’t managed to persevere.
A lot of progress has been made on this front in many workplace cultures around the world, but inequities remain. In America, women’s roles in the workforce have changed significantly since the 1960s, with women working a larger variety of jobs than ever before, and for more hours. But there has not been a corresponding change in women’s roles in the home. In her 1989 book, The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild demonstrated that while there had been a revolution in women’s roles in the workplace, women’s responsibilities at home remained largely the same, especially among couples that have children.
More than thirty years later, these imbalances in family-rearing responsibilities continue to endure and show up frequently in couples therapy. Men often believe they are contributing equally at home (and certainly doing more than their fathers ever did), when in many cases their contributions of time to home care activities are less than they imagine. A woman might cook dinner, a man might load the dishwasher; one takes an hour, the other takes a few minutes. A woman might help a child with homework, a man will read the child a story before bed. One takes half an hour, the other fifteen minutes. Every relationship is different, but statistically, the time burdens in the home still often weigh more heavily on the woman.
The difficulty for women doesn’t end when they leave the house. The Me Too movement has drawn needed attention to sexual abuse and harassment connected to hierarchies and power imbalances in the workplace. But even at a more innocuous level, when sex is not involved, cultivating authentic relationships with others who are at different levels of authority is risky, and this is true for both women and men. Power discrepancies have a tendency to skew and sometimes corrupt all sorts of relationships.
Ellen Freund, the wife of a First Generation study participant, worked in admissions at a university, and she discovered the danger of power imbalances when a particular discrepancy poisoned some of her friendships at work. Asked in 2006 if she had any regrets, she told the Study:
I do have regrets, actually. It’s been a few decades now but I’ll tell you about it. Several years after I started at the university I worked with four or five ladies who were about my age. Technically they worked under me, but we became good friends. We socialized all the time. The new dean of admissions asked me to give him a confidential assessment of all the people on the staff—their strengths and their weaknesses. I did this and I was absolutely honest. The office manager thought that I was traitorous. She copied the memorandum and put it on the desk of every one of those ladies. I never thereafter developed a close relationship with anyone that I worked with at the university. And that trails me to this day. It ended my friendships with them. They were pretty good about it. We never talked about it. They realized that what I said was true. I tried my best to be fair. It probably didn’t hurt their standing because I said that. But it certainly destroyed my friendships with them.
Asked if she had intentionally avoided forming relationships with others after this incident, Ellen said, “Absolutely. I wanted to be free to deal with people on as nearly pure a professional basis as I could. I didn’t want to be influenced or perceived to be influenced by personal relationships.”
Ellen chose to disengage from her relationships at work, to separate her “personal relationships” from what she considered her “work relationships.” This is a common and understandable strategy. If we minimize our social connections and minimize the degree to which we open ourselves up to our workmates, it will minimize a certain kind of trouble at work. But it can potentially open up new avenues of trouble—including feelings of disconnection and loneliness. In Ellen’s case, this decision defined her life at work for the duration of her career, and she eventually came to regret it. What might she have done instead? Facing toward the difficulty—talking with each of her colleagues to see if hurt feelings could be eased—might have allowed her to hold on to at least some of the relationships that she so valued.
These decisions impact the workplace in more ways than one. Not only can disengagement diminish the quality of our time at work, but it can also hinder the transfer of knowledge and stall workers’ growth, particularly the growth of younger workers. One of the most valuable types of relationships at work is also one that comes with a power imbalance: that of mentor and mentee.
When our high school teacher Leo DeMarco was young, he dreamed of becoming a fiction writer. But in the end, that dream gave way to his enthusiasm for teaching, and he found meaning in helping his students pursue their dreams of writing. “Encouraging others,” he said, “was more important than doing it myself.”
Leo, like all teachers, was in a unique position in that it was his job specifically to be a mentor to his students. But in any profession there are those who are just getting started, and those who’ve been there a long time. A mentorship relationship can be beneficial for both the mentor and the mentee. As mentors, we get to be generative. It’s a very particular joy to be able to extend our influence and wisdom beyond ourselves and into the next generation. We get to pay forward benefits given to us in our own careers—or benefits that we’d always wished had been given to us. We also get to enjoy the energy and optimism of people who are at earlier points in their career paths, and to be exposed to fresh ideas that younger people often bring. As mentees, on the other hand, we are able to grow our skills and advance in a career more quickly than if we had to learn everything by ourselves. Some jobs, in fact, require this kind of relationship. There are many jobs in which it is not even possible to learn without some kind of instruction and a close apprenticeship with a more experienced person. Embracing these relationships and cultivating them can make for a much richer experience for everyone involved.
Bob and Marc have benefited from a number of mentors who have shaped our personal careers, and for that matter, our lives. In fact, at different times, we’ve provided mentorship to each other.
When we first met, Bob was officially Marc’s boss, as Bob was the director of the program where Marc was doing his psychology internship. Marc was more than a decade younger than Bob but more advanced in his research training. Soon after they met, Bob decided to apply for a grant that would allow him to pursue research himself. He had an established career as a clinical psychiatrist and educator; doing research would mean leaving his administrative position, and starting from square one. Some of his colleagues counseled against it, saying it was too late, and the transition would be too difficult. Bob went ahead anyway. But he had a problem; a significant part of the grant application included complicated statistical analyses, which were as foreign to Bob as ancient Greek. So he offered Marc both his friendship and a lifetime supply of chocolate chip cookies in exchange for Marc’s guidance.
It was a complex relationship: Bob was Marc’s boss and had to accept a certain amount of vulnerability in order to ask for help. Marc also was vulnerable, since Bob was substantially senior and had much more security. But we learned from each other. In one direction flowed statistical knowledge, and in the other, a wealth of experience. In the end, Bob got the grant, and made the transition to research (though Marc hasn’t seen a cookie from Bob in many years).
As we grow older, and transition from being mentees to being mentors, from students to teachers, new opportunities for connection arise, and those opportunities can come from surprising places. Mentoring younger generations, and sharing wisdom and experience with others, is part of the natural flow of work life, and can make almost any kind of job more rewarding. The satisfaction that comes from being generative makes the good life at work more possible.
As we progress through the stages of our lives there are transitions that will occur in our work as well, whether it be when we receive promotions, get laid off, move into new jobs, or have kids. With each major transition it never hurts to step back and reassess our new lives from a bird’s-eye view: How are my relationships in the work world and beyond being affected by the current change? Are there choices I can make to maintain connections with people who are important to me? Are there new opportunities for connection here that I’m missing?
One of the most impactful transitions around work is also one of the last: retirement. This is a complicated transition and one filled with relational challenges. The “ideal” retirement—in which a worker puts in the required years on the same job, retires with a full pension, and then lives a life of leisure—has never been that common (and in the modern age is all but extinct).
The Harvard Study asked participants often about retirement. A good number of the men in the study were adamant that their life was too tied up with work to consider the possibility. “I’ll never retire!” they said. Some didn’t want to retire, others didn’t feel financially able to retire, and some were just struggling to imagine a life without work. Some participants’ work status was very difficult to pin down. Many refused to think about it, left retirement questions blank when they filled out Study questionnaires, or indicated that they were retired despite the fact that they were continuing to work almost full-time; for them, it seemed, retirement was just a state of mind.
When we retire, it can be a challenge to find new sources of meaning and purpose, but doing so is crucial. Those who fare the best in retirement find ways to replace the social connections that sustained them for so long at work with new “mates.” Even if we didn’t enjoy working and were doing it only to support ourselves and our family, removing this major organizer of our days can leave an enormous hole in our social lives.
One participant, when asked what he missed about the work he did in his medical practice, which he operated for nearly fifty years, answered, “Absolutely nothing [about the work itself]. I miss the people and the friendship.”
Leo DeMarco had a similar feeling. Just after he retired, a Study interviewer visited him at his home and wrote this in his field notes:
I asked Leo what was most difficult about retirement and he said that he missed his colleagues and said that he tried to stay in touch with them. “I get spiritual sustenance from talking shop.” He said he still enjoyed talking about what the task of teaching young people was all about. “It is wonderful to help someone acquire skills.” He then told me, “teaching is an almost total human commitment.” He said that teaching young people “started the whole process of exploring.” He said that small children know how to play and “the adult in education has to remember how to do that.” He said it was hard for adolescents and adults to remember how to play because of the other “commitments” in their lives.
Leo was early in his retirement when he said this, and still trying to understand what it meant for him no longer to be teaching. He was looking back on his career, thinking about how it affected him and what it was he was missing, exactly. His comment about adults remembering how to play was something he himself was grappling with; now that work was no longer the center of his life, play could again become important.
For many of us, at a deeper emotional level, work is where we feel that we matter—to our workmates, to our customers, and even to our families—because we are providing for them. When that sense of mattering is gone, we have to find new ways to matter to others. New ways to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
Henry Keane is a representative case. He was abruptly forced into retirement by changes at his factory. Suddenly he found himself with an abundance of time and energy, so he looked for some volunteer opportunities where he felt he could be helpful. First he began working at a nursing home run by Veterans Affairs, and then he started participating in the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was also able to put more time into his hobbies, refinishing furniture and cross-country skiing. But even with all of that, it didn’t feel like enough. Something was missing.
“I need to work!” he told the Study at age 65. “Nothing too substantial but I’m hoping to find some jobs that will keep me busy and add to my income. I’m realizing that I just love to work and to be around people.”
It wasn’t so much that Henry needed the money—he had a decent pension and was happy with that income—it was that earning money would somehow make his activities feel like they mattered; someone was paying him for them. Each person must find their own way of mattering to others.
Henry’s realization about wanting to be around people also teaches us an important lesson—not about retirement, but about work itself: the people we work with matter. It’s important to look around our workplaces and appreciate those coworkers who add value to our lives. Since work is often so shrouded in financial concerns, in stress and worry, the relationships we develop there sometimes don’t get their due. We often don’t notice how significant our work relationships really are until they’re gone.
On the northeast outskirts of Philadelphia, not far from where Marc lives, is a large plot of a land that used to be a family farm. People who lived near the farm could drive by in the morning and see green pastures, with cattle grazing. When World War II began the farm was sold to the U.S. government and converted into an enormous industrial complex for producing artillery shells and prototype planes. The view changed to buildings and runways, with trucks and planes taxiing. After the war, various types of manufacturing continued on the site until the late 1990s, when it was sold and transformed into a golf course. Homes were built around the course, and people could look out their windows and see trees and fairways and motoring golf carts instead of an industrial park. Now, thirty years later, after further changes in the economy, the golf course was sold, and as this book is being written a large portion of the land is now being converted into a UPS sorting center. Soon, when the people who live nearby look out their windows, the fairways and golf carts will have been replaced by a vast warehouse and delivery vehicles. This area is not unique; all over the country, in every sector of the economy, we are witnessing these evolutions.
Our inner-city Boston participants’ most formative years, from when they were toddlers until they reached their preteen years, occurred during the Great Depression. Growing up at a time when they couldn’t take financial security for granted shaped how they would go on to conduct their work lives. For them, work was often less about creating a good life, and more about staving off disaster.
The economic trials that those participants experienced are relevant today, when we face economic, environmental, and technological challenges that are causing uncertainty for the foreseeable future. The uncertainty that Henry Keane or Wes Travers would have felt when standing in a Depression-era breadline is directly related to the uncertainty that a Gen Z child might have felt when watching her family evicted from her childhood home during the 2008 financial crisis, or that young people face as we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite technological advances, there are still plenty of people working grueling jobs, people still struggling to meet their basic needs. The idealized prosperity that many expected to arrive with the computer and the information age has been limited to certain sectors and people, leaving others worse off than before. New technologies are changing how often we interact with others at work. Artificial intelligence is replacing some jobs and people with automated systems, creating more interaction with machines and less with human beings. Advances in communication technologies are making remote work much more common for jobs in business, media, education, and other industries, and an always-on mentality threatens to make workers’ home lives into an extension of the work sphere. To say the least, a consideration of how these changes have affected our social fitness has not been a top priority. And yet the state of our relationships is among the most important factors in our health and well-being.
In Chapter Five we encouraged you to remember that the time each of us has left is both a finite resource and an unknown quantity. If we want to take full advantage of the hours of our lives—many of which are spent at work—we must remember that work is a major source of socializing and connection. Change the nature of work, and you change the nature of life.
The Covid pandemic could not have made this clearer. Millions of people who were locked down in their homes and laid off, furloughed, or forced to work remotely, quickly found themselves missing the connections they were used to having every day. We became isolated from our workmates, customers, and colleagues. Bob and Marc, for example, began using remote tools to teach, work with colleagues, and even to see people in therapy. That took some getting used to. It was better than nothing, but it was not the same as before.
More technological development is inevitable. Because of the economic advantages (the lower cost of not maintaining an office), and advantages of flexible schedules and reduced commutes for employees, more jobs will undoubtedly include remote or partly remote options. This might make sense financially and for certain logistical reasons, but how will it affect the well-being of workers?
The opportunity to work remotely can have positive effects. It allows some workers greater flexibility and more contact with their families. It’s especially favorable for working parents who would like to spend more time at home, or who don’t have access to or can’t afford child care, and to those who have expensive or onerous commutes to work.
But there is a flip side to that coin, as well. Working from home detaches us from important social contact in the workplace. We may feel an initial liberation, and love the new convenience, but as we discussed in Chapter Five, the losses we experience from new technological advances are often veiled by the gains, and these losses are potentially profound. More research is needed, but the loss of in-person contact as we move as much work as possible into the home may have a significant impact on the mental health and well-being of workers. While parents who work from home might get some benefits from being more available to their families, doing so can also place a greater burden on them, forcing them to work and care for children at the same time. And it’s likely that this burden will fall harder on working mothers and those with fewer resources for supplemental child care.
As we confront these changes, we can and should ask ourselves the question: How are these technological changes in the workplace affecting our social fitness? If automation means we are interacting more with machines and less with people, is there a way to cultivate new social environments at work? If more of us are going to be working remotely, how can we replace the in-person contact we used to get at work?
Our brains, tuned for novelty and danger, catch fire when stimulated by the wonders of new technology and the stresses of the workplace. Compared to those two things, the subtle currents of our positive relationships, so important to our well-being, are likely to be overshadowed. If our relationships—both at work and at home—are going to thrive in this new work environment, we have to elevate and care for them. We are the only ones who can. If we don’t, and if the Harvard Study still exists in eighty years, then when today’s youngest generation reaches their 80s and the interviewers ask if there was anything they regret about their lives, they might look back, as some of our First Generation participants did in their comments quoted earlier in this chapter, and realize that something crucial has been lost.
We often think we have plenty of time to make changes, plenty of time to figure out how to improve our life at work or to balance our work and home life—If I can only get through this current difficulty, this current issue, I’ll have time to think about that; there’s always tomorrow—but five or ten years can pass in no time. We conducted personal interviews with Harvard Study participants every ten to twenty years. That seems like a long time, but whenever we requested a new interview, participants often said something like, Has it been that long already? It seemed to them that a decade had passed in the blink of an eye.
In Chapter Five we talked about the common illusion that there will always be time for the things we need to do, and how in reality we only have the present moment. If we are always imagining that there will be time later, one day we’ll look around and realize there is no more later. Most of our nows will have passed.
So tomorrow when you get up and go to work, consider a few questions:
Then, when you head home, consider how you feel and how the experiences of the workday might influence your time at home. It could be that this influence is, on balance, a good one. But if not, are there small, reasonable changes that can be made? Would ten minutes or half an hour to yourself help, or a short walk or swim before you get home from work? Would it help to turn your smartphone off for a specific period of time to keep work from spilling into family time?
Sometimes we’d rather be doing anything other than working. But these hours are a major social opportunity. Many of the happiest men and women in the Harvard Study had positive relationships with their work and their workmates, whether they were selling tires or teaching kindergarten or performing surgery, and they were able to balance (often after much difficulty and negotiation) their work lives with their home lives. They understood it was all of a piece.
“When I look back on my work life,” Ellen Freund, the university administrator, told the Study in 2006, “I sometimes wish I had paid more attention to the people who had worked for me or around me and less to the problem at hand. I loved my work. I really did. But I think I was a difficult and impatient and demanding boss. I guess I sort of wish—now that you mention it—that I had known everyone a little better.”
Our life doesn’t wait at the door when we walk into work. It doesn’t stand on the side of the road when we climb into the seat of our truck. It doesn’t peer through the classroom window as we meet with our students on the first day of class. Every workday is an important personal experience, and to the extent we can enrich each one with relationships, we benefit. Work, too, is life.