The Euphoria of Employment

Family Spy Story #10: The double-cross of peak productivity

I’m wrestling my own demons on the meaning of work at the same time that I’m writing the next chapter in A Family Spy Story, imagining the bizarre combination of euphoria and terror that motivated my Grandmother Marjorie in her first month “on the job” in Paris in 1933.

Last December, after too many months of unemployment — the excess counted in credit card debt and double-digit bank balances — I finally started a job.

While I was interested in the challenge of the job itself, I was cynical and despondent about the general expectations of “work-to-live” in the 21st century economy. The fact that a person needs to work 40 (+!) hours a week to barely earn enough to cover costs is an idiotic invention of capitalism that serves no one but the owners of capital who reap the profit from other peoples’ labor.

When I started working some two months ago, my principal emotion was resignation: if I had to be working, this job was a good one for my skills and experience.

I was fortunate that the job includes an excellent boss and smart, capable colleagues. By my 60th day of employment, I was enthusiastically immersed in the work — writing memos, proactively making project plans, facilitating workshops. At the end of the week, I sent my supervisor a list of almost two dozen action items I had accomplished just the week before.

When I allow myself to wear my cynic’s glasses, I roll my eyes at the inane busyness knowledge workers create for ourselves, the infrastructure of documentation and decision-making that is required to do anything. I also recognize that the outcome of this ‘administralia’ is often just more paper getting pushed down the line: a report becomes a blog post, becomes a LinkedIn post, becomes a report download, becomes a research project, becomes a project proposal, becomes a funding proposal, becomes a project, becomes a report, and so it goes in a never-ending loop.

And yet, this creation of something from almost nothing, no matter how arcane, results in a kind of addictive productivity. The making of things is what humans are evolutionarily adapted for, whether that be farming carrots or Facebook ads or Word documents.

It feels exhilarating to be asked to solve a problem, to propose a solution, and to see it executed. Critical thinking is the principal goal of the 20th-century education model, intellectual muscle that can transform the unknown into the known. (My grandmother’s second husband, Jimmy, often teased Marjorie that a Vassar girl might know nothing, but she could figure out anything.) With the use of intellect and critical thinking, one can discover knowledge within the vast swamp of information and data that surrounds us, and codify it for the benefit of others.

What’s more, the efficient modern knowledge work organization offers a management framework that so capably rewards the behaviors of productivity, the worker never wants to stop. This feeling of complete utilization is a kind of drug. It feels so good to be in its thrall, doing something that consumes one’s capabilities so fully, it leaves little space to stop and think: who really benefits from this work? And of course, the regular paycheck in your bank account only helps to strengthen that incentive.

Charting a Course to Espionage and Intrigue

I have been thinking in the midst of this new season of life about my Grandmother Marjorie and her sojourn abroad in 1933. After graduating at the top of her high school class and receiving a free ride to Vassar with the 1920s assumptions that she would easily enter the skilled workforce, she graduated into a 1930s economic wasteland devoid of employment opportunities. Whether she accepted the opportunity to become a Soviet spy because she loved my grandfather, because she believed in the Soviet cause, or because she just wanted a damn job, we’ll never know for sure. But perhaps it’s safe to assume it was some alchemy of the three. I have to imagine the prospect of some employment felt more encouraging than the alternative.

Gordon and Marjorie left New York for England on May 9, 1933, and after months of dithering about, landed in Paris on September 19 to finally get to work.