"... from the greying and weary middle managers who must pretend to be thrilled about PowerPoint presentations to the prospective interns who have to write begging letters proclaiming themselves to be 'passionate' about the prospect of making those same greying and weary middle managers coffee for a couple of weeks... And as work (thanks to longer hours and ubiquitous email) encroaches on our time and becomes more defining of who we are, the boosterish values of the workplace have become more prominent in society generally. Employees find themselves colluding in this. For, if work is the defining activity of your life, how depressing not to be passionate about it.
In a meritocracy passion is also a sign of worth. The top jobs — at least in theory — go to the eagerest beavers and are no longer insouciantly inherited by the upper classes. If you were insouciantly to inherit a job, a public display of enthusiasm might help convince sceptical colleagues you were there on merit.... We must not be afraid of indifference, which nowadays looks positively like a virtue."
Writes James Marriott in "The cult of enthusiasm leaves me indifferent
All this talk of passion and excitement is crowding out the virtues of boredom and apathy" (London Times).
ADDED: It's important to keep in touch with your natural aversion to fakery, but what if your livelihood depends on existing with it all around you and generating plenty of it yourself? Ah, it's not the hardest job in the world, but it's horrible.
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Link seems broken.
Not to mention acting “with a sense of urgency” — which means pretending something is urgent even though it really isn’t in order to impress . . someone.
I can't relate to the descriptions provided, but my own company went through an absurd notion that it was "great to return to the office". Not really. No. The IT equipment is outdated. The risk of spreading covid is higher. People keep interrupting you to talk when you are trying to get your work done. Working from home is just fine. I'm not against companies insisting employees be in the office, but cut the nonsense that it is a great experience.
It's usually less about enthusiasm and more about motivation. If you help people understand how what they're doing is important, they do their work as if it's important. I was lucky enough to give that to a group of people over the last few years. They could see the results of what they were doing and I couldn't be more proud of what they achieved.
On the other hand, fake enthusiasm is a poison that saps the will and leaves you going through the motions. Been there, too.
This kind of fakery has nothing to do with jobs where people produce things of value and hold their jobs due to their worth as an employee. These kinds of absurdities are required for the kind of "elite jobs" that basically anybody could do, but that pay the long buck, both in cash and prestige, kind of like the royal courts of old; looks, connections, and the sartorial are probably the top considerations in hiring.
"but what if your livelihood depends on existing with it all around your and generating plenty of it yourself?"
The issue of trans people: from tolerating the mental illnesses of a tiny sliver of >1% of the population to the now requirement of robustly celebrating these illnesses.
Soon your life, not simply your livelihood, will depend on showing uber-sympathy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/gulag-of-the-mind-why-north-koreans-cry-for-kim-jong-il/250419/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085636/North-Koreans-face-labour-camps-upset-death-Kim-Jong-il.html
Yeah I remember all that talk about the Democrats being the intellectuals, the deep thinkers. Maybe that’s about the same time they began to lose the worker vote.
Now they’ve lost everyone but a few hard core old white ladies, the government unions, the grifters and the thugs.
I have found that any large organization feeds off of this same phony enthusiasm: corporations, religions, universities, etc. It's the curse of bigness.
I feel pretty sure that most of these people wrote college applications saying they would be thrilled to attend X Institution of Higher Learning. I don't think pretending passion is new to them. Perhaps nowadays school never ends.
That's why they call it work. This is a version of what workers in retail have to deal with all the time.
And then, of course, we all have to go home and muster some enthusiasm as we listen to our spouses tell us about their day.
"We must not be afraid of indifference, which nowadays looks positively like a virtue."
I'm not afraid of it, I just don't want to pay for indifferent service or performance.
"the virtues of boredom and apathy"
Lovely virtues indeed, on your own time and at your own expense.
Fakers pretending being fake bothers them is fake too. It's plastic turtles all the way down.
I think the author is confused mixing passion with merit. They can exist together, but one is not dependent on the other and passion does not get you promoted in most operations. Production does. Sales does. Completion of tasks above and beyond those requested of you. Leadership within the group. Ability to exceed expectations of customers. Any of these or a combination of some of them can get you promoted. If you want. You don't have to strive for that however.
I know of people in corporations, past and present, who have found their niche. The slot they are most comfortable in. They make a good living, have a manageable amount of stress. Can do the job without too much extra effort. And can get home to their families with some extra time on weekends. If they move to take on the next level position, all that changes. Money goes up, but stress levels and time at work increase exponentially. So they instead choose to stay where they are, until they've turned into those graying middle managers mentioned. They're not evil. They just got their slot and they're going to hold onto it as long as they can.
Passion is like a nice decorative topping on a fabulous dessert. It doesn't make the dessert, but it adds a nice touch to the overall look. And passion has been cheapened over the years to the point where every entry level corporate applicant says they are 'passionate' about that field or that company. Real passion is easy to spot. Its seen in the person who just works longer, into the evenings and on weekends, not because they have to, but because they love it. You don't declare you are passionate. It's shown in how you work.
So we have choices. No one is dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night to work in any particular office (unless maybe you live in parts of China). You choose where to apply, what job you want to go after. And you can choose to leave if it's not what you want. You can be passionate about changing jobs.
The law is 100% fakery. There might be good intentions behind it, but it's completely made up. Whereas science and engineering is 100% fakery. It's all based on incomplete models that we make up inside our heads. The only real profession devoid of fakery is acting.
What's sad is some people need to engage in fakery denial to pretend their pathetic insignificant lives have authenticity. This is why man has created thousands upon thousands of fake gods to give their suffering meaning.
If it's reality and passion your looking for, stub your toe.
Most jobs used to be hard work. Even white collar workers did a lot of manual arithmetic or collating. Old photos of a sea of desks in an open office building gives the general idea. Companies sponsored all sorts of social groups for employees to foster some general geniality and pride in the product. My grandmother was a long distance operator for AT&T for years and was a member of the Telephone Pioneers. They were the social organization sponsored by AT&T for operators and they had dinners, bus trips and retirement parties. It was quite popular.
Today the geniality is indeed forced and made doubly bad by the need to watch out for any taboos you might inadvertently break.
Cue the Jennifer Aniston scene from "Office Space"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ChQK8j6so8
They are called shit jobs for a reason...
...they also omitted discussion of the mandatory self-flagellation and political indoctrination.
There is a special place in Hell for whoever came up with the idea of Corporate Team Building.
And another equally hot space for the fiend who invented Employee of the Month.
The top jobs — at least in theory — go to the eagerest beavers
It's a me too thing.
The top jobs go to the person incompetent at that level, the Peter Principle says.
Peter Principle avoidance depends on finding some harmless way to show you're not suitable for the next higher position. Then you can stay in a job that you're good at.
Failure to salute fakery is one harmless way.
George Carlin said it best regarding corporate bullshit. However since this is the way the game is played, bullshit we must.
When I made a rabbit out of towels at a hotel I worked at, as a joking office decoration for Easter, a manager suggested I teach all the maids to make towel animals for placement in the rooms. He got very excited about the idea.
With equal expression of excitement, I asked what he'd pay me to do the training for his workers, and never heard another word about it.
I’m a couple decades into my corporate career and am currently one of those (not yet) greying middle managers.
I have mixed feelings about corporate enthusiasm culture. My natural inclination is to be dismissive of it because it all feels so absurd. But then I love sports, why do I allow myself to embrace enthusiasm for teams that give me nothing but scoff at enthusiasm for my company that allows for my lifestyle to exist?
I’m Gen X which probably drives my feelings here. Maybe the enthusiasm comes more naturally to Millenials and Gen Z.
When I got my first corporate job out of college those couple decades ago, I remember my (elementary school teacher) mom asking me what it was like. I told her about my boss, who was great. She was a few years older than me but was a natural developer of talent. She was tough, which rubbed many entry level folks the wrong way, but that’s what I needed out of college. So I thrived under her management.
I told my mom all that but added one detail. One thing that drove me bonkers about my boss was every time there was some new project or piece of work, she would alway say “aren’t you so excited…?” She was always “so excited” about everything. I was, ilke, I am working in Corporate Accounting for a Fortune 500 company, none of this is all that exciting.
Who is James Marriot?
If he is a journalist that explains a lot.
The only people dumber on aggregate than comms majors are education majors. They are below psych and soc majors which says a lot.
At least the Psych and Soc majors were smart enough to admit they didn't know what they wanted to do with themselves.
And this guy must have worked for some shitty companies if he worked in an office at all.
That was not what office life has been like for me.
Okay, now explain the "absurd pantomime" of the government bureaucracy.
A global ad agency I'm familiar with has just hired a Head of Mindfulness.
Imagine being a prospective client and reading this: "At xxxxxx, productivity will become second to intentionality. Doing will become second to being. Right now, we fear that financial gain will suffer by raising the vibration of the workplace."
The link doesn't work but this should.
I wanted to see a bio about the writer, to see how much he knows about actual workplaces. But you need a subscription to read the whole thing. I find writers do a poor job describing modern workplaces because, to the degree they lived it, they view the workplace as a source of writing material and not necessarily as it actually is.
I am a paralegal in BigLaw. After one year of tenure, the firm had a 'celebration' event for all those finishing one year. In a conference room full of other One Year employees, I was the FIRST person to be asked: "Tell me why you are passionate about your job!!!!".
Yikes, well, I am not one to lie so I said "Sorry, I tend to approach things more pragmatically. There isn't an idealistic bone in my body. What I do needs to be done, and I do it."
I could tell it wasn't the response they were expecting but it was the response they got.
There is no such thing as a shit job, just shitty attitudes.
“I think the author is confused mixing passion with merit. They can exist together, but one is not dependent on the other and passion does not get you promoted in most operations. Production does. Sales does. Completion of tasks above and beyond those requested of you. Leadership within the group. Ability to exceed expectations of customers. Any of these or a combination of some of them can get you promoted. If you want. You don't have to strive for that however.”
I would add in the line by Actual Items about their first boss. And I thought of high school, where almost every girl in the school was morally obliged to join the Pep Club, wear their identical Blue and Gold (school colors) uniforms Fridays to school, sit together at the football games, where they cheered our team on to victory (latter was just by chance -state football titles my last two years). The guys, on the other hand didn’t have that expectation placed on them.
My point here is that males and females tend to respond differently to this sort of thing. And tend to judge results differently too. Males are more interested in individual achievement, while females more interested in group membership and achievement. So, a male management orientation will use more competition between employees to drive performance, while a female management will use more teamwork against outside competition. One big weakness of female management is that employees are rewarded for group solidarity over actually producing anything - which is one reason that women probably do better at government work, because there is often little actual accountability in such organizations. Male management orientation though suffers from sabotage of co-workers.
That all said, these are tendencies, and I have spent my life since about 16 with women who are not happy joiners, who do not do well in female oriented organizations, etc, from my HS girlfriend who hated wearing that Blue and Gold uniform on Fridays, to my partner, who was one of three twirlers in HS, but refused to wear her uniform to classes. And they all prefer spending time with men over women.
Why do we have to pay people to work? If everyone's so enthusiastic and fired up about working, why don't they work for free?
The overuse of these two words has annoyed me for a long time. I worked on a charity event several years ago with a couple of thirty something women. They were always SO “excited” about everything going on and also they knew how “passionate” all the volunteers were. These two women kept repeating these words ad nauseam to my annoyance. As it turned out, the two excited, and employed women did very little work except cheerleading the volunteers. The event was a tremendous flop because there was little to no advertising done in the community by the sponsor of the event. These words when used in a work setting are usually total bullshit as I found out. So, when people use the word “passionate” about a job or profession (unless they are doing something to save lives), I tune out. These people who are so full of passion and excitement have got to find other words to describe their feelings. It is difficult to perform on a daily basis when one is so passionate and excited all the time. I asked my 12 year old granddaughter not use the word “passionate” when she was describing a project for school. I told her to come back to me when she is getting married and is “passionate.” about her love.
I can't speak to what it's like in the UK, but as far as the US goes; my experience is that the "enthusiasm" movement is largely the province of young, female HR employees and weak middle management who spent more time on the management track than actually gaining experience in their field. It seems to be the only measure they have for evaluating an employee's (or potential employee's) suitability for a particular role.
I think there is a big difference between being passionate or interested in your work within the context of your job, and being broadly passionate about your job in the context of your normal life. I enjoy my work and enjoy talking about work with coworkers within the context of work. I don’t sit around reading caselaw and FAR clauses for fun in my free time.
The performative aspect of corporate/executive leadership is important, but this new office/culture prioritizes it above all else to the detriment of expertise, ethics and courage. Potemkin companies.
The performative aspect of corporate/executive leadership is important, but this new office/culture prioritizes it above all else to the detriment of expertise, ethics and courage. Potemkin companies.
Yes, being the workplace Cordelia is not the way to get ahead when Regan and Goneril are ostentatiously hopping up and down and wriggling with excitement as they affirm their passion for widget-making.
I would not want an indifferent employee working for me.
Go be indifferent on your own time.
The publisher of The Charlotte Observer, Rolfe Neill, and the executive editor Rich Oppel were interviewing a woman candidate for the post of managing editor.
They concluded (and told her) that they didn't get the feeling she was "passionate" about the job she was applying for.
She responded by putting together a package for them. I can't remember what they were, but among them was a bottle of "Passion" perfume.
She got the job.
This was back in the 1980s, after I had left the newspaper, and it was at that moment that I realized that the newspaper was not in the hands of serious people.
Somehow this post reminded me of Wemmick, the clerk in Great Expectations who has a face like a mailbox. He was boring, Pip thought, and just did his work as required of him, did it well, and went home. No drama. But then Pip got to know him and it turned out he had a totally delightful life outside of work, full of love and a variety of interests. My husband said it made him think of the guy on Parks and Rec who was married to Christie Brinkley but no one knew it.
My point is that this has been going on for a long time, and there's something to be said for being fine at work but not looking at it to be fulfilling. Fulfillment comes from love, and that usually doesn't have a paycheck attached. As a matter of fact, you are probably much better off if it doesn't.
Bill Peschel, I just made a comment but now I want to answer yours! Seems to me that this woman had to prove she would love the job more than her family and had to prove her passion. Multiply that times a thousand incidents just like it and now we see how this stupid "passion" think started. People afraid to hire women (and now men) because they cared more about something or someone(s) outside of work than the work, and unwilling to play second fiddle.
The link to the article is not connecting.
It's appropriate that an Englishman wrote the article. For much of the 20th century, British companies were the kind of low-key, unenthusiastic, inertial muddlers that he admires. They were coasting on their country's head-start in economic development and eventually they fell behind companies in other countries. The reason why businesses today are so hyper about competition and so demanding is that they don't want to end up like those old style British firms.
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