The Good Enough Job

Description

A challenge to the tyranny of work and a call to reclaim our lives from its clutches.

From the moment we ask children what they want to “be” when they grow up, we exalt the dream job as if it were life’s ultimate objective. Many entangle their identities with their jobs, with predictable damage to happiness, wellbeing, and even professional success.
 
In The Good Enough Job, journalist Simone Stolzoff traces how work has come to dominate Americans’ lives—and why we find it so difficult to let go. Based on groundbreaking reporting and interviews with Michelin star chefs, Wall Street bankers, overwhelmed teachers and other workers across the American economy, Stolzoff exposes what we lose when we expect work to be more than a job. Rather than treat work as a calling or a dream, he asks what it would take to reframe work as a part of rather than the entirety of our lives. What does it mean for a job to be good enough?
 
Through provocative critique and deep reporting, Stolzoff punctures the myths that keep us chained to our jobs. By exposing the lies we–and our employers–tell about the value of our labor, The Good Enough Job makes the urgent case for reclaiming our lives in a world centered around work.”The Good Enough Job is an incredibly propulsive read, filled with characters whose stories will be at once familiar and astonishing — and it will absolutely challenge you, in the best way possible, to change the way you think about work. This isn’t a book about burnout, or addiction to a certain type of work — at least not precisely. It’s a book about how so many people have come to root their entire sense of value in the work that they do for pay — and what happens when that strategy begins to sour.” –Anne Helen Petersen, coauthor of Out of Office and author of Can’t Even

“I couldn’t stop reading The Good Enough Job. It’s packed with sharp analysis about modern work culture and vivid, surprising, page-turning stories of people who have sought — often clumsily, always bravely — to detach their sense of meaning and self-worth from their productivity as workers. In this timely dissection of what our overworked culture is doing to our psyches, I was startled to recognize myself. You will, too.” –Vauhini Vara, former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, story editor at The New York Times, and author of The Immortal King Rao

“The Good Enough Job is a thorough, insightful, and much-needed reminder that we are not what we do at work. Weaving his own experiences with surprising stories and research, Simone reveals why the modern world makes it so easy to fall under workism’s spell—and how we can finally disentangle ourselves from its clutches.” –Liz Fosslien, best-selling author and illustrator of Big Feelings and No Hard FeelingsSimone Stolzoff is an independent journalist and consultant from San Francisco. A former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO, he regularly works with leaders—from the Surgeon General of the United States to the Chief Talent Officer at Google—on how to make the workplace more human-centered. His feature writing on the intersection of labor and Silicon Valley has appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. He is a graduate of Stanford and The University of Pennsylvania.US