The Expanding Job

We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes to productivity, creativity, concentration, cooperation, plus all of the other skills we try to cultivate alongside the labor we do for pay.

But the “rockstars” of any profession usually have another secret: they’ve found themselves in a situation in which they’re able to still do one job. I don’t mean that they’re not doing several things at once. I mean they’re not trying to do the work that three or four people.

The system itself — which, like so many corners of the American labor market, still assumes the support of a partner that does not work full-time outside of the home. If you have that support, you will excel. If you don’t, you either have to make enough money to buy it, or you will (perhaps in slow motion, but inevitably) drown.

It’s not that people don’t want to work. It’s that their jobs feel, for whatever reason, unsustainable: unsustainable for their mental and physical health, but also unsustainable for their family, and their longterm survival. Many people actually really like the work that they do, if they were, indeed, allocating the bulk of their time to doing tha... See more