Work Pray Code

Work has become a spiritual practice that inspires religious fervor. People are not “selling their souls” at work. Rather, work is where they find their souls.

The lives of high-skilled professionals like John, Hans, and Doug suggest that work’s influence is indeed expanding. It does so, however, not by extracting and “caging” the human spirit, but by satisfying high-skilled Americans’ social, emotional, and spiritual needs. Work, it appears, is fulfilling, not depleting, their souls.

More Americans took on white-collar managerial and professional occupations starting in the 1940s.6 Writing in 1951, sociologist C. Wright Mills described work very differently from the way that Silicon Valley tech workers like John, Hans, and Doug do. White-collar work, he claimed, was soul crushing. In the big bureaucratic organizations where they worked, white-collar workers “habitually submit to the orders of others,” selling their “time, energy and skill to the power of others.”7 Under the oppressive weight of the corporation, workers lost their individuality, freedom, and personhood. The faceless, bureaucratic corporation so squeezed the quintessential American spirit of independence and entrepreneurialism out of employees that Mills characterized that time as the “rise of the little man.”8 “Underneath virtually all experience of work today,” he wrote, “there is a fatalistic feeling that work per se is unpleasant.”9 If work crushed the soul, then it was in the world outside of work where white-collar workers found their souls and built their “real” lives, according to Mills. “Work,” he wrote, “becomes a sacrifice of time, necessary to building life outside of it.”10 The typical 1950s white-collar worker, who was White and male, worked from nine to five, forty hours a week.

In these organizations outside of work, white-collar workers recovered their souls and became something more than another faceless worker in what Mills called the “the great salesroom” of the company.12 The most important of these were religious congregations. During the 1950s, nearly half of Americans attended religious services weekly.13 Church memberships grew at a rate faster than the general population.14 As young, White, middle-class families migrated to the newly developed suburbs, they built their communities around their Protestant and Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues.15 Through them, they met their friends, found their spouses, raised their children, and created a sense of belonging and identity in the American experiment of suburban living. Through these faith communities they found meaning in life, from baptism at the beginning, to burial at the end, and everything in between. To not participate in religion was to risk both social and existential anomie. In the 1950s, Americans also belonged to multiple social clubs—bowling clubs, poker clubs, softball leagues, workers’ unions—but among them religion was the most central to creating community and finding meaning in life.16 In the 1950s, work was only one of many organizations that the white-collar worker belonged to. Work was reined in, not only by a nine-to-five work culture, but by the nearly compulsory draw of religion.

But there is another, less cited reason that professionals started working longer and harder—work became more rewarding and more fulfilling. This is especially true for high-skilled professionals in the last forty years relative to other occupational groups. Since 1980, wages have been stagnant or declining for most Americans, but they’ve ballooned among the top wage earners, who are largely professionals and managers.26 The earnings of those in the top ninety-fifth percentile of workers (making more than $150,000 a year) rose at a rate almost four times higher than that of those at the fiftieth percentile.27 So too, those in the higher income brackets have grown even more satisfied with their jobs in the last forty years.

Firms taking “high-road strategies” tended to be concentrated in knowledge-intensive industries, such as technology, that faced both global competition and frequent labor shortages.31 These companies introduced new incentive structures designed to make work more rewarding for high-skilled workers, despite greater demands and less security. For instance, in the late twentieth century, a growing number of Fortune 1000 firms instituted reward practices such as gainsharing, profit sharing, employee stock ownership plans, stock option plans, “pay-for-performance” programs, and nonmonetary recognition awards for performance.32 Companies adopted “high-performance work systems” emphasizing mentoring, training, and learning. And they flattened the authority structure, removing middle management to prioritize team work, greater autonomy, and decentralized management.

Japanese firms had a competitive advantage over American firms, business experts claimed, because they emphasized unity and loyalty and were able to command deep sacrifice and commitment from its employees.34 Popular best sellers like William Ouichi’s Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge, argued that American firms should learn from the Japanese by creating similar strong cultures that cultivated belonging, loyalty, and shared goals and values among employees and management.35

Today, companies are not just economic institutions. They’ve become meaning-making institutions that offer a gospel of fulfillment and divine purpose in a capitalist cosmos.38 Most Fortune 500 companies have adopted key elements of religious organizations—a mission, values, practices, ethics, and an “origin story.”

The executives in her study “lose” themselves in work. Work “induce[s] a powerful sense of transcendence,” Blair-Loy writes.44 It gives them a sense of identity, independence, recognition, community, and even “euphoria.”45 Sociologist Gideon Kunda also describes the work of engineers in a Boston tech firm in religious language: “membership in Tech implies heavy involvements and a strong emotional bonding of the individual to the company, characterized in such terms as ‘missionary zeal,’ ‘fierce loyalty,’ and ‘family affiliation.’ ”46 Religious elements such as “ideology” and “ritual” in the company’s culture produce what is tantamount to late capitalism’s version of Émile Durkheim’s collective effervescence, “the collapse of boundaries between the self and the organization,” according to Kunda.47

When sociologist Maria Poarch asked the residents of a middle-class Boston suburb where they found their friends and source of community, the most popular answer was “work.”52 A real estate agent from the study reflected, “I very much belong to a community within my own office, within my own company, within my own industry.… Strangely enough I am unbelievably and sadly disconnected from the community that I live in, both because we’ve lost our religious pulls to one another and there is simply not the time.”53 In another study of professionals and religion, the authors conclude, “For many businesspeople, the corporation is the closest thing that they have to community after family.”

late. What is more, people are divorcing more often, marrying later (if at all), and living alone in unprecedented numbers. Work is where the hearth is, then, for many solitary souls.”66

Even when religion declined dramatically in Western European countries as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and secularism, the United States remained exceptionally religious well into the late twentieth century: over 90 percent of Americans continued to claim a religious identity, and over 90 percent professed to believe in God or a higher power.70 There’s good reason for this. Religion has played a vital social function. It has been the primary source of community, belonging, identity, and meaning for Americans.

Faith communities have felt the pinch. The median number of people involved in congregations has dropped.78 And so has the time Americans devote to religious organizations. From 2003 to 2018, Americans spent a quarter less time participating in religious organizations on the weekends.

Another study found that counties with higher religious adherence and denser concentrations of religious congregations have a smaller proportion of “creative class” workers and fewer patents.

In the past, upwardly mobile Americans signified their changing status by “moving up” the religious ladder from more demanding to less demanding, higher-prestige denominations: Pentecostals became Baptists; Baptists became Methodists; and Methodists became Episcopalians. But today’s highly skilled professionals are choosing to leave religion altogether.

Just when work is replacing religion, religion is moving into the secular world, a trend I call the secular diffusion of religion.

To be sure, companies and other secular organizations are not teaching the same Buddhist mindfulness that monks practice in the mountain monasteries of Asia. It’s a secularized, Westernized version, repurposed as a therapeutic and self-improvement practice.99 As one mindfulness entrepreneur put it, it’s a Buddhism that’s had the religion “steam cleaned” out of it. This doesn’t mean the absence or erasure of Buddhism, but the evolution of a new kind of Buddhism, one that has adopted the instrumental logic of work.100 The corporate teaching of mindfulness is the logical consequence of work replacing religion—religion is now a part of work. Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West, the corporation. Fewer Americans are praying in the pews these days. Instead, more are getting healed, actualized, and enlightened at work, through religious practices borrowed from religions that few of them actually profess.

So instead of asking, as Weber did, how religion shapes work, the more relevant question of our time is: how does work organize people’s religious lives?

Rather than ridicule Silicon Valley tech workers for worshipping work, perhaps we should wonder whether they are harbingers of things to come—whether their orientation toward work may already be ours, too.

But could work be becoming too enchanting and too fulfilling? Things look different when we consider the larger social consequences of what I call Techtopia—an engineered society where people find their highest fulfillment in work. By taking care of the body, mind, and soul, tech companies have colonized the functions of other social institutions. In the stories that I will share, we see that as people invest more of their selves in work, they invest less of themselves in critical social institutions like the family, neighborhoods, and religion.

In retrospect John admits that during those years in Atlanta, “doubt started creeping in my head that this is the truth and the only thing right and true in the world.” But he didn’t leave Christianity, and he didn’t leave the church because “where we were from, it [church] was just what you did.”

To understand the souls of tech folk like John, the first thing we must remember is that almost no one who works in these companies is actually from Silicon Valley. They are “tech migrants”—immigrants who come to work in the technology industry. They come from far-off places like India, China, Korea, and Germany. Even more come from the far corners of the United States—small towns in Iowa, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, and South Carolina. These details are important. For nothing stirs the young American soul like the journey of leaving home and finding a new one. Westward migration preceded some of the most dramatic moments of religious transformation in American history. The majority of people who were part of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century were young migrants moving west, according to historian Whitney Cross.2 So were those drawn to new religious movements in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s.3 And to the masses of young Irish, Italians, and Germans who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, migration, according to historian Timothy Smith, was a “theologizing experience.”4 But one important detail separates the spiritual journeys of “tech migrants” today from other migrants in America. In the past, immigrants found community and immortality by building churches, synagogues, temples, and communes. The “tech migrants” of the twenty-first century, however, meet these religious needs by starting companies.

Moving may be advantageous to their careers, but it has spiritual costs: it uproots people from the communities that nurture their religion. As a result, religion is one of the traditions that people may leave behind in the process of migration.

People lose their religion in the process of moving, not only because they leave home, but because the Bay Area is one of the least religious regions of the country. According to the 2014 Pew Research Landscape Study, 35 percent of Bay Area residents are religiously nonaffiliated, compared to 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Los Angeles, and 23 percent in the general population. Moreover, the Bay Area is less Christian than the rest of the United States. Only 35 percent of San Francisco residents identify as Christian compared to 71 percent of the general population.

His tinkering made wacky, personal inventions, and not products that would change the world or become the next Facebook. Becoming a tech entrepreneur required John to transform his relationship to his work. He had to become one of those “crazy” people who believed that his invention would change the world. Work gave John a clear purpose in life, one that was not so different from Christianity—to transform the world one person, or user, at a time. Only John’s work did it through technological products, not the Gospel.

All this talk about believing in work, drinking the Kool-Aid, and the burden of changing the world would have felt strange and “crazy” to John back in Georgia. But in Silicon Valley it was normal. The company made work real, urgent, and immanent in Silicon Valley, just as the church made God real, urgent, and immanent to John in Georgia.

He spent more time with them than he’d ever had with his church or Christian fraternity. Not only did they work together, but they ate three meals a day together, played together, and traveled together. In the winter, they rented cabins in Lake Tahoe and went snowboarding. And in the summer, they went camping and to Burning Man. They even made music together. John and a couple of coworkers jammed during their breaks.

For John, work wasn’t contained within time and space. It was an omnipresent spirit that had become a part of him and infused everything that he did. Just as John’s devotion to God hadn’t been confined to Sundays at church, his devotion to work informed every part of him and at all times. John had crafted his Christian life in accordance with the biblical teaching to “be imitators of Christ.” Now he crafted his work life to optimize his productivity.

John never chose to leave Christianity. He’d had his doubts, like most Christians in a secular age. But he never had a crisis of faith or a break with the religion. Instead, his Christian faith slowly withered and died, like a sapling in the shadows of a giant redwood, choked off from water and light. The god of work was like the God of the Hebrews in Exodus, a “jealous God,” who demanded exclusive worship. If believing in God and going to church was “just what you did” in Georgia, then believing in work and “drinking the Kool-Aid” is “just what you did” in Silicon Valley.

For instance, entrepreneur Chris Hadley had worked at a prestigious management consultant firm in Manhattan, putting in sixty- to-seventy-hour weeks, before joining a start-up in Silicon Valley at the age of twenty-six. Even though tech’s hours were comparable to management consulting, the work felt different to Chris. He described it as expressing something essential to who he was, saying, “It was the path that I wanted to follow … a side of me so desiring to express itself.”

To Chris, work wasn’t a place or a thing contained in time or space, but something that had become a part of him. He explained, “I was mentally preoccupied all the time. Even when I wasn’t at the office, I was still mentally working,” a state that other engineers, especially entrepreneurs, also described.

Roshan Menon, a programmer from India, explained that when he worked in a large firm in New Jersey he had a different attitude toward work: I thought of work as just a job. I do my job. I get paid and leave. I’ve always been an IT guy; it’s just fun and games for me. I don’t get stressed out about it. You don’t bring your worries home. I didn’t want to think about work after I was done with work. I wanted to pursue other interests. I never considered work would be somewhere where I’d find any meaning. And, that has changed. Now that Roshan works for a large Silicon Valley company, he describes himself as someone who takes “ownership” of his work, “that guy who’s coming up with new products.” Work is no longer just fun and games, nor is it confined to the workplace; it’s something he thinks about all the time because, he says, “I really want to make a difference in the world.”

In Silicon Valley, however, the vast majority of the people I met were people like John, Chris, Mike, and Roshan: millennials who found their work to be very meaningful and believed that it made a difference in the world. According to a survey conducted by PayScale, over 70 percent of employees at Apple, Google, and Facebook believe they are improving the world.17 This creates a culture where people expect work to be meaningful. That was true for Greg Johnson, a twenty-six-year-old engineer who left his job creating graphics for video games because “it wasn’t changing the world.” He moved to his current company for its “culture of good.” Greg was attracted to its mission of making the internet accessible to everyone, even the poorest, around the world.

This is not, however, how they thought of work, or the act of “making things,” before Silicon Valley. In narrating their work histories, engineers often compared themselves to craftsmen and described their work as “making things.”

Money, in fact, was a trifling thing. One engineer explained that, to inventors, “Money’s like toilet paper. You need it, but you don’t want to spend your time thinking about it.” “Making things” is a hobby and what engineers do for fun. For instance, on what he does for leisure after work, one engineer told me, “I would go home and write code for fun [laughs], read papers or watch videos from people giving talks about the design of this system or that system.” Another engineer told me that in his free time, he learns new programming languages. In fact, people from the design and business side of tech often complain about clueless engineers who care only about building technologically sophisticated systems, but have no idea how the product will change the world and make money.

My interviewees spoke of their products using the language of transcendence and transformation that we often associate with religions. For instance, one entrepreneur described the work networking app his company created as “helping humanity thrive.” Another entrepreneur told me that the mission of his digital gift certificate app was to “spread love.” Yet another entrepreneur described the social networking app his company built as “leveling the playing field.” I found this to be true not only among entrepreneurs in start-ups but also among engineers in large firms.

Instead of saying that the app would make users more motivated, they could only say that it might make users more motivated. The company hadn’t hurt any of its users, nor had it intentionally lied to them, as tobacco companies had. But the lawsuit crippled the company precisely because it unraveled the faith of its employees. Cecelia was “crushed.” She and others became “disillusioned,” prompting a mass exodus from the firm, including her, because they “couldn’t bear to be associated with the company.”

Cecelia and her coworkers could no longer believe in the work. The experience was so damaging to Cecelia and her “idealistic” Guru coworkers that many of them left tech altogether to pursue careers in nonprofits or attend graduate school.

As work converts, both Yasamin and Hans expressed feelings of moral obligation and indebtedness to their “work families.” Yasamin said, “I can’t imagine leaving this company. I know I can get a really good job somewhere else, but I don’t know why, I just can’t.” After a moment’s pause, she reflected, “What they’ve given me these four years I don’t think any company can offer me.” Hans also expressed feelings of indebtedness to his company. He admitted that his company’s technology isn’t as cutting-edge as Google’s (everyone compared their companies to Google), but Google could never give him his “awesome family.”

Work in Silicon Valley is what sociologist Lewis Coser calls a “greedy institution.” It vies for “exclusive and undivided loyalty,” outmuscling family and religion when they get in its way.27 Yasamin admitted that her sense of duty to her “work family” is even stronger than that to her real family.

In his small start-up, where it was always all-hands-on-deck, Thomas quickly moved up the ladder; in three years he assumed the kind of authority that it would have taken him “about twenty years” to earn at his old firm. Thomas described his own transformation as a leader in the start-up. Once, at a tech meeting, he had the exhilarating experience of speaking to a crowd of three thousand people. A shy introvert, Thomas had always been petrified of public speaking. At the meeting though, not only did he survive it, but he “nailed it.” The start-up gave Thomas that same sense of self-worth, status, and belonging that the Korean church offered to his displaced immigrant parents when they migrated from Seoul to the United States and converted to Christianity. Thomas was no longer a nine-to-fiver, but someone whose life revolved around work: He worked all the time. All his friends were from work. Church was no longer a part of his life.

The genealogy of tech companies is similar to the successive spawning of new religious communities through church planting, the development of new ministries, and schisms. Moreover, companies become impersonal and institutional as they grow, engineers complained. Continually joining or founding start-ups is how some engineers create and sustain the high that comes from belonging to a faith community. For instance, the close-knit executive team of one start-up expressed anxiety about achieving their goal of getting acquired. What would happen to their faith community if it got broken up with an acquisition, they wondered. “We’ll just start another company,” one person responded.

“True believers” tend to be the young, single, and more recent migrants, who are also the majority of the tech workforce. “Nonbelievers,” on the other hand, tend to be older workers (forty-plus) and people with families. I found one exception to the pattern. Religious people—people who identify with a religious tradition and belong to religious communities—are “nonbelievers” in the religion of work, regardless of age, family status, or timing of migration.

So what do people who are older, parents, or religious have in common? They are bound to communities outside of work that offer alternative sources of identity, belonging, meaning, and purpose.

Whereas the other three members of the executive team spoke to me about the company mission with great passion and optimism, Carl struck a more cautious tone, questioning the sustainability of their business model. He spoke softly, occasionally looking over his shoulder, concerned that others might hear him in his typical wall-less start-up office that offers little privacy. Carl’s doubts manifested in other ways. He didn’t participate in the company daily meditation at 2 p.m. Instead, he attended the weekly Taizé service at his church. Nor did he go on yoga retreats or ski trips with others. He explained: “So, you know, the three of them are single, and they all kind of get together a lot and mingle, and it’s a very important part of our culture. People are going out. Other employees coming together for lunches on the weekend. Some going out to the movies together and going to live music together and having dinner at each other’s houses, and I do none of that.” Carl was also the only person to tell me that he didn’t bring work home, even though he worked fifty-to-sixty-hour weeks, like the others I spoke to. Why was he different?

The other three members of the executive team are also involved in things outside of work: yoga and meditation, rock climbing, and cycling. They are a part of social networks; they attend hack-a-thons and meet-ups with other entrepreneurs. But none of them speak about being bound to their hobbies or networks with the sense of love and duty that Carl has for his wife, family, and church. None of their hobbies and networks demand the time, energy, and devotion that work does.

Being devoted to something other than work, however, can be a liability in Silicon Valley. When I ran into Zizi’s CEO a couple of years later, he told me that everyone was still working there—except for Carl, who had been “let go.”

Why? How do they resist converting to the religion of work? According to Weber, all world religions share a critical stance of judging this world against an ideal world that should be.28 This “world-rejecting” dimension of religion offers followers a way to resist, separate from, and, in some cases, even transform “the world.” Throughout history, religions have prompted some members to live differently and sometimes apart from “the world.”

Howard Chen, an entrepreneur who’s sold multiple start-ups and retired at the age of fifty, is another Protestant who is “in but not of” the Silicon Valley world of work. He acknowledges that he is “very well off” and that his “biggest spiritual challenge” is to maintain what he calls “Christian stewardship”—using God’s gifts responsibly—in the midst of the Bay Area’s extreme wealth. He says that living in the “high-tech bubble,” it’s easy to forget that most of the world does not share his material privilege and to get caught up in the area’s status seeking and materialism. “If your friend drives a Tesla, you want one too,” he says. Howard wards off the temptations of Silicon Valley by intentionally belonging to a class-diverse community of faith.

In both Christian and Buddhist interpretations, work is in service to religion and not the other way around. Buddhists and Protestants both feel that they are swimming upstream against the prevailing Silicon Valley religion of work. And no one does it alone. They gain strength from their religious communities and the traditions that support their “countercultural” values and orientations. That’s a critical difference from nonreligious people who critique Silicon Valley’s religion of work. Nonreligious critics say things like, “I don’t want work to be my whole life” or “there’s more to life than work.” They have interests that take them away from work—cycling, mountain climbing, hiking, yoga, Burning Man, meditation—all of which are common hobbies in the Bay Area. But for them, these are leisure activities that offer a respite from work, rather than resistance to it, as religion does.

Religions, however, are singular in offering alternative narratives and practices of self and community against Silicon Valley’s religion of work. Families can do this, too, but religions are particularly powerful in critiquing the culture of work because they do so in ways that are both systematized—embedded in a sophisticated and coherent tradition of religious teachings, texts, practices, and rituals—and collective—shared with a community that reinforces these alternative values and norms about the meaning of work.

I heard harrowing stories from burnt-out tech professionals who in their prime of youth should have been healthy and vibrant. Among these tech casualties were a twenty-six-year-old woman whose immune system was so overwrought that she came down with mono; a twenty-nine-year-old man who had a nervous breakdown; a thirty-two-year-old woman who developed a mysterious illness that left her unable to work for a year; and three men in their thirties who experienced temporary paralysis for months. In addition, people also reported the more common symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, irritability, inability to focus, and headaches.

Understanding burnout as a problem now reflects a fundamental shift in how companies view their skilled labor in a knowledge economy: as assets to be developed rather than costs to be cut.4 In an industrial economy, the means of production are machinery and natural resources. In a knowledge economy, however, “the means of production is knowledge, which is owned by knowledge workers and is highly portable,” according to management scholar Peter Drucker.5 That makes educated workers and their skills the company’s most valuable assets.

Tech companies have not disrupted the laws of the market. There still is no such thing as a free lunch, really. Corporate maternalism monetizes the nonproductive parts of life that the busy tech worker otherwise has no time for—eating, exercising, rest, hobbies, spirituality, and friendships—and makes them a part of work.

To move away from the sterile and mechanical term “human resources,” many companies are opting for more humane titles such as “people operations” and “people development.” Those shifting terms reflect how at one time tech companies treated employees as “resources” like machines, but now treat them like “plants that need to be watered and nurtured,” as one human resources professional put it.

Second, the personal is the professional has radical implications for the role that corporations play in employees’ personal lives. We see this in Vijay’s experience. Star Bright’s CEO believes the company reaped returns on its investment in Vijay’s romantic and spiritual life, areas that, outside Silicon Valley, have no obvious bearing on his work. Anne Simmons, a veteran in leadership and development, explains the approach this way: “You build a person, and it shines through all areas of their life.”

Gwen and Susan argue that corporate maternalism doesn’t benefit the company by merely mitigating worker burnout, but by binding workers emotionally, socially, and spiritually to the company. Susan articulates this clearly: When the company takes care of the whole person, it gets the whole person. This is one of the ways that organizations with high demands, like cults and communes, command the commitment of their members.

Corporate maternalism is the latest version of a long effort to obscure the relations of power between company and employee, and the contractual nature of work. These efforts seek to recast what Karl Marx perceived as an employment relation that was inherently oppositional—recast it away from the world of contract, wages, and timesheets, with their tangible rewards and consequences, to a more personal, private, and cooperative (nonoppositional) relationship defined by intangibles such as commitment and loyalty.

In fighting the notion that work and life occupy distinct spaces and times, tech companies are reviving a much older way of organizing society. In agrarian societies, work and life were integrated for both women and men.20 The farm was both home—where people ate, slept, and played—and workplace—where people labored and participated in the economic system. Industrialization began to impose stark boundaries between work and life, particularly for men.

Today’s tech company is returning to the undifferentiated spheres of its preindustrial predecessor, however, by making life a part of work.

There are studies that show that employees lose about an hour a day getting food when they go out of the office, grab food, and come back. So it ends up being cheaper for the company to pay for food and keep them in house. So we offer free food all the time—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The food is brought in every day. Sarah explains how this logic also applies to chores. Instead of being diverted to “life’s chores,” employees can devote their time and attention to work:

Another human resources director described lavish company perks in Silicon Valley as part of a “fling” mentality. “People aren’t marrying their companies anymore. They are having flings. It’s a short-term relationship. And every day better be a good day!”

In the “war for talent” in Silicon Valley, meditation, mindfulness, and spiritual retreats are not about healing, health, wholeness, or spirituality. They are another set of perks companies use to keep up with Google.

They were happy, not in spite of work, but because of work. They were laughing with friends and eating healthy food in the sunshine. The company gets them free theater tickets. They dance salsa at work. They meditate at work. They drink custom-made smoothies and cappuccinos at work. They play the guitar at work. They sing at work. They stretch at work. They believe they are healthier because of work.

he still came “home” for dinner, to hang out with his friends and take dance classes. Why did Ken suggest that engineers have to feign happiness, I wondered? Why the anxiety about happiness? Were companies really making people happy, or were they teaching people how to look and act happy because it needed to advertise happy employees? Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Ken, who had given his whole self to work, needed the company to bring him happiness, because no one else could care for him as well as “mom.”

And it also showed up at work. Just as Patrick’s self-alienation compromised his capacity to be “fully present” in his personal relationships, it also detracted from his capacity to give his full self to work. He couldn’t be his best at work, he feels, because he was always expending emotional energy distancing himself from others

“You know, misery loves company. And the more miserable people are, the more it has a contagious effect,” one that can be disastrous to organizations. And that’s the problem with most workplaces, according to Patrick and others: People feel “shut down” and “un-alive” there. Many brought up a recent Gallup poll purporting to show that about 70 percent of workers feel disengaged from their work. They worried about the organizational consequences in quantified terms. “Companies suffer when their workers are not engaged and want merely a paycheck,” Patrick says. “So if 70 percent of people are not engaged, that has a huge cost to an organization. So every day that I can have you 10 percent, 5 percent, 1 percent more engaged is a day of return.”

The human relations movement underscored that managing labor involved not only the technical task of coordinating efficient production, but also understanding the human psyche. It emphasized harnessing the human need for group belonging and acceptance in order to transform it into productive labor.

Unfortunately, they lamented, the workplace too often alienates people from their “authentic selves.” Consider what I heard from one man who worked in human resources in tech for twenty years before becoming an executive coach, as he described the toll that conforming to work took on him and his personal life. “So I gave a part of myself until I didn’t have anything left. I shut a part of myself off.” He finally left corporate life, fed up with the way work made him feel, determined “to get over feeling ‘I hope the company likes me so I don’t get fired.’ ” One engineer described work as a place where he has to “disconnect to stand being there.” Others described a fragmented life that pitted a “work self” against a “true self.”

Who am I? What do I value? I didn’t even know these things because I gave everything to work.” Taylor described leaving her job as both the “death of self” and a “resurrection” of her “real self.” Others told me stories of “losing themselves” at work to the point of becoming physically ill.

His work experience left him “living as someone I did not recognize.”