Work Ethic / Play Ethos

I love ethics because they’re messy. They wear the buttoned-up, black-and-white clothing of right and wrong to the party, but hang with them just a little while by the bar and they show themselves for the messy bitches they truly are. They’re all contradictions, pointed-fingers, shame, and entitlement. They lay down the rules our brains crave with what looks like hard-drawn lines, but the lines they draw are made of sand and the closer we examine them, the more easily we have a hand in blurring them. And nowhere do I hear the concept of ethic mentioned more than in the context of work.

Work ethic has changed across generations, but recent divides can be particularly hard for each side to navigate. For example, the state of one’s hands is often brought to the front when making a point about the work ethic of earlier generations. The building of something physical, the act of getting up and going somewhere each day, the building of strength, the wear-and-tear on one’s body, and the value of your work leaving an impression on you that can be acknowledged by your family and community is encompassed in the “rough handed” description of working men and women prior to the onset of the Digital Age in which we’re now living. Looking down at my own hands and the hands of my peers, it’s true that only a few show the wear of continuous manual labor, our calluses moisturized before they can even appear. But then I notice our cuticles are non-existent, gnawed away as the biproduct of an anxiety that is unique to those just old enough to have begun careers attached to smartphones which effectively eliminated the 5-day workweek and amidst economic downturn that demanded we monetize our every waking moment with that most odious of things: side hustles. So, I’m inclined to just say none of our hands are pristine and leave it at that.

I am one of those people who touts my own work ethic as the bedrock of my corporate value, I always have been, but I’m starting to see what generations just younger than my own mean when they say this is an ethos that allows for the propagation of unhealthy workplaces. My own insistence of taking pride in what I do in the service of the almighty dollar has absolutely made me stay in toxic work situations longer than I had any right to be there. Then, still, I look back on those times with pride at what I was able to sign my name to even despite the toxicity of the culture I was working within, and that’s how the cycle stays alive and expands in the macro. So, I’m trying this new thing where I slowly separate myself from my “work ethic” and try instead to view my mandatory participation in capitalism as an effort to work more ethically.

When I align the way I work to my own morals, I’m not answering to society’s definition of work ethic, but only to my own. And my own changes and evolves depending upon the chapter of life I’m in. 20-something Kylie took on everything she could get her hands on, positively desperate to get off of the bench and into the game. But with age comes the wisdom that the best way to guarantee quality output is to know when to put limits on your workload, care for your body of work as an athlete cares for their body (you wouldn’t sign up to run a marathon two days before you were slated to play in the Superbowl... unless you were stupid 25-year-old me). I am also a newly-minted, yet firm believer that our job is not to cling to the society handed to us, but to mold it into something worthy of future generations. This change is maddeningly incremental… like, really, truly maddening… you watch the news, right? But then, so is systematic change, and one of my morals is to not lose sight of just how far the endzone seems before the last hundred yards while remembering that you don’t get to the last 100 yard line by standing still. You get there by putting in the work, day after day. And sometimes, if you’re in the exact right place at the exact right time, you carry the ball over that finish line. More often than not, though, you get the privelidge of handing the ball off at the 50-yard-line to someone playing a longer game than you were ever aware existed.

That’s the thing about fields of work, and our bodies of work within them that becomes more clear to me by the day: they’re perpetual relays. Our goal should be to close the gap of advancement as much as we can for our successors, with the knowledge that their own race will be run alongside us for only a brief stretch before they head for an even more distant and brilliant horizon. In order for our part to be played well, we must shrug off the yokes of rugged individualism and work toward leading, supporting, or reorienting our larger network, depending upon where in the race we find ourselves at a given moment.

At this very moment, I am working on the loosening of my clawed grip upon the learned ethics of professionalism and embracing the ethic of play at work to make room for a little bit more joy in the day-to-day. The children we once were never saw the jet-lagged hours, torn muscles, forced rest, uphill battles, and mind-numbing numbers of laps around the track undertaken by our favorite athletes and idols; we only heard the proverbial crack of the bat and dreamed of standing on home plate ourselves one day. And here I am, with a voice, a bank account, a life, and a seat at the table. I’m in the game my younger self wanted so desperately to play while stretching for autonomy. I’m here, I’m in it, and I’ll be damned if I won’t enjoy it as I set out for another loop around my current track. Because that’s how the magic happens - one day you look up and you’re not on the track you thought you were, you’re on a larger one with higher stakes, more excitement, and a large helping of pressure to succeed, but the ability to get yourself around it comes down to the same muscles you’ve been working with on every previous lap you’ve ever taken. When you’re there and it feels good to move as an individual and as a unit, you can give a nod to the pinstripe clad referees of work ethic enforcing what appear to be hard and fast rules from the sidelines and acknowledge them for what they are: a set of critiques laid forth by those not playing the same game that you are. So, I say go ahead and mess them up a bit - that’s what they’re there for.