Does Your Job Really Need To Spark Joy?

"I just don’t feel like I’m contributing anything," a friend said to me recently in despair. "I want to do more. It’s not just about earning money but also I need to feel secure and keep paying rent."

This friend is in her early 30s. She does not come from a wealthy background but she has 'hustled hard' in a creative job (in which she regularly pulls 18-hour days) since her mid-20s. During the pandemic, she, like so many people, had a reckoning. She says she now wants to "make a contribution" and "do something meaningful". As things stand, it looks like she might re-train as a midwife. 

What is the purpose of work? If that sounds like a big question, that’s because it is. The answer is at once practical, historical, ethical and philosophical. But as young women emerge, rubbing their tired eyes red-raw after years of staring at screens in the name of side hustles and girlbossery, it’s one worth asking. 

And, perhaps, we have recently stumbled upon an unlikely Generation Z philosopher who can offer some answers from one side of the argument. Molly-Mae Hague is a 24-year-old influencer who, since her turn on Love Island in 2019, has gained millions of Instagram followers and amassed many large brand partnerships. 

According to Molly-Mae, the purpose of work is success. That’s why she faced backlash for espousing a 'Thatcherite' doctrine when it comes to her work ethic. "We all have the same 24 hours in the day," she told The Diary Of A CEO podcast. "If you want something enough you can achieve it," she went on, "it just depends on what lengths you want to go to get where you want to be in the future."

You can get it if you really want, Molly-Mae said. Sounding just like the Iron Lady herself (who, famously, only needed four hours' sleep a night) when she said: "What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing you are doing, knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work."

"Happiness," she said, "is not in doing nothing. Happiness is to be overloaded the whole day, become exhausted by the evening and realise you did something worthy." Someone, please, call HR.

We have been told that if we follow the rules – work hard at school, university and in the workplace – anything is possible. You can transcend conventional and entrenched class boundaries, get your dream job (even though wages have largely been stagnant since the global financial crash), buy your dream home (even though they keep getting more expensive, with house prices rising exponentially faster than wages) and live the life you want. The children of low-income workers can become prime ministers, those who were once destitute can become millionaires; all they have to do is work hard enough. Or can they?

We now know that sleeping six hours or less a night leads to a greater risk of dementia in later life and that working all available hours is unlikely to buy you a house. There is a growing awareness that hard work is not necessarily enough to get you to where you want to be and, what's more, that success in and of itself is perhaps not the goal. 

This insecurity is weighing heavily on young people, Cristiana Orlando, a health foundation research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies tells Refinery29. "We asked over 1,000 young people from a range of backgrounds what ‘good’ work looks like to them and the majority told us they do want to be well paid but they also want security, stability and flexibility," Cristiana says. "But more than that, they want jobs that are ‘interesting’ and 'fulfilling’ which they said meant feeling ‘stimulated’ and ‘supported’ by their employer."

All around me (and perhaps around you), the people I know are saying similar things. "It’s not just about money anymore," Cristiana adds. "It’s about being able to fulfil your passion. A lot of people told us that the pandemic – being able to take a break from the frantic daily life we had before – had made them reconsider what it is that they want and need from work. They want to look after their health, they don’t want to be burned out. They want to feel valued, they want to contribute and they want to feel supported."

Millennials are coming to the same conclusions as Generation Z (a little bit later in life) and they’re coming up against similar obstacles. Young people are telling researchers that they want more from their jobs but are struggling to find safe, secure, reasonably paid work with decent conditions that can provide it.

"There is," says Cristiana, "a gap between young people’s aspirations for work and the reality of their working conditions."

The girlboss – with her bullet journals, bottomless ambition and fresh acrylics laid over nails bitten down to the quick in anxiety – was loosening her grip before the pandemic, but now young women are questioning the purpose of work itself and finding the jobs available to them wanting. That could be a bleak thing to acknowledge but, perhaps, it is an opportunity. We (particularly those, like my friend, who are considering career switches later in life) can ask for more.

If the question is how do we make good quality and meaningful work more easily accessible, the answer is not yet more self-interested hustling. It's looking outside of ourselves at how we can improve working conditions for others as well as ourselves.

As Amelia Horgan notes in her book Lost In Work, it needs to come from collective power (joining unions), demanding an end to poor working conditions and, finally, refusing to accept the spread of paid work into leisure time via the monetisation of our hobbies as hustles. It won’t happen overnight but work that actually sparks joy and gives you time to lead a rich and fulfilling life beyond it may yet be possible.