Dying Breed Dialogues: Jennifer Tosti-Kharas on What Makes Work Worth It

The potential dark side of making your career your calling, what's worse than being unemployed, and the best movies about work

We’re back with another edition of Dying Breed Dialogues!

Since work occupies roughly a third of our waking hours, how we relate to our jobs can have a big impact on our sense of fulfillment in life. That's why I wanted to speak with Jennifer Tosti-Kharas who co-authored a book with philosopher Christopher Wong Michelson entitled Is Your Work Worth It?

Jennifer brings both academic rigor and real-world experience to her research, having worked as a management consultant before pursuing her PhD in organizational psychology. What makes her perspective valuable is her refreshing pushback against our culture's obsession with finding the perfect calling or even making work the biggest source of meaning in our lives.

I recently talked with Jennifer about the origins of the job-career-calling framework, the dark side of considering work your calling, what makes work feel pointless and meaningless, and what to do if yours does.

We also talk about the lessons she got from her first job, the best movies about work life, and what job she'd secretly love to try if she weren't studying meaningful work (hint: it involves mountains and large machinery).

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm curious about your background and your career trajectory and how it influenced your ideas about meaningful work and purpose. When did you start thinking about meaning and work?

I started out as a pretty straight-ahead business major in college. Then I went to get the most business-major job ever, which is management consultant. I was living and working in New York City right around the time of the dot-com boom. I was hired by Anderson Consulting and sort of flying high. We used to travel everywhere, and people were really dedicating a huge amount of their life to consulting. I was paying for an apartment in New York City that I was never in.

After the dot-com boom came the dot-com bust. Anderson Consulting had this huge corporate divorce from Arthur Anderson, changed their name to Accenture, and that bust hit people like no one even saw it coming. I managed to keep my job, but tons of my colleagues and managers who had really dedicated their lives to this firm and made so many sacrifices in terms of spending time with their family were devastated to lose their jobs.

The experience reminds me of a book with the title Work Won't Love You Back. Watching those layoffs was a perfect example of that. You can love your work, feel it's meaningful, give a ton of yourself to it, and at the end of the day, you're replaceable to your employer. That drove me to realize I didn’t want to be in management consulting anymore. I ended up going back and getting my PhD, and that's when I met my mentor, Amy Wrzesniewski, who studies the meaning of work. And here we are today!

Based on your experience as a consultant, why do you think people were spending so much time working? Was it just about the money?

It's funny about the money. The two most desirable jobs back then were investment banking and consulting. Both require unbelievable work hours. With consulting there's a travel component built in, which can be fun and exciting, but takes up a lot of time. Investment banking, you're just living at your office. The salaries look high, but when you boil it down to an hourly wage, and especially the lack of control over your own schedule, it's really not even that much money.

Certainly, I think with jobs like that, it's money, it's status, it's access. The work is somewhat challenging and interesting. There's a lot of learning. But a lot of the work I did day in and day out as a consultant was making PowerPoint presentations or plugging numbers into spreadsheets. We weren't rocket scientists. But you sort of fool yourself into thinking it’s important because of the status, the prestige.

We kind of intuitively categorize our work as either job, career, or calling. But I can see this can be a messy categorization. It's not as neat as we think.

My book is co-authored with Christopher Wong Michelson, who's a moral philosopher and business ethicist. I view the job-career-calling distinction as being highly subjective. He is always quick to say we should also think about a more objective meaningfulness in work. There probably are some jobs that even if people love them or think they're benefiting society — are they really?

Medicine is interesting because it's both high prestige, clearly a helping profession, and you can make a lot of money if you're a surgeon or an anesthesiologist. A teacher or nonprofit worker — these are more traditional jobs where in society we kind of ask people to make a choice. It's deeply meaningful, but we feel like we can pay you less because of the deep intrinsic reward you're getting.

A study that always challenges the job-career-calling typology looked at hospital cleaners. When we think of the hospital hierarchy, a cleaner would be toward the bottom. The study found two groups of hospital cleaners: one who saw their job really as a janitor — "I'm just a janitor, I could be doing this job anywhere." The second group saw themselves as integral parts of the care team alongside doctors and nurses.

This led to differences in how they approached their work. The ones who saw themselves as janitors did the bare minimum. The ones who saw themselves as part of the care team spent more time interacting with patients and their families, customizing their work to help. The hospital cleaner example shows that it is at least possible to find more meaning in what might seem like an objectively meaningless job.

For the past 30 years, there's been this big emphasis that when you pick a job, you need to find something that's your calling, something you're passionate about. Are we over-romanticizing the idea of work being a calling in modern culture?