Week Four Discussion: Career and Well Being
So, when I look back over the past thirty years of my career, there’s been moments where work has contributed to the most euphoric and life-giving parts of my life. It’s enabled me to travel the world, meet some incredible people, find lifelong friends, and be involved in some of the most rewarding and fulfilling projects I could ever imagine. There’s also been moments where work has felt like it almost killed me. Stressful encounters, bad bosses, or just years of a punishing commuting schedule in and out of New York every day. I would never wish the hell having to deal with Penn station and the New Jersey transit twice a day on anyone.
So ultimately I have mixed thoughts about wellbeing at work. But wellbeing through what I should probably call ‘work outside of work’ has often been the most fulfilling. Personal creative projects. The work which comes with parenthood. Or an academic journey back to Penn. These have consistently been the work which has been necessary for me to do on my own, and which has nourished and sustained me through whatever the paid work throws at me. It shows up as sitting in the quiet reading a book about Ancient Rome as much as it does quietly building a generative artificial intelligence side hustle. Paid work’s benefits have allowed me to create highly impactful things. Even today, my work reaches hundreds of millions of people each month. But it’s only nourishing in the sense that it fuels what I really want to do. To spend time in antiquity. To travel the world and learn its ancient languages. Or to lose myself in the museum for the day. All paid work does is facilitate ever growing windows into what I think retirement is going to be. I’m about 15 years away from retiring, and I’m thinking about this a lot. Basically, I’m about 2/3 through my working life, but I’m almost there.
My current work supports my wellbeing through being incredibly supportive and generous with both time and money. They have funded my time at Penn, but also accommodated days off to write papers. We both understand that by doing this, I am even more motivated to work as hard as possible for them, and ultimately, such accommodation makes me happy and invested. I’m not a huge fan of the current climate of returning to the office every day, although I get the perspective of thinking we do our best work when we’re together, even if I don’t expressly agree with it. Yet through it all, when I think of the best jobs I’ve had, it’s always been about the people. Those folks who get you through the day. Ask how you’re doing. Or are just simply fun to have lunch with. It’s the folks you always feel better are in the room with you. The people who make the stress worth bearing. And often, the people who you are sad to see move on. My current boss is a very large contributor to my sense of wellbeing, even if he doesn’t really know it. When I applied to Penn the first thing he said was ‘you know we’ll pay for this, right?’ And it’s that sense of having someone advocate for you in rooms you’re not in that I feel very positively from him. I know how fortunate I am.
In terms of enhancing my wellbeing, I’m currently striking a comfortable balance between life inside and outside of work, and don’t particularly have any further career aspirations in terms of promotion or advancement. My career has been incredibly fulfilling and I’m lucky enough to be able to look back on it with pride. But that said, it’s far, far from over. Would I love to be able to jump to full-time study and indulge my passion for antiquity in a more scholarly way? Absolutely. Would I love to live the art life and spend my days drinking coffee and creating? You bet. So while these days aren’t here yet, I’m actively doing everything I can to line them up, so that when they do arrive, they will be the best days of my life.
