What the advice about don’t make work the centre of your identity gets wrong

Scott Schieman is a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and author of the new book I Want M.O.R.E.: Why Your Job Still Matters.

Don’t make work the centerpiece of your identity.

That was one of the rules about work that gained momentum in 2021 as the anti-work movement rode the wave of the Great Resignation. Popular advice to “decentre work” is often paired with the transactional vision that work should simply be a means to an end.

It’s like the idea of work to live versus live to work.

As a sociologist who’s spent decades listening to what people think and feel about work, the decentre work advice never really sat well with me. From my read of the data, the narrative surrounding this Identity Rule exaggerates the scope of the problem – that too many make work the centre of their life and that this work-centricity is more virulent now than in the past, partly because of the broader conversations about life priorities during the pandemic.

But is it true that too many people centre work? For a historical benchmark, I went back to the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey, which asked: “How much do you agree or disagree that the most important things that happen to you involve your job?” About half of American workers agreed.

To find out if sentiments had changed, I partnered with Angus Reid Global to field my own surveys in the aftermath of the Great Resignation – just when the anti-work narrative was most intense.

In 2023, the Identity Rule’s grip should have been easy to spot. It wasn’t: Fewer than one in four Americans and one in five Canadians said the most important things that happen to them involve their job. Most of that shift happened not from work centrality to rejection, but to ambivalence.

By 2023, one third of Canadians and Americans neither agreed nor disagreed. So, claims about heightened work-centricity aren’t accurate. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction and – as my open-ended follow-up questions unearthed – we’re more conflicted about work’s role in our lives. I fielded the same question three years later and found similar results.

A small share of workers continue to place work at the centre of their identity. “Teaching is my calling and the foundation of my existence,” a 52-year-old elementary school teacher told me. “I am always looking for new ways to improve my teaching.”

“My job is part of me as an artist,” said a 31-year-old business owner in e-commerce and publishing. “When I excel in my career, I excel in my life.”

“The process of going to law school, passing the bar exam and becoming a licensed lawyer were some of the biggest accomplishments in my life,” said a 29-year-old lawyer. “There are more accomplishments tied to my profession down the road.”

However, not everyone is so unequivocal. A 29-year-old senior research manager expressed the internal tension: “My job is the biggest part of my life, for better or worse – probably worse. What happens to me during my work will inevitably impact the other areas of my life.”

For a larger segment of the workforce, the experiences are mixed. “Some of the most important things that happen to me involve my job,” said a 48-year-old senior translator and language advisor. “It’s where I spend one-third of my time. But ‘importance’ is relative.”

A 50-year-old senior network engineer elaborated: “My definition of ‘most important things’ changes. When I am doing my job and focus on that, it’s important, and I know my job is how I get paid and that’s important. When I am watching TV or doing other leisure activities, my job is not as important. It averages out to ‘neither agree nor disagree.’”

As a 33-year-old asset manager told me: “I wouldn’t phrase it that way, but I think the idea is correct. I would say ‘the most important things that happen to me’ involve my way of life. However, my way of life is, in a way, my job.”

The largest share of respondents (a similar share as in 1977) openly rejected the idea of centring work, often in moral tones. “Your job is not your life, and it shouldn’t be made to be,” said a 47-year-old payroll administrator.

“I would hope that the most important things to happen to me are personal, not professional,” said a 27-year-old economist.

And a 30-year-old corporate accountant elaborated: “I like to think that while a job is vital to one’s sense of self, unless you are solely self-employed or running your own business, the key elements of your life should be outside of work.”

“Work hard, play harder,” advised a 52-year-old estimator. “I enjoy my family time and my social life. I work to live as opposed to living to work.”

And a 44-year-old policy analyst observed: “It would be a sad world in which job-related events seemed more important than the birth of a child or the death of a loved one.”

This mindset sometimes even pathologizes those who want to make work more central to the core self. “All the saddest, most depressed people I know make their job their life,” a 34-year-old IT educational technician told me. “I have worked very hard to avoid such a sadness.”

In my view, the anti-work pendulum went too far. That’s even more ominous in an era of headlines about artificial intelligence-related job displacement.

To be sure, embracing your work identity doesn’t mean being passive about exploitative employers or being so obsessed with work so that nothing else matters

But it’s time to take guilt out of the identity equation to recognize – perhaps celebrate – that work identities are highly salient for many of us, shaping and stabilizing how we see ourselves.

Work usually isn’t one’s only source of identity. But based on my surveys and interviews, it is high on the list of elements that define how we see ourselves – and how others see us too. Identities ground us and give us concrete markers for understanding who we are and what we aspire to become.

It such turbulent and uncertain times, this anchoring effect is invaluable.

This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab.