On Work Anxiety

For the few weeks preceding this one I found myself wandering around with the hazed feel of a half-aware dream. This was the time when I was still planting my feet into my first white-collar job, an internship (yes, slavery, but still loved), and the second leap into the grind of a forty hour workweek, my first being a two month stretch working construction, with all the exhaustion, sweat, and sexaholic men who archetypically come with manual labor deal. I’ve noticed a difference between these types of work which goes beyond the work itself – the very social environments are qualitatively different, the very people who make up the fields capable of being reduced to distinctively alternate modes of being.

Take construction. The grown-up boys who made up most of the workforce were essentially men of flesh. They lived with immediacy in mind, and all the wishes for beer, sex, and compliant women were pushed to the very jokes and relative good humor they brought to the job. The recurring complaints were with the routine work itself. These were men who were seduced by the high pay and had become to a large degree trapped in this field because almost any other alternative job for their level of education and experience would have meant minimum wage or something approximate. The most tragic expression of this tendency was made in the words of a coworker on my brother’s crew. After a somewhat hopeful high school graduation based in dreams of getting good cash at construction, the few years of repetitive work exposed to the elements had begun to accrue, until eventually he would come to work entrenched in a morose mood, which would find a cryptic release through telling my brother that he would like to rob a bank because the job he was on now – which stood for the limit of work possibilities in his life – was inconceivable as a lifelong career and something he already hated with a cold, hopeless indifference. That was the cognitive refrain embedded in most of the minds there, which never found the roaring release of despair articulated by this young mind, whether for reasons of family support, religion, or the numbness that comes with accepting one’s burden over the years.

But these guys could be damn fun to be around. Dostoevsky, in his too little known Memoirs from the House of the Dead (not zombies, folks), recorded in psychological detail some unforgettable sights and scenes from his four year prison stay in Siberia (which he would later describe to his brother as similar to “being shut up in a coffin”), including the searing insight that the inmates there were by and large indistinguishable from children in their very personalities – in the way they sometimes quarreled over things, in their sense of appreciation when given attention, “like children, delighted over the smallest success, vain over it indeed.” Likewise with the field of construction. The jokes were juvenile, and many of the oldest members discussed with a sort of adolescent excitement the grand days of sexual adventure and partying till dawn. Humor and gentle jabs were ubiquitous. They lived for beer and all the clichéd masculine qualities you can imagine. And most importantly, aside from the perennial stress of drumming out the same work day after day and the expected (and therefore less harmful) layoff, they were psychologically free. Camaraderie is the adjective of choice.

The white-collar world, despite all its claims to the contrary, might not be that much better than its sweat-drenched counterpart. Despite the glories of a desk and office to oneself and salvation from the naked sun, here the workplace can become packed with a silent anxiety that isn’t quite articulated in the moment of social exchanges. Smiles are more often forced, emotions are more often manufactured. Kind words and good intentions may be present in the social greetings, but there’s a barely perceivable reservation behind most (if not all) exchanges, a slight distance in the exchange, just enough to be contagious, and have your mind clapped back in perpetual doubt even if you’re not sensitive enough to capture the hint with conscious eyes. The weekends may not be as craved as a life with those who live a life of manual labor, but I found that an inconspicuous retreat to my office often is. Perhaps part of the reason has to do with being more intimately juxtaposed with one’s higher-ups, and so having a higher consciousness of one’s performance, but there is a large degree of the same thing present in the blue-collar work environments.

But perhaps the answer seems more in the direction of being caught up more in our culture’s definition of comprehensive “maturity”. A large part of this means being conscious of one’s status and prestige, the importance of keeping oneself in a linearly growing career path, and from a broader perspective thriving in this environment often means having a higher sense of individualism. Yeah, the Reaganesque, up-by-our-own bootstraps individualism that means eschewing dependence and charging toward the goals that would better us and the families we might have. According to this view, others aren’t relatable because they’re too caught up in self and the web of self-related goals, primarily family, and we find a greater challenge working with a seamless exchange of words in relational moments because we’re led to believe that others are instrumental or ornamental parts to our driving goal of pursuing the American dream, or we’re consciously or unconsciously afraid of being the brunt of the neglect that results from this mentality and so draw back to a safety zone of stretched smiles.

It’s just a thought, and there are certainly other variables at play – such as our greater tendency for materialism (which correlates with the status drive), or the simple distractions that come with living a life of higher responsibility (family, deadlines, bosses, you got it). But there’s clearly something about the blue-collar mentality of being in a constant state of job anxiety regarding where you’ll work, which when added to the clear sense that your place in the hierarchy is down in the dregs rather than floating in the limbo of middle importance gives one a sense of ease in reaching out to others. When all is secure in the sphere of one’s career and the only way to look is up, then people who are capable of being given secondary glances are more likely to be handed them.

Then there’s the psychologically tricky part. Our light disdain for the existence of others – of not caring intrinsically for them as persons rather than parts of one’s work environment – translates to a fear of judgment by those who do the disdaining, and this fear of judgment adds that much more inertia to our reluctance to take the chance to heroically reach out to another human being and catch them where they are for who they are. Whether we start our grand high-class careers with good intentions and get caught in the social distance imputed by others until we eventually catch the disease ourselves, or start fresh from college with a careless attitude, we’re going to end up being tempted with the essential problem at some time. And this problem perpetuates itself. The harrowing sense of distance brought about through the dispositions of others (whether meekly through fear of judgment or aggressively through indifference) adds to the conviction that others really are worth keeping a distance from -- and being feared. We need the courage to love others and be authentic, which in terms of our duties from a Christian perspective are two aspects are entailed within one another. Only with the daringness to love others and meet them for who they are does authenticity come to grow within us, or conversely, only when we cease to care about ourselves (whether through fear of judgment or interest in our goals to the indifference of others) are we allowed to respond flowingly with the person across our conversational table.

Leave it to C.S. Lewis to offer the brilliantly practical advice that Christians should seek to integrate themselves in secular places in society rather than live in their own Lord-bring-the-rapture worlds. For from a spiritual perspective, we shouldn’t imagine the social distance problem without its own cause. Underneath all there is a lack of knowledge, or lack of seriousness in attending to, the message of Christ in this so-called Christian nation. I simply can't imagine times being harder in social terms than in the present. We have no shared national difficulties, and our sense of individuality has grown to such a degree to where the social unity that would otherwise organically grow when individuals find themselves in the same room is gone. This is the age of advanced capitalism, with the concise and impersonal treating of others for the business bottom line, the pervasive interest in getting what we want, and all the cold gaps in our social relations (from the reflective pause in one's look, to the inauthentic smile) have resulted.

We simply have lost the art of relating. Instead of each one of us bursting outward toward others in the exuberance that defines the benevolence that a life seriously dedicated to Christ inspires, we've become tragically tagged with the tendency of looking inward for concern of what the other might say or do to us, or looking outward and beyond others, treating them with the emaciated concern that allows our consciences to remain in a jagged territory comparable in smaller size to the guilt of a murderer. We are scared. Tensely, nervously scared. But there is always the courageous solution of learning to love behind our tight circles of accepted others.