Stop Letting Your Job Steal Your Personality

Earlier this week, after a long work day, I made myself an amaro spritz (with my favorite amaro) and a shitty frozen pepperoni pizza and plopped down on the couch with a copy of The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years.

These pieces, which ran from 1977-1997, have been a sweet little treat for seeing the inner workings of the early years of outdoor writing (which, yes, gives me just a hint of jealousy).

I was cozy and ready to get dreamy about my next (mis)adventure. I was ready to put the world of Work Seriousness™️ behind me. I took a fizzy sip of my drink and opened to a profile about David Brower.

That name sounds so familiar, I thought only to quickly realize—after reading about the hours and hours and hours of “work” he still did everyday in his 80s—that he was the first executive director of the Sierra Club, founded Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, and cofounded the League of Conservation Voters.

I let out an immense sigh.

For fuck’s sake, I thought when I saw the titles and accolades. I didn’t particularly feel like spending my relaxing evening reading about work.

The Aura of Environmental Workplaces

As someone who has spent the last decade seeing how the sausage is made in the environmental nonprofit sphere, the shiny magic and holiness these famous leaders once inspired in me has since worn down into a persistent, grimacing toothache. Their self-righteous, single-minded personalities have a way of disguising their uncanny ability to craft some of the most toxic workplaces under the illusion of “passion” and “results.”

I was irritated with this man less than a paragraph into the story. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed to see exactly how David Brower had made my work life such a living hell.

No, Brower did not found the organization I work for. But his influence is obvious in my workplace. Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and LCV are not only partners in the work, but also competitors. Every dollar of fundraising they receive is a dollar my organization doesn’t get (hello, nonprofit industrial complex). And because these groups are all in direct competition, if Brower shaped one of them, in a way, he shaped them all.

Within the first few paragraphs, I saw exactly what I expected:

“[Brower] is also, as numerous people will testify, holy hell to work with. Beneath his genial veneer lies an obsessive, uncompromising drive that led to a series of bitter disputes and his unhappy departures from both the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Prickly and single-minded, Brower seems always to move too fast, want too much, push too hard. No one can keep up. His sense of mission comes before allegiances, before friendship and family, before everyday comfort and affection…Year by year, he has purified his life until all that remains is the David Brower ecological gospel in excelsis, the totality of which is contained in the most primal of assertions: I know.”

And there it was. The relentless drive. The conceited belief that you know more than everyone. The burned bridges. A sense of “mission” that must be so profound and indisputable as to never have to look deeply at yourself. And then of course the requirement that everyone else meet your same uncompromising work ethic, because if the work isn’t EVERYTHING to EVERYONE, then you might be forced to confront the reality that you fundamentally weren’t as important as you thought you were.

This is the aura under which environmental nonprofits still work today.

That Don’t Impress Me Much

I’m not here to convince you what a butt Brower was, you can read that for yourself in the profile in Outside magazine (and as a heads-up, the dude’s long dead, in case any of this was making you feel a little squeamish). But I think it’s fair to be frustrated that men like this are lauded for their “achievements” without ever having to look too heavily at the suffering they caused along the way or the obnoxious standard that they set.

I mean, the guy wrote a 904-page autobiography, which probably tells you everything you need to know about his self-absorption. His kids resented him as an utterly inattentive father, and a friend once said Brower thought he was placed on Earth to “do these things no one else can do,” which is the kind of thing someone experiencing delusions of grandeur would say.

Did he do a lot to protect the environment? Kind of. I guess. But I also get the sense that this was a time when no one was doing much for the environment, so actions that are now the absolute bare minimum of my daily working life somehow managed to accomplish major political wins back in the 50s.

For example, when the Bureau of Land Management wanted to dam the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon, Brower ran some full-page ads in the New York Times and thus (and I quote!), “Public sympathy swelled,” and “the dam was scuttled.”

If all I had to do was run some New York Times ads to save the places I work to protect, well, I would have single-handedly saved those places several times over.

What I’m saying is I’m not impressed. If anything, I’m kind of disgusted by Brower. And when I look at the nature of my work, I see his egotistical fingerprints all over the structures and systems I’m forced to work within every single day.

While we’re still busy handing out grants and awards in his posthumous honor, I can’t help but wonder what all we lost by allowing—hell, glorifying—such an obvious narcissist to call the shots.

What really sent me over the edge in this piece though, wasn’t even Brower himself. It was the way he treated his wife, Anne, and the way she made herself so small in his presence.

When asked about herself, she said, “I’m very uninteresting compared to David. Everything has always been connected to his work. I’ve lost my identity.”

That was roughly when my blood began to boil, and I had to set the book down and march around my house muttering in a fugue state for a few minutes.

Do You Want Information Or Experiences?

We’ve been having a lot of discussions at work recently about the difference between thriving and surviving, and what’s been coming up for me is a cognitive dissonance between my work identity and my personal identity. When I’m just surviving at work, I build resentment. I want nothing about the job to seep into my personal identity.

Despite my obvious passions, I’ve always struggled to identify with my job, even when the mission aligns with what I think is important. Perhaps this is related to my avoidant personality tendencies, but as soon as the job starts attempting to define me in my off-work hours, I shove it away from me like a stinking heap of garbage. (Yeah, dating was very similar for me. Why do you ask?)

In fact, the only job I’ve ever been even remotely compelled to identify with was during undergrad when I worked as a curatorial assistant at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

Perhaps it’s because I only worked there 20 hours a week (the maximum amount I think we should all be working), but also because they didn’t ask me to “identify” as some monolithic thing. There were no expectations beyond get the work done by the deadline. So long as you did that and weren’t an absolute bummer to be around, you were pretty much left alone.

But now, there’s an unspoken (and sometimes spoken!) compulsion to be kinda working all the time. When your work is so tied to the political cesspool, reading Tweets, catching up on the news, and delving into breaking reports IS working. And it all comes straight to your phone, which never leaves your hand.

The landscape is changing and moving so quickly, you could always be more up to speed, more informed, more in-the-know. You should always be schmoozing with someone new or making some powerful connection. You should have talking points ready to regurgitate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and if you’ve got time to do other things, are you really prioritizing being as good at your job as you could be? You should be constantly informed and driving other people to take action, and if you’re not, what are you even worth?

Despite living long before the instant gratification of the digital age, David Brower’s desire to be endlessly informed and endlessly informing others was his entire schtick. On the opening page of his profile, reporter Daniel Coyle writes:

“Each afternoon, Brower’s desk receives a stack of environmental journals, magazines, books, newsletters, updates, pamphlets, and broadsheets from all regions of the globe, reams of paper deepening at the steady rate of four inches a day. About twice a week, Brower dives in, tearing out pages, pressing down sticky notes, performing hasty origami on countless leaves of newsprint, cutting and pressing the anonymous flow with an imperial hand until only the vital information remains. Governments proclaim, scientists reveal, ambassadors declare, activists denounce, politicians waffle, and rebellions are crushed: human civilization gushes along on a torrent of print, and Brower inhales all of it in great thirst gulps. Once he has done that, his instinct calls for utterance, expressive action. To tell them, all of them: Can’t they see what’s happening?”

This sifting through and digesting of information was, at its core, Brower’s identity. This belief that if others just knew, just had as much information as him, that something would change. And this is the identity Brower’s wife Anne found herself lost in. Which in my opinion, isn’t much of an identity at all. To be outraged by a flood of knowledge and try to convince others to share your outrage is an incredibly thin and fragile selfhood.

I get hung up on this “work as my identity” bullshit because I would rather take in experiences than information.

And work really wants me just to take in and regurgitate as much information as possible.

Networking sucks because it’s just taking in info about each other. Hanging out (genuinely), on the other han,d is an actual experience. Writing press releases and social media captions is barfing out even more info. Organizing and building resilient communities is an experience.

Anne Brower lost her identity because she was heavily influenced by a man whose main goal in life was to take in and spit out information. That is such a meaningless way to live; there’s almost no depth to plant an identity seed into.

People need experiences to have an identity. And work should be providing experiences. And if it’s not, then I shouldn’t be faulted for not having some kind of flimsy info-centric identity with my work.

If work just wants me to shuffle information around, I’m sure as hell not going to allow four inches a day of information overload to take over my life outside of work. That’s why you’ll find me on my bike somewhere out in the desert, or hanging out with my horse, or 60 feet deep in the ocean, or writing, or painting. That’s why I identify so heavily with all the other magical, experience-based aspects of my life and not at all with my career.

No, I don’t always have the most perfect grasp of what’s going on in the world across every issue area, but I do actually live in the world, which is more than I can say for a lot of the D.C. politicos.

So many of us workers are starved for experiences and overstuffed with information.

Be The Hard Reminder

I met with my resiliency coach this week at work (yes, that’s a for real title and a for real thing we’re trying to do at work). After lamenting that I’m struggling with this pressure to have a stronger identity to my job when I don’t see myself at all in the work I’m being asked to do, she said something that had me on the edge of tears:

"You are a hard reminder for people of the way they could have lived their lives. And that makes leaders who are stuck in their ways extremely uncomfortable. Continue to be the hard reminder."

I think very few young people enter their careers hoping they’ll spend the next 45 years moving bits of banal information between links, emails, and meetings. I would bet a lot of money that most of them actually want to do something.

I’ve been working some kind of job since I was 13, but I’ve really only done the 9-to-5 thing for the last eight years. Not long enough to have the respect of my (older) peers, but just long enough to feel myself slipping into phrases like, “Ahh, it’s the same shit everywhere. You’ll learn to deal with it,” instead of some of my earlier career phrases, such as, “What the actual fucking fuck is wrong with you dildos? How can you be so boring and so inefficient AND earn five times more than me?”

If you can believe it, I have toned down my rhetoric a bit over the last eight years, but even with some slightly softer edges, my resilience coach is probably right: Less than a decade into this, I’m still a hard reminder for the more tenured, eroded folks of what their earlier career lives may have looked like.

I still want to do something. Get my hands dirty. Try and fail. I want to take risks and I want to laugh the whole time I’m doing it. I don’t just want to upchuck information hoping it accomplishes something (or worse, just to look busy).

For as long as I choose to be in traditional work, I’ll likely always be the hard reminder.

When Death Comes

That profile of David Brower ends with him out on a Sierra Club trip in the California mountains when he experiences a stroke. He survives it, but passes away a few years later in 2000 at the age of 88. I’m not here to argue whether or not he left a legacy (he did) or question if he brought a lot of new people into the environmental movement (also yes).

But when death comes—and lord help us it will come—do we want to be able to say we did a lot of really good work, or do we want to say we had a lot of really beautiful relationships? Do we want to look at the stacks of information we consumed, or the gaggle of people who loved us in spite of it?

See, this might seem like a random, long rant about one irksome man (and it is), but it is also a reminder that life is short and you get the wonderful blessing of getting to live it. And I want to live mine so much less like Brower and so much more like Mary Oliver:

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”