Category Archives: Contemporary life

Time well wasted

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I have a weakness for signs. Not the cosmic type, I don’t believe in those. I think when people look for signs, what they’re really doing is looking for confirmation for things they have already decided or already know to be true in their hearts. They see what they want to see and attribute meaning so that they get the confirmation they need.

No, the signs I’m talking about are physical signs, words written on a slab of wood or a sheet of metal. I have two hanging on the wall over my desk in my office. One says, “Wake up. Kick ass. Repeat.” and was a gift from a dear friend. Looking at it makes me feel strong and, if not fearless, then at least less afraid. The other one was a birthday present from my family and it says, “Of course I talk to myself. Sometimes I need expert advice.” It makes me laugh, and the truth be told, I do talk to myself a lot.

Not too long ago I saw a sign in a shop that said, “Every day without laughter is a day wasted.” I was drawn to this sign because I truly believe in laughter. Laughter is so important. It’s healing, it’s therapeutic, it’s the glue that keeps families together, and it’s fun. But there was something about this sign that just didn’t feel right. I realized it was the part about days wasted.

Let me set one thing straight. No day is ever a waste of time, regardless of whether it’s filled with joy, sadness, stress, or just boredom. Every day is important, a piece of the puzzle that makes up your life and who you are. We can’t go through life always laughing. Some days I, at least, definitely don’t feel like laughing and those days are important too. A day without laughter may not be a fun day, but it doesn’t necessarily make it a bad day, and definitely not a wasted day.

This whole concept of wasting time gets to me. Ever since industrialization, productivity has become a mantra; it’s become something to strive for in everything we do. Organizations are supposed to be productive, individuals are supposed to be productive, and we streamline to the point of maximizing productivity at all times. We are led to believe that anything less is a failure to live to our maximum potential. This, however, is not a truth, it’s not a law of nature; it is just the way we are conditioned to think in society. We constantly seem to weigh everything’s worth instead of letting things be for the sake of being.

As I write this, I’m lying on the couch, nursing a cold, and thinking about how I should be using my time. I’m definitely not feeling very productive. Instead of just focusing on getting better, a part of me feels pressured to at least make an effort and answer emails – even though I’m feeling too tired to work – because aren’t we sort of expected to work anyway, even when we’re sick? Even though resting will make us better faster? Productivity is so ingrained also in my consciousness that even I, who research these things, get filled with self-doubt if I don’t feel I live up to social expectations.

Well, I’ve been relatively successful at resisting the temptation to work. I have taken a well-deserved rest, and let me tell you what happened: As I lay here on the couch doing nothing, I got bored. My mind started to wander and I started thinking about that book proposal I’m supposed to be working on but just haven’t had the peace of mind to get my head around. I started to see how I want to structure the book and jotted down a preliminary table of contents. This gave me such an energy boost that it inspired me also to write a blog post. Hooray for so-called wasted time!

P.S. And yes, I’m going to write another book! I’ll keep you posted, so stayed tuned!

Young people are lonely. Is this our doing?

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Being the mother of a teenage girl, a comment I heard the other day at a conference really caught my attention. It was a person in the audience, and the comment was that 25% of young Norwegian girls are reported to be lonely. Well, I haven’t been able to verify this number, but I did some digging and it turns out that this is not only a Norwegian phenomenon. It turns out, that studies have shown that teenagers and young adults in other places too, like the UK for example where a study has recently been conducted, are reported to feeling very lonely; lonelier than many elderly feel and we already know that is a problem. In one article the term ‘generation lonely’ had even been used.

The main argument – which has also been contested – is that the Internet and social media are the reason. Apparently, people in this age group rely more on social media to interact with friends than actually seeing them in person. And by now we know that the way we interact over social media is quite different from how we communicate with each other when we see each other face-to-face.

If you ask Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, this is a major problem. One thing is the flat and one-sided personas we present to the world through social media. They affect both our own identities but also the identities of those reading our updates due to the way we compare our own messy realities with the edited lives presented by our social media friends. Another problem is that we lose the ability to really be on our own with ourselves and our thoughts, which is a good thing to be able to do for emotional and mental well-being.

Well, that’s one aspect. Another is unemployment among young adults that many countries struggle with. In another presentation I heard, young people today are also known as the ‘Net generation’. People apparently associate them with things like flexibility and precarious work, arguing that this is the way they want it. Apparently they are supposed to lead us into the future where meanings of work are going to be completely different than today. But in a study conducted in Sweden, it is young people who are most negatively affected by insecure and flexible job markets. And when asked, these young people say that all they really want is a good and secure job so that they can earn a living. Not having a job can be a very lonely experience.

Both of these aspects are definitely relevant, but I’m struck by a thought. What also comes to mind is the way we organize our children’s lives, before they become lonely young adults. Due to the false perception that the world has become a more dangerous place (despite terrorist threats and the media going wild on this topic, studies have shown that the world is actually a safer place now than it has been previously), parents limit how far they allow their kids to roam. In my neighborhood I don’t ever see kids playing in the street, like I did with my friends when I was a kid. So if kids are to see each other, play dates need to be organized first. This, in addition to the professionalization of all things that should be fun (i.e. kids’ hobbies), seem to fill up our children’s schedules to the point where it becomes difficult for them to hang out with friends after school because everyone is constantly somewhere at some sort of training, club or class that just can’t be missed.

Hmm… it kind of makes you wonder: is social media really at fault? Or are we active participants in creating lifestyles for our kids where they don’t have much choice but to limit their interactions to Internet solutions? After all, as parents we set the standards.

Having a successful life

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“The changing nature of work has made subjective success measures more important.”

This is something I jotted down in my notebook last week at the WORK2017 conference, as I was listening to a presentation on the ‘net generation’ and work in the digital age. The presenter said something along those lines and my immediate reaction was ‘YES!’

In research we differentiate between objective and subjective definitions of success. For a long time, success has been measured in things like salary, promotions, and fringe benefits (like a company car) – so called objective measures. In other words, the more you make, the more often you get promoted, the more powerful and higher up you are in the organizational hierarchy, and the more access you have to things like business class travel and other perks, the more successful you must be.

Okay, but that is a very narrow and one-sided definition of success. People who have opted out of objectively successful careers sometimes report that yes, they may have had a successful career before opting out, but not necessarily a successful life. Objective definitions of success didn’t always make them feel successful, not to mention happy or fulfilled or any of the other things that are considered important in a well-rounded life.

For them things like feeling that their work was meaningful and being excited about what they were doing, feeling healthy and rested, and having the time and the possibility to pursue other interests and spend time with the people they care about were more important. These are examples of subjective measures of success.

What this means in practical terms is that more money and power doesn’t necessarily attract potential employees anymore, or at least it isn’t enough. But don’t think that means you can offer people a meaningful job without paying them what they deserve. Getting paid is a hygiene factor and should be a given. It’s also an important form of validation and needs to be taken seriously.

But as always I feel pleased when my research results and ideas are confirmed. Employers need to recognize that there is more to life than work and objective definitions of success. But they need not worry, just because people value subjective success doesn’t mean they aren’t ambitious or don’t want to work hard. They just realize that a successful job isn’t enough; they want a successful life too!

The times they are a changing, and we can be part of that change

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I’m at a conference at the moment in the beautiful city of Turku, Finland, and the topic of the conference is the future of work. You can imagine, I kind of feel like a kid in a candy store. I mean, this is what my research on opting out and in is all about: to decipher clues that might tell us something about how people want to and will work in the future.

Well, I listened to a very interesting keynote presentation yesterday. It was given by Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future. Gorbis said something that really hit home: you can shape change as it is happening, but you can’t put it back in the box thinking that things can continue as before. Because they won’t.

We’re living in an extremely interesting and exciting, if not also somewhat frightening, time in history and things are changing at a mindboggling speed all around us. The nature of work is being completely revolutionized and we need to be involved in shaping this change. According to Gorbis, jobs are being broken down into tasks and micro-contributions and organizations have access to large networks rather than just a finite number of employees to complete these tasks. To a certain degree, management is being replaced by algorithmic coordination.

Gorbis talked about machines as economic agents and how many people feel threatened by this, by machines, technology, and artificial intelligence, but that these are, in fact, not part of the problem. The real problem is that we’re competing not against machines when shaping our lives and work, but against social processes and institutions. We’re in a time of dramatic change and development, but we are stuck in our ways, which makes it difficult to influence the change in a way that will serve us – humanity – in the best possible way.

And this is true. This is what I see in my research. People want to work differently, to create alternative ways of understanding and organizing their work. However, many organizations are stuck in routines and mindsets that date back to industrialization. When these organizations are unable to change with the times and accommodate the people who work for them, and who would most likely continue to work for them under different circumstances, some people see no other alternative but to leave – to opt out.

Another thing that I have found is that the change that is needed for these people to want to stay is really not that dramatic. They aren’t asking for much, just some flexibility, freedom, and control over their lives and their time. They still want to work, and they want to do so in a meaningful way. No, the change people crave isn’t necessarily really that great, but it involves a change of mindset; a change of the social processes and institutions that Gorbis talked about.

So to tell you the truth, as I was listening to her talking about the future, the future that is already here by the way, and describing the innovative ways in which people already organize their work – for better and for worse – I realized how ridiculous the situation really is. The fact that these organizations that people have opted out of are worried about things like flexible hours or working offsite is laughable. Come on organizations, catch up already!

Sometimes slow is faster

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I remember when I was working on my PhD. I would get so stressed over how long everything took. As I wrote chapter drafts, I couldn’t believe how incredibly slow the writing process was. Academic writing is a very particular and exact art form, not like jotting down a blog post. Well anyway, it felt excruciating at times and what I thought would take one week, took two or three, and then I would wait for feedback, after which I would have to rewrite parts… At a certain point I thought I would never finish, and never make the four-year deadline.

Well I did finally finish, but the thing I realized as I was working on my thesis was that the faster I tried to work, the slower it went. When I rushed, which I tend to do when I get stressed, I ended up having to rewrite more, not to mention rereading and having to go over my sources again more carefully. In other words, rushing really slowed my process down. So when stressed, I forced myself not to let my impatience get the better of me, and my mantra became “it has to be allowed to take the time it takes”.

I know this doesn’t sound very profound, but to me it really was. Because things do just take the time they take, whether it’s writing or learning a new skill or recovering from an illness. In this age of quick fixes and instant gratification, this can be hard to accept, but sometimes we just have to.

A while back as a group of us at work were fretting over looming deadlines and too much too do in too little time, a friend and colleague recommended a book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber titled The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. This book is about academic life, but many of the points the authors make are definitely relevant to all of us.

The authors talk about what they call a “culture of speed”. In fact it is exactly this – the sheer speed of things – that many sociologists have argued is what makes contemporary life different from any time we have ever experienced before. The problem as Berg and Seeber see it, is that there is a constant pressure to increase productivity, which means that work tends to take over what should be our down time. As a result we end up having to manage also our free time in order to squeeze everything in (work, spending time with kids/friends/family, exercising, having fun…). And this, in turn, can lead to stress, a feeling of time poverty, and even mental health issues, in addition to stifling creativity, which at least for an academic trying to write is absolutely vital.

Besides, we cannot constantly create or write, we also need time to reflect so that we actually come up with something to write or create. We need quiet down time not only to recuperate, but also to actually be productive. Productivity does not necessarily come from doing more.

So let’s make sure we have enough down time this weekend so that we can be more creative and productive and whatever else it is we need to be.

The wonder of new words and other covfefe

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I’ve been cracking up over Trump’s blooper from the other day. Just thinking about it has me in stitches. I’m talking about his tweet of course where he coined the wonderfully mysterious word ‘covfefe’. Just writing it down makes me smile.

I’ve been wondering to myself how one would pronounce such a word. Covfeef? Covfeefee? Covfayfay? Isn’t it wonderful, no one knows how to pronounce this word because no one knows where it comes from. And the reason no one knows that is because it doesn’t come from anywhere. It is a made up word, either an autocorrect blunder or just sausage fingers at a very late hour. So it has no origin and it has no correct pronunciation. We can pronounce it any way we want. We can use it in any way we want, in any number of wild and wonderful ways.

Trump is a disaster in so many ways. I’m not even going to begin to list them here; one blog post would not suffice. But the one positive thing he has done, he did without meaning to, and without even noticing until he woke up to the comic covfefe storm raging all over social media. What he unwittingly did was he coined a nonsense word that tickles our imagination. And let’s face it; we could definitely use some fun amidst all the dismal on-goings around us.

The thing about language is that it forms our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. Language is central to the way we organize the world. We use language to communicate and to mobilize people towards a common world order. This is important and handy of course. Without the wonder and the power of words we wouldn’t be able to communicate the way we do and share our inner worlds with each other.

But language can also be problematic and limiting. Because we’re so good at labeling, once a word has been uttered we instantly have a common understanding of what it is we’re talking about. And when this happens, we effectively stay within the boundaries of what we understand to be right and true. We stay inside the box.

This means that thinking out of the box, or developing new ways of organizing, working, living, and being – to name a few – becomes difficult when we use our common and familiar language. Simple terms like work or meeting or flexible time instantly pull us back within the familiar boundaries of what we understand these things to be. So redefining work becomes difficult, as does redefining what flexible work should really entail. Or how we meet and interact with each other. This makes imagining and creating the new – the really new and innovative – challenging.

We need new words to talk about these new things so that we don’t get dragged back into our familiar but dated ways. We need to develop with the times and new language will help us do that.

And this week a new word was given to us, just like that.

Let’s create lots of new words; words that question what we know to be true, and that open our eyes and imaginations to new possibilities. Let’s covfefe!

(…she giggles as she hits the publish button.)

What’s wrong with providing employees with mindfulness training?

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I have very mixed feelings about mindfulness. It’s not mindfulness as such. Being mindful is not a bad thing. Research has shown that being mindful can help people be more resilient and prevent them from overreacting in different situations. This, in turn, has a positive impact on work environments in organizations. If people aren’t shooting from the hip so much, but instead taking a moment to reflect – to being mindful – then it is bound to have a calming impact on situations that might otherwise be conflicted.

No, I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is when we use mindfulness to fix a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I was at a conference last week organized by the European Association for Work and Organizational Psychology. Being a sociologist, this was a new crowd for me. Sociologist and psychologists do have a lot of research interests in common, although the methods used are often different. One thing that struck me was how popular mindfulness research was also at this conference. Although studying the effects of mindfulness can be interesting and intriguing, the problem is that much of the research focuses on the individual and not on the systems and structures in which these individuals are embedded.

But not only are we researching mindfulness like never before, I also constantly see new consulting companies that specialize in mindfulness and that provide programs to help employees learn and practice mindfulness.

Work environments today are incredibly hectic. Focus is more on short-term wins than on long-term development and sustainability. Jobs are insecure and as Richard Sennett observes, past experiences aren’t so important anymore. It’s rather about potential and you’re only as good as your next accomplishment. However, since seriously questioning and changing the system is hard, instead of going to the source if people aren’t coping well in their jobs, we try to fix the symptoms by helping people deal. And the latest fad on that front is mindfulness.

So instead of creating sustainable working cultures where people can thrive and can work to their full potential, we give them tools so they can be better at dealing with the hectic work pace and organizational culture. By teaching them mindfulness we help them cope.

And yes, it’s good to be able to cope. But it’s bad if it means ignoring the actual problem, which in this case is organizational cultures and structures that don’t necessarily work anymore. They just no longer correspond to how a lot of people want and need to live and work.

So by all means, practice mindfulness. It’s good for many things, and something I probably need to do more of too. But let’s not use mindfulness to ignore the real problem at hand. And please, don’t provide mindfulness training to your employees thinking that you’re off the hook. We still have a lot to do when it comes to creating better and more sustainable working models and environments.

Be whatever you want, sort of

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In many ways we live in very exciting times. We really do. There are a lot of scary things going on politically, and at times it feels like everything is up in the air, but it is during times like this that you can really make a change. We have a chance to take a stand and shape the future.

Sociologists like Anthony Giddens and the late Zygmunt Bauman talk about how this is a time unlike any we’ve ever experienced before, partly due to the speed at which everything is happening. And I do agree; for better and worse though because not all of it is good, but not all of it is bad either.

One of the things that has been argued to define this exciting time in which we live, is the fact that tradition really isn’t as important anymore as it used to be. We aren’t bound by certain professions and we don’t have to do things in certain ways; we can reinvent ourselves at the drop of a hat. Not only can we, we are encouraged and pushed to do so too. Ulrich Beck coined a very illustrative expression; he talks about contemporary society as a tightrope society. If you don’t constantly keep your balance and reinvent yourself to stay competitive you might just crash to the ground. Not a very uplifting picture.

But still, even though there undeniably is societal pressure to reinvent and stay competitive, the promise of reinvention is also quite intriguing. If traditions don’t matter so much and you can reinvent yourself as you wish, you can do anything you want. Or can you?

This whole idea of individualization, reinvention, and having a multitude of choices has been criticized. They say that it may be true for a chosen few, but many, if not most, are bound by issues like gender, class, and race. The ones who aren’t, are according to these critics basically white men. Not all white men obviously, but white upper and middle class men. And I have to say, I have seen first hand how women, for example, can be bound and held back by traditional gender roles and norms both in the workplace and at home.

For my current project I have been interviewing men who arguably belong to this privileged group of people who can be whatever they want, and choose from a myriad of possibilities. I’ve been interviewing mostly in the US and Finland, and all but one of my interviewees have actually been white middle class males. Now you may wonder why my data set is so homogeneous. Well, Finland as we all know is somewhat restrictive regarding immigration policies, and the Finnish population just isn’t as culturally and ethnically diverse as in many other countries. In the US, the population is much more culturally diverse, but the fact that almost all my interviewees (so far) are white does say something about the people who get promoted and recruited to top corporate positions, which most of these men opted out of.

However, for people who are free to do and be whatever they want, I have to say that I have been struck by how bound by tradition and expectations my interviewees have been when choosing a profession.

You would think that these men who have opted out of their careers to create and adopt new lifestyles and ways of working, are the epitome of this age of reinvention. Yet many of them didn’t really seem to realize that they had that many options when they started out. In fact, most of them felt they didn’t. Many of them talk about how they chose what to study or what to become, based on what was expected of them, either by their families or by their peers. Again and again I hear stories of men who after high school decide to study business, engineering, or law because growing up that is what the men in their communities did. I’ve also heard stories of how men have based their choice of university or major on what their friends have chosen or what is considered high status and will make them rich and powerful.

Subsequently, for some of these men, entering the job market after university became a bit of a rude awakening. They worked for several years before opting out, but many of them reported not enjoying it or nor feeling that they were in the right environment. They often didn’t like the culture or they just didn’t feel at home, and when they finally did opt out they did so to do something completely different. I have interviewed a man who retrained to become a nurse, a few teachers, and a life coach to name a few. Others have opted into research, writing, community work, or they might have set up their own business where they could work on their own terms.

So for white middle class men who have so many options, they sure seemed to have been bound by traditions, expectations, and norms, at least when they were starting out. Thank goodness they had the courage and conviction to break out of that mold.

Tolerance doesn’t do the trick

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Times have changed, thank goodness. Sometimes we take a few steps forward, sometimes a few steps back, but all in all our world is becoming increasingly tolerant. In Finland same sex couples now finally have the legislated right to get married. A bit late in the game I have to say considering how progressive my country has been compared to others when it comes to issues like gender equality, to name one. Although also in that area we sometimes take steps forward and sometimes backward. But the general direction is still, thankfully, forward. In the US, however, we see threats of backsteps on many fronts, and although this is really worrying, not to mention scary, and something many of us are painfully aware of, that is not what I am going to write about today.

I’ve been reading a book about choice, namely The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar. Choice is an interesting thing. It is one of the concepts that defines the very fabric of being in our individualist society. How much choice we really have or whether we just think we have complete freedom of choice is constantly up for debate, but the rhetoric and idea of choice is, either way, central in contemporary society.

Choice gives us a sense of agency, a sense that we have control over our lives and how we live our lives, which according to Ivengar is important for our sense of wellbeing. Although it’s worth mentioning that research has also shown that too many choices can have the opposite effect. It can just be overwhelming and create anxiety over whether or not you’re making the right choice. But still, on a whole, the idea of free choice is something that appeals to most of us.

So how ironic isn’t it then, that so many people are still reluctant to let other people exercise this concept that many consider a fundamental right? I’m thinking about people in the HBTQ community for example. The message they often get is you can choose what you want as long as you make the same choice as everyone else. I hate to break this to you, but that’s not freedom of choice.

But as interesting as this book on choice is to me, there is one thing that Iyengar writes about tolerance that in all it’s simplicity was so profound to me that I had to underline it:

“While tolerance is certainly better than judging every other culture from the fixed point of one’s own, tolerance has severe limitations. Rather than promoting conversation and encouraging critical self-reflection, it often leads to disengagement: “You think your way, I’ll think mine, and we don’t have to interfere with one another.” … We cannot tolerate one another by shutting the doors because our spaces, real or virtual, intersect as never before.”

And isn’t that just the truth. All this talk about tolerance is good to a point, but it’s not enough. Tolerance is ‘you do what you want and I won’t bother you as long as I don’t have to be a part of it.’ Do you see the problem? It’s not going to make people get to know others who are different from them. It’s not going to help integrate people in the community. It’s not going to make sure everyone has the same fundamental rights. In short, it’s not going to help people understand, just tolerate.

Tolerance just won’t do.

 

 

Quality time is unstructured

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My daughter and I got back from a long weekend in Paris a few days ago. This was a trip that we had been talking about taking together for years, and I’m pleased to say it turned out to be everything we hoped it would. My daughter is the best company and the spring weather was absolutely gorgeous. But the best thing was – and we agreed on this – that we had nothing scheduled other than our flight back home. We did what we felt like doing at the pace we felt like doing it with no pressure to move on to the next thing until we wanted to. We ate whatever we were in the mood for whenever we felt hungry. If we felt tired we went back to the hotel, but it didn’t matter if it took forever getting there. No one was expecting us to be anywhere at anytime. And I tell you, this sounds simple enough, but it was the most liberating feeling.

This is something I often hear people who opt out or want to opt out say. They wish they didn’t have to be in such a hurry all the time. And we are very much in a hurry all the time in our day-to-day lives. I at least feel like I am. I sometimes wish I could clone myself because I need to be in so many different places at the same time. And it’s not only us; it’s also our children. Their time is very structured with school and hobbies and whatnot and we raise them to fit in to this hectic world, which seems to be spinning faster and faster.

I went to a seminar the other day and heard Professor Anna Rotkirch talk about family time management. According to her, and I’m so glad because I’ve been saying this for years, when it comes to time with your children quality is quantity. Just spending time with your children – and this goes for both mothers and fathers – is so important. This time does not need to be structured, it does not need to involve actively engaging your children in activities; it just means being there. Research has shown that this has such a great impact on children and their development throughout their lives, and the positive effects even ripple down to the next generation.

One of the things Professor Rotkirch recommended was something known as the 15 minute technique. This technique has been developed for parents to use with their children, but really it works with anyone. It involves being with your child (or whoever else) for 15 minutes without an agenda, without any structured activity, and without telling or teaching in any way. Just being there.

It is hard at first. When we’re constantly on the go, constantly having to get things done, doing just nothing tends to make us antsy. But apparently, if you work through that nervousness, just being together works wonders. If we do this, the person we are with might open up to us and talk about what he or she is thinking and feeling. And how wonderful for the person on the receiving end of this 15 minute technique to be able to do that, to talk about what they want to talk about. And this is something we might never experience if we’re always on a schedule or have an agenda.

I’m not going to ask you to fit one more thing into your busy schedule, because whenever I see recommendations and lists of things to do, it just tends to overwhelm me. I am a true believe in doing what works for you. But I will say this: unstructured time really is the best thing.