“You’re one kind of person to your close friends, a different person to strangers. Most of the time, this complexity feels natural. But our work personas? Those often feel like an ill-fitting mask,” writes Whizy Kim (whizyk).
All of us live multiple lives — our identities shift depending on where we are and who we're with. You're one kind of person to your close friends, a different person to strangers. Most of the time, this complexity feels natural. But our? Those often feel like an ill-fitting mask.
Katarina says her most humiliating job was personal training, which she held after graduating college."My clientele were wealthier and I was fairly often treated as the help, or as someone not as respectable,” she says. “I think that's why I place a high value on my master's degree — and a job that at least sounds high-up and 'respectable.'"Rosa*, a 24-year-old who lives in Australia, feels humiliated by the purposelessness of her duties.
Many people spoke about feeling pressure to control their image to please supervisors and fit in with professional peers, or adhere to some never-quite-explicitly-stated social norm."Around white colleagues, I try to make sure I use 'proper English,' and around coworkers I try to act like I'm not too snobby," says Terry*, 32, in Wisconsin. Both personas are different from how she behaves around loved ones and friends — goofy and awkward, she says.
The interview process brings up similar emotions."I feel this especially when I have to answer questions about why I wanted to work at a company when I was fresh out of college looking for a job," Nikita says."I mean, why else did I want to work somewhere after applying to hundreds of jobs? I needed money. But somehow it feels wrong to tell the truth. Instead I have to lie and pretend I care, somehow, about a company's values.
We tend to find emotional labor more draining when it doesn't feel justified by genuine purpose. A teacher might be self-motivated to regulate certain negative emotions at school because they want to be a good role model for their students."But not all emotional labor serves a value people care about," Dr. Rousseau points out.
It can feel humiliating to be inauthentic at work, because authenticity is really a matter of dignity and being in control. Bad managers try to prescribe the exact conditions of how you do your job. During the pandemic, when more Americans are working remotely than ever before, there's been an increase in theprograms that enable managers to surveill what you're doing and even where you are under the guise of tracking productivity.
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