Author: Michael Jensen
Here’s a radical idea for the second quarter of the 21st century: please don’t bring your whole self to work.
It was a lovely dream while it lasted. With tech companies competing for the best Gen Y/Z graduates, they cast themselves not just as workplaces, but as places for identity, belonging, and moral formation.
In 2018, author Mike Robbins even wrote a book about it: Bring Your Whole Self to Work. Unlike the nightmare of Severance, where there is a work self completely separated from the home self, the whole, authentic self at work is real and connected. That self knows that it is loved, because the company offers itself as a site of emotional and even spiritual connection.
Historically, work was one sphere amongst the others: church, family, civic life, clubs and sports, and neighbourhood. But with the breakdown of those other spheres, the workplace has absorbed what the other institutions once carried. In the case of the big tech companies like Google and Atlassian this has been quite deliberate. Bring your whole self to work and you will find your spiritual and personal values expressed in your workplace.
This was the introduction from the original article
which can be downloaded in full as a PDF below
