Work Pray Code Study Guide
Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley
Part 1
Work as a Religious Community
Carolyn Chen writes that work has become the new religion, a place where employees go to find meaning, transcendence, and deep connections with others.
There are consequences to turning work into a religious place of sacred worship.
Some argue that The Great Resignation is a sign that workers are abandoning Work-As-Religion, but Carolyn Chen in her book that the hunger for finding meaning and community at work has never been stronger, based on her interviews with people who work in Silicon Valley.
Many of these employees and employers hire Buddhist mindful counselors and spiritual advisers as if having such spiritual leaders is a requirement for both substance and image in such workplaces.
Even Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Walmart hire chaplains to address the employees’ spiritual needs.
In 1990, 8% of Americans said they have no religious affiliation. Today that number has jumped to 25%. As a result, Chen observes that Americans don’t go to work to sell their souls but to find their souls.
As a result, there is no work-life balance. Now a 65-hour work week is “typical.”
Work becomes the god. In contrast, white-collar work in the 50s was soul-crushing and Americans found peace and connection in their religious community. Now that the religious community is eroding, work is taking the place of such a community.
Those in the upper-income brackets are more likely to like their jobs and to see their workplace as a spiritual haven.
The job sites have a mission, a higher purpose, and even like Marvel superheroes, an “origin story.” In the new global economy, if you don’t have an origin story to strengthen your brand, you are irrelevant.
Even college students writing personal statements to get into high-tier universities fabricate an elaborate origin story to strengthen their brand.
We live in a world where we are on social media and creating a brand for ourselves. This brand may be BS, but over time we will come to believe in it.
Work As Friendship and Emotional Support System
Chen quotes sociologist Arlie Hochschild who reports that today more Americans are meeting their social needs more at work than they are in their families.
If this is true, then what is the motivation to stay in a family, if not literally then at least in terms of time given to that family. Would not someone who finds love and friendship at work be prone to spend as little time with family as possible?
Chen is making the case that the rise of business as a place to meet love, spiritual, friendship, and emotional needs is taking the place of religion and even the family.
Who’s the Team Player in This Scenario?
I love my job and the people I work with and my students, but the fact that I’d rather be home with my family is such that some co-workers might grumble, “He’s not a team player. For McMahon, the apotheosis of love and meaning must come from work. Family is second.”
This sounds insane.
The More Educated and High-Income You Are, The More You Embrace the Workplace as Your Spiritual Haven
Chen traces a direct line between high income and the job site as a place of spiritual meaning, identity, and connection.
Richard Florida calls these job sites “human capital clusters.” They are mostly in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The workplace has gourmet buffet, yoga centers, wellness centers, gyms, tracks, meditation retreats, self-esteem therapists, sleeping quarters, busses that come to your house, barista cafes, organic gardens, vegan and homemade pasta cooking lessons, media entertainment centers, deep-tissue massage, hand-crafted IPA and wine bars, and spiritual counseling repurposed to make you more productive. These are One-Size-Fits-All Nanny Centers. They suffocate you, yet you love it.
Chen observes that the higher up the ladder the employee climbs the more likely they are to abandon religion, but their religious needs have not disappeared; “they have been displaced.”
Techtopia
Chen coins the term Techtopia: an engineered society that gives people the highest fulfillment at work by colonizing the functions of other social institutions.
In other words, the spiritual nourishment of the holy temples and family has been spiritually appropriated by work.
Tech Migrants Are Not Just Paying the Bills
Most of the workers Chen interviewed are tech migrants, those who traveled great distances to work in the tech industry. They left friends and family behind. Therefore, they are hungry for connection, and they find it at work.
In the tech industry, a job is more than paying your bills: It’s your identity and your brand. You can never work hard enough to cultivate your identity and your brand. The employer has you right where they want you.
Why You Need Faith
You have to believe in yourself in the tech industry. Either you will become a billionaire and win a big IPO or get bought by Facebook or Microsoft or something equally big, but all the while you know that over 90% of start-ups fail. Therefore, you need lots of faith. You have to believe in the Purpose and the Mission. You have to drink your own Kool-Aid.
All the missions are the same: “My product will bring people together and change the world.”
Any worker who doesn’t drink the Kool-Aid of the above mantra is a nonbeliever, a malcontent who must be expelled from the premises.
Corporate Maternalism
The corporation suffocates you with “love” and all-day care and expects a return on their investment. “The personal is the profession” is the mantra.
The goals of corporate maternalism are threefold: strengthen emotional bonds to the company, help employees avoid job burnout, and obscure the line between the boss and the underling in order to create a family atmosphere.
Corporate maternalism become a form of authoritarianism and in its extreme, it is the influence of the hit Apple TV show Severance.
In Carolyn Chen’s readable book Work Pray Code, she chronicles the workplace as a “Techtopia” where all of one’s emotional, spiritual, and physical needs are met by “corporate maternalism.” One of the key features of corporate maternalism is feeding your employees. As an employee at a hot tech company, you can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks from a celebrity gourmet chef and be so satisfied that you don’t even have to waste time and money on grocery shopping. You don’t even have to go home to face meal preparation or kitchen cleanup. The perk attracts talent and keeps it there.
If that’s not a perk to stay on the job, I don’t know what is.
However, Chen observes that corporate maternalism is often phony. She asks the question: What use is a yoga studio when your boss wants you to work 16 hours a day?
Toxic Positivity
Another symptom of corporate maternalism is toxic positivity in which the employees are pressured, often through implicit means, to force a smile and curate a persona of glee and happiness in order to persuade everyone that the company is legit.
Be Your Best Self equals Work Your Butt Off Without Complaining.
“We want you to be your best self, go deep into your soul, and find out who you are.” What this really means is we want you to give us your blood, sweat, and tears, and smile while you’re doing it.
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