What is work actually for

High-achievers are brilliant at career optimisation.

Negotiating raises. Changing companies. Climbing levels. Changing industries.

Less brilliant at asking what the career is actually for.

Not “what do I want to do?” - that’s a different question.

Not “how do I advance?” - most have figured that out.

What role should work play in a life?

Most people never ask. They inherit a default answer and optimize within it for decades.

The Operating System You Didn’t Choose

Where did your beliefs about work come from?

Think about it:

- What did your parents model about work? Did they love it, tolerate it, resent it?

- What did achievement look like in your household - celebrated, expected, never enough?

- When did you first connect your worth as a person to your accomplishments?

Nearly half of people say their parents influenced their career path.¹ Children of entrepreneurs are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Children of corporate lifers tend to follow suit.

It’s not just values - it’s what you see modeled as possible.

You didn’t choose these beliefs. You absorbed them.

I absorbed mine. My parents both worked hard - my dad in manufacturing, my mum as a teacher. Neither seemed to love their work. No entrepreneurs in my world.

The belief I carried into my career wasn’t “work hard and succeed.”

It was “don’t end up trapped like them.”

That fear drove my pivots, my restlessness, my refusal to settle. The absence of entrepreneurial role models meant the “safe path” felt like the only path. Only recently did I realize these inherited defaults were running the show.

What belief is running yours?

The Narrow Platform

Derek Thompson calls it “workism” - work as the centerpiece of identity and life’s purpose.²

When religion declined, we put something else on the pedestal. For many high-achievers, that something was career.

The numbers are uncomfortable: around 28% of retirees experience depression - higher than the general population.³ Many describe feeling like they’ve “lost themselves” after decades building a work identity.

When your identity is your job, losing the job means losing yourself.

Simone Stolzoff calls this the “narrow platform” problem: If work is your sole source of meaning, identity, and community, you’re balancing on something that can be knocked over by a single gust.⁴

A bad quarter. A restructure. A health issue. A new CEO who doesn’t rate you.

Suddenly you’re not just unemployed. You’re untethered.

Ask yourself:

- If you lost your job tomorrow, who would you be?

- When you introduce yourself, what do you say first?

- If your title disappeared, what would be left?

These aren’t comfortable questions. But they reveal how much weight you’ve put on that narrow platform.

The “Enough” Question

What number would be “enough”?

Most people have never defined it. And the number keeps moving - lifestyle creep locks you into needing what you once considered luxury. The golden handcuffs tighten.

But here’s what most people miss: how you earn the money is inseparable from the number.

Say your target is £150k to fund the life you want - time with family, travel, flexibility. But earning £150k requires 70-hour weeks, constant stress, and being chained to your laptop on holiday.

You’ve hit the number. You’re living the opposite of the life it was supposed to buy.

Sometimes that trade-off is deliberate and temporary - sprint now, breathe later. But most people never make it conscious. They chase the number while the lifestyle it’s supposed to fund disappears.

Questions worth sitting with:

- What lifestyle do you actually want? What does that cost?

- Does hitting that number require living a life you don’t want?

- Is the trade-off deliberate, or did you just drift into it?

Three Frameworks for Work

There’s no single right answer. And these frameworks aren’t mutually exclusive - you might relate to all of them in varying degrees, or shift between them in different seasons of life.

But they’re worth examining:

Work as Identity

Work IS who you are. Purpose, community, meaning - all flow from career.

- Upside: Deep engagement, mastery, impact

- Downside: Vulnerable to disruption. What happens when it ends?

Work as Tool

Work is how you fund the life you actually want.

- Upside: Clear boundaries, protected priorities

- Downside: Can feel hollow if there’s no meaning in the work itself

Work as Expression

Work is one way you express who you are - but not the only way.

- Upside: Meaning without total fusion. Multiple sources of identity.

- Downside: Requires clarity on what else you ARE beyond work

Stolzoff offers a fourth: the “Good Enough Job.” Reject the dream job myth. Find work that allows you to be the person you want to be.

“Good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means.”

Which model are you operating from?

More importantly: did you choose it, or inherit it?

The Forcing Function

Something usually forces the question.

For some, it’s parenthood. The calculus shifts from “What do I want to achieve?” to “What kind of life do I want to model?” Time becomes finite in a visceral way. The cost of missed moments becomes tangible.

For others, it’s a health scare. Three months of long COVID forced me to reassess everything. Suddenly the prestigious path looked less important than having energy.

For others still: burnout, loss, a relationship ending, redundancy.

The forcing function makes you ask questions you’d been avoiding.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to wait for one.

You can ask these questions now - while you still have options, energy, and time to adjust course.

The question is whether you will.

The Work Beliefs Audit

This isn’t about having answers. It’s about asking better questions.

Five to sit with:

1. What did I inherit about work that I’ve never questioned?

What did your parents model? What did your culture reward? What beliefs are you operating from that you never consciously chose?

2. Who would I be if I introduced myself without my job title?

Try it. “I’m [name].” Then what? What else is there?

3. What would be “enough” - and why that number?

Is it a number you chose, or a number you inherited from comparison? Does it account for HOW you’d earn it?

4. If I lost this role tomorrow, what would be left?

Relationships? Interests? Identity? Or just a gap where work used to be?

5. What role do I WANT work to play - not what I’ve defaulted to?

Identity? Tool? Expression? Something else? What would you choose if you were choosing consciously?

You might not change anything after asking these questions.

But you’ll be operating consciously instead of on autopilot.

The Real Question

You’ve spent years asking “What should I do with my career?”

Maybe the better question is: “What should my career do for me?”

Same words. Different order. Different life.

What belief about work did you inherit that you’ve never questioned?

Reply and tell me. I read every response.

Elis

P.S. If this made someone pause, forward it to them. They might be running on an operating system they never chose.

Sources:

¹ [The Impact of Parental Influence on Career Choices](https://www.joblist.com/trends/the-impact-of-parental-influence-career-edition) - Joblist

² Thompson, D. (2019). [Workism Is Making Americans Miserable](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/) - *The Atlantic*

³ [Prevalence of Depression in Retirees: A Meta-Analysis](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7551681/)

⁴ Stolzoff, S. (2023). [The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704142/the-good-enough-job-by-simone-stolzoff/) - Portfolio/Penguin