Should work meet all your needs?

As much as I like to talk about de-centering work, I understand why life so often revolves around it. 

I may be idealistic, but I’m also realistic.

We work to earn money to pay for our most basic needs, like food, shelter, and utilities. If you’re American, you probably get health insurance through your workplace. (In 2023, 53.7% of insured Americans had employment-based insurance for some or all of the calendar year.) 

I wish we had more social services and social safety nets available so that we didn’t have to rely so heavily on our (increasingly precarious) employment status to meet our basic needs. Most countries are ahead of the USA in this area, a fact that I continue to experience first hand since moving from Iowa to Canada nearly four years ago. 

Canada has publicly funded healthcare and federal parental leave provisions, for example. Many countries are experimenting with universal basic income (UBI) programs and other progressive ways of addressing poverty and inequality. 

Change is happening. Slowly.

In any case, most of us rely on work of some sort to meet our basic physical and safety needs. And that’s not likely to meaningfully change anytime soon.

But what about our other needs? I’m talking about the upper levels of Maslow’s pyramid:

Increasingly, we’re meeting these “higher” needs through…

Work.

We don’t need time use surveys to tell us that we spend much more time working than hanging out with friends and family (but time use surveys do tell us that). 

Obviously, it’s not wrong or weird to find social fulfillment at work. Work has always had a social component. What’s sad is that we used to have a lot more options for meeting our social needs. 

Bars, cafes, and restaurants have gotten more expensive and less suitable for “hanging out.” Fewer people are attending church. Many third places have simply disappeared. 

At the same time, work’s place in our lives has steadily grown. Many of us have work emails and DMs flying at us all day, every day. We spend most of our time at work and much of our “free” time either thinking about work or resting in preparation for more work.

And workplaces are intentionally blurring the work/life and work/play boundaries. Fun perks, free lunches, and sprawling corporate campuses that cater to your every need? Those are designed to make employees work more. If employers had it their way, you would eat, socialize, exercise, relax, party, and even sleep at work.

Work has even quietly expanded to feel the emotional and existential gaps. Read the words on the top two tiers above:

• Achievement

• Respect from community

• Reputation

• Personal growth

• Fulfillment

In my experience, it’s easy to get those needs met through work. It’s much harder to carve out the time, energy, motivation, and self-permission to seek them out literally anywhere else. 

This is partly because of our programming (dare I say brainwashing?) Since the day I left the world of traditional, full-time employment, I feel like I’ve been on a long, slow external validation detox.

To a certain extent, we can do inner work to separate our sense of achievement and self-worth from our work. 

But to a greater extent, work needs to change.

We need work that demands less from us — less time, less focus, less physical and emotional energy.

We need living wages, four-day work weeks, and remote work.

We need work that supports a full and balanced life, not work that consumes us.

We’ll get there someday.

See you next week,

Kara

Out of Office

What I’m doing when I’m not working

• I watched Sinners yesterday. On my iPad at 5pm on a Wednesday, as God intended. It was so good and definitely lives up to the hype! I listened to the incredible soundtrack all day today.

• We’ve done a bunch of DIY projects on the inside of our house in the past few years, and we’re finally getting to the outside. Currently discussing some landscaping ideas and prepping for house paint. We’re going from an ugly cream color to a gorgeous dark green. It’s going to be a dramatic change!

• We took our kayaks out for the first time this summer on Saturday. It was a perfect day, very still. We saw a ton of pelicans and seagulls and terns. Saskatchewan summers are as beautiful as the winters are brutal.

P.S. Got a question about self-employment, anti-hustle culture, business books, or something else?

Kara Detwiller is a writer and creative based in small-town Saskatchewan. She specializes in long-form content writing for enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, and manufacturing clients. She is also working on her first novel, among other creative pursuits. To connect, reply to this email or find Kara on LinkedIn or Bluesky. To support her work on Wishful Working, share this email with someone or buy her a “coffee.”

Why Wishful Working? I write this newsletter because I want to see more people enjoy a life not centered around work. For some, the path to freedom and flexibility is through self-employment, but we also need to challenge cultural norms and champion healthier working conditions and work/life balance for all types of workers.