The Culture of Work

Rethinking productivity, worth, and the systems we labor within

Photo by Milo Bauman on Unsplash

What is work for? This is a deceptively simple question.

For centuries, we’ve been taught to equate work with identity, virtue, and value. Work is where we earn a living, yes, but it’s also where many of us seek meaning, recognition, and connection. Somewhere along the way, the idea of “doing your job” expanded to “proving your worth.”

Modern work culture in America, at least, is more than a function of economics or industry. It’s a belief system reinforced daily through routines, norms, rituals, and unspoken expectations. For many of us, this system is so normalized that it becomes invisible, even as it quietly shapes how we spend our time, how we define success, and how we relate to ourselves and others.

When we look closer at this culture that we have helped to create, we start to notice cracks in its foundation: the exhaustion masked as achievement, the disconnection beneath the buzzwords of “teamwork” and “belonging,” the quiet resignation behind a polished LinkedIn post.

This dissonance between what work promises and what it delivers isn't merely an individual experience; it's a collective condition shaped by historical forces, economic systems, and cultural narratives. As we navigate these systems, we're often too close to see their full architecture or recognize how deeply they've shaped our sense of self-worth, time, and purpose. By examining the structures of modern work culture more deliberately, we might begin to imagine alternatives that honor productivity without sacrificing humanity.

This isn't about rejecting work, but instead reclaiming its place within a life that values more than what can be quantified in a performance review. It’s time to consider reclaiming the essential self that has been lost in our pursuit of productivity.

A system that consumes the self

Workplaces are living systems that both reflect and reinforce societal values. From the first day on the job, we begin our training in the language of work systems: performance reviews, key performance indicators, billable hours, and corporate values. But the most powerful lessons are often unspoken. These lessons teach us how to behave, what’s rewarded, and, critically, what parts of ourselves to bring forward or leave behind.

In many work environments, being valuable means being available. Responsiveness becomes a virtue, and restlessness a badge of commitment. The pressure to perform extends beyond tasks into how we speak, dress, and relate to the others we work with. The result is often a fragmented self that performs belonging rather than experiencing it.

This internal division can be understood through sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of the ‘presentation of self¹,’ where we craft and maintain social personas to fit situational norms. Goffman observed that all social interactions involve performances where we present different versions of ourselves appropriate to different contexts. In the workplace, however, these performances aren't merely situational adaptations; they've become habitual, required, and often internalized, blurring the line between the role we play and who we believe we are. The ‘professional self’ isn't simply a contextual persona but an identity construct we're expected to maintain across expanding boundaries of work and life. This emotional labor, particularly common in customer-facing and care professions, can be both draining and disorienting².

This fragmentation of self creates a fertile ground for productivity to become not just a measure of output but a measure of worth. Once we've learned to compartmentalize our identities to meet workplace expectations, we become more susceptible to measuring our value through what we produce rather than who we are. The system first teaches us to separate our professional and authentic selves, then offers metrics to validate this constructed professional identity, creating an endless cycle of performance and validation that fuels the cult of productivity.

The Cult of Productivity

Beneath the modern workplace lies an enduring myth that busyness equals worth. Systems that reward visible effort, speed, and quantifiable output reinforce this myth. As a result, even moments of quiet focus or creative pause feel indulgent unless they produce something measurable.

This myth has deep historical roots in the Protestant work ethic and capitalist ideals that prize discipline and delay of gratification. The religious virtue of industriousness eventually transformed into secular productivity metrics, where visible labor became not just economically necessary but morally virtuous³. In today's knowledge economy, these industrial-era values haven't disappeared but intensified. Digital technologies that promised liberation from labor have instead extended work's reach into every corner of life, creating not a break from but an acceleration of these historical patterns of valuing discipline and utility. The boundaries between work and life dissolve under the glow of digital devices, with algorithms and productivity apps translating Weber's Protestant ethic into endless notifications and performance metrics.

Ironically, technology promises to give us more freedom, but it often tether us more tightly to work. We check emails after dinner, schedule meetings across time zones, and respond to Slack messages in bed. Flexibility was meant to empower us, but for many, it’s become another word for ‘always on.’ The body may rest, but the mind is still at work. It makes us great at “doing” but not so great at “being.”

Research shows that such overwork not only affects mental and physical health but also undermines actual productivity. Chronic stress impairs memory, decision-making, and creativity, the very capacities that knowledge work depends⁴.

This relentless drive toward productivity exhausts individualism and creates workplaces where belonging becomes conditional on performance. When worth is measured through output, inclusion often becomes another form of demanded productivity. This raises profound questions about who belongs in these systems and on what terms.

Belonging or Assimilation?

Modern workplaces often tout inclusion and authenticity as core values. However, inclusion without structural reflection can devolve into assimilation, inviting people in only if they adapt to dominant norms. Authenticity becomes conditional, measured by how comfortably it fits within the system.

People learn to code-switch, mask emotions, and shrink parts of their identity to survive. This is especially true for those navigating intersections of race, gender, class, or ability in predominantly white, male, or able-bodied environments. In these cases, the workplace becomes a space of micro-adjustment decisions made daily to stay safe, acceptable, and employed.

These adaptations of our identity are often invisible to those for whom the system was built. But their cost is real, resulting in burnout, imposter syndrome, and emotional disconnection that are, in my opinion, systemic outcomes, not individual pathologies.

Maintaining these workplace personas, constantly negotiating the terms of conditional belonging, exhausts us, ultimately undermining our capacity to connect with meaning and purpose. When organizations demand assimilation as the price of inclusion, they create environments where even the most inspiring mission statements become hollow rhetoric rather than lived experience. This depletion of self creates the conditions for a peculiar modern workplace phenomenon: organizations with compelling purpose statements filled with people too drained to genuinely embody them.

Purpose without presence

Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of contemporary work culture is its fixation on the concept of ‘purpose’ while simultaneously undermining the conditions that allow purpose to emerge. Organizations declare mission statements about making the world better, but the day-to-day reality often feels transactional, bureaucratic, or misaligned.

This dissonance between stated purpose and lived experience creates what some scholars call “mission mirroring,” a situation in which the rhetoric of values masks a culture of compliance⁵. Perhaps more simply, the essence of mission mirroring is when purpose becomes a brand instead of a blueprint for organizational operations. As this disconnect becomes more apparent, people within the organization begin to disengage, not from apathy but from the psychological toll of maintaining conviction in a purpose that institutional practices contradict. This disengagement represents a form of emotional self-protection. When we invest in purpose, we make ourselves vulnerable; when that vulnerability meets systemic indifference or contradiction, withdrawal becomes a rational response. Yet, not disengaging because we don't care, but because caring too much in a system that doesn't respond is a fast route to personal despair.

Purpose cannot thrive without presence. And presence requires a culture where people are more than tools, more than avatars of competence. It requires spaciousness for reflection, dialogue, contradiction, and growth.

These patterns of fragmentation, productivity obsession, conditional belonging, and hollow purpose are deeply entrenched in contemporary work culture. Yet they are ultimately human creations, systems we've built and continue to maintain through daily practices, policies, and norms. As such, they remain open to reimagination and restructuring. The path forward isn't about abandoning work but about reclaiming its place within a fuller expression of human dignity and purpose.

Reclaiming the human in work

The question isn’t whether we should work, it’s how we work and what we’re working toward.

One pathway forward begins with reflection: not just pausing but examining.

• What are the unspoken rules of this workplace?

• Who benefits from them?

• Who is excluded or exhausted by them?

• What is considered "normal," and what alternatives are silenced?

• How do our timelines accommodate different working styles and life circumstances?

• Whose voices influence decisions, and whose are marginalized?

• What metrics do we use to evaluate success, and what do they obscure?

This reflection is not just an individual practice. It can be integrated into organizational processes, such as creating space in team meetings to examine assumptions and incorporate diverse perspectives into decision-making, or establishing regular practices of questioning “that’s just the way things are done.”

These questions don't always have easy answers. But asking them is itself a form of agency. It begins to shift the culture from unconscious reproduction to conscious participation. When organizations create containers for this kind of reflection, whether through facilitated dialogues, anonymous feedback systems, or community councils, they open possibilities for evolution beyond the default patterns of work culture.

Another pathway is the intentional design of rituals and practices that reinforce dignity, not just discipline. Rituals that honor transition, celebrate collaboration, and make space for grief, rest, and renewal. These might include collective pauses between intensive work periods, acknowledgment of personal milestones beyond professional achievements, or ceremonies that recognize contributions that metrics often miss, specifically those of mentorship, conflict resolution, or community care. When workplaces integrate rituals that affirm humanity, they create environments not just of function, but of meaning⁶. These practices aren't mere add-ons to existing structures but embedded alternatives that gradually reshape the culture itself, offering experiential evidence that productivity and humanity aren't opposing values.

Reflections on the Journey

Writing this, I'm struck by how easily I have internalized the values of the systems I participate in. Even in spaces where I am passionate about the work, I've found myself defaulting to urgency, performing, or confusing busyness with significance. I've caught myself measuring days by output rather than presence, defining worth through accomplishment rather than connection. These patterns run deep in me, embedded not just in organizational policies but in how I've learned to move through the world. It’s not easy to reimagine how to move through the world of work when the values of the work systems no longer align with my own values.

This recognition returns me to the question that began this exploration: What is work for?

This question reminds me of a conversation with my dad many years ago. Dad worked for one company for over 30 years, and, as I was starting my third company after a couple of failures, he said, “There’s a lot to be said for going to work, doing your job, and coming home.”

I’m not wired that way. I have never been.

I have a different sense of self-purpose that, when working for others, has limited my tenure to about five years (with one exception). I used to think this was rooted in boredom with the work, but now I think it probably has more to do with my frustrations with workplace systems that have, however subtly, a lower regard for humanity within the system.

I like to think that work at its best creates conditions for contribution and connection, individual expression, and collective purpose. It is a container for meaningful challenges that expand rather than diminish our humanity. Achieving this vision requires more than individual awareness; it demands collective reimagining and structural change.

This piece was a reminder to me that reclaiming our humanity at work doesn't require heroism. It requires honesty.

We need to be willing to notice when the system is shaping us in ways we didn't consent to. And we need to have the courage to begin making different choices rooted in presence, purpose, and care. This reclamation acknowledges both the necessity of work and the possibility that it might occupy a more balanced place within lives rich with meaning beyond productivity, and worth beyond output.

1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).

2. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Third Edition, Updated with a New Preface (Berkeley, Calif. London: University of California Press, 2012).

3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).

4. Bruce S. McEwen and Peter J. Gianaros, “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Links to Socioeconomic Status, Health, and Disease,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1186 (February 2010): 190–222, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05331.x.

5. David Allyn, “Mission Mirroring: Understanding Conflict in Nonprofit Organizations,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 40, no. 4 (August 2011): 762–69, https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764010370869.

6. Victor Turner, Roger Abrahams, and Alfred Harris, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1st edition (Routledge, 2017); Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 1st edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).