Skip to main content

Emotional Labor

It crossed my mind recently (and not for the first time) that I feel exhausted by my work for none of the obvious reasons. I do have decent work-life balance, do not work particularly long hours, feel very comfortable with the actual content of my job , there are many opportunities to learn and my co-workers are decent. All in all hardly a situation from hell. Yet most days, it takes a lot of effort to get up and get going. Emotional labor is the likely root cause here. It is manifested in the intensity of effort that goes into managing people who simply cannot help tripping over their egos by the minute. Dealing with a crowd of such characters is like taking a stroll in a dense minefield. 

Someone is getting their feelings hurt all the time and then they decide to act out and create needless chaos for the group. The drivers for bad behavior are almost always visibility leading to promotions and bigger compensations. I am at a point in my life where I don't much care for any of what motivates my peers. When I see someone getting promoted, I feel sorry for the new level of administrivia couched as "leadership" that they will now need to deal with in return for a slightly larger paycheck. When J was younger and my situation was infinitely more complicated, I had the energy to pursue such things but not anymore. I would be reluctant to give up my personal time for a bigger and better job. Given those conditions, if I am intent on staying in the game with people whose intrinsic drivers are completely different than mine, it seems that I  have to bring value in the form of emotional labor. That is the cost of being where I don't naturally fit or belong. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...