There’s been a lot of talk, a lot of articles, and podcasts, and heated conversations over the disappearance of our national work ethic. Mostly, they blame COVID and the government’s insistence on doling out “handouts.” Apparently (so the theory goes), pandemics lead to labor shortages not because people are traumatized and anxious, not because life is short and you only get one and why in the world would anyone spend it sucking up to a boss who only wants to hear how grateful you are for the opportunity to sell yourself for the pennies he’s willing to offer you…. No, no, it’s definitely not that. 

It’s that people are lazy and would rather sit at home collecting unemployment checks than scrub floors, or pour drinks, or get harassed by customers; all so they can continue to scrape by while making someone else richer. Somehow, when given the option of either, A) killing yourself and your soul at a pointless job for the rest of your days, or B) collecting unemployment insurance that allows you to spend more time on your family, your home, yourself, or even just buys you some time to rest for the first time in your adult life, somehow, society has convinced us that A is the only moral option. 

Except, here’s a news flash: People work to make money. And sure, while many people can and do genuinely care about their jobs and/or careers, the vast majority of us on this green Earth work so that we can pay bills. I am certain that given the opportunity, most of us would in fact run away from gainful employment, no matter how engaging, and right into the arms of a sun-drenched hammock on a deserted beach somewhere. Call me lazy, I guess. 

At first these views seemed to be an attack on lower wage workers. Those uppity poors thinking they deserve a living wage, thinking they deserve to exist without laboring for the rest of us. The audacity of some people… But no, capitalism recognizes no boundaries and now that we’re all having to at least think about heading back to an office, to inflexible hours, stuffy work clothes, and germy co-workers, some folks are looking around and thinking, nah, we good. And so of course, the powers that be are freaking out. Working from home is an “aberration,” says the CEO of Goldman Sachs who probably has nannies and chefs and housekeepers to manage his life’s pesky details. Oh and if what you want is a career and not just a job, well then you better be available at all times because apparently that career owns you now. So what if you get paid for 40 hours of work a week? You better be ready to drop 80 if you want to prove you’re committed. Not responding to emails after 5; not answering work calls on a Sunday; not generally choosing to kill yourself to keep the machine going? What are you a communist? 

Work is how we define ourselves in this country. It’s one of the very first questions we ask when we meet somebody, “What do you do?” For kids it’s, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  We talk about dream jobs, as if labor were something to dream about, to strive for. As if all we need to know about a person can be summed up in how they choose to spend their working hours. Tell people you’re a lawyer or a doctor or a CEO and watch their eyes light up with interest. Tell them you’re a receptionist or work retail and watch them glaze over. Don’t you have ambition? Don’t you have drive? Don’t you want to make a billion dollars and laugh at all the peasants as you wave to them from your rocket ship? Something must be wrong with you. 

No doubt, I’ve fallen into that trap myself. When I first started law school I was already in my 30s. I’d spent my entire adult life until then working admin and retail jobs, jobs that allowed me to pick up and go whenever I wanted. I wasn’t building anything except a life of somewhat temporary adventures. And I loved it. Law school was just another journey to embark on, a way to make my day job more interesting while I continued to pursue whatever other interests I had at the time. I’m sorry to say that ten years later, I’m hard pressed to tell you what those interests were or are. This career thing will swallow you whole and I have absolutely allowed it to define who I am. All of my extracurriculars are somehow related to the work that I do; the books I read, or at least the ones I finish, all have some kind of social justice component; the friends that I interact with the most all work in the same spaces and we inevitably end up talking about work no matter the reason for getting together. 

Because I love my job and it happens to be of the kind that society “respects,” we take for granted that this is as it should be. I should be happy and grateful for this way of life that I’ve created for myself, and mostly I really am. I’m lucky. I mean, I’ll be in debt until I die for the privilege of having this JD but I did choose this and I chose correctly. I’m not complaining about that. I also realize that people are different and some of you thrive in fast-paced, all-consuming work environments. That’s cool too, to each their own. But the pandemic introduced a new way of life and many aren’t super desperate to go back. Over 100 million people in the U.S. transitioned to working remotely; over half of them want to continue to do so. Why not let them? Why continue to mourn a “work ethic” that can be defined as little more than butts-in-seats and eyes-on-emails; one that leads to the deterioration of our physical and mental health? Are we really so uninspired that we can’t imagine and embrace a new way. 

So, from my perspective, these articles and opinion pieces that call for a return to “normal” don’t seem to have a clue or care about how toxic that normal had become for most. That’s no surprise when you realize that most of them are written by rich folks, all of them written by people on the management side of things, who probably define “normal” quite differently from the rest of us. I for one want to do a job I love and that I am proud of; I want to contribute to the world that I live in and to my community, but I’m sick of being defined by one thing alone. And I know that I am privileged to be in a situation where that is mostly up to me to decide, but If I want it for me I want it for y’all. Work, and the way we do it, should be defined by the workers. It’s really not a very complicated concept. It only took a whole pandemic for us to realize. 

Martha E. Menendez lives in Nevada and is the legal manager for Justice in Motion, a NY-based organization.