If ‘work is the new religion,’ does society lose out?

No longer just somewhere to make a living, work has become a place to find purpose, and, yes, even transcendence. But what happens when the balance of life skews so heavily toward the workplace? The Monitor’s Erika Page spoke recently with sociologist Carolyn Chen, author of “Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,” to find out. 

How did your thinking on this topic evolve?

I was interested in looking at where we see religion in secular spaces. This project started by studying yoga in studios and interviewing yoga practitioners. They would say, “Well, I practice yoga after a long day of work. It helps me relax and de-stress.” Then they would also say, “and practicing yoga makes me a better ‘X,’” and here you can fill in the blank. It might be a nurse, an engineer, a lawyer. Work figured prominently into their narrative. What was sacred was not Hinduism, the icons, or the practice. What was sacred to them was work, because work was the thing that they were willing to submit and sacrifice and surrender their lives to. 

What’s different about the role of work today?

The typical white-collar worker in the 1950s and ’60s was working 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. It was also the height of civic associations and participation in the United States. So you had contained hours, but then you had all these other options, these other sources of meaning and belonging outside of the workplace, things like faith communities, the Rotary Club, and softball leagues. So work wasn’t the only game in town. But in the last 50 years, maybe even longer, we have seen this dramatic decline in civic participation.

Meanwhile, professional workers have devoted an increasing amount of time and energy to work. Part of this has to do with a shift in our economy in the late ’70s and ’80s. In an industrial economy, you increase your profits by lowering labor costs, or you have better technology. But in a knowledge economy, the most important asset for a company are human workers. 

So how do you increase your assets? Well, you can educate your workers and give them more sophisticated skills. But there’s also this spiritual dimension. How do you make sure that your workers give their full selves? How do we align the souls of our workers with the mission and goals of the company? You make work a meaningful place, where they find identity and belonging and purpose. So work is demanding more from high-skilled workers than it did 50 or 60 years ago. But it’s also giving more.

How are tech workers “finding their souls” at work, as you write?

Tech companies have come to understand this spiritual dimension of the human worker – though they don’t necessarily say “spiritual” – and the need to capitalize on that. In many of the companies I studied, folks in human resources would say, “I nurture the souls of the employees,” or “I bring wholeness to the workplace.” These companies provide meditation and mindfulness, they bring in spiritual and religious leaders to give inspirational talks, and for their senior leaders, they hire executive coaches, which one HR person called “spiritual guides.” In most Fortune 500 companies, it’s really basic to have an explicit mission, a set of ethics, an origin myth, and often a charismatic founder or leader – some of the basic elements of religious organizations. So it’s not just happening in Silicon Valley; you see this in so many organizations. I get asked all the time, “Really, are they really happy? Are they really whole?” And I have to just go by what people tell me. People say that they’re really happy, that they’re feeling so much more spiritual because of work.

What’s the downside?

These tech companies are meeting a need that most professionals simply don’t have the time for [but] otherwise actually really crave. But there is a social cost. When people get so wrapped up in their workplaces, they disengage from the public sphere and other realms of life. In what I call “Techtopia,” workplaces act like these giant, powerful magnets that essentially attract all of the time, energy, and devotion of the community. Institutions like the family, faith communities, neighborhood associations, even small businesses start to grow weaker and smaller in comparison to this giant workplace.

Some pastors talked about, “Well, work is so important, why don’t we shift our attention to providing a workplace ministry?” But then you take away from the focus you might have on families or children or other members. That Bible study or prayer time, that becomes a workplace perk. And so these things which we might have understood in a different time and place as being public goods meant for the well-being of everyone in society, they start to become cloistered behind the walls of the tech workplace.

In Silicon Valley, all of the institutions line up to “get Google money,” as I call it. This is what I saw with meditation and mindfulness teachers, who used to be teaching in community centers, in yoga studios, in retreat centers. But with the increasing cost of living in the Bay Area, they can’t do that anymore. So what do they do? They basically have to monetize the practice and figure out how to teach it at Google or LinkedIn. But to do that, you need to alter the teaching dramatically to fit within the logic and goals of the workplace.

How do we bring back a balance?

I hope we can name these “invisible cathedrals” we are worshipping, these secular institutions that shape us, spiritually form us, and direct our devotion. We stop worshipping work by finding other sources of fulfillment. Almost everyone I interviewed had a deep spiritual longing and yearning, whether they called it spiritual or not. They were driven by these very human desires: to create, contribute, and belong. What if we were to start from that assumption and think about how we build up other “houses of worship”? They don’t need to be actual religious institutions. How do we create a life that can be flourishing for everyone, not just for tech workers who have this army of human resources people to make them happy? What’s been fun about this project is I’ve spoken to so many different groups of people who are really trying to create those spaces, those alternative ways of creating community and belonging and meaning. And it comes in all different shapes and forms.