8 questions to ask yourself at the end of the year
Year-end reviews seem so corporate and pointless, but they can help us reflect on what we’ve done, how we’ve grown, and where we want to go next. Here’s the framework I created for myself and use every year.
Year-end reviews seem so corporate and pointless, but they can help us reflect on what we’ve done, how we’ve grown, and where we want to go next. Here’s the framework I created for myself and use every year.
When I worked in media as a journalist and eventually an executive, it was common for every editorial calendar to have a series of year-end content pieces that we would produce and publish for our websites and TV programs. You’ve probably seen some of them: The biggest moments of 2023, the most successful celebrities of 2023, the most popular TikTok videos of the year, the biggest influencers of 2023 — and I always wondered, does anyone truly care about year-end reviews?
Do you really want to know all the major news stories of 2023?
Do you really want to know how much richer billionaires have gotten in 2023? It’s a lot, by the way.
Do you really want to know what the top shows were on Netflix? OK, this one is cool, but mainly because I want to know whether I watched any of them.
I would argue no. Most people don’t care about year-end reviews unless it is about themselves.
Spotify Wrapped is a great example of how people love year-end reviews when it’s about their interests and habits. The popular marketing event by Spotify shows its customers which artists, songs, and podcasts they most frequently listen to throughout the year. And that information is put in context with the data they have from their 574 million users. For instance, in 2023, Spotify said I was the top 1% of listeners who streamed the artist Miley Cyrus on their platform. What can I say, I love a good heartbreak song.
Spotify Wrapped is so successful that 156 million users engaged with it in 2022. Now, other companies like PlayStation, Nintendo, Duolingo, and Reddit have launched similar products to boost user engagement.
This leads to my theory about why people like year-end recaps, or wraps when it’s about themselves: We want to understand who we are, and these year-end summaries and data points help us see what we like, how we act, and how we live.
So as 2023 comes to a close, I wanted to challenge myself to create a year-end review, highlighting the good, the bad, the ugly, and the best things that I accomplished, experienced, and lived through this year. In corporate America, year-end reviews are a common way to reflect and assess what you’ve done for the company, and how your work ladders up to business priorities. But we rarely put that sort of rigor against our own life, which I would argue is way more important than work.
That’s why I made a framework that I’m following to help me document how I think my year went. I want to highlight what I’m proud of, what I enjoyed, and what I’m looking forward to doing next year.
The questions for my year-end framework are in bold. My answers — at times a little vague for privacy reasons — are italicized. The context of why we’re asking ourselves these questions is provided below my examples.
Year-end review questions
2023 was the year I…
… got comfortable working, traveling, and being alone which helped me create new ideas and launch big projects.
I like to start a year-end assessment with a big statement. This is your opening line, and it also helps summarize your year. It’s where you define how your year was with a statement, feeling, or accomplishment. I try to keep my answers short, like a sentence or two because brevity helps with clarity.
What I’m proud of the most this year is…
Launching my food brand: The Hungry Bengali
Becoming a better chef and creating more than 50 new recipes
Reading more. I read 30 books in total, which helped me get inspired to finish my manuscript. Also, it turns out I love reading Stephen King and Lisa Jewel.
Traveling around the world by myself, some highlights: Dominican Republic, France, and Vietnam
Filming a documentary in another country
Launching a new video project that tells the story of small businesses
Creating a new marketing program for work that I’m going to implement in 2024
Spending more time walking and being active, averaging at least 5 miles of walking a day
Creating more art that I enjoy making and using new mediums to create it
I became more financially independent, saving more than I have in any other year.
For this question, I like to create a series of bullet points of my top highlights. It can be as exhaustive as you want, but I think it’s important to just make a list of what comes to mind. What makes you feel proud doesn’t have to be strictly work accomplishments either, it can be feelings, experiences, or hobbies that brought you joy or filled your time that are memorable and worth documenting.
This year, my favorite …
Movie: Oppenheimer and Barbie
Song: “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus
Book: “The Institution” by Stephen King
Show: “Hadestown”
Restaurant: Keens
Trip: Vietnam
Work project: Filming my documentary
Project: Drawing I did of a woman working in her bedroom with her cat
Recipe: My stuffed artichokes with sweet corn
Purchase: Gold spider ring
Clothes: My mid-rise black denim pants
Activity: Hiking 20 miles through a state park in North Jersey
Game: Mario Wonder
Wine: 2021 Thompson Vineyard Syrah
Food: Dry-aged steak I cooked and paired with a fancy cheese board
Event: Dave Chapelle live
The problem I often have with year-end reviews is that they focus too much on accomplishments and work and not enough on things you’ve enjoyed and experienced. Therefore, I like to ask myself what I liked this past year. I like to challenge myself to pick “favorites” or memorable things I saw, ate, and did because documenting those experiences helps us appreciate and cherish them more.
What I wish I did more of …
Spend more time with my partner
Hang out more often with friends during weekends
Take more and longer vacations
Work less, especially after hours when things weren’t urgent
Try cooking new cuisines I haven’t done before
See more live music
Have hobbies outside of computers or devices, like taking up pottery, crafting, jewelry-making
Explore new neighborhoods and restaurants outside the metro New York area
Stop posting so frequently on social media
Grow more plants, especially herbs and vegetables
Practice my language skills
Take on one project at a time so I don’t get burnt out
Every year, there are a million things I wish I did. I like to ask this question after I reflect on what I enjoyed this past year because it helps me get more clarity on what I didn’t do and what I may want to do the following year. I try to keep this list close to my top 10 things I wish I did that were within reason. When I say, within reason, I mean things that can realistically be accomplished in a year. For instance, I wish I was an astronaut, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to add that to the list. Try to not add more than 10 things because any more can become unrealistic. We only have so much time in a day, week, month, year.
This past year, I mostly felt…
… anxious about my timeline and eager to pursue projects that have lasting impact.
This question can be a little scary to answer. It forces you to sum up your year into a few feelings, which can be hard or painful to do. It took me a while to find the words for this question if I’m being honest. And I truly did feel anxious a lot this year for personal reasons. Although I accomplished a lot in my work life and my side projects, I often felt anxious in my personal life, straining to figure out if I was going in the right direction, second-guessing the projects I started, and unsure if I was making the right financial moves. But there is strength in being honest with ourselves about how we feel, and the reality is that we don’t always need to be happy and the world isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, and that’s OK. It’s OK to be unsure about things, that is what makes us human and those feelings and experiences matter.
For 2023, I am grateful for my …
Health
Family
Best friend
Partner
Work friends
Boss
Curiosity to learn
Willingness to fail and try again
Taking risks even when my ideas aren’t fully ready
Gratitude is a powerful emotion we often don’t practice in our modern society because many of us are so busy. Reflecting on what we’re grateful for can help us gain perspective on our time, accomplishments, and the people in our lives. It can help us navigate feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress, especially during challenging times. It can also help people disrupt negative thinking, focus on solutions, and appreciate relationships and experiences. I like to list a few things I’m grateful for every year. I’m especially grateful for my health this year. I was sick for a part of this year and it was very disruptive and painful and prevented me from exercising or going out for a while. I’m finally feeling a lot better and I am so grateful to be able to walk, run, cook, and hang out with people, especially because those are the things I value the most in my life.
For 2024, I feel …
… hopeful and level-headed about my future. I know there’s a lot of uncertainty in my personal life, but I know I am talented, hardworking, and smart, and I’ll be able to finish every goal and project I set out to do while making space to live my life and enjoy it too.
Sometimes it is easier to list a bunch of things we want to accomplish next year than to ask ourselves how we want to feel. Of course, we all want to be happy, but it’s important to reflect on how you’re feeling at the end of 2023, and what you’re hoping to feel and experience next year. By doing this, you can set out realistic goals and expectations for yourself. For me, 2023 was marked with a lot of anxiety around my health and personal life, but for 2024, I want to embrace uncertainty with calmness and clarity.
For 2024, I want to…
Spend more time with friends, family, and loved ones during long weekends
Take more vacations outside the country
Create a habit of unplugging from technology and the internet during most of my weekends
Finish my manuscript by the end of January
Grow my food brand by making more high-quality content on YouTube and taking on more brand partnerships
Design and launch a product that I feel proud about selling
Create my art brand and share my process videos as well as launch a new art Etsy store
Uplevel my consulting business and take on new clients
Find a community that I want to settle down in and put down roots
I always have hefty goals for the next year, and I think those are so important to have because they are big and motivating. But it’s also OK to have small goals as well because life is full of big and small moments that can both be important and influential. I like to list no more than 10 things I want to accomplish for next year because too many goals can feel overwhelming or impossible when you put those goals against a timeline. Some of my examples are a little vague for this exercise. For instance, I want to take more vacations, but in reality, it is best to be specific. Where do I want to go? When do I want to take this trip? Who do I want to go with? What’s my budget? What do I want to experience? For example: “I want to spend two weeks traveling by train through Europe with my partner as we do a whirlwind tour of European sites and highlights on a budget of $5,000 in May.” Being specific with your goals can help you see them clearly and make realistic plans to achieve them.
That’s a wrap on my year-end review questions. To recap, the questions are:
2023 was the year I…
What I’m proud of the most this year is…
This year, my favorite …
What I wish I did more of …
This past year, I mostly felt…
For 2023, I am grateful for my …
For 2024, I feel …
For 2024, I want to…
As you can see, it’s a pretty short year-end review. Who wants to fill out a long questionnaire during the holidays? This exercise is supposed to be enjoyable. It’s supposed to help you reflect, show gratitude, document success, cherish memories, and plan for next year.
I like to do this exercise for myself. I’ve been doing it for the past six years, and this is the first year I’m sharing my answers and framework publicly, outside of a few friends and family members. I hope it inspires you to give it a try.
You can keep your answers private, but I’ve also gotten a lot of value from sharing my answers with close friends, partners, and family members and using them as sounding boards because sometimes it’s helpful to get the perspective of others, especially when reflecting on yourself.
I wish you a wonderful new year filled with success, joy, and company.
If you liked this article, please like it and share it with your social networks. You can follow me here, or on TikTok and Instagram “at jareenimam” where I post often and talk about topics like love, money, and work.
How to become more empathic
Recently, a friend reached out to me to vent about work. Generally, I’m the kind of friend you call for advice. I want to help. But as she started sharing her work problems, I started feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Eventually, I had to stop her midstory and tell her I was going to have to call her back. I hung up the phone, exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to feel empathy.
What is empathy?
Empathy is our ability to understand how others are feeling. It helps us forge connections and make meaningful relationships. Empathy is comprised of three primary components: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. The cognitive component is our capacity to understand another person’s thoughts, feelings, or perspective. The emotional component is our ability to share feelings and relate. And the compassionate component helps us not just hear someone’s concerns, but also actively reduce their pain and suffering.
Why are we less empathic now?
Empathy is an important part of the human experience, but the moments we experience it are fleeting as we spend more time preoccupied with work, stressed out about obligations, and absorbed in our digital lives. In fact, we’re becoming less empathetic and it’s affecting our personal relationships, the way we navigate workplaces, and how we interact with each other in our society.
I was recently listening to a Wall Street Journal interview with Brian Chesky, the founder, and CEO of Airbnb. He’d announced that the company’s employees can now work from anywhere remotely. Chesky said he make this decision because he wanted to give his employees more flexibility. But he also said he wanted to create community spaces that help cultivate empathy because being on screens all day disconnected people from each other.
“I hope that we still have physical communities because I think right now when you hear the word community, most people think of social media… The problem with online interactions is there’s not a lot of empathy. The interactions are more fleeting. You don’t really build the same kind of understanding. You’re not as curious. You’re more judgmental,” he said.
This decline in empathy has been happening since the early 2000s, experts observed. Researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research analyzed data on empathy from 14,000 college students over 30 years and they found that most students were less empathetic than college students from 1979 — an era notable for its women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements, as well as the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis, and the ongoing Vietnam War.
“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
This data, although older (2014), shows we’ve been trending downward on the empathy scale.
What causes us to lose empathy?
Researchers believe we’re losing our empathy because we’re exhibiting the negative consequences of repeated exposure to stressful or traumatic events. For example, the pandemic was traumatic for many people, especially those who weren’t able to stay home during the peak of the virus and had to work on the frontlines. During that time, the U.S. saw an increase in domestic violence. It was also common to see social media videos of people displaying incivility. And that constant stress and trauma can cause people to withdraw from others.
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I remember when I was a young journalist, I was left alone during the weekends to report on major breaking news. One of those events was a mass shooting. My job was to speak to the people who were affected by the shooting. It was obviously a really painful experience listening to these people share the worst moment of their lives. After I finished my work, I locked myself in my bedroom during my days off, barely eating or sleeping. I didn’t have the energy to speak to anyone. The vicarious trauma I took on from work had sparked a habit of self-isolation. As my career continued and I covered more of these traumatic events, the more numbness I felt.
What is empathy fatigue?
Whether you work as a journalist, healthcare provider, or teacher, empathy fatigue is a real problem. Empathy fatigue is when we’re emotionally and physically exhausted and we lose our ability to care. And with the pandemic, racial injustice issues, climate change, and inflation, there are too many issues to worry about, causing us to feel overwhelmed and apathetic.
“Over time, we start to see people experiencing a sense of numbness and distancing themselves from others,” said Susan Albers, a psychologist with the Cleveland Clinic.
Extreme cases of empathy fatigue are dangerous. For example, it can trigger depression. It doesn’t just affect our mental and physical health, but it also affects how we treat each other.
How do we treat empathy fatigue?
Psychologists suggest that you can combat empathy fatigue by doing the following things: Focus on being aware of how you’re feeling. For example, if breaking news and Facebook stress you out, then limit the amount of news you watch every day, and put a limit on your social media exposure. Add balance back into your life by exercising, going on walks, getting proper sleep, and connecting with people around you.
How to become more empathetic
Empathetic people tend to have higher life satisfaction, stronger relationships, and better health. So how do we increase our empathy? Scientists have two theories for how we can become more empathetic. Research shows that we have neurons called “mirror neurons” that activate when we see and feel emotions, according to WebMD. And scientists believe these “mirror neurons” help us experience empathy. However, there are other scientists who believe empathy can also be learned. When we see how people react and feel we can intellectually understand their emotions and learn how to empathize.
There’s consensus from scientists that empathy is a vital quality. It’s an important part of not just the human experience, but the natural world, even animals like squirrels, dogs, cats, and elephants, show empathy. One of the ways to become more empathic is to practice.
What should you do to be more empathic?
Be curious about the world: Empathic people strike up more conversations with people around them, even strangers. They want to understand their surroundings. They listen to others. They’re better at perceiving what’s happening in their environment. Curiosity is a great teacher. It helps us better understand different perspectives, beliefs, and information.
Find things that unite rather than separate: Finding commonality can help create stronger bonds. Whether that’s where you went to college or your love of the same TV shows, finding similarities can help you connect with people.
Perspective-taking: Ever heard of the phrase, “put yourself in someone else’s shoes?” Perspective-taking allows you to see and experience how others go through life. Volunteering is a good way to gain perspective. Growing up, it was common for me and my brother to volunteer on the weekends. We did beach cleans up. We helped little sea turtles get safely into the water during hatching season. We removed invasive plant species from the Florida Everglades. We picked up trash from gopher tortoises’ homes. In hindsight, all these experiences helped me appreciate nature better. And today, I find myself opting out of using single-use plastic when I can or preferring to buy products that are made from glass and aluminum instead. Empathy doesn’t just help us treat others better, it helps us treat our world better.
Listening and sharing: We all know listening is essential. But it can be hard. Social media has trained us to put our needs and thoughts out first. But by taking a step back and listening to others, we can form deeper connections. And that can inspire us to share our perspectives and feelings as well, which can help strengthen relationships.
Experience art and culture: Going to a museum, looking at artwork, reading new books, watching an indie movie, and exposing ourselves to creative and thought-provoking content can help us better learn about the world around us and help us appreciate people, places, and things.
Meditation: Just a few minutes of compassionate meditation, silently repeating phrases that express intention that moves us from being isolated to connected, apathetic to caring, judgmental to understanding, can help us empathize better, according to researchers at Emory University. In general, meditation has a profound effect on our brains. Mount Sinai Medical Center researchers scanned the brains of people who were meditating and found the areas that experience empathy brightly light up. In addition, meditation can also help calm our nervous system, so that we’re able to be more receptive to other people’s feelings.
Why should you be more empathetic?
Empathy helps us understand the world around us. Kindness and compassion make us better friends, parents, leaders, lovers, citizens, and humans. There’s a lot of scientific research about why empathy is important. But I think we all know that we need to fix this loss of empathy urgently. We’re drifting apart from each other. We’re lonelier, angrier, more anxious, and divided than ever before. We’ve seen protesting, fighting, and even wars break out because people can’t understand each other’s perspectives.
Practicing more empathy can help us start filling the void that we’re feeling. It can be a way to bring us closer together. And maybe it can help us get back to loving one another, and ourselves again.
Why is everyone so rude right now?
A few months ago, I went to Seattle for a business trip. I was looking forward to revisiting the city, a place I had grown to love and had been to half a dozen times.
When I jumped into a local cab from the airport, I greeted the driver, but she didn’t reciprocate, which I was used to coming from New York City. When we arrived at my location, she didn’t help me with my bags. I still left a tip. At the hotel, the automatic doors were broken. As I was making my way to the hotel’s side door, a man pushed past me, barked at me to move, swung the door open, and slammed it in my face. After checking into my hotel room, I looked at my watch and saw that I needed to meet a colleague at the office. While hustling to leave on time, I thought I locked myself out of my hotel room. I went down to the concierge and asked for another room key, explaining to the woman at the front desk that I had accidentally locked myself out. The woman, who looked like she was a little bit older than me, blurted out loud without even looking up, “That’s pretty stupid of you.”
Unsure how to react, I just stared at her in silence as she slowly made me a new room key and tossed it in my direction. When I left the hotel, I couldn’t help but think: Why is everyone so rude right now?
It turned out my original room key was safely tucked away in my back pocket.
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Why are people mean, rude, and disrespectful?
It’s not just you, people are getting ruder. Social media is flooded with videos of angry customers yelling at service workers, patients fighting with healthcare personnel, and even Americans sparing with other Americans while shopping for groceries. Since the mid-2000s, journalists, researchers, and philosophers have pondered whether our society is getting ruder. And the answer is, yes. But why?
Theories about why incivility is rising range from the anonymity of social media platforms, which have made us more emotionally disconnected from each other to stressful working environments, which are causing people to take their workplace traumas back to their personal lives. And it appears the stress of the pandemic has only made matters worse for some people who haven’t been able to cope with the stress and anxiety of the unknown.
David H. Rosmarin is an assistant professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, and he is a clinician at McLean Hospital. He said in a 2020 interview that the hospital program he runs, Spirituality and Mental Health program, has observed rising levels of anger. And that anger is manifesting itself as aggression and domestic abuse. When it comes to the pandemic, there’s heightened fear, anxiety, and depression, which has also fueled people’s anger.
“One of the ways of thinking about anger — which I find helpful from a clinical standpoint — is to conceptualize it as a secondary emotion. Fear, anger, joy, and sadness are your four primary emotions, and secondary emotions occur as a reaction to our primary emotions, rather than to the situation,” he said to the Harvard Gazette.
Rudeness is rising, and that’s a serious problem
Incivility is rising — and that’s a bad thing, Christine Porath, a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and author of “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace,” said in an interview on the NPR podcast “The Hidden Brain.”
Rudeness takes an emotional toll on us. When we encounter incivility, it puts us in fight or flight mode. Oftentimes, we endure the abuse and stay silent. But the pain lingers long after.
“Incivility is so costly,” Porath said to Forbes. “It robs cognitive resources, hijacks performance and creativity, and sidelines people from their work. Incivility impairs thinking. People miss information right in front of them.”
Porath’s team wanted to learn more about the hidden costs of rudeness on people’s brains. They ran an experiment with two groups. One group was subjected to rudeness. The other group was not. After their sessions, both groups were given a brick. Researchers asked the subjects what they could do with a brick. The control group, the one that didn’t face any rudeness, had creative ideas, like building homes and making art. The group that endured rudeness had destructive answers. They said they could hit people with the brick and break someone’s nose. This showed researchers that rudeness can negatively impact people’s cognitive skills and creative abilities.
Why are customers angry at retail and service workers?
There are also cultural reasons why people are ruder nowadays. For instance, the “customer is always right” model, which became popularized across retail and service industries after World World II, has enabled people to abuse retail, service, healthcare, and hospitality workers. And because consumer purchasing power is so important to businesses, most companies allow their employees to be mistreated, berated, abused, or sometimes even physically assaulted. The pandemic put renewed focus on how much abuse workers endure from customers, from passengers on airplanes yelling and hitting flight attendants because they didn’t want to wear masks, to customers throwing food at service staff when they were unhappy with their orders.
“We’ve gone past the point where the retailer was in charge to a point in society where the customer is in charge,” Mark Cohen, an adjunct professor and director of retail studies at Columbia University, told Insider in 2021.
Some workers have reached their limit. Since the pandemic started, there’s been a rise of retail and service workers who have quit or refused to go back to their old jobs because of low pay, hard working conditions, and rude customers.
Acting mean, rude, and disrespectful makes us feel powerful
Rudeness is contagious. When someone yells at us, we’re likely to pass on that negative emotion to someone else. Trevor Foulk, who researches organizational behavior at the University of Maryland, told the Washington Post that rudeness is sort of like the common cold. It’s easy to catch and pass on to others.
“When it comes to incivility, there’s often a snowballing effect. The more you see rudeness, the more likely you are to perceive it from others and the more likely you are to be rude yourself to others,” he said.
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Radical candor can disguise rudeness and mean behavior
Rudeness has also found its way into our homes as people continue to work from home. Whether it’s subject line only emails, curt slack messages, or colleagues scolding you, incivility has become pervasive.
At the streaming company Netflix, for example, three marketing managers were fired in July 2021 after making disparaging comments about their coworkers, according to TIME.
“What happened here was unfortunately not simply venting on Slack or a single conversation,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in a comment on LinkedIn. “These were critical, personal comments made over several months about their peers…including during meetings when those peers were talking or presenting.”
Sarandos faced backlash for his comments from some Netflix leaders who claim that the company’s culture of radical candor allows for this sort of communication.
If you don’t know, in 2017, a new workplace trend caught on in management: radical candor. But Kim Scott, the ex-Google employee who defined the term and wrote the book, “Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” said radical candor is most successful when paired with caring, meaning the intention behind your bluntness is to do good and uplift others. However, some companies and managers have taken radical candor to the extreme in the workplace by publicly shaming employees for poor performance in front of their peers.
How do we protect ourselves from rudeness?
Rudeness hurts us emotionally, and it has become more common to be rude than to be nice to each other. I once heard someone say that being polite is so rare that people nowadays confuse it with flirting.
Like most of us, I don’t like when people are rude to me. Rudeness affects me emotionally. When the hotel worker called me stupid and threw the room key at me, I thought about that exchange for weeks afterward. My meeting with the colleague after that exchange felt uninspired because I was thinking about what that woman said to me. Since rudeness impacts so many of us negatively, how do we protect ourselves?
Most people lack self-awareness, Porath said. And they typically don’t know they are being rude. Generally, people are unaware of their tone or attitude. Based on her research, only 4% of people intentionally try to hurt others for fun.
When someone is being rude or hurtful to me nowadays, I try to point it out in a gentle but firm way by saying: “The way you’re speaking to me is making me uncomfortable.”
I’ve found that this phrasing has helped me navigate difficult personalities in more productive ways. However, I do think personal safety should always be your number one priority. Therefore, if you can avoid or limit your interactions with rude people, it’s best to do it because it’s hard to determine how strangers will react when confronted with their bad behavior.
Sometimes, we can’t avoid rudeness. But if we do face it, we can try to be conscious of not passing it on to others by giving ourselves time to recover after a negative interaction. We can reduce the impact of rudeness by focusing on our personal happiness, growth, and wellbeing.
The best way we can protect ourselves from rudeness is with a resilient mindset, which we can build by having creative passions, strong support systems, and fulfilling relationships.
At the end of the day, your emotional well-being matters. If you don’t want to deal with rude people at work, you don’t have to. Thanks to our globalized society, there are more opportunities than ever before to find better jobs, better work cultures, and better quality of life. It just takes a little bit of time and energy to find the best environment, career, and place that fits your needs.
The American worker has changed. But has the workplace?
Hustle culture is dead. More people are prioritizing their personal lives above work. But have workplaces kept up with changing times?
Recently, a colleague asked me to attend a meeting at 8:00 pm in order to discuss a project he wanted to explore at work. I said no and offered alternate times during standard work hours.
And just the other day, I was at a board meeting and the chair asked for volunteers to help with a task. There was a deafening silence. Normally, I would jump up and help. But this time, I very vocally said, I can’t.
Soon after, I got a LinkedIn message from an old coworker who wanted to “pick my brain” about how to use TikTok. I sent him my YouTube channel and told him to watch my videos.
We’re living at a time when we have more to do than ever before. Beyond work, we have responsibilities and tasks that demand our time and attention, but we only have 24 hours in a day. And frankly, most of us are tired.
Nowadays, the American worker is not just saying no to extra work, they are also leaving jobs that don’t serve their passions and purpose — and that’s a good thing.
Months before the Covid-19 pandemic started, Yale professor and historian Frank Snowden published a book about how pandemics spark paradigm shifts in societies. When traumatic events like pandemics happen, it causes people to face their own mortality, which makes them reevaluate their lives and their priorities.
“Epidemic diseases reach into the deepest levels of the human psyche,” he said to the Guardian in 2020. “They pose the ultimate questions about death, about mortality: what is life for? What is our relationship with God?”
As our friends, colleagues, and loved ones contracted the virus, and some unfortunately died, that trauma has caused people to reevaluate their lives. The American worker has changed. But American workplaces and work cultures have largely remained stagnant. Worse, workplaces are in denial of how much Americans have changed. Before the pandemic, American workers worked longer hours than most workers living in developed nations, while lacking breaks and paid time off. Prior to the pandemic, hustle culture ran rampant throughout workplaces and corporate thought leadership. But as the pandemic wore on, many workers felt like they had to keep working even though it felt like the world was ending. And as corporate profits soared to the highest levels since the 1950s, American workers’ mindsets about their workplaces soured.
@jareenimam #stitch with @shouldntthisbeobvious apparently the tax rate in Canada isn’t so bad #getthatraise #bettercareer #workculturematters #workingtoohard #moneymoves2022 ♬ original sound - Jareen Imam
As offices start opening up, it’s clear that many companies want workers to go back to how things were before the pandemic. Goldman Sachs is demanding its employees return to the office 5 days a week, according to a Fortune interview with the investment firm’s CEO David Solomon. Labor experts believe this mandate can signal other companies to start asking the same from their employees.
However, many workers want the flexibility of working from home, not because of Covid-19 safety, but because they want to reclaim more of their time. More than 50% of American workers said in a survey that they are willing to take a pay cut to be able to work from home. But in a time of rising inflation and higher cost of living, those pay cuts can be financially damaging.
Additionally, many American workers are feeling overworked and unhappy. The Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, reported in May 2021 that 48 percent of U.S. workers feel mentally and physically exhausted at the end of the workday, while another 41 percent reported feeling burned out from their jobs. And for the first time in more than a decade, there’s been an increase in U.S. workers who feel disengaged at work, according to a January survey by Gallup.
Hustle culture is dead — at least for now. The pandemic and all of its tragedies have caused American workers to reevaluate what matters to them and it turns out, it’s not work.
In a 2021 survey that polled workers about how they feel about work, many respondents didn’t have positive things to say. Many wanted more pay, location and work hour flexibility, more purpose in their work, and the ability to step back from work responsibilities and focus on their personal lives.
Anne Helen Petersen writes in her book, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,” that burnout happens when devotion becomes untenable: “When faith in doing what you love as the path to fulfillment, financial and otherwise, begins to falter.”
It’s not just companies that want things to go back to normal, it’s also governments and institutions. But realities have changed. Those who didn’t have the privilege of working from home, those working in retail, hospitals, warehouses, utilities, construction, sanitation, transportation, hospitality, and more, had to go into the office. They had to put customer needs before their own personal safety — and now we’re seeing a massive labor movement as more workers aim to unionize — that’s not a coincidence. People are unhappy with corporate and economic needs trumping human needs.
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During the height of the pandemic, I was working as a journalist and manager at a big media company. I was working about 12 hours every day, and I was also expected to work late into the night and on weekends during breaking news — for no extra pay. When my grandmother died, I asked for a day off so that I could write her obituary. I missed her funeral because I had to cover the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. When my family, most of them healthcare workers, were suffering because of the pandemic, I wasn’t able to take time off in order to help them. I wasn’t given any space or time to grieve. During that time, I didn’t feel supported by my company, managers, or team. Eventually, I felt so much despair from the lack of support, I resigned.
I’m one of 4.5 million Americans who quit their jobs during the “Great Resignation.” That’s about 3 percent of all employment. And resignations aren’t slowing down. Workers are now more empowered to seek out jobs that align with their values and goals — that might mean working from home or working 4-days a week instead of 5.
As companies face this new reality, whether they want to or not, I think the biggest thing employers need to focus on is compassion. Using brute force to demand workers to go back to how life once was in 2019 isn’t going to work. People want to reclaim their time and lives. Employers who aren’t able to provide more paid time off, better benefits, and more work flexibility will inevitably have a harder time hiring talent. It’s not because the American worker is lazy, it’s because the American work culture is broken.
Now that we’ve gone through this societal trauma, American workers are seeing they deserve better.