Work is (Not) a Four Letter Word

I recently finished reading comedian Mindy Kaling’s second memoir, Why Not Me? What I found most empowering was her openness about hard work.

In the book, Mindy is refreshingly honest about being a “workaholic.” In the Glamour excerpt of the book, Mindy cites hard work as the path to “killer confidence.” She writes, “...the truth is, I have never, ever, ever met a highly confident and successful person who is not what a movie would call a ‘workaholic.’” Mindy describes herself as a “vampire” following a daily routine consisting of 5am wakeups and days so long in the studio she never sees the sun.

Amidst this discussion, Mindy acknowledges that her honesty about work is in opposition to how we are socialized. She describes how we are taught to work hard until we finish school and then, all of the sudden, people seem to regard work as something harmful. We live in a society that values achievement but not the work required to get there.

Yes, Mindy Kaling. YES. I have long felt caught between pressures for my achievements to appear effortless yet well-deserved. This tension is particularly fraught because of the connection between work and social identity. To some people, I work “all the time”--and to only a subset of these is this a good thing. Others have asked me, “Do you ever work?”--some with admiration and some with disdain. Why is it that my attitude towards work seems to matter more than the work I produce?

Increasingly, narratives around work have become a means for reinforcing current structures of power. In Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite, Shamus Khan writes about how attitudes towards work serve as a gatekeeping function for socioeconomic status. The elites, Khan writes, value hard work and appearing busy as a way of justifying their superior status. It is, however, important to maintain an air of effortlessness. True elites need not work.

Race plays a role in narratives of work. In his New York Magazine piece “Paper Tigers,” Wesley Yang writes about the phenomenon of Asian-American families placing a higher value on academic work--and thus schools requiring Asian students to, on average, score 140 points higher on the SAT for college admissions. Throughout their careers, Asian-Americans continue to be penalized for the perception that they are predisposed to be hard-working, facing the “bamboo ceiling.” Asian-Americans must work harder while maintaining the facade of effortlessness, lest they be labeled as one of the one who knows little else than hard work.

Unsurprisingly, narratives on work also have a gendered element. People have told me, “But you’re a woman. Don’t you want to have a family?” While men have the freedom to be “obsessive” like Judd Apatow or “cocky” like Jerry Seinfeld (okay, I have been reading a lot of comic memoirs), there are fewer equivalent roles for women. The hard-working woman is often vilified, portrayed as cold and distanced from the ones she could love. There is no doubt that this perceived incompatibility between being female and hard-working contributes to the glass ceiling. I have all the more respect for Mindy Kaling for being among the few celebrity women who talks openly about hard work.

In “Is Food the New Sex?," Mary Eberstadt argues that food has replaced sex as the dominant mechanism for maintaining social hierarchy. It is fitting that Mindy Kaling is as open about loving McDonald’s as she is about working hard. If we are to promote inclusiveness and equal opportunity, we need to talk openly about work--and be critical of our fascination with the narratives around work, rather than the work that is done.