The first time Britney, 22, and I spoke, she was chronicling her introduction to the paid workforce via text. She’d been hired into a full-time administrative support role at a New York City hospital right as the pandemic surged. That meant her routine included walking past morgue trucks lining the streets outside, and the sounds of her workday followed her home and into bed, where her mind replayed the desperate and tired voices on the other end of the phone, the overhead speaker bellowing out stroke codes, and code blue after code blue. Beginning her professional life in the midst of a crisis—one in which everyone around her was losing their jobs—meant overwork was her baseline.
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Sometimes, it felt that everyone else was functioning as usual and Britney was “the weakest link” for not keeping up, she said. She recounted how trauma was compounding around her while being overworked: Black and brown workers were in the most vulnerable jobs throughout the pandemic, and Britney, a Black woman, was watching patients die from COVID at the same time protests were unfolding in the streets, following the murder of George Floyd by police. Meanwhile, work was supposed to go on anyway. Britney was trying to survive.
Eventually, unrelenting stress took a toll on Britney’s health. It destroyed the lining of her stomach to the extent that she wound up in a different hospital—as a patient. In a weird way, she said she’s glad she entered her working life when she did because now, everything is laid bare: “Where company priorities lie, where your personal limits stand, where governing bodies move and stay stagnant,” she explained. For example, she knows that, had she not learned these lessons now, she would’ve saved her paid time off (PTO) for a someday vacation and muddled through if it got pushed back or unapproved. A coworker of hers had a month’s worth of PTO accumulated by the time he resigned. He hadn’t taken a single day in three or four years. “I saw a potential future in front of me, and I didn’t want that,” she said.
The pressure from overwork can result in everything from insomnia and heightened anxiety to depression and even heart attacks, yet overwork is held up not just as a necessity but as an inherently ambitious quality, a requirement for the ambitious. Which is why I called Britney again, around six months after she resigned.
She was still living in New York, where she’d initially moved because she’s disabled and needed access to public transportation. She’s pursuing her master’s in urban studies and working a part-time internship. After she departed her hospital job, she felt half relief at escaping and half guilt for leaving her colleagues behind. As we talked, she mentioned she had to mail a crocheted blanket to her sister—a hobby she picked up when her medical issues landed her in the hospital. Her dad suggested she could make a business out of it. “I was, like, please never say that again,” she laughed.
I think often about how she told me that overwork, to her, meant removing the ever-thinning line between your own needs and your job’s needs: skipping meals, crying on breaks, and becoming ill from the stress and strain of working. No employer will ever list these “side effects” to overwork in a job description, but they get accepted as the status quo. This presumption of overwork being necessary and inevitable is a sometimes-fatal, systemic flaw in the workplace in general.
“My relationship to work and ambition has definitely been formed by overwork,” Britney told me. Because she was a young essential worker, she was ambitious in the sense of feeling fortunate to have a job when so many people were being laid off, not thinking she deserved a break because it was so early in her working life, and zeroing in on surviving the day-to-day, rather than thinking about longer-term purpose or meaning. She did not have that luxury.
She thinks about how wanting to be fulfilled with how you spend the bulk of your waking hours—working—should be a good thing, but that lifting self-worth out of work is critical to restructuring it. She’s dropped the societal expectations to achieve, she told me, because walking away with her life intact was all she could ask for. “We have to organize for us, for our lives, for our livelihoods, because our workplaces are sure as hell organizing for their best interests,” she said. Especially during such an intense period of overwork, Britney realized that, yes, a lot of ambition comes from within. But “the more and more that I’m in the working world, it seems like ambition is formed a lot from these pressures that work is putting on us.”
Excerpted from All The Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive by Rainesford Stauffer. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.