Over the last several weeks, I have sought to answer the question, “Why am I burned out?” The short answer is, of course, labor. It’s also a life that seems too messy and complicated to accommodate the relentless productivity demanded by 21st-century capitalism. But what is it specifically about the labor that I have been doing that creates the feeling of endless work without meaningful progress? I suspect for me, part of the answer lies in the difference between work and labor.
Hannah Arendt outlines this difference in her book The Human Condition. Labor is the work we do to sustain life. Arendt writes, “It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.”1 Historically, this primarily referred to agricultural and care work that was literally necessary for survival. In the modern world, the definition of labor has grown to encompass the mass production of consumable goods and the repetitive work that goes into sustaining large bureaucracies and organizations. Whether labor is necessary for survival or wealth generation, there is never an end to it. There is never a day when we are done surviving, and as much as we would like this to be otherwise, there is never a day when corporate shareholders will say they have generated enough wealth.
Work, on the other hand, requires creativity and autonomy. Work can create meaningful and lasting output, even if that product has little monetary value. In my experience, the primary difference between labor and work isn’t what I accomplish but how I feel doing it. Work can be finished, and whenever possible, followed by a period of rest before starting on the next task.
I suspect Hannah Arendt would consider nearly all tech work to be labor. After all, nearly all the products we create are short-lived and intended to enrich tech founders rather than improve society. However, in my experience, there is a more granular distinction that can be made.
The Google SRE manual talks about the difference between engineering work and toil.
Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.
In my world, this equates to work like package upgrades, cleaning up CSS files, fixing linter errors and warnings, and doing manual release work. No amount of toil will create less toil in the long run. It’s the technical equivalent of doing your laundry.
As opposed to the productive work that creates a sense of accomplishment and pride, toil is never done. There is no seasonal pattern of sowing and harvesting. There is no launch party, big breakthrough, or eventual triumph over adversity. There is no forward motion, just the endless struggle against the forces of entropy.
On the other hand, engineering work has a visible and longer-lasting result.
Engineering work is novel and intrinsically requires human judgment. It produces a permanent improvement in your service, and is guided by a strategy. It is frequently creative and innovative, taking a design-driven approach to solving a problem—the more generalized, the better. Engineering work helps your team or the SRE organization handle a larger service, or more services, with the same level of staffing.
Engineering work involves building things, such as features, services, or processes. In an ideal world, engineering work creates a better product or reduces toil.
Toil is an unavoidable part of software engineering, but the real problem is when there is too much of it or it is distributed unevenly. The Google manual goes on to say that too much toil will result in career stagnation, low morale, slow progress on feature work, and attrition. If you are working in tech, when was the last time you saw someone formally recognized for fixing broken tests or running formatting scripts? We recognize heroes, not repetitive laborers.
Looking back on my career over the past few years, I feel this deep in my bones. It has been hard to find time to build meaningful things when I’m spending the majority of my time cleaning up after others. When I described the repetitive maintenance work I was doing for a large tech company a couple of years ago, a friend who also works in tech asked, “But how is that helping your career?” It wasn’t, but as a software consultant working primarily on staff augmentation projects, what other option did I have?
The distinction between work and toil can’t be separated from the politics of power dynamics. Who gets to do the work, and who is doing the toil that enables that work?
Historically, there has been a difference between men’s work and women’s work. Men hunt bears or land big sales contracts while women do repetitive housework, administrative tasks, and child care.
At work, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I am not a white man, and I also get assigned a lot of the work that other engineers don’t want to do. On top of that, women are expected to help others with their work more frequently. Jenny Odell writes in the book Saving Time:
Entirely apart from the phenomenon of the “second shift” and women’s frequent role as the “default parent,” multiple studies show that women in the workplace are expected to say no to work less frequently than men are. For example, one study showed that both men and women expect women to offer help and respond to requests for help; in the study, men would wait to volunteer favors when there are women in the group, but would raise their hand earlier if the group contained only men.2
Women are expected to do more menial labor and feel less able to turn it down. The effect is even more pronounced for women of color.
Other professional women of color say that, when they attempt to control their time in the workplace, they’re cast as “aggressive, out-of-character, or too emotional.”3
The gender dynamics of different kinds of work don’t just affect women. There is also a reason my coworkers on my front-end platform team are also feeling burdened by a disproportionate amount of non-productive toil, even though I am the only woman among them.
Miriam Posner writes for Logic(s) magazine about the gendered dynamics of front-end engineering.
I spoke to a number of developers who confirmed something I’d sensed: for some time, the technology industry has enforced a distinct hierarchy between front-end and back-end development. Front-end dev work isn’t real engineering, the story goes. Real programmers work on the back-end, with “serious” programming languages. Women are often typecast as front-end developers, specializing in the somehow more feminine work of design, user experience, and front-end coding.
As front-end engineering becomes more feminized, it becomes less scientific and less like “real” programming. And I have a theory that the more feminized an engineering discipline becomes, the more toil they do.
An influx (modest though it is) of women into the computing profession might be helping to push developers to make distinctions where they didn’t exist before. “As professions are under threat, stratification is very often the result,” says [tech historian Nathan Ensmenger]. “So you take those elements that are most ambiguous and you push those, in a sense, down and out. And down and out means they become more accessible to other groups, like women.” But these roles are also markedly distinct from the main work of software engineering—which is safely insulated from the devaluing effect of feminization, at least for the time being.
I’m not sure whether Ensmenger meant that the work is in an ambiguous category or the task itself is ambiguous, but I have seen a lot of ambiguous tasks show up on my backlog recently. This has been the same for most front-end-focused teams I have worked on—we tend to do a lot of the complex and tedious work that other engineers don’t have time to do.
In the beginning of 2024, I hit a wall. I had been working for years but struggled to list my accomplishments. I had been relentlessly trying to move my career forward despite years of upheaval in my life and in the tech industry, and finally, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was tired all the time, showing up late to every meeting, completely disinterested in my work, and barely functioning as an adult human. I could feel my engine sputtering, and I didn’t have time to find an entirely new career direction before I ran out of gas. As quickly as I could, I figured out how to take an unpaid leave and submitted the paperwork.
I envisioned myself having luxurious amounts of time—sleeping in, going to the gym every day, cooking better food, traveling as much as I wanted to. However, for the first few weeks, that’s not what happened. In true 21st-century fashion, I spent several hours trying to sign up for COBRA insurance when my company’s online portal required seven forms of authentication and kept throwing errors when it tried to process my payment information. When I looked around my house, there were piles of stuff I had been meaning to take to Goodwill, trim that hadn’t been painted, cabinets that needed to be re-organized, weeds in the garden that needed to be pulled, and piles of laundry that needed to be folded. Even with a lot more time on my hands, these sorts of chores have a way of expanding infinitely to fill it.
A few weeks into my leave, I didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel the dread that came with my first work meeting of the day, but I still felt tired and directionless. Essentially, I had replaced one kind of toil with another.
I am slowly starting to feel better, but that didn’t happen until I put down the laptop, the paintbrush, the garden shovel, and the vacuum cleaner for a few days and stopped doing work just because it was there and someone needed to do it. It was only in that freedom that I was able to start to imagine a different path forward. When I stopped doing so much labor, I had the time and space to do the work.
As a part of my attempt to be less productive for a while, I got completely engrossed in the fantasy romance series A Court of Thorns and Roses. The first book in the series borrows a lot of plot points from Beauty and the Beast—in short, it is about a young woman who is taken from the human realm to live in a castle with a fairy High Lord with shapeshifting powers. While I won’t comment on whether my chosen reading material is good4, it’s definitely addictive. There is an epic battle between good and evil and no lack of hardship, pain, and trauma. However, I described the series to a friend as “fantasy in more ways than one” because the world is also full of magical realms that have perfect weather all year round, luxurious castles, shirtless men, and lots of help with domestic labor. If I lived in a world like this one, I’m pretty sure I would also be willing to risk torture, imprisonment, or death to ensure that I could keep living in it.
“I’m hungry,” Mor said nudging me with a thigh. She snapped a finger, and plates piled high with roast chicken, greens, and bread appeared.
“There’s already a bank account in Velaris for you, where your wages will be deposited. And you have lines of credit at most stores. So if you don’t have enough on you when you’re shopping, you can have the bill sent to the House.”
I took up a spot against the dresser, where clothes that I had not packed but were clearly of Night Court origin had been already waiting for me.
The sheets had been changed by the domestic magic of the house, and they were warm and smooth against my naked body as he set me down and stared at me.5
If only I had a man with wings. But also, I think it’s really interesting that in books like this one, the protagonist is conveniently wealthy, and all domestic labor is performed by magic spells, fairy servants, or house elves. After all, the hero couldn’t save the world over and over if he was busy doing his own laundry, planning after-school activities for his three children, or trying to track down the 47 passwords he needs to file his taxes this year.6
The hero’s journey, as we typically tell it, may be full of hardship, but it is also defined by the absence of labor. Hannah Arendt also made this point in The Human Condition when she wrote: “The daily fight in which the human body is engaged to keep the world clean and prevent its decay bears little resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition.”7
This begs the question—in a 21st-century world that is devoid of magic but full of annoying bureaucracy and never-ending domestic and administrative labor that needs to be done by someone, who gets to be a hero?
I am not an AI idealist. I generally think that putting powerful tools that can disrupt society in the hands of clueless tech billionaires is a bad idea. However, in all the panic about AI replacing workers, I wonder whether we are asking the wrong questions. What if we stopped asking how people who are doing repetitive, easily automated work are going to find another full-time job and instead asked how we could build a society that wasn’t dependent on everyone doing so much labor? What if automating toil wasn’t a threat but an opportunity to do more meaningful work? I would love to live in a world where there are fewer tech workers fixing the same bugs over and over and more teachers, writers, artists, or shop owners who are making a lasting impact on those around them.
Like many, I yearn for a shift from labor to meaningful work. I envision a world where I can harness my creativity and direct my energy where I choose. I understand that for most of us, this may seem as fantastical as fairy servants or a magical house that does laundry. Hypercapitalism is one hell of a drug.
The gift I received from a period of rest wasn’t an immediate, tangible change. It was a vision, a glimpse into how our lives could be different if we weren’t bound to old stories about who gets to do meaningful work and who is supposed to labor to support them. In the meantime, I still have a lot of labor to do.
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 87
Odell, Jenny, Saving Time (Random House, 2023), 59
Ibid.
I highly recommend this podcast for more ACOTAR commentary.
Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
I would really like to see him book a flight on Expedia, squeeze his cloaks, armor, and extra underwear into a carry-on bag, make sure his dagger is in his checked luggage, and plan enough time to take off his boots and check for talismans in his pockets before flying off to confront the Dark Lord. Bonus points if he remembers to pack Advil and sunscreen so he doesn’t have to buy them on the way to the big murder castle.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 101
I very much relate to not feeling better, or different, or dare I say "productive" during the early part of your leave. I had the same experience. I think it's easy to get really ambitious about time off from your labor and want to jump right into that more meaningful work. But I think our bodies and minds instinctively know there needs to be a liminal period when rest prevails.