Self-worth

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers — perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world — the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when — or how, or why — to quit.

Workaholism could be on the upswing thanks to Zoom, Slack and every other technological advance that makes it easier for people to work anywhere, anytime. Behavioral scientist Toon Taris says. “It is something I’m worried about. The conditions for workaholism to develop have never been as good as today.”

Psychologist Malissa Clark agrees that the stage seems to be set for more people to find their inner workaholics. She said, “The mass shift to working from home and remote work may have changed some of our communication patterns and expectations.” Working from home, which became especially widespread during the pandemic, likely created a new group of always-on workers who lost all sight of the boundaries between work and home life. It’s troubling, she says. “Even just your average worker might now start to be more of a workaholic.”

Jack Hassell, a human resource specialist in New Zealand, interviewed an academic who got a wake-up call during the massive Christchurch earthquake of 2011. When the earthquake started, they were reluctant to quit work and leave their desk, Hassell says. Finally forced to exit the shaking building, the academic had an epiphany. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, I was so consumed with work I was willing to almost die.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the curse (Gen. 3:19) introduced toil and effort into our lives. Yet, God never meant for us to become slaves to our work. In fact, He insists that we take a day of rest for every six days we labor (Exod. 20:8-11; Luke 23:56).

Those constant Zoom calls and Google Meets are fundamentally altering how individuals perceive their facial appearance. A study shows that people spending more time staring at their digital reflections than the actual speaker. In addition, thanks to appearance-enhancing filters, they’re finding themselves more likely to consider cosmetic procedures as a result.

Much like staring into a mirror for extended periods, spending hours on video calls has created a new form of self-scrutiny. Platform features like “touch-up my appearance” filters, which provide an airbrushed effect, might amplify this effect by presenting users with an idealized version of themselves. This phenomenon shares similarities with ‘Snapchat dysmorphia,’ where people seek surgical changes to replicate their filtered images.

Survey results show that nearly 89% used videoconferencing platforms more than three days per week. Perhaps more tellingly, 68% reported using appearance-enhancing filters more than half the time during their calls. 66% of participants admitted to focusing more on their own image than on the speaker or presented material during video meetings.

Most striking was the connection between self-viewing behavior and cosmetic procedure interest. Among those who frequently watched themselves during video calls, over 80% expressed interest in cosmetic treatments. Popular procedures under consideration included chemical peels, fat reduction, laser treatments, surgical reconstruction, dermal fillers, and neuromodulators like Botox.

In 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to a psychiatric asylum in Southern France, where he spent a turbulent year creating roughly 150 paintings, including masterpieces such as “Irises,” “Almond Blossom” and “The Starry Night.”

Now, a former curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has teamed up with a group of conservators, scientists, and historians who believe they’ve discovered No. 151. It is a previously unknown Van Gogh portrait of a fisherman plucked from a Minnesota garage sale a few years ago by an unsuspecting antiques collector in Minnesota. The dealer called to say he’d spotted this fisherman in a bin of other paintings at a garage sale. He’d bought it because he liked the work’s impasto, or thickly painted brushstrokes.

A team of specialists is trying to prove that the canvas bought for less than $50 was painted by the iconic artist and is now worth $15 million.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Human Worth; Value - Just as we often find unexpected treasures in the most unlikely places, people, too, carry within themselves hidden value that may not be immediately apparent. Each individual holds unique talents, perspectives, and strengths waiting to be discovered and appreciated. By taking the time to look beyond the surface, we open ourselves to the possibility of uncovering remarkable qualities in others.

Yet another study shows what should be obvious: teenagers need to spend time with dad. The study tracked over 200 families and found that time with both parents starts to decrease when kids reach the age of 15. But the University of Pennsylvania study also found that the time teens spend with their dads has critical benefits.

A CNN article stated, "The more time spent alone with their fathers, the higher their self-esteem; the more time with their dads in a group setting, the better their social skills." The article also said that time with mom helps too, but there's just something special about time with dad.

The researchers conjectured that one-on-one time with dad "may develop higher general self-worth [in teenagers] because their fathers go beyond social expectations to devote undivided attention to them."

The message is clear: dads can make a huge difference in their kids' lives.

For young professionals today, work is no longer just something they do for a paycheck; it has become one of the primary spheres of meaning in their lives. For those who pursue a vocation, work is a way of leading a purposeful life and making a mark on the world. For those still going to the office, work is where people find others to talk to and, if they’re lucky, people who care about the same things that they do. Often, it’s where people fall in love.

Above all, it’s how many people in the middle and upper-middle classes define their value and sense of purpose: it is against the standards of their professions that people measure their level of success and personal growth. And it is in a large measure on the social status of their professions that they base their self-worth.

Because work has become so central to people’s identities, self-esteem, and social lives, it is easy to lose sight of its many dry demands. For full-time employees, work takes most of our waking hours. And for whole swaths of highly skilled white-collar workers, the willingness and ability to give more and more time to their careers has become a professional virtue in itself.

Anxiety around aging may be universal, but recently some members of Gen Z have been voicing acute distress. A few widely circulated social media posts have advanced the tantalizing theory that Gen Z is “aging like milk,” which is to say, not well.

In one viral TikTok video that has been seen nearly 20 million times, Jordan Howlett, a 26-year-old with a dense beard and professorial glasses, says that he thinks he and other members of Gen Z look more mature because of the stressors heaped on the generation. In another, a wrinkle-free young woman named Taylor Donoghue feigns outrage at commenters who thought she might be in her early 30s. “Bye digging my own grave,” Ms. Donoghue, who is 23, wrote in her video’s caption.

The oldest members of Gen Z are around 27. It may be that, like every human before them, they are simply getting older. The trend is all but certain to persist.

David Crosby, the lead singer for Crosby, Stills and Nash., became one of the most successful rock musicians of all time. But even at nearly 80 years old, Crosby could not stop hitting the road and promoting his music. He was worth over $40 million. And his wife did not want him to travel, but his entire sense of significance was wrapped in his music.

In a film about his life, Crosby expressed a lot of regrets. “People ask me if I got regrets,” he said. “Yeah, I got a huge regret about the time I wasted being smashed. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of dying. And I'm close. And I don't like it. I'd like to have more time—a lot more time.”

Crosby tells his interviewer that music “is the only thing I can contribute, the only thing I got to offer.” Then toward the end of the film, he raises the volume of his voice and the intensity of his delivery with these summarizing words: “The one thing I can do is make music. Myself. So, I'm trying really hard to do that.” His interviewer asks, “To prove yourself?” Crosby responds, “That I'm worth a [expletive].”

People today may say that it shouldn’t matter what other people think about you. All that matters is what you think of you, that you live up to your standards and do what you think is right. I propose that that is utter nonsense. We are utterly dependent on others to name, bless, and affirm us.

Imagine a poet who says, “You know, I've been writing poetry for 10 years and I've let 3,000 people read my poems. Everyone has hated them. Everyone says, ‘This is stupid, this is terrible, this is bad. You must get another job.’” But the poet says, “It doesn't matter what they think. I know I'm a great poet.”

Would you say, “Well, there's a person with a great self-image?” Of course not. You’d probably say, “That’s a person on the verge of insanity. They are not functional.” And you know the reason why? Because we cannot bless ourselves. We cannot feel beautiful just because we keep saying I'm beautiful. You cannot bless yourself. You cannot name yourself. You cannot say I'm somebody. Somebody from outside has got to tell you you're beautiful. Somebody from the outside has got to tell you you're a good poet. Somebody from the outside has got to bless you. Somebody from the outside has got to name you. You can't do it yourself.

And that means you are completely dependent, or you will be completely dependent on somebody else, spiritually. Your whole being is going to rest on somebody, whether it's the critics, your parents, somebody you hope to marry, somebody you have married, or somebody else. Like sheep, we are dependent on others for our survival and flourishing.

Does a pay raise bring happiness? Sometimes it will, but the level of happiness is often tied to how we compare our salaries to others.

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, people’s happiness with their pay is strongly tied to how it compares with the pay of others around them, say researchers who study compensation. Sometimes, those comparisons rankle.

Executives are more likely to leave their companies if their pay is low compared with other top bosses, according to a 2017 study in the journal Human Resource Management. Comparisons matter closer to home, too. Living in an area where people tend to make more money than you is linked to being less happy.

A 30% raise made Ryan Powell less happy at work. Powell, a 38-year-old finance director for a manufacturer in western North Carolina, received that pay bump in 2022. He had been hoping for more based on the salary information he had heard from recruiters, peers in the industry, and his M.B.A. cohort.

The initial thrill of the raise lasted about three months, he said. “The further I got into it, the more I was realizing that I was anchored to the higher number.”

When a researcher started interviewing hospital workers—the people who cleaned out the patients’ rooms each day she assumed they would only have bad things to say about it. That was partially true, but she also found a second group of workers with the same jobs who felt their labor was highly skilled.

They described the work in “rich relational terms,” talking about their interactions with patients and visitors. Many of them reported going out of their way to learn as much as possible about the patients whose rooms they cleaned. “It was not just that they were taking the same job and feeling better about it … It was that they were doing a different job.”

This group didn’t see themselves as custodial workers at all. One described forming such a bond with patients that she continued to write letters to some of them after they were discharged. Another paid attention to which patients seemed to have few visitors or none and would make sure to double back to spend some time with them. They said things like, “I’m an ambassador for the hospital” or, “I’m a healer. My role here is to do everything I can to promote the healing of the patients.”

One woman told how she rotated the art in the rooms of coma patients. She would take paintings down in one room and putting them up in another. The woman explained that it was at least possible that a change in scenery might spark something in their comatose brains.

These workers were quietly creating the work that they wanted to do out of the work that they had been assigned to do. The researchers called them “job crafters.”

By the year 2000, Judge John Phillips had long since lost count of the number of minors he had sent through the California penitentiary system for crimes committed during a violent and hopeless adolescence. He said on one occasion, “You send these young people to prison, and they learn to become harder criminals.”

In 2003, he set out to find a better way—to get kids in an environment of support where they could pass through these difficult years with a hand on their shoulder. Phillips started Rancho Cielo in the town of Salinas, ironically using an old juvenile detention center.

Rancho Cielo has a wide variety of programs, much of which is hands-on and kinetic, from the carpentry and construction program and vintage car repair, to beekeeping and equestrian care. Experts and industry professionals frequent Rancho Cielo to share their knowledge; like Tom Forgette who teaches the auto and diesel repair shop, and Laura Nicola, co-manager of the ranch restaurant, whose other job is at the James Beard Award-winning La Bicyclette.

“Upstairs,” traditional high school level classes are held for academic topics like writing and mathematics, usually to prepare students for a GED or community college admission. This is paired with additional preparatory courses like resume and cover letter writing and interview skills.

17-year-old Omar Amezola said, “In my other school, it was all reading and writing. Here the teachers are more chill, you don’t have to stay in your seat all day, you can do things that are hands-on—it’s cool.”

Each year, 220 students attend Rancho Cielo. While some don’t make it, 84.8% of first-time offenders who enroll at Rancho Cielo never re-offend, compared to the 40% recidivism rate in the county. Even with all the tutoring, diversity, and infrastructure, it costs just $25,000 to put a kid through Rancho Cielo, compared to the $110,000 it costs to house them in prison.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Grace; Judgement; Justice; Mercy – There is only endless punishment when God judges the guilty for their sins. But through his redemptive grace, he offers hope, a new life, and a new beginning to those who come to him in faith in Christ.

Beauty has its privileges. Studies reliably show that the most physically attractive among us tend to get more attention from parents, better grades in school, more money at work, and more satisfaction from life. A study published in the Journal of Economics and Business found that good-looking banking CEOs take in over $1 million more in total compensation, on average, than their lesser-looking peers. “Good looks pay off,” the authors write.

New research from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance similarly finds that comely managers of mutual funds lure more investments and enjoy more promotions than their counterparts, even though their funds don’t perform as well. The researchers suggest this performance gap may be because handsome managers approach risk with arrogant levels of confidence.

Scientists attribute the human tendency to give attractive people better treatment to something called the halo effect. Basically, we tend to assume that good looks are a sign of intelligence, trustworthiness, and good character and that ugliness is similarly more than skin deep. This may help explain why attractive people are less likely to be arrested or convicted, even after controlling for criminal involvement, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The gospel works by grace not by beauty—God saves us in Christ not because we are beautiful and worthy. He saves us despite our lack of spiritual and moral beauty. But he saves us to make us truly beautiful in him.

Author and researcher Bruce Feiler crisscrossed the country, trying to understand the roots of shifting attitudes towards work. He collected 400 extensive life stories of Americans in all 50 states, interviewing everyone from CEOs and mom-and-pop proprietors to schoolteachers and line workers. Feiler concluded that “unprecedented numbers of Americans are walking away from their jobs, rethinking their routines and breaking away from traditional expectations.”

Fifty million Americans quit a job in the last year, and another third of the workforce is renegotiating where, when, and how they work. Three-quarters of Americans in a recent survey said that they plan to look for new work this year.

Feiler discovered a shift: “Today’s workers are increasingly rejecting the script that has long defined the American Dream. They rebuff the notion that each of us must follow a linear career—lock into a dream early, always climb higher, never stop until you reach the top."

His data shows that the average worker goes through a moment of disruption or reinvention every two and a half years—what he calls a “workquake.”

In the end, fewer Americans are searching merely for work these days; more are searching for work with meaning. Some still emphasize wealth and status, but others stress service, self-expression, or personal fulfillment.

A new study found that hospitalizations for pediatric suicidal behavior increased by 163 percent over an 11-year period. According to an article in The New York Times, “The portion of American hospital beds occupied by children with suicidal or self-harming behavior has soared over the course of a decade … The study did not include psychiatric hospitals, or reflect the years of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that it is a considerable undercount.”

A doctor quoted in the article lamented, “The hospital ends up being the place you go when all else fails. Could you have nipped it in the bud earlier? That is a systems-of-care problem.” She added, “This is playing itself out in an attention-grabbing way.”

One the study’s co-authors, pointed to “a growing use of social media among children and adolescents and in particular, growing use among younger adolescents,” which she said had been shown to increase symptoms of depression.

Whatever the reason, she added, “we don’t have the magic formula to figure out how to dial this back and make things better.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Note the crying need for the gospel and for the church, especially considering the quote at the end—“we don’t have the magic formula to figure out how to dial this back and make things better.”

A business professor quoted in the Wall Street Journal noted how Gen Z is craving stability in the midst of anxiety.

Not long ago, a friend who teaches a communications course at a Midwestern business school asked me to speak to her class. Her instructions were invitingly wide: “Just tell them about your career.” And so I did, trying to hit all the points that might be relevant to students about to enter the job market.

When I was done, my friend opened the floor to questions and, much to my excitement, a line formed at the mic. Then came the first question: “You’ve had such a long career,” the student said. “Could you please tell us how you’ve avoided burnout? Like, what do you do for self-care?” As the student sat down, so did about half of the other students in the queue, signaling their question had been taken.

I’ll spare you my answer, but perhaps you can guess it. I am of the generation that thought work was what you did, even when it was hard. You pushed through. Burnout wasn’t an option. Self-care is what you did when you retired.

She goes on to quote a survey which asked 1,800 new graduates what they wanted most from their future employers. The overwhelming majority—85%—answered “stability.” High pay and benefits also ranked high. The desire for “a fast-growing company,” on the other hand, garnered only 29% of the vote.

Two Christian university professors had an unusual assignment for students over a long break. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon told their students while they were on school break to take a long, good look at their belly button. Why? They explain:

Nothing is quite as revealing as our belly button ... by noting that we are creatures, creations of mothers and fathers, the Bible tells us that we have life as a gift. We are begotten, not manufactured. Someone even changed our diapers; our first hint of what grace must be like. No wonder some of us resent our parents, for they are a visible, ever-present reminder that we were created, that the significance of our lives is not exclusively self-derived.

In contrast, it is all too easy in today's Western culture for us to imagine that we are self-made people. But your belly button does not merely remind you of Mom and Dad, but of your Creator and Redeemer, from whom you have life, meaning, and purpose.

In the film Wonder, which is based on the novel with the same name, a 10-year-old boy named Auggie was born with a rare medical facial deformity. Auggie has been home-schooled his whole life. But in fifth grade, his parents make the decision to send Auggie to school. The film chronicles Auggie’s experience of acclimating to his new social environment, getting bullied for the way he looks, and slowly making friends.

The story is told from multiple perspectives, including the story of Auggie’s older sister, Via. Via loves Auggie and watches out for him, but she often feels unseen by her family because of how much attention Auggie requires. And so she adjusts her life around this reality. Via fades to the background and keeps the details of her life hidden from her parents. There’s this poignant moment when Via expresses how much she longs for her mother to cast her gaze fully on her.

And then there’s this scene, where Via is serving as a stagehand as well as the understudy for the lead role in the high school’s production of Our Town. Her parents are in the audience because Via’s best friend has the lead role. But then her friend, who sees an opportunity, pretends to be sick right before the curtain goes up, which thrusts Via onto the stage, while her parents sit in the audience watching her amazing performance.

After the play is over, her family comes backstage, overwhelmed by her performance. And then there’s this moment, where Via looks up, and everything else fades to the background, and her mom is staring her right in the eye, with this look of incredible love and pride. And she simply points at her. In that moment, it’s as if Via is receiving the fulfillment of a fundamental human desire: to be seen, to be known, and to be loved.

The scene can be found here.

Work success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s the gist of an article in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Is This It?’ When Success Isn’t Satisfying.” The article states:

You got the job, won the award, launched the new project to accolades. So why don’t you feel better? “You get the title and it’s, like, ‘Ugh. Is this it?’” says Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who leads a study on how people thrive.

Sometimes, getting the thing is just as delicious as we imagine. Other times, we climb and climb, only to be underwhelmed by what we find at the top: more work, political wrangling, the feeling of being a fraud. Or the success high wears off fast, replaced by that old panic we hoped the accomplishment would finally cure. Then we wonder: Where’s the next win?

We’re all sprinting on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. That is, we might get a hit of joy when we achieve something, but we eventually return to our baseline level of happiness (or unhappiness). Whatever heights we reach, we’re still, well, us.

The article quotes a man named Andy Dunn who sold his clothing line to Walmart for $310 million. Mr. Dunn, now 44, spent years strategizing and fantasizing about such a sale but says it was a mirage. Building the company brought him more happiness, he says, than the eventual payout. Dunn said, “From the outside, people think, ‘Oh, my God, amazing, [but] I learned that those are just illusory things.”

Miwa Sado, a reporter for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, “died in the line of duty and her body was found with her mobile phone still clasped in her hand.” Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor, the official cause of here death was changed to “karoshi”: death by overwork.

In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period. Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that.

For the last few decades, the world has watched as China became the world’s largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods. But one of the unintended consequences of this has been a surge in the number of people whose deaths have been attributed to overwork. In 2016, CCTV, the state broadcaster, which usually only resorts to hyperbole when they have good news to share, announced that more than half a million Chinese citizens die from overworking every year.

Many in China’s high technology sector now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.” The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There are so many people who overwork their entire lives. They may not suddenly die as poor Miwa did, but over the course of their lives, they do eventually work themselves “into” death by fixating on the wrong goal, and putting temporary gains over eternal rewards.

Dr. Lisa Iezzoni is a professor of medicine at Harvard. She has done research for 25 years with people who have disabilities, to find out, “What is it like for you to go to a doctor?” She kept hearing stories about doctors’ offices “you can’t get into. Doctors who don’t treat you with respect. Care that is way below standard.”

So, she decided to then ask doctors, “What is it like for you to treat someone with disabilities?” She promised the doctors, “You’ll be anonymous,” and the focus groups were on video, so the doctors couldn’t see that Dr. Iezzoni, who has multiple sclerosis, was sitting in a wheelchair.

The result? Some doctors said their office scales could not accommodate wheelchairs, so they had told patients to go to a supermarket, a grain elevator, a cattle processing plant, or a zoo to be weighed. Some would tell a new patient, “Sorry, the practice is closed.” One specialist said disabled patients take too much time, and they’re a “disruption to clinic flow."

Possible Preaching Angle:

How differently Jesus approaches a person with disabilities (John 9)! He was approachable, empathetic, and affirming.