This Week In Sunday Letters
Content from weekending 14th April 2024
969—that’s how many published posts there are on Sunday Letters. For better or worse, I’ve changed the format and frequency of posts over the years, and there have been plenty of gaps. Browse it if you dare! Anyway… more on the new format below.
Last Friday saw the relaunch of the Sunday Letters Podcast, where I was joined by
for a conversation on our personal experiences with daily work. We also outlined the basis for this ongoing conversation, which is essentially to provide an account of the state of the contemporary workplace and to suggest an alternative. That is, to take control of our own working lives, decide what that work looks like, how it should be done, how much money we should make and so on.Some people are content in their work, no doubt. However, numerous research papers and surveys have indicated that anywhere from 30% to 50% of people report unhappiness with work. For example, the UK charity Action For Happiness suggests that happiness at work is important for over 90% of people, yet 50% say they are unhappy at work1. In the U.S. specifically, 50% of workers reported feeling stressed at their jobs daily, 41% worried, 22% sad, and 18% angry.
Gallop’s 2023 The State of The Global Workplace report2 found that sixty per cent of people reported being emotionally detached at work, 19% miserable, and only 33% feeling engaged. The number one reported cause of dissatisfaction with work is "unfair treatment at work" or the lack of respect, community, and acknowledgement of contribution. This is just a fraction of the findings globally.
Another question that must be addressed concerns those who seem content: Have they capitulated to the corporate machine, or are they truly happy with work? Erich Fromm’s theory of the socially typical character would suggest that they have, in fact, capitulated. Regardless, we are prepared to speculate on this and other phenomena related to human beings at work. Here’s last Friday’s episode. We’ll have a new one every Friday.
224 The Sunday Letters Podcast: Refreshed
Specially Designed Sunday Letters Postcards
I’m working on a specially designed Sunday Letters postcard collection for you to purchase as print-ready PDFs or as printed-for-you. These postcards contain a quote related to the human relationship with work from poets, authors, essayists, activists, leftist political figures, and social figures from history. We’ll have more on this over the next few weeks. Here’s a free sample;
Notes
Notes is like a Twitter feed only not so filled with vitriol and hate. Dmitri and I share other people’s stuff, links, images and interesting stuff we find here on this platform. It lives right here on
and we’d love to see you there. To access Notes, click the link in the top menu or download the Substack App.Merch
We’ve branded up some gear… Now you can show your support for Sunday Letters by getting a Sunday Letters Coffee Mug. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Next Week
On Tuesday, you’ll get a new post from me on The Future of Work somewhere in the region of 1000 words. It will focus on how work is changing due to technology, particularly from the impact of Generative AI. I have been building and delivering a program on this topic recently with fellow academic
, and along the way, we have made some interesting discoveries for ourselves. I want to share some of that with you and speculate on how this global technology shift will change how we work.On Thursday,
will publish a short essay on the topic of the week. We met tonight to go through this and will share our thoughts on the social and cultural influences on what we believe work to be, what its function is and whether it could be something different. The basis for this discussion is that the workplace makes many people physically and emotionally sick.Ok, see you next week 🤙
https://actionforhappiness.org/work
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx