The “Good Enough” Job: A Love Letter to Not Living at Work
Saturday, March 22, 2025.
Once upon a time—not too long ago—you were supposed to love your job. Not just like it. Love it.
You were told to “follow your passion,” as if passion were an obedient golden retriever instead of a drunk raccoon living in your crawlspace.
If you didn’t wake up every morning humming with purpose and productivity, you were either lazy or broken. Or both.
Then came a plague. And in its fever-dream wake, millions of people woke up and asked, “Wait, what the hell am I doing?”
Chapter 1: The Cult of Work and Its Mild Disintegration
Before the world caught COVID, it caught a different kind of virus: workism—the belief that your job should be your purpose, your identity, your therapist, and your social life all in one. Sociologist Derek Thompson (2019) called it the new American religion. You worshipped at Slack. You tithed to LinkedIn. You believed in hustle, grit, and that maybe, just maybe, your startup would save the world while also making you a millionaire.
Chapter 2: The Great “Nope”
In 2021, more than 47 million Americans resigned from their jobs (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). Some called it the Great Resignation. Others, like writer Anne Helen Petersen, saw it as a burnout-fueled exodus from a system that had stopped making sense.
Imagine this: You survive a global catastrophe only to return to a windowless cubicle where your manager asks if you can “turn your camera on for this one.” So people quit. They left the job, the city, the whole premise. They moved back home, started micro-bakeries, bought chickens. They Googled “how much money do I actually need to be happy?” And then… they got jobs again.
But this time, something changed.
Chapter 3: The Rise of “Good Enough”
Simone Stolzoff (2023), a journalist with the vibe of a recovering productivity addict, wrote a whole book about this new era of “good enough” jobs. These are not passion projects. These are not dream jobs. These jobs are… fine. Fine is the new dream.
People started realizing that maybe work didn’t have to be your everything.
Maybe it could just be a paycheck that lets you go home at 5 p.m. and touch grass. Or play guitar badly. Or have dinner with people who remember your name even when you don’t wear a nametag.
Work became something to contain, not something to become.
Chapter 4: But the Science!
You want data? Let’s toss some cold, hard peer-reviewed reality into the existential soup:
A Pew study (Parker & Horowitz, 2022) found that people weren’t quitting for better jobs—they were quitting for better lives. Less stress. More time. A shot at dignity.
MIT researchers (Sull et al., 2022) discovered that it wasn’t low pay driving resignations—it was toxic culture. The kind of culture that turns “we’re a family here” into code for “we expect you to die for us.”
Schieman (2023) noted that what people actually want is autonomy, recognition, and a chance to not lose their minds. Fancy that.
Chapter 5: What If the System Isn’t Broken—Just Cruel?
Here’s the punchline: The system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s working precisely as designed.
It was never built to make you feel whole. It was built to extract value.
But if enough of us start looking around and saying, “Actually, I’m good,” something wild happens:
The machine doesn’t know what to do.
Because the dream job cult needs believers. And if we all start treating work like what it is—a trade, not a religion—then maybe we can remember how to be human again.
Chapter 6: The New American Dream (is Lowercase)
So here’s what a “good enough” job looks like:
You don’t cry in your car before going in.
You log off and stay logged off.
You’re a person with hobbies, not a personal brand.
You can afford your meds.
You don’t dread Mondays so much you consider faking your own death.
That’s not settling. That’s surviving. And maybe even sorta thriving, in a very human, post-apocalyptic kind of way.
There’s a certain poetry in mediocrity. A gentle rebellion in choosing sufficiency over spectacle.
The “good enough” job is not a failure of ambition. It is the birth of boundaries. It is your quiet refusal to sacrifice your soul to someone else’s quarterly goals.
It’s not a resignation. It’s a reclamation. Until AI arrives. Then all bets are off.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Parker, K., & Horowitz, J. M. (2022). Majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 cite low pay, no opportunities for advancement, feeling disrespected. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected
Schieman, S. (2023). The weird truth about work is we actually like it. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/6baaa586-f2f8-454d-9f1f-0b29fd723f02
Stolzoff, S. (2023). The good enough job: Reclaiming life from work. Penguin Random House.
Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2022). Toxic culture is driving the great resignation. MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022). Job openings and labor turnover survey highlights. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm