The Search, page 9
“I described the exact place where his wife died, with blood all over the laundry room floor. Then I told him that she held out her hands and had M&M’s in them. His mouth dropped. ‘That was our thing,’ he said. ‘Whenever I was sad, she would give me M&M’s. It was her way of saying I love you.’ ”
Lauren was sure he was going to fire her; instead, the opposite happened. “Now he asks me about my mediumship all the time; he told our colleagues at the British Ministry of Defence, and they all believe that my psychic work benefits my government work.”
Which is exactly what side jobs often do.
Hope Job
As popular as side jobs are, they’re still not the most common alternative jobs. That distinction falls to another kind of job that I heard about so frequently I eventually gave it a name: a hope job. A hope job is work that people do in their spare time—like writing a children’s book or selling blueberry muffins at the farmers’ market—that they hope develops into something bigger.
Nearly nine in ten people have a hope job, suggesting that even people who are happy with their main or side jobs have other jobs they imagine would make them even happier.
Michael Running Wolf is part of the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota tribes. His father was an artist, his mother an engineer. “My mother was basically a genius. But she grew up in the wrong time both as a woman minority in tech—her professors called her squaw—and during a period when the government attempted to sterilize Indigenous women.”
Michael was raised in a government home in Birney, Montana, population 108; his house had no electricity, toilets, or telephones. He spent half his year in a tepee. “I longed for big cities and gadgets, but I always feared the loss of culture. How can we carry our people’s knowledge into the future when children prefer being on TikTok?”
Michael attended Montana State University, where he earned a BS and MS in computer science. He worked for IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, before returning to Montana with his wife, Caroline, a member of the Crow Nation, to pursue side-by-side PhDs. That’s when he happened into a hope job.
The Madison Buffalo Jump is a limestone cliff near Bozeman that Native Americans used for two thousand years to trap bison. When the site was threatened by a housing development, defenders of the historic site struggled to explain its significance. Michael stepped up. “I designed some augmented reality, threw up some geo tracking, re-created lost artifacts like hide scrapers, and allowed people to have a relationship with their past.”
The housing development was canceled.
Michael went on to use similar techniques to help fight the Keystone Pipeline. While engaged in that work, he stumbled into a little-known calamity. Machine learning cannot translate most Indigenous languages, which rely more on morphemes that have ambiguous meanings than Western languages, which rely more on words that have concrete meanings. “It turns out there are only a handful of people in the world working on this open problem, which affects more than five hundred million people, most of whom will soon be cut off from advanced computing.”
For the next five years, while working on one of the most elite AI teams in the world, building Alexa at Amazon, Michael labored on this hope job. He started a nonprofit; he begged for grants. “I felt all alone. It was a hope job because I would have loved to do it full time, but I couldn’t get anyone to support us.”
Finally, the urgency became too great. Michael decided to walk away from his dream job at Amazon to take a subsistence job at a university, which would give him more time to focus on his hope job. The logo of his effort: a digital buffalo running toward the jump.
In 2009, two doctoral students at Penn State were chatting about their work. Kathleen Kuehn, a self-described avid jigsaw puzzler, music lover, and dill pickle connoisseur, was researching amateur reviewers on Yelp; Tom Corrigan was researching amateur bloggers. They discovered that their subjects had something in common: they were doing unpaid work because they hoped it would lead to paying work in the future. The two coined the phrase hope labor.
While that term never really took hold, it perfectly captures the work that Michael and others do every day. I began asking all my subjects whether they had a hope job. Eighty-nine percent said yes.
Four in ten hope jobs were in media—writing a memoir, creating a comic book series, starting a podcast. Laura Delarato, a creative director at Vox in Manhattan who once sold high-end sex toys, was working on a book about body positivity and sex. Harmit Malik, a first-generation geneticist in Seattle, was writing a sci-fi novel about fossilized viruses.
One in four hope jobs was in the arts—making jewelry, acting in community theater, performing burlesque. Kelly Lively, a nuclear scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, was honing her skills as a stand-up comedian. Karléh Wilson, a housing analyst in Louisiana, opened a Patreon account to support her dream of becoming a jazz singer.
One in five hope jobs involved starting businesses. Kara Young, a supermodel who appeared on the cover of Vogue at nineteen and later became a correspondent for Fox News, opened a cosmetics line. Susan Venturelli, a cop for Amtrak in Chicago, sold charcuterie boards, cookies, and what she called crack brownies, because of their addictive nature, at the farmers’ market.
As this dazzling range suggests, hope jobs inspire the best in us. They bring us emotional rewards in the present, even if they never bring us financial rewards in the future. In many ways, hope jobs are a symbol of the full circumference of Work360 in that they reveal how prominent unpaid work has become to our identities. We are willing to replace free time with work time if we believe it will make us happier today and perhaps bring us even more happiness in the future.
Care Job
The fourth job in the Work360 circle is the opposite of looking toward the future. It’s all about the here and now. It’s a job that involves taking care of someone else, whether that’s a child, a parent, a neighbor, or a mentee. And for most people, even though that work is done with love, it definitely feels like a job.
Nygil Likely grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a home that included a mom, no dad, all four grandparents, and several uncles. All the adults worked. “The first thing my grandma always said was, ‘If you start something, you have to finish it.’ ”
When Nygil was in seventh grade, his school faced a wave of bullying. The principal set up a peer mentoring program in which students were trained to help mediate conflict; she asked Nygil to run one of the groups. He loved it. After high school, Nygil went to work for the YMCA in youth programming, while also earning a BA and MBA. He stayed in that job for a decade, jumped to Job Corps, and then moved to a local university as the head of student services.
“I was so energized. I was married by this time, I had good work-life balance.”
Then a butterfly appeared.
Nygil is Baptist; his wife, Kieychia, is Pentecostal. They had been attending a nondenominational church but were unhappy, so they returned to his childhood church, where they were married. “Immediately I began to feel God calling me to ministry.”
Nygil approached the pastor, who encouraged him to become a deacon, which allowed him to administer Communion. But even that role didn’t satisfy his yearning.
“Eight months in, I finally heard God say, You’re called into preaching. The pastor said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to get to the message.’ ”
Nygil earned his ordination and was hired as the head pastor at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. He performed this job on nights and weekends, because he still had his main job in higher ed. First at a college in Chicago, then at a university in Grand Rapids, and finally as a vice president of Lake Michigan College, where he ran advising and residential life. On top of both of those roles, Nygil and Kieychia had a biological son; they adopted the son of one of Kieychia’s relatives, who had addiction problems; then they took in two more children from Nygil’s side of the family, whose parents also battled addiction.
The fatherless boy who grew up in a multifamily home now was the father of his own multifamily home.
The boy who was told to always finish whatever he started now had three different jobs—vice president, pastor, and father.
“I think they’re all care jobs,” he said. “When I first heard God calling me, my pastor preached a sermon out of Jeremiah. The scripture said we should all be clay in the hands of the potter, but the pastor said we should all be potters. That message broke me. Even with all our shortcomings, we are called to roll up our sleeves and go to work helping to mold people.”
We are all called to care.
In recent years, we’ve become so enamored of the conversation around work-life balance that we’ve forgotten that life itself is fundamentally unbalancing. The idea that work and life are in tension is actually a positive outcome of having more women working—and more women studying work. For decades, researchers found that men tended to keep their nonwork lives separate from their work, while women rarely did.
But those norms have been changing. The number of women who are primary breadwinners today is close to 50 percent, while the number of men who are more involved in parenting is even higher. One outcome of this change is that the language of work has migrated into the family. Most parents view large parts of child-rearing as a job. Economists can grouse at this usage, but pollsters have consistently found that parents view many aspects of parenting—from preparing meals to planning playdates to prepping bath time—as chores to be managed and jobs to be divvied up.
And it’s not just child-rearing that’s become infused with the language of work. Thirty million Americans provide unpaid labor to an adult over fifty, from aging parents to infirm spouses to grown children. Family Caregiver Alliance, which tracks this issue, says Asian Americans perform these jobs more than whites, Blacks more than Asian Americans, and Hispanics more than Blacks.
This gamut of personal obligations helps explain why two thirds of my cohort said they had a care job. Just under half of all care jobs involve family members, from children to parents to grandchildren. Susan Venturelli, for example, in addition to her cop duties and brownie selling, spends one day a week as the primary caretaker of her grandson.
But more than half involve non–family members. Issa Spatrisano, the Alaska refugee director, spends ten evening hours a week editing the papers of her former clients. Marcus Bridgewater, a TikTok plantfluencer who makes videos relating botany to a meaningful life, was the part-time caretaker for his elderly neighbor. Kirby Metoxen, a full-time council member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, had a side job as the vice president of a birdseed company, a hope job breeding show horses, and a care job as a sobriety coach, which, as a former alcoholic, was the job that meant the most to him.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is a Stanford PhD, the author of fifty peer-reviewed articles on public schools, and the dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Education. After a colleague refused to take his call, saying he didn’t have time for someone so junior, Julian vowed to always make time. He created a widget on his calendar for anyone to schedule a fifteen-minute call. “I just got a tweet the other day from a parent, ‘My son just told me he spoke with you about his high school paper. I can’t believe you did that!’ ”
Care jobs rarely make us money; they usually make our other jobs harder. But we spend so much time doing them because the meaning they provide to our overall identity is disproportionate to many of the other jobs we have.
Ghost Job
The last of the five jobs is the most invisible. It’s the one we rarely share with others. Yet it’s the one we most need to get better at if we expect to find happiness at work.
It’s a ghost job—something so powerful, scary, and haunting that addressing it feels like a job.
It was one such ghost that led Chely Wright, at what was otherwise the pinnacle of her work life, to stand in the foyer of her East Nashville home with a 9-millimeter revolver in her mouth.
Chely grew up in Wellsville, Kansas, “a town where no one had much, and we were on the poorer end of that,” she says. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Chely knew as a little girl that she wanted to sing on the Grand Ole Opry.
“When I was four, I disappeared one day. My family dispatched a search party and discovered me in a nursing home, surrounded by people in wheelchairs, singing ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ ”
When she was eleven, Chely started playing piano in honky-tonks and trumpet in graveyards. “I played taps in over a hundred military funerals.” When she was sixteen, she took a summer job performing in Branson, Missouri. When she was eighteen, she moved to Nashville. Her classmates gave her a necklace and said, “Wear this on the Opry one day.” Within a year, she did.
But Nashville was chock-full of hopefuls, and Chely struggled. She worked in a shoe store; she sang backup for Dolly Parton’s longtime partner, Porter Wagoner; she managed to land a record deal. But her first six singles and two albums flopped. So Chely approached the legendary hitmaker and Elvis’s onetime keyboard player, Tony Brown, to produce her next record. Their first single, “Shut Up and Drive,” cracked the top fifteen; their first album hit number one.
“I was making more money than anyone in my family ever imagined.”
But all this time, Chely was harboring a secret.
One night, she went drinking with the rising country star John Rich. Out of the blue, he asked, “You’re not gay, are you?” “I took a deep breath and said, ‘No, John, I’m not.’ He said, ‘Good, because that ain’t right. Country music ain’t gonna stand for that.’ ”
Chely was lying.
“I was aware from early on that I was different,” she said. But in the deeply churched culture of Kansas and Nashville, she tried to block out the truth. “Every day of my life, I’d pray, Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I also saved every dollar because I knew I could lose it all in a second.”
Now that second appeared to be here.
The next morning Chely broke up with her girlfriend of twelve years. Weeks later, she went into her bedroom and grabbed the revolver her parents had given her for safety. “I took it downstairs, where I had a beautiful, beveled mirror on this hundred-year-old mantel. The gun was heavier and colder than I thought it would be. I was surprised I wasn’t crying. I had imagined this moment so many times.”
But she stopped herself.
“I knew my sister would call me. She would call my best friend. And they would find me, a failure.”
Chely knew she wasn’t a failure, though.
She took a nap, woke up, and started praying. For the first time, she heard a response. “I didn’t see a dude in a white robe or Birkenstocks. I didn’t hear a booming voice. But I felt warm, and I felt hopeful. I decided that if I was going to survive, I had to share my story.”
Three years later, Chely published a memoir and released a new album. “I had a book, a record, and a person all come out on the same day.”
She lost half her audience, but she also gained a side job as an advocate for inclusive workplaces. She married a marketing executive she met soon after coming out. She moved to New York and had twin boys.
“What I learned from hanging out in nursing homes all those years ago is that the only way to survive is to have a map. It’s how you get from five to ninety-nine. And the most important part of that map is not the thing you’re worried about—in my case, the declaration that I’m gay—it’s the overall picture on that map. It’s the declaration that I’m a person of faith, that I grew up on a farm, that I played for troops in the Middle East, and, oh, by the way, that I love women. The only way to be happy is to create your own map, hand it to others, and say, ‘Please, read this. Then you’ll know my story.’ ”
In my earliest conversations, I didn’t ask people about ghost jobs. I’d never heard of or imagined such a concept. But I kept hearing stories that suggested that everyone was haunted by some specter that made even their dream jobs otherwise nightmarish. They were plagued by impostor syndrome, exhausted by bigotry, worried about letting down their parents, anxious about relapsing into drinking.
The poet Cathy Park Hong brilliantly named such “negative, untelegenic” thoughts as minor feelings. Minor feelings are rarely featured in heroic stories, she said, because they “do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination.” They occur “when American optimism is essentially forced upon you.”
In Hong’s case, her minor feelings were related to being Korean American. “For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence. I just don’t look the part.” But she speaks for everyone when she says that patiently educating clueless people is draining. “It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.”
Minor feelings are endemic. They are relentless. But are they a job?
I decided to ask.
Ninety-three percent of all my subjects said that yes, their innermost battles felt like a job. That percentage was the highest of all the five jobs I probed. And when I asked if people could quantify how many hours they spent on these jobs, 60 percent said these feelings were pervasive; their ghosts were always present. The rest said an average of twelve hours a week. That’s a quarter of a typical workweek when instead of being productive, we actually feel anti-productive.
Ghost jobs are the invisible epidemic of work.
The three most common ghost jobs involve discrimination, self-care, and money. On discrimination, Alton White was wrongfully arrested in his own home in Manhattan while starring in Ragtime on Broadway. “The cops burst in, pushed me against the wall, and handcuffed me. They said, ‘We got a call about some Hispanics selling drugs!’ I said, ‘I’m not even Hispanic. I’m Black!’ ” The incident made the nightly news. “Are you fucking kidding me? I thought. Now I’m that guy. At least I had the profile to fight back.” Daphne Jones, who was one of the highest-ranking minority women at IBM, dealt with whispers behind her back and sneers to her face. “Being a woman in business is hard by itself; being a Black woman in STEM is impossible.”
Lauren was sure he was going to fire her; instead, the opposite happened. “Now he asks me about my mediumship all the time; he told our colleagues at the British Ministry of Defence, and they all believe that my psychic work benefits my government work.”
Which is exactly what side jobs often do.
Hope Job
As popular as side jobs are, they’re still not the most common alternative jobs. That distinction falls to another kind of job that I heard about so frequently I eventually gave it a name: a hope job. A hope job is work that people do in their spare time—like writing a children’s book or selling blueberry muffins at the farmers’ market—that they hope develops into something bigger.
Nearly nine in ten people have a hope job, suggesting that even people who are happy with their main or side jobs have other jobs they imagine would make them even happier.
Michael Running Wolf is part of the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota tribes. His father was an artist, his mother an engineer. “My mother was basically a genius. But she grew up in the wrong time both as a woman minority in tech—her professors called her squaw—and during a period when the government attempted to sterilize Indigenous women.”
Michael was raised in a government home in Birney, Montana, population 108; his house had no electricity, toilets, or telephones. He spent half his year in a tepee. “I longed for big cities and gadgets, but I always feared the loss of culture. How can we carry our people’s knowledge into the future when children prefer being on TikTok?”
Michael attended Montana State University, where he earned a BS and MS in computer science. He worked for IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, before returning to Montana with his wife, Caroline, a member of the Crow Nation, to pursue side-by-side PhDs. That’s when he happened into a hope job.
The Madison Buffalo Jump is a limestone cliff near Bozeman that Native Americans used for two thousand years to trap bison. When the site was threatened by a housing development, defenders of the historic site struggled to explain its significance. Michael stepped up. “I designed some augmented reality, threw up some geo tracking, re-created lost artifacts like hide scrapers, and allowed people to have a relationship with their past.”
The housing development was canceled.
Michael went on to use similar techniques to help fight the Keystone Pipeline. While engaged in that work, he stumbled into a little-known calamity. Machine learning cannot translate most Indigenous languages, which rely more on morphemes that have ambiguous meanings than Western languages, which rely more on words that have concrete meanings. “It turns out there are only a handful of people in the world working on this open problem, which affects more than five hundred million people, most of whom will soon be cut off from advanced computing.”
For the next five years, while working on one of the most elite AI teams in the world, building Alexa at Amazon, Michael labored on this hope job. He started a nonprofit; he begged for grants. “I felt all alone. It was a hope job because I would have loved to do it full time, but I couldn’t get anyone to support us.”
Finally, the urgency became too great. Michael decided to walk away from his dream job at Amazon to take a subsistence job at a university, which would give him more time to focus on his hope job. The logo of his effort: a digital buffalo running toward the jump.
In 2009, two doctoral students at Penn State were chatting about their work. Kathleen Kuehn, a self-described avid jigsaw puzzler, music lover, and dill pickle connoisseur, was researching amateur reviewers on Yelp; Tom Corrigan was researching amateur bloggers. They discovered that their subjects had something in common: they were doing unpaid work because they hoped it would lead to paying work in the future. The two coined the phrase hope labor.
While that term never really took hold, it perfectly captures the work that Michael and others do every day. I began asking all my subjects whether they had a hope job. Eighty-nine percent said yes.
Four in ten hope jobs were in media—writing a memoir, creating a comic book series, starting a podcast. Laura Delarato, a creative director at Vox in Manhattan who once sold high-end sex toys, was working on a book about body positivity and sex. Harmit Malik, a first-generation geneticist in Seattle, was writing a sci-fi novel about fossilized viruses.
One in four hope jobs was in the arts—making jewelry, acting in community theater, performing burlesque. Kelly Lively, a nuclear scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, was honing her skills as a stand-up comedian. Karléh Wilson, a housing analyst in Louisiana, opened a Patreon account to support her dream of becoming a jazz singer.
One in five hope jobs involved starting businesses. Kara Young, a supermodel who appeared on the cover of Vogue at nineteen and later became a correspondent for Fox News, opened a cosmetics line. Susan Venturelli, a cop for Amtrak in Chicago, sold charcuterie boards, cookies, and what she called crack brownies, because of their addictive nature, at the farmers’ market.
As this dazzling range suggests, hope jobs inspire the best in us. They bring us emotional rewards in the present, even if they never bring us financial rewards in the future. In many ways, hope jobs are a symbol of the full circumference of Work360 in that they reveal how prominent unpaid work has become to our identities. We are willing to replace free time with work time if we believe it will make us happier today and perhaps bring us even more happiness in the future.
Care Job
The fourth job in the Work360 circle is the opposite of looking toward the future. It’s all about the here and now. It’s a job that involves taking care of someone else, whether that’s a child, a parent, a neighbor, or a mentee. And for most people, even though that work is done with love, it definitely feels like a job.
Nygil Likely grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a home that included a mom, no dad, all four grandparents, and several uncles. All the adults worked. “The first thing my grandma always said was, ‘If you start something, you have to finish it.’ ”
When Nygil was in seventh grade, his school faced a wave of bullying. The principal set up a peer mentoring program in which students were trained to help mediate conflict; she asked Nygil to run one of the groups. He loved it. After high school, Nygil went to work for the YMCA in youth programming, while also earning a BA and MBA. He stayed in that job for a decade, jumped to Job Corps, and then moved to a local university as the head of student services.
“I was so energized. I was married by this time, I had good work-life balance.”
Then a butterfly appeared.
Nygil is Baptist; his wife, Kieychia, is Pentecostal. They had been attending a nondenominational church but were unhappy, so they returned to his childhood church, where they were married. “Immediately I began to feel God calling me to ministry.”
Nygil approached the pastor, who encouraged him to become a deacon, which allowed him to administer Communion. But even that role didn’t satisfy his yearning.
“Eight months in, I finally heard God say, You’re called into preaching. The pastor said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to get to the message.’ ”
Nygil earned his ordination and was hired as the head pastor at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. He performed this job on nights and weekends, because he still had his main job in higher ed. First at a college in Chicago, then at a university in Grand Rapids, and finally as a vice president of Lake Michigan College, where he ran advising and residential life. On top of both of those roles, Nygil and Kieychia had a biological son; they adopted the son of one of Kieychia’s relatives, who had addiction problems; then they took in two more children from Nygil’s side of the family, whose parents also battled addiction.
The fatherless boy who grew up in a multifamily home now was the father of his own multifamily home.
The boy who was told to always finish whatever he started now had three different jobs—vice president, pastor, and father.
“I think they’re all care jobs,” he said. “When I first heard God calling me, my pastor preached a sermon out of Jeremiah. The scripture said we should all be clay in the hands of the potter, but the pastor said we should all be potters. That message broke me. Even with all our shortcomings, we are called to roll up our sleeves and go to work helping to mold people.”
We are all called to care.
In recent years, we’ve become so enamored of the conversation around work-life balance that we’ve forgotten that life itself is fundamentally unbalancing. The idea that work and life are in tension is actually a positive outcome of having more women working—and more women studying work. For decades, researchers found that men tended to keep their nonwork lives separate from their work, while women rarely did.
But those norms have been changing. The number of women who are primary breadwinners today is close to 50 percent, while the number of men who are more involved in parenting is even higher. One outcome of this change is that the language of work has migrated into the family. Most parents view large parts of child-rearing as a job. Economists can grouse at this usage, but pollsters have consistently found that parents view many aspects of parenting—from preparing meals to planning playdates to prepping bath time—as chores to be managed and jobs to be divvied up.
And it’s not just child-rearing that’s become infused with the language of work. Thirty million Americans provide unpaid labor to an adult over fifty, from aging parents to infirm spouses to grown children. Family Caregiver Alliance, which tracks this issue, says Asian Americans perform these jobs more than whites, Blacks more than Asian Americans, and Hispanics more than Blacks.
This gamut of personal obligations helps explain why two thirds of my cohort said they had a care job. Just under half of all care jobs involve family members, from children to parents to grandchildren. Susan Venturelli, for example, in addition to her cop duties and brownie selling, spends one day a week as the primary caretaker of her grandson.
But more than half involve non–family members. Issa Spatrisano, the Alaska refugee director, spends ten evening hours a week editing the papers of her former clients. Marcus Bridgewater, a TikTok plantfluencer who makes videos relating botany to a meaningful life, was the part-time caretaker for his elderly neighbor. Kirby Metoxen, a full-time council member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, had a side job as the vice president of a birdseed company, a hope job breeding show horses, and a care job as a sobriety coach, which, as a former alcoholic, was the job that meant the most to him.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is a Stanford PhD, the author of fifty peer-reviewed articles on public schools, and the dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Education. After a colleague refused to take his call, saying he didn’t have time for someone so junior, Julian vowed to always make time. He created a widget on his calendar for anyone to schedule a fifteen-minute call. “I just got a tweet the other day from a parent, ‘My son just told me he spoke with you about his high school paper. I can’t believe you did that!’ ”
Care jobs rarely make us money; they usually make our other jobs harder. But we spend so much time doing them because the meaning they provide to our overall identity is disproportionate to many of the other jobs we have.
Ghost Job
The last of the five jobs is the most invisible. It’s the one we rarely share with others. Yet it’s the one we most need to get better at if we expect to find happiness at work.
It’s a ghost job—something so powerful, scary, and haunting that addressing it feels like a job.
It was one such ghost that led Chely Wright, at what was otherwise the pinnacle of her work life, to stand in the foyer of her East Nashville home with a 9-millimeter revolver in her mouth.
Chely grew up in Wellsville, Kansas, “a town where no one had much, and we were on the poorer end of that,” she says. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Chely knew as a little girl that she wanted to sing on the Grand Ole Opry.
“When I was four, I disappeared one day. My family dispatched a search party and discovered me in a nursing home, surrounded by people in wheelchairs, singing ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ ”
When she was eleven, Chely started playing piano in honky-tonks and trumpet in graveyards. “I played taps in over a hundred military funerals.” When she was sixteen, she took a summer job performing in Branson, Missouri. When she was eighteen, she moved to Nashville. Her classmates gave her a necklace and said, “Wear this on the Opry one day.” Within a year, she did.
But Nashville was chock-full of hopefuls, and Chely struggled. She worked in a shoe store; she sang backup for Dolly Parton’s longtime partner, Porter Wagoner; she managed to land a record deal. But her first six singles and two albums flopped. So Chely approached the legendary hitmaker and Elvis’s onetime keyboard player, Tony Brown, to produce her next record. Their first single, “Shut Up and Drive,” cracked the top fifteen; their first album hit number one.
“I was making more money than anyone in my family ever imagined.”
But all this time, Chely was harboring a secret.
One night, she went drinking with the rising country star John Rich. Out of the blue, he asked, “You’re not gay, are you?” “I took a deep breath and said, ‘No, John, I’m not.’ He said, ‘Good, because that ain’t right. Country music ain’t gonna stand for that.’ ”
Chely was lying.
“I was aware from early on that I was different,” she said. But in the deeply churched culture of Kansas and Nashville, she tried to block out the truth. “Every day of my life, I’d pray, Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I also saved every dollar because I knew I could lose it all in a second.”
Now that second appeared to be here.
The next morning Chely broke up with her girlfriend of twelve years. Weeks later, she went into her bedroom and grabbed the revolver her parents had given her for safety. “I took it downstairs, where I had a beautiful, beveled mirror on this hundred-year-old mantel. The gun was heavier and colder than I thought it would be. I was surprised I wasn’t crying. I had imagined this moment so many times.”
But she stopped herself.
“I knew my sister would call me. She would call my best friend. And they would find me, a failure.”
Chely knew she wasn’t a failure, though.
She took a nap, woke up, and started praying. For the first time, she heard a response. “I didn’t see a dude in a white robe or Birkenstocks. I didn’t hear a booming voice. But I felt warm, and I felt hopeful. I decided that if I was going to survive, I had to share my story.”
Three years later, Chely published a memoir and released a new album. “I had a book, a record, and a person all come out on the same day.”
She lost half her audience, but she also gained a side job as an advocate for inclusive workplaces. She married a marketing executive she met soon after coming out. She moved to New York and had twin boys.
“What I learned from hanging out in nursing homes all those years ago is that the only way to survive is to have a map. It’s how you get from five to ninety-nine. And the most important part of that map is not the thing you’re worried about—in my case, the declaration that I’m gay—it’s the overall picture on that map. It’s the declaration that I’m a person of faith, that I grew up on a farm, that I played for troops in the Middle East, and, oh, by the way, that I love women. The only way to be happy is to create your own map, hand it to others, and say, ‘Please, read this. Then you’ll know my story.’ ”
In my earliest conversations, I didn’t ask people about ghost jobs. I’d never heard of or imagined such a concept. But I kept hearing stories that suggested that everyone was haunted by some specter that made even their dream jobs otherwise nightmarish. They were plagued by impostor syndrome, exhausted by bigotry, worried about letting down their parents, anxious about relapsing into drinking.
The poet Cathy Park Hong brilliantly named such “negative, untelegenic” thoughts as minor feelings. Minor feelings are rarely featured in heroic stories, she said, because they “do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination.” They occur “when American optimism is essentially forced upon you.”
In Hong’s case, her minor feelings were related to being Korean American. “For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence. I just don’t look the part.” But she speaks for everyone when she says that patiently educating clueless people is draining. “It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.”
Minor feelings are endemic. They are relentless. But are they a job?
I decided to ask.
Ninety-three percent of all my subjects said that yes, their innermost battles felt like a job. That percentage was the highest of all the five jobs I probed. And when I asked if people could quantify how many hours they spent on these jobs, 60 percent said these feelings were pervasive; their ghosts were always present. The rest said an average of twelve hours a week. That’s a quarter of a typical workweek when instead of being productive, we actually feel anti-productive.
Ghost jobs are the invisible epidemic of work.
The three most common ghost jobs involve discrimination, self-care, and money. On discrimination, Alton White was wrongfully arrested in his own home in Manhattan while starring in Ragtime on Broadway. “The cops burst in, pushed me against the wall, and handcuffed me. They said, ‘We got a call about some Hispanics selling drugs!’ I said, ‘I’m not even Hispanic. I’m Black!’ ” The incident made the nightly news. “Are you fucking kidding me? I thought. Now I’m that guy. At least I had the profile to fight back.” Daphne Jones, who was one of the highest-ranking minority women at IBM, dealt with whispers behind her back and sneers to her face. “Being a woman in business is hard by itself; being a Black woman in STEM is impossible.”
