Arbejdsglaede
Arbejdsglaede is Danish word for the feeling of taking satisfaction in work.
The pleasure that people find in work doesn’t follow any kind of universal formula. There’s no recipe for arbejdsglaede that’s going to work for everyone, because different people have different kinds of work that requires different skills and different forms of dedication.
This podcast episode includes perspectives on the joy of work from Brandy Agerbeck, John Pabon, Eleni Poulous, and Ranelle Golden.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that celebrates the diversity of emotional experience. This week’s episode pushes its nose into a controversial corner of the representation of emotion with arbejdsglaede. Arbejdsglaede is a word that the people of Denmark came up with to describe the feeling of taking joy from one’s work.
We first met author John Pabon, who works in environmental sustainability, a couple of weeks ago, in the episode about climate grief. John introduces us to arbejdsglaede in the form of his passion for this work.
John Pabon:
That sounds very Nordic, arbejdsglaede, the joy that comes from work. We alluded to this in the sense that a lot of my work is wrapped up in my person, and how that's in a lot of ways a no-no in the professional world, but for a sustainability folks, we can't get away from it. Once somebody finds out the work that I do, there's always going to be a conversation one way or the other where they're going to share their opinion with me and ask for mine or advice or something that they could be doing. So, I can't get away from it. It doesn't feel like an onus or a cross to bear. It feels like something I'm very happy to be contributing. If I again, that sense of responsibility, if I have this knowledge, it's not something I can date, keep and just keep to myself. I need to be sharing this stuff with the world and I am very happy to do so. I just wish more people would listen.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s become popular to talk about the importance of establishing a work/life balance. John, however, feels that his identity and his work are inextricably wrapped up together. Given what John’s working on, this melding of professional responsibilities and personal passions is understandable. We are living in a time when the severity of the climate crisis has finally become undeniable to all but the most unreasonable ideologues. Massive disruptions, causing immense economic damage and widespread death around the globe, are underway. So, John can’t just think about his work during working hours, and he’s glad to see people taking interest in his sustainability projects.
The truth is, though, that John isn’t just passionate about work on the climate crisis. He’s also proud of his work on the issue of sexual exploitation during wartime. The pleasure he feels from this work doesn’t just come from pride in specific, publicly-recognized accomplishments, either. Even though he doesn’t track the impact of his work on this subject, he retains a feeling of pleasure in the more general sense of having done work that is worthwhile.
John Pabon:
I tend to forget the accomplishments that I've actually done. That's where that joy comes from, is seeing things come to fruition or seeing taking a step back and really giving credit where it's due. One of the biggest projects that. As I talk about it and as I think about it, I know it's a big project, but in the grand scheme of the work that I've done, it sort of just gets put in the pile of things that I've accomplished. And that was a piece of work I did at the at the United Nations around helping women and girls who have been sexually exploited during wartime. So, it was a piece of research and a resolution, the world's first resolution, to help really overcome what is quite a big scourge in war.
My master's thesis was devoted to this topic as well. So, there was that bit in it, and it is such an impactful thing, but if I don't stop for a second, remember how impactful it is, I don't know what's happened with it. I haven't kept track, but I'm sure it has had an impact. I forget that that's actually happened, and that for me is something that really does, when I sit back and think about it, give me a lot of joy to know that that that is in one small way, shape or form a way have contributed to the betterment of the world.
I keep a journal of all the things that you do. This is something that I've only recently picked up. It's probably been about six or six or so months of taking time out. It does have to be every day. It doesn't have to be, you know, something awful that you need to put on your to do list. But just write a quick sentence or two down of something you've accomplished. It doesn't need to be, you know, groundbreaking for everybody. It could be something that's just groundbreaking in your own personal world. What have you done today that really is has either surprised you or made you happy or has been something that's been on your plate for a long time that you've wanted to get off?
You write it down and just you don't need to go back and reread all of this every six months. I don't, but it's nice to just take that moment for yourself and remember that, that even with everything going on in the world and I'm not just talking about sustainability, I'm talking about everything that we're faced with, especially over the last three years, remembering that it's not all so bad and that we are all still making progress in our day to day, no matter what it is is, I think, so important for our mental health and just to sort of help us to keep moving forward.
Jonathan Cook:
John takes care to describe himself as a pragmatist, meaning that he tries to focus on professional projects that are likely to make measurable improvements rather than efforts that make a performative impression. However, it’s clear that John’s pleasure in his work is also derived from a strong idealism. He's not working just to make a living. He's chosen work that he believes will contribute to the betterment of the world.
John Pabon:
I wouldn't find joy in my work if I perhaps accomplished something accidentally. I wouldn't think that's necessarily. It wouldn't be just me that accomplished that. So having that pragmatism really ensures that A, I've made that mark, which is secondary, I suppose, for me. But I think with pragmatism that also gives me the sense that whatever's been accomplished will continue to either improve or stay in place versus an accident where maybe that's just a one off that yeah, maybe it's great today, but things could just go back to where they were tomorrow, which is not what we want to see.
Jonathan Cook:
There are many different ways for people to bring a sense of idealism to their work, of course. Screenwriter Ranelle Golden finds a sense of professional satisfaction in adapting the stories of people she admires into films that can be seen by people around the world.
Ranelle Golden:
I've taken on many, many clients and many telling their true stories, which, you know, is something I never dreamed I'd do. It has its own impact on me because I'm very emotional and telling their stories, you know, at times it takes a lot out of you. And my process for writing is I literally become all of those characters in the story, whether it's my story or someone else's. So I become very bizarre during the writing process. I literally have to put my head down and get it out of me, if that makes sense. I, like, have to, you know, I just keep going until it's released.
Jonathan Cook:
Ranelle describes a different dimension of the emotion of arbejdsglaede. Although this emotion is often translated as the feeling of joy found through work, there’s an element of pain in the professional satisfaction Ranelle achieves. To start with, she feels compelled to work on communicating her clients’ stories, with a kind of burden that she cannot be released from until a project is complete. This burden arises from her empathy for the people she represents in her screenplays. This emotional identification powers her work, but also leads her to feel immersed in their struggles. So, often, what she’s feeling in her version of arbejdsglaede isn’t really joy much of the time, but the feeling of doing work that must be done.
Ranelle Golden:
It's kind of hard, but when I'm writing, I become all of the characters, at least the main players. So I hear their voices. I feel what they're going to say, what they're going to do. I very much become who they are. So, if they're angry, I'm angry. If they're sad, I'm sad. That's one of the reasons I almost have a furious pace when I'm writing, because I have to get it out. Because if I don't, I you know, I get a little bit lost when I'm in these big feature screenplays. In ninety pages, one hundred twenty pages, I will, I have a hard time stopping because I'm so absorbed that I take on their personalities almost like, you know, I'm upset, like my husband just tried to shoot me. I have that, I go around with that pain in me and it's not even truly my pain, but I do carry it with me. But that's, you know, that's kind of the price to pay or something, for lack of another way to put it. It's the cost of writing for me. It's not really a cost. I can't think of the right word, but being absorbed means I am connected to my work and I am those characters and I am respecting what they're going through.
Jonathan Cook:
The pleasure that people find in work doesn’t follow any kind of universal formula. There’s no recipe for arbejdsglaede that’s going to work for everyone, because different people have different kinds of work that requires different skills and different forms of dedication. John’s pleasure in work comes when a global sense of urgency is applied in a pragmatic form. Ranelle’s arbejdsglaege, on the other hand, is manifested at a more personal scale, because she’s working to communicate the struggles of individual people.
Eleni Poulous has a history of working in activism, but when she described the joy she found in the work dedicated to her PhD in politics, she spoke of a pleasure in being able to get away from the expectations of other people. She was relieved to have the time to do work that was important to her alone, in the way that she felt it ought to be done.
Eleni Poulous:
Yes, the joy that comes from work. I felt that when I was doing my PhD. I think for a whole lot of reason. It was just me, no one else, but I had my supervisor, that associate supervisor, but really no one and no one else. No one else gave a shit if I finished it or not really. It was the antithesis of the work that I had done where everyone had a stake in it and the work that I've been doing for 15 years.
I wanted to do something that would be helpful and contribute to human knowledge and all of that kind of stuff, but it was really, you know, I got up every morning and did my work, and that was just it was just me. I loved it and it was the first time, when I got to the end. I realized that I had done my best, and for the first time in my life, it wasn't just the best that I could do under the circumstances.
I had to do my best, because I had the time to do it. I was interested. I felt satisfied. I felt really I thought, that's what my best without constraint looks like, and I think that's a very rare thing to experience in work, actually.
Jonathan Cook:
Eleni gets to an issue that’s a struggle for many people as she talks about the pleasure of doing work on her own terms. For many people, that kind of intrinsic satisfaction doesn’t feel possible. Many people don’t have the privilege of following their personal passions in their work. They have bills to pay, and the work that’s available to them is controlled by bosses, in accord with a purpose that often doesn’t align with the values of workers.
Sometimes, people feel that the expectation that workers should feel arbejdsglaede is just another level of oppression. It doesn’t seem authentic to feel joy in work when most of the benefits created through work are realized by executives and investors. Joy in work is also difficult to feel when managers dictate not only the tasks that are to be accomplished, but also direct the manner in which they must be accomplished.
Given how rare it is for workers to be in control of their own work, arbejdsglaede can often come as a result of the ability to disrupt the conventional expectations of what work has to be. Artist and graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck learned this kind of disruptive power as a child, when she followed her own path to complete her academic assignments at school, rather than complying with the literal directions of her teachers.
Brandy Agerbeck:
Can you feel joy in your work? Fuck yes. Fuck yes. I do understand that I am in a very sadly rare position that I get to work to my strengths every day. The kind of work I do is absolutely using the skills I love to do. I mean, you know, if I had to give the quickest answer for what I do for a living, I get to think and draw for a living, and I could not be more thrilled. I also recognize that's not a position a lot of people are in. How I got into that position was being, you know, I say it's weird work, but I'm a weirdo. I'm a glorious weirdo, you know. I was just that kid who drew all the time. I turned class assignments into craft projects.
Happily, I had teachers who understood that, well, Brandy isn't following the directions, but one, we know she's challenging herself, and two, she's not disrupting us. So, you know, getting to be that kind of weirdo in class, then toddling off to a college full of weirdos that had like a very independent path that continued that, and then I fell into this work, the graphic facilitation work specifically, shortly after college. It was this brilliant, crazy, truly fell into it and used those listening, the listening skills, the thinking skills and the drawing skills. Happily, I get to work to my strengths, and that's why I love teaching critical thinking as I think it is.
I think there are tools that are a way a lot of people are wired or want to work, but we've never been encouraged. You know, unfortunately, so many people have that story of exactly when they stop drawing. We have a culture, we have a education system and work cultures that are so text focused and, you know, presentations, writing. I like to blame Gutenberg for the printing press. It's a really good way to distribute information. I do not think linear text is a great way to process information or make new meaning.
Jonathan Cook:
Now, as an adult, because she can follow her own process to accomplish her work, Brandy is able to integrate her individual passion and perception to get the job done in a way that honors both her subject matter and her vision of the world. It isn’t that her work is without struggle, but rather that Brandy has learned how to pay attention to the shape of the struggle of her work in order identify the larger meaning of the projects she has been hired to represent.
Brandy Agerbeck:
We’re noticing, oh, all of these different ideas kind of grouped together. But this idea over here is an outlier or noticing that I drew this really big because this is truly what this big sticky problem I'm working on is all about. So, all of those choices we make because we have so many more choices in drawing versus writing or making meaning, we're noticing where the patterns are or getting. And also, I just got it as I was describing this, I also love it as we're doing this kind of work, especially I'm a huge fan of just good old analog paper and pen. I think it's great at helping us just work as whole human beings. So, part of it is noticing like, is there a point where you're feeling tension and you might have that pain come back as you're working out something.
Jonathan Cook:
Brandy hints at the interesting idea that we can learn from the resistance that we often feel to the work that is required of us. When work is unpleasant, that unpleasantness can teach us in contrast our work and our own values, revealing to us a vision of what our offering to the world could be, if only we could obtain the autonomy required to pursue that vision.
People who truly find work that contributes to their sense of meaning in life are lucky. More often than not, people hear messages from their managers about their companies’ organizational missions, even as the actual tasks in their work are depersonalizing, or even degrading. Many people have lost trust in their employers’ idealistic posturing, having seen how far the reality of their work deviates from its supposed purpose. In response to the discrepancy of the working world and employers’ promises of a higher purpose, many workers become emotionally distant from their work, preferring to accept their roles as cogs in a giant corporate machine, unwilling to make themselves vulnerable to exploitation by bosses who are motivated primarily by economic profit.
In the cynical business world, to find a way of working that unites individual values with organizational priorities is a remarkable achievement. How can we be certain, however, that this achievement is more than just an illusion? The emotional dimensions of achievement of our goals will be explored in next week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity, which will consider the emotion of having arrived, and what comes afterwards.
Until then, thanks for listening.