Why People Have Strong Ties to Their Workplace -Parasocial Strata 1

How is it possible to care so deeply about a job? Even while making minimum wage, or working a job that doesn’t care about them, people from all walks of life still seem to take deep pride in their professional work. Workplaces are an interesting place, especially if they are one of the few sources of comfort for an individual.

It’s like they are building a sort of parasocial relationship with their job. Relying upon it for emotional support, or an unspoken bond, that isn’t ever acknowledged or really talked about outside of work. This happens a lot in blue collar, low-paying jobs left to the lower strata of society.

And the relationships we develop while working can help us in ways that are more important than we might think.

My first true job was at a reputable hospital.

After that job, I’ve worked in workplaces that are considered blue collar (in this case, lower paying jobs).

Humbling myself, I realized these jobs are important not only to a functioning economy but also to a growing society.

These jobs can be low-paying and exhausting, but I try to humble myself by acknowledging these jobs are important to a society’s foundations. The work we do at the lowest level helps an economy grow and keeps society running. When the day goes beyond the normal eight-hour ritual most people endure, and overtime is a regular expectation—especially on holidays—it means that many of us are spending most of our lives serving these blue-collar industries. My co-workers cares about their job like their lives depended on it; because it kind of did. When you suspend most of your life doing a job every day, it kind of becomes your life. I remember one woman I used to work with, and how she would boast about herself and her work habits. How the employer would call her “fast” compared to the rest of the team, and how she was “the best employee!” I remember how much pride she seemed to get from this. It was weird to me. I never considered my work my life. It was work and was it. The separation between work and life was a core concept for me.

My coworkers called me either reckless or uncaring but were surprised at my high work ethic. That's why they found my separation of work and life weird. I was different from my coworkers. They cared and worked hard because the validation of being a top worker gave them a personal sense of pride. But, for me, my work ethic was rooted in my ego—my sense of self. I wanted to do good work, because that’s what I expected of myself, regardless of whether a manager was telling me I did a good job or not. I wanted to be motivated intrinsically; the external forces were irrelevant to me. This wasn’t the only thing that made me feel different from the others though. It was unusual to me how much I would hear my coworker say things like, “I don’t want to be home. I would rather be at work.” I found this baffling at first. Why would you want to go back to work? But, as I grew into a man, I realized that the traditions and expectations of masculinity in men often left us unequipped to handle the emotional weight of being outside of work. We were so driven by society to meet the expectations of menial work, that we began to find comfort in it. And when so many of us have been rooted in stressful, broken homes, going to work becomes escapism. When you’re at work and following the masculine duties expected of the “man of the house,” you get a task, a title, and maybe even Employee of the Month. We become someone useful in the eyes of the system. Workplace is Home Working in the wholesale and retail industry preceeded the falling apart of my life. I would go home after work to the silent walls where I lived, and prepare for the next day of work. This would take up all of the time I had left in the night trying to squeeze in hobbies and chores when there was no willpower left. It was defeating. There was never enough time for myself. My life felt as devoid as my empty house did. But, when I would return to work, laughter would ensue, or we would find solidarity in working tirelessly as a team to make customers happy. We were working toward something more purposeful and these jobs are always filled with so many characters and personalities to study and learn from. Even if the job was frequently frustrating, there was never a dull moment with such a cast of people. When I think about the ways I was different from my coworkers, upbringing was one of the first things that came to mind. In Jamaica we live by a “do as I say,” attitude. We’re expected to listen to our elders and follow orders exactly as given. If you deviate even slightly, you invite scorn and shame. Men grow up attaching their personal value to their work ability. If you can’t perform well, then you’re deemed worthless. Women grow up with their value determined by how they make those around them feel, and by how dedicated they are to others. They are expected to be accommodating, loyal, and to not bring shame to themselves or their families.

My views differed from much of this expected upbringing. Stronger Relationships and Community. When your home life lacks direction, or is ruled by mayhem and stress, the workplace looks like heaven. It makes it much easier to place great value in your coworkers and the distant bonds we share with them. And, as an adult, it becomes increasingly difficult to build or find new relationships outside of the home or the workplace. If you come from a smaller community, you tend feel that everybody knows everybody. It’s a bit hard to find new people, because everyone you’ll get to know is already pretty much there. In urban communities and business sectors, things are segregated in more interesting ways. Due to how things are built, building new relationships becomes a matter of literal and figurative walls. Housing plots and apartment complexes are very self-contained. A lot of people don’t really feel the need to know their neighbor, especially when they work most of the day. Then, when travelling, there are just so many people in the city that, unless you leave the house at the same time as your neighbor every day, you’re going to see new, unknown people almost every day. You can probably count on your fingers the number of people you run into more than twice over the span of a year. In a more tightly contained smaller community, you see the same people almost every day. This makes it easier to build strong relationships in smaller communities. It also helps maintain social norms and enforce customs. These also become important for destressing us from unstable homelives. The more chaotic life is at home, the greater the desire to work becomes. And, in a vicious-cycle kind of way, the less time you spend at home fixing things, the worse those things probably become. Maybe it was designed this way? What I Learned When I’m at work, I find myself striving to make customers happy. But because it helps to dismantle my lone-wolf mentality, a staple from my masculine cultural conditioning, and it opens the door to greater community. It is something new from my usual selfish mannerisms, and it is strangely rewarding. Being part of a group, a new culture and environment, it changed me a little. But this is only in the workplace. The lesson I learn from these relationships will carry with me and change with time, as I explore new communities, cultures, jobs, and people; a speck in the larger pool of my life experiences. Learning how these groups come together will help me take what I’ve lived and learned and put it into my own creative ideas. In particular, these workplaces and group settings are great inspirations for writing more detailed characters.

In my next post, I will be discussing this topic a bit more deeply, and examining how the different people from even the simplest of workplaces can become significant factors and influences in a someone’s life. Have you ever used work as an escape from your personal life?