Losing meaning

One of the nice things of working in science is that we do not work under a lot of time pressure. Sure enough, we do have crunch times when something has to be delivered and the circumstances just do not align in time, but on most occasions we can just ask for an extension because, in the end, it is all about getting the answers right not getting them fast.

One of the bad things of working in science is that we do not work under a lot of time pressure. This means that it is relatively easy (very easy in fact) to slack on your work and not have to deal with any kind of consequences. The situation is so much so that it is not infrequent at all to move over a feature (a program functionality, a set of data, you name it) to the next delivery if you did not manage to finish or even to work on it at all.

Photo: Washington State Department of Transportation

Under normal working conditions, the random encounters with your team mates naturally set a limit to your ability to postpone work. There are just so many times that you can run into someone in the cafeteria before they start to question you very sternly why are they still waiting for "that piece of work" that you promised one month ago. Besides, the reward when you manage to deliver with some delay but still within the period of grace the appreciation on the other side is even stronger than if you had delivered on time. Somehow all the pent up impatience finally finds a release and, on top of the gratefulness for the support you are providing, you also get certain amount of recognition for "not being too late". Of course, the repeated comments about how difficult the task was or how you did not have time to work due to a busy schedule are an important factor in setting up this kind of reward scheme. However, the pandemic has completely disrupted this dynamic.

There are two clearly distinct responses to the home office mandate: on the one extreme are the micro-managers, who insist on having three meetings per week (or more) to carefully apportion and distribute the work within the team, setting clear deadlines and actually expecting them to be respected; on the other end of the spectrum, organic teams evolve into an even more organic equilibrium where the contact between team members becomes essentially one-to-one all the time and the interactions limit themselves to petitions and provisions of support, but there is not much exchange in terms of coordination. My team belongs to the second category, as I mentioned before, but that only makes even easier to slack on a piece of work that you do not feel like doing. Knowing that you will not run into anyone on the hallway and will be forced to avert your eyes or conjure an excuse on the fly is a potent disincentive to stick to the promised schedule. Furthermore, when you finally manage to complete the task it will be received with a very dry "Thank you, I will give it a try" in a chat window, nothing comparable to the sparkly eyes that you would get in person.

It has been proven for decades now that pay is far from the only factor influencing the amount and the quality of our work. We would all try to avoid letting it drop to the level where we might risk being fired, but all the rest of the working environment, form the dynamics within the team to the attitude of the clients and even the traffic you find every morning on the way to work also play a pivotal role in your performance. As Dan Ariely, one of my favorite psychologists, pointed out some years ago, doing a job that has no purpose is extremely disheartening, to the point that you will be ready even to give up good money to spare yourself from the pointless effort. American anthropologist David Graeber reports similar conclusion in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory: that many jobs are there essentially to test our strength of character, our ability to endure in a meaningless effort, only to gauge how deserving we are of societal appreciation.

The last few weeks I have been quite disconnected from my colleagues at work and I have had to remind myself that my contribution is still crucial to the success of the project, that every day that I slack will mean an ever-so-slight reduction in the amount of science that the spacecraft can provide over its lifetime, but I have done so with varying degrees of success. When the reward lies so far away it is easy to believe that your efforts will rot before they come to fruition, that the flagstones that you have dutifully stacked will collapse into a dusty pile of rubble, denying you the meaning of your work. Luckily, this just a mirage caused by the distance and all we have to do most of the time is just persist on our efforts and hope for the best. The world is not (anymore) such a place of chaos the it will capsize overnight. Hopefully. Have a nice evening.