From the archive: ✨ What I keep getting wrong about generosity
Part 1
A note from Melissa
Hey y’all — this week, I’ve been working hard on a post about the importance of pursuing the beautiful but it’s not quite where I want it to be!
It’s a real honor to be invited into your inbox, so I don’t like to send anything out before it’s I think it’s worth your time. That’s why this week I’m pulling a post out of the archive — there are so many new subscribers that have joined since November (we’re up to 355 community members now! WOW!!) so this post will be new for a lot of you. I’ve also added a voice recording to make it fresh for all y’all OG subscribers.
Hope you’re all having a terrific week — the leaves are all unfurling from the trees up here and we just had our first 80º day — summer is well on the way.
xo m
There is a red and white snorkel, a Mario Kart figurine and a drawing of a dragon tucked into your small arms as you walk across the bedroom to wake me up.
“These are for you, Mama.”
You say, their awkward shapes spilling out and flopping like caught fish onto the walnut veneer of the bedside table.
I reach over to move my phone and stack of half-read books out of the way to make enough space for everything. You’re so focused on making sure I have it all, your top lip curled just a little while you carefully adjust the pile of goodies to make sure nothing falls off the edge.
“These are for you! For doing a good job.” You say, as plainly as you might tell me the sky is blue. The toys were yours, and now they are mine.
You’re not waiting for a gracious thank you; there is no chasm of loss that you need me to acknowledge. You’re not waiting to breathe in and puff your chest with praise for your generosity. You are just waiting for me to gather my toys and follow you to your bedroom so we can make the most of the day.
There are many things about being a parent that leave me in awe, but this unpolluted generosity is one that never fails to surprise me. It’s not like my kid is some kind of saint who doesn’t get grabby and possessive — two weeks ago at soccer practice, a little girl, barely two, toddled across the wet grass and plopped herself into his folding chair. Oscar looked up from the field and dropped to his knees — MAMAAAAAA!!! That is MY CHAIR!! he screamed at the open sky. Scorcese couldn’t have asked for a better rendition of betrayal.
And that feels more right, doesn’t it? That’s how we talk about little kids — they’re inherently selfish. Pure Id. They need to be taught (see: forced) to share.
But honestly, who decided that hesitating to relinquish a Hotwheel before you’re done with it is a sign of irreparably flawed character? Especially when the generosity practiced by children contains none of the tight, narrowness of self-sacrifice baked into so much of the generosity of adults.
When Oscar chooses to give something away, he gives it up completely. The goodness of the object is self-evident, and as far as he’s concerned, the goodness of the giving is irrelevant. What matters is the time we spend playing with it together.
Adult generosity is of course, more complicated, and at this time of year, particularly exhausting. Whether it’s the assault of flashing gifs all over the internet encouraging us to SHOP EARLY for whatever Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday-Giving-Tuesday-Green-Wednesday-Hoopty-Doopty sale is around the corner, or the end-of-year pressure to “push through!” and hit those last deadlines at work, or your anxiety about giving your kids Perfect Holiday Memories… ’tis-the-season to be burned the fuck out.
Every corner of life seems to be angling for a foothold to squeeze out just a little more of our effort and attention while we look on from the windows at the vanishing sun — our little animal bodies longing for a quiet, dark place to take a good nap (or at least a bathroom door with a lock on it). Maybe we should call it the season of giving every last scrap of our sanity.
When Oscar was about three, we were invited to a birthday party for his preschool best friend. I’d forgotten to get a gift in advance, so we stopped at the local bookstore on the way over. I walked in and headed straight to the little nook in the back where they keep the children’s books — Oscar had begun happily pulling books off the shelves he could reach and I needed to choose fast. There was a shelf called “Children’s Classics” and sitting face-out on the top was the familiar lime green cover of Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” Done. We paid, got back in the car and I opened the book to flip through for a little nostalgia before we got to the party.
There they were, just as I remembered them — the sweet little boy and the big, bountiful apple tree who love spending time together. I remembered the book had a sad ending, but as I re-read it that day in the car I started to feel that hot, prickly feeling you get under your ears when realize something has gone terribly wrong.
It starts off sweet, filled with branch swinging and apple eating — but as soon as the boy comes of age, he shows up looking for money. Then it seems like maybe he squandered the money? Because he comes back decades later saying he has a family but no house to live in. And then he comes back as an old man with no family and what is clearly depression looking for a boat?! Each time the tree gives up another part of herself (herself! Of course the tree is a woman.) so the boy “will be happy” until all she has left is a stump. This isn’t a classic, it’s a horror story. I closed the book and put it back in the bag.
In my (southern, evangelical) childhood memories, The Giving Tree was this moving story of ultimate, virtuous generosity. The kindness (and goodness) of the tree had no end. The obvious lesson was that being good means to keep giving of yourself, no matter how poorly you’re treated, no matter whether you’ve got enough left to survive. Your worth is defined by what you can give the world, so you’d better not be stingy.
This is adult generosity. Adult, American generosity anyway.
Generosity as a thief. Generosity as performance. Generosity as obligation.
It’s the kind of generosity that is asked for in the office, too. In my research, there have only been two interviews out of the 40 where I didn’t hear about an employer expecting far more than is reasonable, and there have only been two people who didn’t think it was their duty to rise to the challenge.
Lily is a warm-hearted person who does a mean Stevie Knicks at karaoke and is loved by her animals and colleagues alike for the steady, grounded confidence she brings to a room. When we talked, she was zooming from the cozy A-frame living room of the home she bought with her wife in upstate New York.
“I studied environmental policy in college and started out in a fellowship program in city government — the people were amazing, and because it’s the government, it’s more of a 9-5 sort of a thing. They were super open to teaching me — government jobs can be more nurturing in some ways because there’s that work-life balance.”
The money she was making in the fellowship wasn’t great, but she was shocked to see her paycheck go down when she became a full-time employee. Dragging massive student loans behind her and starting to feel like she was treading water instead of acquiring marketable skills, she decided to move into the private sector and look for better pay and a faster way to learn.
“I always figured I’d go back to the government at some point, but I literally couldn’t pay my bills. I needed to find a way to improve my options.”
After surviving layoffs at a 300-person unicorn-gone-bust start-up, she ran across her dream job — an ops gig at an early-stage company with an environmental mission.
“The first red flag was when I found out they hired a guy for the same job and paid him $20k more than me. I was really frustrated, but I liked my boss and I wanted the job to work out so I thought about it for months trying to figure out how to talk to him about it.
Finally, at my performance review, my boss told me he got me the biggest raise he could. I thanked him, but let him know I was aware how much less I was making compared to a guy on the team doing the same job. All he said was ‘I don't think it's great to talk to peers about salaries — someone is always upset.”
On top of the open discrimination, the work environment was complete chaos. There weren’t enough people to do everything the company needed to run so Lily ended up juggling the work for 6 different roles.
“There were NO off hours. I would be out to dinner at 7PM on a Saturday and they were calling my phone. We never shut our farms during COVID because I was good at my job, but it was literally killing me.
The thing is, I really wanted it to be my dream job!! I was fascinated by the technology we were making and the potential impact it could have on the environment. I kept telling myself ‘it’ll get better when x-y-z happens’ but it never did.
One morning I was working in the New Jersey warehouse when I got a Slack message asking if I could move a palette from one side of the warehouse to the other. I went down to find that there was no equipment to move it and the only other person on the floor had called out sick.
They were literally asking me to push a 1500lb palette across a warehouse with my bare hands.
The craziest thing is that I actually tried to do it, and when it wouldn’t budge the first thought I had was ‘why aren’t I strong enough?’ I was pressing my back into the load, tears running down my cheeks and wondering what was wrong with me.”
“I am sorry,” sighed the tree.
“I wish that I could
give you something…
But I have nothing left.
I am just an old stump. I am sorry…”
When I started writing this edition of the newsletter, I spent some time looking up what Shel himself had to say about his most popular book. Turns out it wasn’t much — he mostly refused to be interviewed about it. The only quote I can find makes me think he was quite aware of what his book was actually about:
”It’s a story about two people in a relationship, one of them gives and the other takes. It has a pretty sad ending.”
So, not a parable to teach us that ultimate goodness is the same as ultimate self-sacrifice — more of a cautionary tale about a greedy kid and a codependent tree.
In her 2018 article Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves, librarian and scholar Fobazi Ettarh gives this kind of relationship with work a name: vocational awe.
"When a job is a calling, people are expected to be committed to the work not just for the financial reward, but also for the sake of the work itself. Exploitation becomes almost naturalized because the person doing the work ‘loves’ the work."
The expectation for this kind of generosity self-sacrifice fueled The Great Resignation and the ongoing calls to quiet quit — white-collar workers finally realizing that no matter how much we give, no matter how loyal we are, a company isn’t family or even a friend. We’re better off keeping things cordial, doing what’s required and not getting too emotionally involved. A more than reasonable response to lifetimes of being made to feel like the reason we don’t like our jobs is because we’re all just lazy.
Quiet quitting showed up in my research too — but as much as social media influencers want us to believe it’s the secret to the good life, it doesn’t sound much like freedom. It has a thin, resigned quality and seems to say “Well, we tried. I guess we just have to accept that the 90,000 hours of our lives we spend at work will kind of suck and the only thing we can do about it is try not to care.” And as a recovering #girlboss, I am in no way advocating for the return of hustle culture, but I have to be honest — this doesn’t sound like a solution either.
I need to do more than languish in a Zoom grid, putting in my time and counting down the hours before it’s time to close my computer to go watch Netflix and then cap off the day with bedtime revenge scrolling.
That cannot be the best of all possible worlds, and when I went back to my research again, I think I found some evidence to prove it.
Enjoy the sunshine and come back for part two!
Loved this Melissa - your writing in particular about the nature and origins of quiet quitting was so sharp and insightful! You really have a way about talking about work!