But political polarization is by no means the only growing pain exacerbated by anxieties about the future in urban, industrialized economies, where for many the boundaries between our professional and personal lives have all but disappeared.
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But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing nature of employment and work in the industrial era.
In this respect, Jungian analyst James Hillman goes as far as holding psychotherapy responsible for the tawdriness of American politics since the 1950s. In his reckoning, all the smart people are sitting in therapy incapacitated, their therapists having convinved them that the source of their misery is to be found within themselves. The net result is a state of near oblivion as regards the political debacles that have unfolded around them for the last half-a-century.
But it emphasises also the limit of empathy, explaining why both the wounds of our past and their enactments in the present will continue to haunt us. The affective tone that must colour our strivings, therefore, is neither untrammelled optimism nor hopeless despair: it involves, instead, a tempered liminal space in which we, as citizens, commit ourselves to an unfolding process of searching for moments of meeting where recognition of our shared humanity becomes possible.
Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.
But are we missing something here? Is the separation we perceive between work and life helping or hindering us in our quest for the good life? What if the value of work—even work we dislike—lies not just in getting paid, but also in the moment-to-moment sensations of being alive in the workplace, and the feeling of vitality we get from being connected to others? What if even the most ordinary workday presents real opportunities for improving our lives and our sense of being connected to the broader world?