Turns out, you really don’t wish you’d spent more time at the office on your deathbed

However high your career highs, they are unlikely to amount to much when your end is approaching

Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash

Like most women of her generation (she was born in England in the middle of WWII) work was never destined to be central to my mother’s life. After no more than a decade of formal schooling, her parents arranged for her to go to secretarial college where she learnt shorthand and typing.

Somewhat unusually for a woman of her generation, in her early twenties my mother decided to migrate – at least temporarily – to Australia with a friend. Not so long after they got on the ship to sail to the Antipodes, my mother’s friend found out she was pregnant. Shortly after disembarking, the friend returned to the UK to shotgun-marry the father of her child (it was the early 1960s), leaving my mother alone in a strange land.

Her life’s trajectory hewed back onto a more conventional route shortly thereafter. At some point, she met my father, got married, then exited the workforce for over two decades to raise two children.

I suspect more out of boredom than anything else (we certainly didn’t require the extra income), my mother went back to doing secretarial work, mainly on a temp basis, for around a decade once my younger brother and I were in high school.

Unlike her husband and sons, my mother is a chatty extrovert and she seemed to form fast friendships with many of her coworkers. Being even more solipsistic back then than I am now, I never paid much attention to what was going on in her life. But I do seem to remember her getting lots of Christmas cards from current and erstwhile coworkers and even having a quasi-mother-daughter relationship with one younger colleague.

I’m not sure how seriously my mother took any of her work friendships. To the best of my hazy recollections, she didn’t emotionally invest in them too heavily. She kept her personal and professional identities separate and didn’t expect much from her labours other than a pay cheque. If she happened to get on with some of her fellow employees, that was great. But work was just work. Unlike many women who’ve entered the workforce in recent decades, she didn’t love her job and then expect it to love her back.

Glowing performance reviews won’t be much comfort in the end
In early 2021, a New York Times article titled ‘After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again: I learned the hard way that no publicly traded company is a family’ went viral. The tl;dr version is that a nerdy high-achiever from a hardscrabble background thought she had it made once she landed her dream job at Google.

Here are the money quotes:

I bought into the Google dream completely… I longed for the prestige of a blue-chip job, the security it would bring and a collegial environment where I would work alongside people as driven as I was.

What I found was a surrogate family. During the week, I ate all my meals at the office. I went to the Google doctor and the Google gym. My colleagues and I piled into Airbnbs on business trips, played volleyball in Maui after a big product launch and even spent weekends together…

My manager felt like the father I wished I’d had. He believed in my potential and cared about my feelings. All I wanted was to keep getting promoted so that as his star rose, we could keep working together.

Spoiler alert: a colleague (not the father-figure manager) starts acting creepy, the Google true believer raises it with HR and things don’t get satisfactorily resolved. Sadder and wiser, the employee moves to another tech company, noting:

After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.

So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job.

Work won’t love you back
Back when I first launched my business and was attempting to familiarise myself with the rudiments of entrepreneurship, I read several books by Dan Kennedy. Like the rather better-known Nassim Taleb, Kennedy delights in his own arrogance, which can make for trying prose. But as is the case with Taleb, this bulletproof self-importance frees Kennedy to call out the harsh truths that linger unacknowledged on the edge of everyone’s consciousness.

I can’t remember the exact wording of the quote, but I recall Kennedy observing that for all the sentimental guff sometimes written about workplace relationships, even in the case of a small, family-owned business an employer would be unlikely to turn up to comfort a long-time employee on their deathbed. Or vice versa.

Kennedy didn’t mention co-workers, but I suspect much the same principle typically applies. Especially in a world where jobs for life are now a rarity. Ask yourself – of all the people you’ve ever worked with, even the ones you’ve spent thousands of hours toiling alongside and maybe even hundreds of hours socialising with, how many of them would come to see you if they heard your end was nigh? Now turn the question around – how many of your former colleagues would you make the effort to reach out to if you heard they weren’t long for this world?

I’m guessing not many and quite possibly none. That’s certainly been the case in relation to my mother. Any work-related friendships she had melted away many years ago.

In a few minutes, I’ll post this piece online and then drive over to the other side of town to help my father transport my mother from the hospital, where she’s been staying since suffering yet another fall, to the aged care home where she will see out the rest of her days.

It’s now impossible to know what she spends her days thinking about, but I suspect it’s not promotions, pay rises, employee awards, compliments received from bosses or even happy times shared with colleagues.

As the end nears, the circle of those supporting her has shrunk to a handful of close family members and a kindly neighbour. Fortunately, that’s more than enough to ensure she will be well-cared for during the final stage of her life’s journey. Unlike an unfortunate number of career-obsessed, putatively successful male and female workaholics, she won’t find herself left to fend for herself when she is at her most vulnerable.    

To paraphrase the ex-Googler; no work family can ever be a real family. You’re setting yourself up for bitter disappointment, and potentially much worse, if you allow yourself to buy into that fantasy.