When your day job becomes your identity – Loneliness in society

Live to work, or work to live? Continuing on the theme of Loneliness in 2026

In my further reading on Loneliness in Society and the multiple articles now coming out regularly on our individual struggles to find community and belonging (I found another one in The Guardian here for 2025, along with Malala’s take for Prospect here), I was recommended this piece by Erica Wolfe who went to university in the UK and is now a therapist based in the USA.

“I see more and more people outsourcing their identity, purpose, community, and self-worth to their jobs.”

Interestingly after graduating I assumed that getting into the civil service would enable me to shape my entire life around living and working in London. Much of that was a reflection of:

The great scattering after my A-levels when we all went in our separate directions pre-internet
Not being able to settle at university in higher education circles in Brighton, and ‘not finding my tribe’ – the sort that stereotypically would occupy a couple of the tables at your middle-class wedding
Outgrowing Cambridge by my mid-20s and wanting to move to a larger city and ‘make it’. Or rather, the opportunities that the cohort of us 20-something graduates over-qualified for the admin officer roles many of us had, were simply not made available to a critical mass of us. (And sadly for those that were, they were to find themselves facing the grim prospect of compulsory redundancy a few years later under Eric Pickles’ axe).

“…the places where people once found shared identity (clubs, faith organisations, third spaces, community groups) have quietly disappeared.”

Which sort of matches what Ms Wolfe writes in the above-quotation in her article. In a nutshell the clubs, community groups and even ‘third spaces’ had either diminished in the face of high population turnover in a university city with high housing costs, and then the work-hard-play-hard lifestyle of being on the Civil Service Fast Stream took over.

“So work becomes:
– your social life
– your structure
– your validation
– your meaning
– your entire sense of self“

In a strange way I assumed this was the thing that I ‘wanted’. Or thought what was expected of me. At the same time, I had no idea of what any alternatives might be like. Moving out of London would have been a backward step in my view – not that I could think of where else I would go to. On the face of it I quite liked being in central government despite the stresses of the job. Amongst other things it provided a validation which, to someone who has an extremely insecure disposition, is like gold dust. At the time my GP diagnosed it as General Anxiety Disorder and put me on medication which 20 years later I’m still on, but today given the advances in neuroscience we might associate with autism and ADHD – the latter term more of us are having issues with as I discuss in this post . (I don’t experience it as a ‘deficit of attention’, rather an over-abundance of inputs where my senses are paying attention to ***everything*** they can sense before processing it. Hence our brains never switching off! Hence the exhaustion, fatigue, and breakdown).

The question Ms Wolfe appears to pose is how employers should deal with such forms of burnout – where there is no escape or relief from work pressures.

“What’s sort of ironic to me is that workplaces are now trying to fix the very problem they helped create: burnout trainings, wellbeing weeks, therapy stipends.”

In one sense it’s irrelevant for me – I don’t have an employer and my ill-health is as such that I probably won’t ever have one in future. Not full-time 9-5 as my generation was brought up to believe in 1990s UK.

That aside, firms trying to respond directly to support employees reflects both the evolving case law and the duty of care that firms have, as well as declining publicly-funded services. This also makes me wonder about the correlation between workers’ pay rates and the additional/employer-funded health services provided to employees. Given the waiting lists with mental health services, is access to healthcare in a reasonable time another variable reflected in Cambridge’s extreme inequalities in our city?

Broadening the issue to big picture issues

The initial comments to Ms Wolfe’s article highlight the growth of ‘second jobs’ and ‘side hustles’ to make more money – presumably in order to pay the bills and rising rents/mortgages in the face of the global housing crisis.

The macro-economic and geo-political structures behind the era of multi-crises

**If your firms are multinational, your regulators need to be as well. The challenge is making those regulators democratically accountable to the people**

I sort of coined that phrase in my final year of university in 2002 as I grew tired of my economics degree dealing too much with theories that struggled to reconcile themselves with growing inequalities, environmental degradation, and the rise of authoritarian regimes and the undermining of democracy. The European Parliament has become the closest, imperfect institution able to undertake some sort of regulation of multinationals. That said, it feels like the rise of the big tech chaps have accumulated the sorts of financial wealth previously associated with big 20thC oil dictatorships or even 19th Century European grand dukes with vast estates. And with the political leaders of the most populous and/or largest of countries that are not fully functioning democracies (is any country one of these in a globalised world?) it can sometimes feel that the super-wealthy are able to keep hold of their riches so long as they ‘stay onside’.

The extraction economy

You only have to look at the decline of the high street over the past 30 years to notice the ongoing malaise. Successive governments were warned about the impact of the uneven playing field between ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers vs online retailers. Furthermore, the failures of regulators and governments to ensure that the big online warehouse giants abided by the law on pay and conditions – and enable big firms to get around hard-won workers’ protections with ‘zero hours’ contracts or endless series’ of fixed term contracts meant that, along with rising property prices it became all but impossible for ordinary people to save for deposits on homes, let alone demonstrate to lenders the security of employment. Combined that with the decline of council and social housing, the collapse of public transport provision outside London, and you almost have a perfect storm.

The erosion of social spaces – will the Government’s new policies and legislation change anything?

That remains to be seen. In places like Cambridge, the land price bubble associated with the sci-tech and housing bubbles mean that within the existing city there is perilously little space for new third spaces. With salaries/wages chronically out of sync with rents and house prices, who has the disposable income to pay for leisure activities whose prices keep on increasing? Combine that with reductions in state and council subsidies and you can see why Cambridge’s largest entertainment venue/hall, the Cambridge Corn Exchange now regularly charges over £30 per ticket – with some hovering around the £50 mark.

Secular alternatives to weekly religious services

It’s a delicate balancing act for ministers in any political party because of the passions that are stirred up whenever faith and politics clash. Even more so in these present times. I still recall a newspaper column from my first year at university saying that the British Humanists were experiencing their own problems just as the churches were. (Turns out the article is from Feb 2000 and is here!)

“They don’t call themselves humanists and they don’t feel any need to join a humanist association. Humanism is essentially an intellectual commitment which can be made in private, without joining anything. That’s our problem, really.”

Marilyn Mason then of the British Humanist Association to The Guardian 02 Feb 2000

While Conway Hall in London has been a longstanding meeting point, and while the Sunday Assembly had a big launch in the early 2010s, you’d be hard-pressed to find any thriving equivalent of non-religious gatherings under the same identity/brand across towns and cities today. Anecdotally politicians have mentioned the decline of church attendances and the decline of trade unions (linked to the decline of mass-labour employers) as being root causes, but few of them ventured further into the politics, economics, and culture changes associated with them.

Of the Sunday Assembly, it was – and still is a good idea. I don’t know enough about why it was unable to sustain the large number of places that launched their own chapters under the same brand. Back in 2013 I went along to their launch in Cambridge and wrote about it here. Of the many barriers that the Cambridge group faced, the biggest ones included:

Venue hire costs
Publicity costs
The huge financial risks associated with such ventures in a city with a very high cost of living.

That’s no different to previous generations of religious movements in Cambridge – the rise and fall of a number of non-conformist movements and chapels in 20th Century Cambridge. Are we now in a place where the desire for a maximum return on [land/property] investments – a fiduciary duty for private firms, a factor in the limited ability of not-for-profit groups to acquire and provide those essential third spaces

The challenge remains for a rapidly-growing Cambridge: Who will own the third spaces – land and buildings that we know are so important to the forming and sustaining of new communities?

This is why when it comes to the ‘bigger picture’, we’ve really got to look at the governance of the city. For those of you who want to start thinking about this now, see the Local Government Information Unit’s report here.