Samhita Mukhopadhyay is the former executive editor of Teen Vogue and Feministing magazine. For years, she says, she considered her work to be her identity — until she was laid off from her dream job.
Afterwards, Mukhopadhyay felt lost and depressed and realized how much of her self-worth was tied up in her career.
“Work was something that I believed and valued above everything else, and really just fundamentally thought that it came at the cost of having good health, a personal life, and having time for your family,” she said in a recent interview with WNYC’s Alison Stewart.
Since being laid off, she’s written about her experience in a book called “The Myth of Making it: A Workplace Reckoning.”
Mukhopadhyay joined Stewart on a recent episode of “All of It” to discuss getting laid off, dealing with complicated feelings about work, and her piece in New York Magazine's the Cut about getting fired. An edited version of their conversation is below.
Alison Stewart: Your piece starts with a negative performance review. Before this performance review, how would you describe your relationship with work?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Work was something that I believed and valued above everything else, and really just fundamentally thought that it came at the cost of having good health, a personal life, and having time for your family. To me, work was a great sacrifice that you made for the pride of knowing that you're good at your job.
What did being successful look like to you at this point?
For me, it was less about money because I think that's often when people talk about. "I want to be successful" — they're talking about high-paying jobs.
For me, really, what mattered the most was doing work that felt really impactful, that felt like it was aligned with my values and what I believed in, and that I was getting to manage a team and be part of a bigger conversation. That was what excited me at the time.
Up until this point, if someone had asked you, "How much do you think your identity is wrapped up in your job?" what would you have said?
My work was who I was. I had completely bought into the idea that if you love what you do, you don't work a day in your life. I didn't even see a differentiation.
Let's go back to that negative performance review. First of all, how did you think you were doing in your job?
I kind of knew something was off. I was working in an environment that didn't have a lot of transparency, so I didn't have a really clear line into how I was doing. I hadn't gotten a ton of feedback prior to this performance review.
I'm just one of those people that really prides herself in being liked, which is another trap that a lot of women fall into in the workplace. Not only did I feel that I was effective and I was good at what I did but that people liked me. If people like me, why would they ever give you a bad performance review? They like you, right?
You took a few weeks off of work after this negative performance review. What were you thinking about during this time?
It wasn't a great time for me. I had a bit of an identity crisis. I went into a pretty deep depression. I started suffering from very intense anxiety attacks. As I write in the essay [for New York Magazine], I had some pretty negative thoughts about my own future on this planet, I guess we could say.
I think some of that was a result of how hard I had been working, that I was deeply burned out, and that so much of my identity was caught up in this idea of being successful in this job and being valued. So much of my self-perception was in that value that when that was threatened, I didn't really have a foundation to stand on because I don't know that I necessarily believed that I was valuable without the external validation.
Why do you think many people tend to place so much significance on their jobs?
It’s a neat little trick that's been played on us. We have to work to survive. There's very few people that don't have to work. Most of us have to figure out how to survive in some capacity.
I do think that in the last 30 or 40 years, we've really been sold this idea that work is a net good, working hard is valuable. I'm saying this, and I don't necessarily disagree with it either. I do think hard work is valuable and I do think that getting invested in things you care about is part of having a meaningful life. I do think that we've convinced ourselves that work brings us more value and more good than it necessarily always does. I think the tide is changing on this.
How else can you take that call after putting the kids to bed and cleaning up after dinner? How else could you convince yourself to wake up at 6 a.m. to answer those emails before the morning rush, other than to genuinely believe that you're doing something that's good and you're doing something that's right?
Being let go or being fired, did it matter to you?
No. Technically I was laid off. I wasn't even actually fired, but the way that I metabolized it, I was fired. I took it as a rejection of who I was and the value I brought.
Yes. You use the word "failure" a lot in the piece. What was your relationship to that word?
I had a good relationship to that word because I failed a lot in my life. I was a little bit of a late-in-life success story. I really struggled academically, I struggled to find my footing, to find what my career would ultimately be. I didn't have things figured out until I was a little bit older. I had a lot of anxiety around failure because I associated it with an earlier time in my life that was much harder and much more confusing. I overcame that. I'm not the girl that got the D in English class. I had turned my life around.
I think failure is something that I take very personally. That's not necessarily always fair because, if you'll read any business book, any part of a successful person's journey is quite a bit of failure and an ability to be resilient in the face of that failure.
Then I also think there's an additional pressure, my parents are from another country. They immigrated to the United States, and so the stakes felt a little higher in terms of they came here for me to be successful. Then, look at me, I'm not. What does that say about my ability to live in their shadow and their ability to be successful in America?
All right, so you get a swanky new job. You become the executive editor at Teen Vogue. You say that you were never really good about setting boundaries at work. Looking back, what are some boundaries you wish you had set?
You would think that after I hit rock bottom from losing a job, I would walk into a new job with a sense of skepticism. Instead, as I write in the essay, I hit the ground running, like a rebound boyfriend, where I hadn't really healed from the breakup, but I just immersed myself completely into this new universe and environment. It was a very exciting opportunity for me. It was this new moment. It was the ultimate revenge fantasy for anyone that looked over me in the past. If anything, I doubled down.
I think some of the things that I probably would have done differently is not internalize so much the success of a job or an organization based on my contribution to it. That work comes and goes. We can always have profound impacts on the environments that we're in and the ways that we treat people.
Here’s an interesting text we just got: "I just got laid off Tuesday, my six-year anniversary. Reason? Budget cuts. Although I was doing above my job description, telling me it had nothing to do with my performance, I'm rated an exemplary employee, no warning. Yet if I resign, I'm expected to give four weeks' notice. I'm just angry about how it all went since they knew since February and they waited to the last minute. I wasn't valued [or] being given a heads-up. I'm three years away from full retirement age. How am I expected to start over?” Could you give this person some guidance, something from your experience you think might help them?
Yes. First of all, I'm so sorry that that happened. I understand that feeling of absolute shock. No matter how many times someone can tell you that it had nothing to do with you, obviously, it did on some level because I was the chosen one and the other person wasn't. I'm not going to share a bunch of phony sayings that I think a lot of people do, where it's like, "This is this huge opportunity."
The thing that I've learned, and I'm in the middle of my career, not towards the end of it, is that there are so many opportunities. You get to reinvent yourself, find new types of work, find new ways to engage in issues or areas that you've never thought about before, and try and see it as a gift. I really struggled with that and I see other people, especially really ambitious women in my life, struggle with this.
When they hit a wall, when they lose their job, when they lose an opportunity, they don't take it as a chance to take care of themselves, to step back, to reconnect with their family, to re-establish what their values are or what's important to them. I think giving yourself that space to just heal a little bit will set you up better for whatever next opportunity might come your way, assuming that you're financially able to do that.
Obviously, for a lot of people, when they lose a job, they immediately need to start looking for a new job. That was definitely true in the environment that I was working in. For most young employees in New York City, that is definitely the case.
If you have the opportunity or if you have some severance and you have a little bit of time, think about a hobby that you've never worked on before. Think about some way that you can nurture yourself to get through this moment so you're in a better place mentally when the new opportunity comes along, which it will.
You're a Gen X woman. I'm a Gen X woman. Do you think the generations have a different relationship with work?
Absolutely. One thing that is probably universal right now is anxiety around the future of our economy and the future of all of our jobs. I do think that Gen X and some elder millennials, we were very much indoctrinated into the "work-hard, play-hard" ethos. You sacrifice everything for work, and you have that payday one day.
Younger generations are seeing that payday isn't really coming. We're retiring older and older. Many of us, even our elders, are retiring without a lot of resources, without a lot of pensions or retirement accounts. They're seeing that and they're like, "Well, why did you do it?" So many people my age who have worked for 20, 30 years and still can't afford a house. They still can't afford their day-care bills and all of those different things.
I do think that younger generations aren't really putting up with that. You see that they're agitating a lot more for equitable workplaces. You also see that they are much more comfortable with the language of boundaries, which can be very challenging when you're a manager and you never had any, and you're like, "Well, I worked really hard to get here." They're looking at you and they're like, "Worked hard to get where?"
What kinds of responses have you gotten to this piece?
Overwhelming, Alison. Overwhelming. People have told me that they decided to quit their job after reading it.
I'm out of here.
I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait, are you sure you should do that?" They are realizing that something's off, or they're not being valued in their workplace — from people in every type of industry, in every walk of life you can imagine.
I have gotten so much feedback from people that have just felt seen in terms of identifying all of the feelings that we're talking about in terms of being angry, feeling let down, feeling like a disappointment, realizing how much their job was their identity.
I really do think we are coming upon this time where people are starting to decouple this idea of success from their own personal success, and they're redefining it. I think what scares me, and this is the thought that I'll leave you with, is it's unfortunate that overwhelmingly, that's a lot of women who are self-selecting themselves out of further opportunity because they are tired of having the door shut in their face.
