On zebra cakes and bringing your whole self to work
Do you remember Zebra Cakes? These were treasured children’s snacks in the 1990s along with Gushers and Dunkaroos. I hope a number of readers are feeling a wave of nostalgia right now.
“Each of us is in the world for no very long time, and within the few years of his life has to acquire whatever he is to know of this strange planet and its place in the universe. To ignore our opportunities for knowledge, imperfect as they are, is like going to the theatre and not listening to the play. The world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
I was taking my lunch break at home and finished it off with a locally-made chocolate chip cookie.
I savored the cookie, and realized I don’t savor my food much anymore, not like I did when I was younger. I remembered savoring Zebra Cakes in the two-cakes-per-package servings; I was always bummed when it was a “half” serving i.e. one cake that was my “left-over” snack from Monday. I also remember putting an empty box back in the pantry at home when we wanted to try to deceive our parents of our innocent gluttony.
This all reminded me of growing up as a child and how some children would bring lunches to school.
I was one of those lucky children. I had a peanut butter jelly sandwich most days or if I was lucky and living my guilt-free childhood, my vegetarian mother would generously make some sort of turkey or other cold-cut sandwich for me.
But I also remember peers who had home-cooked meals that represented their country of origin or where their parents emigrated from, and how those non-sandwich lunches triggered bullying. Or the peers who were on free or subsidized meals and were looked at as inferior by other children even if bullies didn’t have the explicit jargon to stigmatize. I was fortunate; the closest I got was having frugal parents who had me reuse my brown paper bag and snacks with the simple off-brand zipper-less sandwich bags, not the fancy heavy-duty trademark Ziploc ® bags other kids had.
I wonder how much they wanted us to assimilate that they ensured we had the “American” things, even lunches.
The thing about lunch time in K-12 school in the US is that it's a daily flashpoint. Kids would be brought together by the hundreds to hang out with friends, bully non-friends, awkwardly engage with the other gender, and so on. As children, we didn’t know who we were, let alone how to “bring our full selves” to school. But we just simply were, ourselves -- even if we awkwardly were still figuring it out and as a result, lunch time was one way we brought our true selves.
This made me think about how I am lucky to work in an industry where people say they bring their whole selves to work, even before COVID-19. This is true in many ways: we speak candidly during meetings in language like we may use at home or with friends, we’re transparent with career ambitions like becoming a startup founder even when that is not one’s present role, we share hobbies like gardening and the most recent concert we attended without fear of how we will be perceived, and so on. And with COVID-19, many people bring coworkers into their homes and families through Zoom calls with children joining in or admissions of slow WiFi because a teenager stuck at home is playing video games in the bedroom next to the “office” where the individual may be sitting. The line between our work identity and our “real self” have become increasingly blurred for many (but not all) people in tech and other industries.
But I wonder how true that really is, when we probe another level further.
I know many women and people of color who do not feel like they can be honest about struggles they face
I know many people with well-intended but controversial questions or views that they do not share out of fear
I know many people who are artists or philosophers but are effectively uninteresting human robots at work
I was aware through Marx and Engels (if not Smith) that capitalism breeds specialization but not sterilization. Yet upon further reflection, dehumanization is precisely what was predicted.
And on a lighter note, no one brings their lunch to work in tech -- but who knows what 2020 and beyond will bring?
Bringing one’s full self to work is not a requirement for society or individual happiness. But by saying it when it is not true in many cases or at least oversimplifies, indicates we have achieved something which we have not. It reminds me of when I thought that Silicon Valley was a meritocracy until I learned the ways in which it is not. Furthermore, we risk people losing their true sense of identity when they don’t bring their full selves yet we perpetuate the idea that we are our full selves at work, risking a sense that who we are when we’re working 9a-5p or 7a-10pm that that’s all we are - when there often is so much more.
What began as a memory of Zebra Cakes led me to examine the concept of one’s “full self” or “true self” and the ways in which this is true for some, not true for others, and ways in which it will evolve in a radically different world.