This is something I’ve thought about in passing for at least the past year but never really stopped to pinpoint or examine. I really don’t like the phrase ‘doing the work’ which in my experience is almost always associated with left-wing activists pushing some form of identity politics. Last Saturday, the NY Times published an opinion piece about this phrase which I just came across today. I’m not on TikTok but apparently “doing the work” is rampant there.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the TikTok algorithm kept serving me videos of 20-somethings speaking directly to camera, admonishing me to “do the work.” They wanted me to know that they were doing the work and that doing the work would eventually turn them into self-actualized beings poised for greater success in life.

Exactly what “the work” meant wasn’t entirely clear.

The author also says she previously associated this particular phrase with left-wing politics, e.g. “doing the work of unlearning racial bias.” She traced it back to 2021 when it appeared in book by a clinical psychologist (“How to do the work”) and also in a New Yorker article about phrases adopted from the culture of psychotherapy. But there’s a reason this phrase pops up on social media and in lefty discussions of politics so often. It has become a signifier of something else.

When you notice something like this on social media, it’s a safe bet that there’s an aspect of performance at play: “Do the work” isn’t just about doing the work; it’s about being perceived as a person who does the work. This kind of superficial therapeutic halo was noted by Mychal Denzel Smith in an Opinion guest essay last year titled “Why Do People Think Going to Therapy Makes You a Good Person?”…

I called Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of “That’s Not What I Meant!” and several other books about conversation and relationships, to ask her about “doing the work.” She said that what Smith is describing — that “doing the work” may now be associated with being an admirable person — is known in the sociological literature as a “vocabulary of motives.”

That term was advanced by the sociologist C. Wright Mills in the 1940s, and it means that in any given culture, people are going to use whatever vocabulary they think will justify their actions to the listener and allow for a smooth interaction.

In short, the phrase “doing the work” has become a kind of virtue signal. It’s a way to show you’re a good person who is focused on the right things, e.g. doing the work to be a good ally or to decolonize your school or to acknowledge your privilege. For people on the left these days, especially white people, life is just one endless struggle session in which the only acceptable pose is to be seen as someone “doing the work.”

What’s most obnoxious about this, besides the obvious ‘look at me!‘ element of it, is the elevation of little more than ideological compliance with actual work. Clinging to progressive cultural views as if they were a religious faith isn’t work in the usual sense. It’s closer to ideological navel gazing and is often the laziest possible alternative to thinking for yourself. In many cases, doing the work is actually something you do instead of working. Walking out of school or work to participate in a protest chanting the same 3-4 slogans isn’t doing the work, it’s explicitly not doing the work. Going to a work-mandated social justice training is not doing the work, it’s something you’re doing instead of, or in addition to, the work. We’d all get a lot more work done if we’d stop doing what the left calls doing the work.

I suspect people call it work because, very often, the goal is to make yourself or others around you feel bad about something (privilege, America, history, etc.). But making yourself feel bad isn’t work, especially not in a political culture that valorizes exactly this kind of call-out culture and critical self-abasement. The more depressive and in need of a safe space you appear, the more you really get what life is under patriarchal late-stage capitalism. This is how you show you’re a true believer.

As the article suggests, anyone posting about “doing the work” on social media is ringing a bell about what a good person they are and asking you to fall in line applauding them. It’s obnoxious and ought to be an embarrassing thing for anyone over the age of 22 to say.