About Your Toxic Job

Let’s talk about toxic workplaces, authenticity, and alignment.

It's really easy to connect with people online by talking about toxic workplaces, bad culture, all the things “we hate about work”. Last year, I built a (small, compared to many other creators) social media following doing just that—sharing relatable skits depicting the sometimes obscure realities of academic work life.

As a former academic, I made those videos partly to show those still in it that they’re not alone and partly to help myself process why I left. I will still make them, but my goal for online connection this year is different. Why? Because relatable content in the work-related social media space is often problem-focused and not solution-focused. And I am a solution-focused person at heart.

Can watching a video about a common occurrence in a toxic workplace help someone feel better? Absolutely. But feeling better doesn’t do anything about the problem, and when we’re looking for a better situation, the kinds of problems we want to focus on are the ones we can take action toward changing.

Take authenticity, for example. We talk a lot about wanting to be our true selves at work and how the inability to do so can lead to burnout and dissatisfaction. Is an inability to be authentic at work a sign of a toxic workplace? Maybe, and I am not saying there is no such thing as a toxic work environment, but maybe something else is going on, and it’s a better use of your time to explore that than complaining, gossiping, and scrolling through videos that validate your feelings. Remember that you don’t have to be the cause of a problem to be the one to take action toward making things better for yourself. Ask yourself this: Do I want to be authentic at work, or do I want my work to be authentic to me?

I guarantee there are parts of yourself you don’t want to bring to a work environment. If you’re finding it hard to be authentic, the problem might be that the work isn’t aligned with your values. Something that doesn’t align with your values can feel extremely toxic to you but not be a toxic working environment. So it’s not the inability to bring your full self to work that’s the problem, but a lack of alignment between you and the work you’re doing, whether that’s the work itself or the culture of your workplace. When what matters to us and motivates us isn’t a part of our working environment or culture, that can lead not only to us feeling like we’re not being authentic but also to other common issues that come up in work-related social media content—burnout and a lack of work–life balance. One thing about both of these issues is that the amount of time you’re spending at work has less to do with the likelihood of feeling them than you might think. Just five hours a day of doing something that is completely misaligned with who you are and what matters to you can leave you feeling burned out and that work is taking energy away from your life. In contrast, it can be quite easy to work on something we’re extremely aligned with for 12 hours (not every day—I would never advocate for that!) and still feel energized for family time, reading, whatever else keeps the burnout/lack of work–life balance feelings away at the end of the day.

If you want to feel authentic at work and avoid burnout and lack of work–life balance, the best way to achieve this is to find work that aligns with your values in a working environment where you naturally fit in with the culture. One person’s toxic culture is another person’s dream workplace, and because it’s such a personal thing, it’s not possible to describe exactly what you need to be looking for, but having a strong idea of what your goals, values, and ideal workplace culture are is the first step.

This is something that can be hard for academics as academic culture becomes so ingrained, and while we might know that we don’t want that, we might not know what we do want instead. It’s not enough to have “not that” in mind when seeking new career paths. We need to know what it is that we do want; otherwise, we might end up taking new roles that just add to our “not that” list instead of finding alignment.

What matters to you the most? What fulfills you? What does your ideal working environment look like, and why? That’s your starting point. Knowing what you’re looking for takes the problem of the toxic environment you feel you’re in and turns it into a problem you can solve by seeking an alternative that aligns with you.

Choosing a new environment that fits you is always going to be easier than changing the environment you’re in or changing yourself to fit it.