when scarcity becomes self-aggrandizement.
the toxic and contradictory narratives we tell ourselves in the workplace
Happy new year!! After the veritable emotional whiplash of 2022, I’ve never been happier to enter 2023. After my content sprint of Q4, I’m deeming January the month of study and reflection—which means I’m watching YouTube videos for craft, something I never thought I would ever say—but also making time to read manga (I read all 23 volumes of Dorohedoro in three days, eep) and watch anime (I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying the soccer anime Blue Lock).
As I sat on my couch, devouring Dorohedoro and flanked by my two cats, it dawned on me: This was the first winter vacation where I didn’t have to check my work email twice a day. I saw some business emails come in, sure, but I just… didn’t respond.
How crazy is that? (I know it’s not crazy in the grand scheme of things. It just felt crazy to me.)
Kate Reder Sheikh, a legal recruiter, ran an informal poll on LinkedIn asking biglaw associates what their vacations were like in 2022. The response was underwhelming, to say the least: 39% didn’t take any vacation where they billed less than an hour a day; 34% took about a week of vacation; and only 28% took two weeks or more. Keep in mind that while vacation time varies by firm and seniority (before firms started switching to the scam of “unlimited vacations”), most New York biglaw firms gave associates 20 days of vacation a year, which was then paid out to you if you didn’t take them. So the discrepancy between the amount of vacation hypothetically available to associates and the survey responses is pretty meaningful—nearly three-quarters of associates aren’t taking their full vacations.
When I spoke with colleagues who didn’t take their full allotment of vacations, two prevailing narratives cropped up:
Scarcity. “I’ll never find another job that pays so well so I can’t afford to get fired, so I can’t take vacation this month/year/career!”
Self-Aggrandizement. “My team is counting on me, which is why I can’t take vacation this month/year/career!”
Notice anything?
Either way, you don’t take your vacation.
battling the toxic narratives.
When I first entered the workforce as an associate at a biglaw firm, with nary work experience longer than three months on my resume, I was solidly operating under the Scarcity narrative. I had convinced myself that I needed to stay there for at least a year in order to be employable ever again. If I don’t last that long, I told myself, I’m screwed. I’ll have to move back in with my parents and work retail. (This was before I did any meaningful therapy and reveled in catastrophizing, clearly.)
I still remember that sense of need for my job, as if it completed me as a person. And in a sick way, it kinda did—after a stressful adolescence in which my parents often tried to use money to control and hurt me, my biglaw job was the only financial agency which was completely mine. My parents couldn’t cut off my direct deposit. They couldn’t yell at me to “get a job.” I was finally in control of my life.
Except I wasn’t, not really. The Firm controlled me using money, albeit through subtler ways than my parents had. It wasn’t like a partner ever explicitly told me that I would get fired if I didn’t respond to emails within five minutes, but they were experts at covertly signaling the message. An associate texted me at 8:38pm: “Hey, you need to respond to Partner’s email now, or else he asked us to call you.” “You say jump, we say how high,” a partner told a client on a call, and the implied directive to the associates also on the call wasn’t lost on me. Because the Scarcity narrative told me that I needed to hold onto this job at all costs—to my sleep, to my mental health, to my friendships—I was never as in control of my own life as I wanted to believe. I had simply switched out one financial master for another.
I thought that after a year, the Scarcity narrative would peter out, and maybe my anxieties would chill. But no. It was soon replaced by the Self-Aggrandizement narrative. “You’ve been selected to be a part of an elite team of associates,” the staffing partner told me. “Good job—you’re my go-to associate,” another partner complimented me on the way out from their office. I no longer lived in perpetual fear that I would get fired—now I lived in constant worry that I would let others down. The graduation from Scarcity to Self-Aggrandizement was seamless, undetectable.
The absurdity of it all only became clear to me when I got more senior and began managing junior associates. I attended an affinity group discussion about that V-word, vacation, and a second-year associate shared that she hadn’t taken any vacation at the Firm yet because she didn’t want to let her team down.
I almost blurted out, “What, that’s ridiculous—you’re a second-year,” before realizing how (a) condescending and (b) hypocritical that was (I, too, believed that everything would fall apart if I wasn’t there). Now, don’t get me wrong—associates of all years provide a lot of value to their teams—but to think that you’re soooo important that you can’t take a vacation is, frankly, wishful thinking. As one partner shared with me, even a sudden hospitalization didn’t stop her teams from keeping on keeping on.
The point of this is to highlight how untrue the Scarcity and Self-Aggrandizement narratives are, at each stage in your career. The job you have isn’t the only job that you can ever get, even if you’re just starting out. Good help is really, really hard to find, and if you’re a smart, thoughtful, and competent person, there will always be demand for your work, although perhaps not in the narrow W-2 confines in which you initially find yourself. On the flip side, you’re also not as important as you think you are. As the Cravath partners allegedly chant at one another’s funerals, “The partner is dead, the firm lives.”
So please. Take your full vacation days this year.1
🔖 open tabs
With all the talk about tech layoffs and biglaw ECVC group layoffs, it’s easy to worry about the death of tech. I enjoyed Parmy Olson’s opposing perspective: the crisis is actually a great opportunity for tech companies to innovate again, rather than merely sit on their laurels and offer dry cleaning services to employees.
Is it possible to capture the unique aesthetic of TikTok? Carolina A. Miranda certainly tries in this LA Times article borrowing from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” format.
Equinox launched a campaign where they would not accept new members on January 1. “You are not a New Year’s resolution. Your life doesn’t start at the beginning of the year. And that’s not what being part of Equinox is about.” Controversial, yes, but I think it’s notable that this ban was only for a day—Equinox still wants those New Year’s resolution dollars, after all, even if they’re willing to pan the idea as part of a marketing ploy.
* This newsletter may contain affiliate links, which are denoted with a *, which means I earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
If your team is somehow guilting you for taking all of your vacation days without reasonable justification (e.g., it’s during trial), it’s time to be even more self-aggrandizing and look to take your talents elsewhere. If you’re soooo important to them, they should also understand that it’s soooo important that you take your breaks.
Super insightful read. I really don't know how your article ended up in my inbox, but I guess it's the sign I was looking for? Thank you for being raw and highlighting the very big issues that are prevalent in the legal landscape.
Love how you highlighted the co-existence of and tension between the scarcity and self-aggrandisement mindsets. Insightful as always, Cece!