Still, it’s true.

  To understand the roots of this lie, we need to go back to the formula we started with:

  WORK = NUMBERS + WORDS

  Specifically, we need to dig into the one number that for the last one hundred fifty years has been the most contentious: How many hours do people work?

  A forgotten feature of the agricultural economy is that there was little specialization. People raised their own food, made their own candles, cared for their own sick, and so on. John McPhee captures this bygone way of life in The Crofter and the Laird, his 1969 portrait of his Scottish ancestral island, Colonsay. The crofter of the title has two dozen different roles: He raises mutton, breeds ewes, grows turnips, makes cheese, collects limpets, gathers driftwood, and floats loans. He’s even the constable.

  For most of human history, what did people do all day? Everything!

  Only since the nineteenth century have people had what we now consider a job. The word itself didn’t even enter the English language until the sixteenth century, and then it meant only a task. Job didn’t assume its current meaning of full-time employment until the 1850s. Those years were the heart of the industrial age, of course, and from the very beginning the single biggest tension was over how much time people worked.

  Over the next century, through political pressure, union organizing, and other forms of pushback, the workday went from twelve hours to ten to eight, the workweek from seven days to six to five. Most thinkers assumed those numbers would drop even lower. Keynes said the workweek would shrink to fifteen hours; George Bernard Shaw said two; Isaac Asimov said we’d stop working altogether and only supervise machines.

  Instead, the opposite happened. Americans today work longer hours, spend fewer days on vacation, and devote more time each year to labor than both our elders in this country and our peers in other countries.

  But it’s not just how much we work that’s changed—when we work has also changed. The Busytown ideal of waking up, going to a workplace, and then leaving work and returning home to your family applies to fewer and fewer these days. Jamie McCallum, a professor at Middlebury College, has gathered impressive data on this topic. Two thirds of Americans are out of sync with this typical workday. Eighty percent of hourly wage-earners work atypical schedules; a majority of all workers check their work emails at night; a quarter of us do work between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.

  Still, even these numbers fail to capture what I believe is one of the biggest revelations of my conversations.

  The average person has up to five jobs.

  I asked everyone in my conversations a simple question: How many jobs do you have? The average answer was three and a half. A quarter said five or more.

  At first, I was surprised by these numbers. The more I probed, the more surprised I became. What people consider to be a job these days is not at all how most economists use the term. From Merriam-Webster to the Department of Labor, the classic definition of a job is work performed for money. Even by this definition, the majority in my cohort—63 percent—have more than one job.

  The full picture is even more complex.

  The emerging way that people use the word job goes well beyond paid work. If anything, it’s closer to the original definition of a job as a task. This definition already appears as the second meaning in many dictionaries, and in effect we’ve repopularized it. In this usage, a job is a responsibility, a duty, an obligation. It’s my job to organize the holiday party at work this year. It’s my job to serve on this nonprofit board. It’s my job to put my children to bed so my partner can study for that second degree.

  Some of these newfangled jobs do, in fact, pay. People run errands for TaskRabbit, host Airbnbs, DJ at weddings. But almost everyone performs additional work that they consider to be a job for which they aren’t paid—in many cases, they actually pay out of pocket for the privilege. They care for the elderly, coach ice hockey, tutor, mentor, protest, podcast.

  Add these paying and nonpaying jobs to our primary jobs and we’re all crofters these days!

  Your instinct might be to dismiss some of these roles as not really a job, but that’s missing the point. The people who do them think of them as jobs. In a sense, this view has been building for decades. As early as the 1970s, feminist scholars argued that unpaid household labor should be counted as a job. But today we need to go even further. We need to accept that in the battle between work and life, work has essentially won. We don’t just work at our workplaces, we also work on our relationships, work on our parenting, work on our bodies, work on our social media profiles.

  In a world where everything is work, every role is considered a job.

  Instead of bemoaning this new way of thinking, we should think about it the way most people do—as a way to wring more meaning from our work. Naturally, some people take these extra jobs because they want or need more money—to pay for college, to cover the mortgage, to replace those worn-out tires. But far more take these extra jobs because they want or need more fulfillment—they want to give back, express themselves, experiment with entrepreneurship.

  What I found in posing the Lowly Worm question is that people choose to have multiple jobs in large part so they can have multiple ways to cobble together the meaning they want from life.

  OK, this job may not be fulfilling, but I get some of what’s missing from this other job.

  Gosh, I was just offered a dream job, but my kid’s on the travel soccer team this year and I have to move my mom into an assisted living facility, so that’s my job for now.

  Wow, this new job is great on paper, but the amount of time I have to spend being twice as good as everyone else feels like a job unto itself.

  I call this new world where everyone is constantly assembling and reassembling their own full circle of jobs Work360. Learning to master its rules is an essential life skill. That skill begins with understanding the five jobs everyone has and what role each one plays in your 360 degrees of meaning.

  Main Job

  The first of the five jobs seems like an easy one. It’s your primary job. Everyone has one of those.

  Well, it depends on what you mean.

  I asked everyone what sounds like an easy question: Do you have a main job? The answers were surprisingly complex. For some, their main job was their primary source of income; for others, their primary source of time; for others, their primary source of meaning.

  And for others, it’s almost impossible to tell.

  Morgan Gold knew from an early age that he wanted to draw comic strips. Born in Marlborough, Connecticut, to a father who was a special ed teacher and a mother who was a drug and alcohol counselor, Morgan idolized Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, and dreamed of working at Mad magazine. In high school, he sold a comic strip about a sarcastic rabbit who smokes cigarettes and curses a lot to an alternative weekly.

  “He wasn’t necessarily a surrogate for me, but he was certainly what a fifteen-year-old boy would find funny.”

  Morgan earned a joint degree from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, then moved to a trailer park outside of Hartford and tried to make a documentary about his neighbors. They kicked him out of the community. “My directing career was over before it started.”

  A friend offered him a gig making corporate videos, which led to a job running communications for the CEO of the Hartford insurance company, which led to being recruited by TIAA-CREF as a vice president of branding and advertising, which led to a job as the managing director and head of marketing for ProShares, a $65 billion investment company in Bethesda, Maryland.

  “Cash ruled everything in my life,” Morgan said. “I went from living in a trailer park to living in a rat-infested apartment in Hartford, to thinking, Wow, I can buy a crazy town house in Washington, DC! As soon as that happened, I realized, Whoa, this life kind of sucks.”

  Morgan tallied all the ways his work made him unhappy. “I spend my days sitting in meetings, I’m not creating anything, I’m responding to pissed-off emails from the CEO. I thought, I gotta find a hobby.”

  What he found was farming. “I began reading books about regenerative agriculture, learning about permaculture, starting one garden in my front yard and two in my back.” Morgan was married by this time; his wife, Allison, had just finished dual master’s degrees in public health and nursing. With roots in New England, the couple bought a 150-acre run-down dairy farm in northeast Vermont as a getaway.

  “The house needed a lot of work. I planted a bunch of chestnut and mulberry trees. I figured that’s a crop I could manage from afar.”

  But once he put his hands in the soil, Morgan didn’t want to pull them out.

  “I always wanted to be a storyteller. I said to Allison one night, ‘What if we start a farm and document everything on YouTube? I bet by the time we have stuff to sell, we’ll have enough viewers to buy the stuff.’ ”

  Allison was game. She found an opening as a nurse practitioner in a medical nonprofit serving the northeast corner of the state; Morgan took a job doing marketing for a small insurance company. “It was a shift in trajectory, but I wasn’t making the move for status.”

  Five years later, Gold Shaw Farm was “more of a farm startup than an honest-to-goodness farm,” Morgan said. He sold horse feed, raised ducks, bred goose eggs. But his YouTube channel, on which he hosts twice-weekly comic videos with names like “A Day in the Life of Toby the Guard Dog” and “Our Freakishly Huge Duck (This Is Not NORMAL),” was a smashing success. He had 700,000 subscribers and 200 million views. The New York Times labeled him the public face of a new genre of homestead infotainment, Chore TV.

  “I usually get up around 4:35 a.m., start editing, then let the animals out and do my chores,” Morgan said. “By eight thirty I’m showered, doing Zoom calls for my insurance job. I kick off around five thirty, get the animals fed and locked away for the night, have dinner, then work on my children’s book about my dog.”

  He basically has three jobs, he said—his marketing job, his farm, and his content creation.

  “I’m good at the storytelling; I’m less good at the farming. The day job makes the other two possible.”

  Trying to figure out what is a main job these days is harder than it appears. Scholars traditionally defined a main job as work performed on a fixed schedule, at the firm’s place of business, under the firm’s control, and with mutual expectation of continued employment. Almost every part of this definition has melted away. Schedules have become more flexible, remote work more viable, continued employment more suspect. Beyond those variations, what some economists call jobless jobs have become more plentiful—from on-call work to contracting to gigging to collabbing.

  All of these changes have led to the same result: Americans likely spend less time at a main job than at any time since jobs became the norm two centuries ago. By some measures, only around half of us even have a main job anymore. In my study, the number was 39 percent.

  These numbers are a reminder that while long-standing norms have been eroded, updated norms have been slow to replace them. In the case of main jobs, as their numbers decrease, the stigma against not having one will surely also decrease. In turn, the social acceptability of forgoing a main job altogether will rise. In the work smorgasbord of the future, more and more people walk past the mains and fill up on sides instead.

  Side Job

  Side jobs are the most talked-about alternatives to main jobs, but they’re neither the most common nor the most demanding. What they are, for most of us, is a hedge, whether that hedge is designed to bring in more money, more meaning, or more options for the future.

  Sometimes they even bring us all three.

  Kirsten Green was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her father sold corporate uniforms; her mother was a school administrator. “I grew up in a middle-class lifestyle, and my parents made it clear that you shouldn’t work for a paycheck, you should work for purpose. My dad would take us to a housing project on Christmas Day. ‘Think about what you got for Christmas. Now look at what they’re playing with. Don’t ever forget that someone else would be grateful for what you take for granted.’ ”

  Kirsten enrolled in the University of Alabama to study premed, then switched to criminal justice, moving on to earn her master’s degree. Her first job was teaching criminology at a historically Black college in Tennessee.

  “My smallest class in college had a hundred people; my largest class in Tennessee had thirty. My goal had always been to change a little piece of the world. Now I knew every student’s name. I met their parents. And when they suffered, they came to me, which is why a six-foot-four football player cried on my shoulder after his mother died.”

  By her second year, Kirsten was running the department; after five years she was hired away by a college in Alabama. She was thriving, but she was also uneasy.

  “Something was missing, and I didn’t know what.”

  Then, out of nowhere, a text.

  “It was from a relative’s fourteen-year-old.”

  There’s something I need to tell you.

  “My stomach just dropped,” Kirsten said. “I called her immediately, and she announced, ‘I’m pregnant.’ My first response was, Oh, crap. Her daddy’s going to kill her. I immediately launched into Mama Bear mode: How are you feeling? How far along are you? Then, to calm down, I called my best friend. ‘Are you sure it was consensual sex?’ she asked. I realized I hadn’t even put on my criminal justice brain.”

  The daughter, it turns out, had been raped by a fellow student. As a criminologist, Kirsten hesitated advising the girl or her parents to press charges on a juvenile, but when the family learned he had raped two other students, the daughter agreed to testify, and the attacker was jailed.

  The daughter, meanwhile, announced that she had prayed on it and wanted to keep the baby. “And I want you in the delivery room to help me,” she told Kirsten. Once again, Mama Bear kicked in. Kirsten timed contractions; she spoke affirmations. “And once all the beauty and hard work of motherhood had prevailed, the daughter turned to me and said, ‘I think you would make a great doula.’ ”

  Now it was Kirsten’s turn to pray on it.

  “I told the Lord that this wasn’t in my plans. And you know what they say, Tell God your plans . . .”

  Kirsten again went to work. She watched videos; she took classes; she earned her license. And she hatched a plan to open a birth center. Not only did her side job redirect her life, it also redirected her main job. Kirsten switched her PhD topic to the importance of offering nurseries to incarcerated pregnant women, which her research showed reduced recidivism.

  “God really had the last laugh,” she said.

  The idea of a side job is hardly new. In the 1800s, following the potato famine in Ireland, many farmers lost their land. Some of those outraged farmers waged guerilla raids against the new owners, killing their cattle. Because those raids were conducted at night, they became known as moonlighting. From that ignominious start, moonlighting evolved to mean performing any second job at night.

  In the twenty-first century, moonlighting has been eclipsed by another term with criminal roots, side hustle. Derived from the Dutch word husselen, which means to shake, hustle entered popular usage in the 1920s meaning swindle or shake down. From this start, side hustle came to mean scam and, later, the less judgmental second job.

  Although side hustle is trendy these days, I prefer side job because while this phrase doesn’t include leisure activities like fishing or gardening, it does include unpaid activities that many people also consider jobs, like preparing meals at the homeless shelter or serving on the board of the co-op.

  Whatever you call this work, it still contains a whiff of two-timing. That’s unfortunate. Hudson Sessions, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, has found that side jobs can bring extra stress, but they also bring heightened meaning. Counter to what employers fear, side jobs also make employees happier and more productive at their main jobs, especially when the roles differ. A graphic designer who calligraphs wedding invitations on the side may feel burned out, but if her side job is welding or being a notary public, she’ll recover faster and feel more creative at her design job.

  Side jobs are especially helpful in easing people’s path to self-employment. Half of all side jobs involve entrepreneurship. They allow someone to either experiment with self-employment while supporting themselves with a main job, as happened with Morgan Gold, or sustain themselves with self-employment by using the side job for extra cash, as happened with Sang Kim, a lawyer who left Goldman Sachs to become an interior designer but also took on a few legal clients. In both cases, the side job provided the primary source of meaning while the main job provided the primary source of cash.

  How many people have side jobs? Three quarters in my study. Anooj Bhandari, a corrections specialist for the City of New York, had two side jobs—coaching storytelling at the Moth and being a member of the Neo-Futurists theater troupe. Bouy Te, a real estate broker in Virginia, had three side jobs—substitute teaching, serving on a county board, and helping an organization that encourages Asian Americans to get involved in politics. Sonia Gutierrez had no primary job but four side jobs—running a computer center in South Fayetteville, teaching college, serving as the first woman of color on any city council in Arkansas, and selling salsa using her mom’s recipe under the brand Salsa for Change.

  Lauren Nichols was so worried that her boss at the Department of Transportation would be unsettled by her side job as a medium that she never told him. But when her boss’s deceased wife visited Lauren in a dream to deliver “a very specific message,” Lauren warily approached him.