The All-Encompassing Spirituality of the Tech Workplace

You hear all kinds of angst about new technology, especially around the parts of life it threatens to replace. Think jobs and relationships. What you hear less about is how the workplaces that make this tech themselves encroach on a centuries-old part of life. Yet this is the intriguing, if unsettling, case sociologist Carolyn Chen made in her 2022 book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley — the title an unsubtle allusion to Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir about a search for meaning in life.

Where Chen lives and works in Berkeley, California, she owns a front-row view of the tech world’s Mecca and its influence on the people within it. For Chen, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, her research centers on this interplay of social setting and belief. “The questions aren’t about what is true, what is good, what is moral,” Chen explained during an interview earlier this year, “but more about how religion functions in society. What does it do? One of the things that I always talk about is that religion is a reflection of one’s social location and one’s social condition.”

In the case of the research that fed Work Pray Code, the social condition Chen found was this: Tech workplaces, often romanticized for their extravagant benefits, actually became totalizing — providing for their employees not only material benefits like childcare and high-end cafeterias, but also immaterial benefits historically associated with religion, with church.

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Before you picked up this thread of the tech workplace as religion, you were looking at religious experience more broadly. How did you get to the workplace?

I was interested in religious and spiritual experience among religious nones, or the “spiritual, but not religious.” I started to notice how they’re all into Asian spiritual traditions. So I started this project by looking at yoga practitioners and studying yoga studios — yoga has religious origins and is quasi-spiritual but largely seen as secular. I went about my interviews in the same way I had done with religious converts. They kept on coming back to the central theme of work, and they would tell me they practiced yoga after a long day of work to help relax. They’d say yoga makes them a better nurse, engineer, doctor, accountant, teacher, fill in the blank with whatever profession.

Interviewees kept telling me about suffering from headaches, anxiety attacks, broken family relationships, divorce, all because of work. Initially, I thought yoga was the religious practice. No, actually, it was really clear that yoga was merely a therapeutic practice that restored them so they could go back to work. It slowly became clear to me: What’s sacred in their lives? What’s sacred here is work.

This is what they’re sacrificing to, submitting to, and surrendering to in their lives. What makes sociology distinctive from other disciplines is that we’re interested in institutions and how institutions shape behavior, shape particular patterns in life. It’s really clear to me that the workplace in the area I studied was the new faith community, the new temples, the places of worship.

Your book Getting Saved in America  directly deals with Taiwanese immigration and conversion. In a lot of ways Work Pray Code is also an Asian story, both geographically in San Francisco and, as you said, with the persistence of tech’s fascination with Eastern religions. Is that part of your initial interest or did it just happen that way?

It didn’t just happen to be that way. In fact, I was particularly fascinated by why you could say some people who were “spiritual but not religious,” people who were religiously not affiliated yet they were fascinated by Asian spiritual traditions. Why were Asian spiritual and religious traditions being co-opted and commodified in secular spaces? That was one of the questions bringing me to this project.

Did you get an answer?

There is very much of a regional story here when it comes to the Bay Area. The Bay Area is the site of the explosion of Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, and then the counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s the epicenter of all these movements of Asian spirituality that I talk about in my book  as being ambient Buddhism. What happens is that the folks in the counterculture over time, as the Bay area changes, actually start to become the mainstream. This is sort of a story of someone like Steve Jobs. He went to India and tried to live in an ashram and was interested in Asian spiritual religions.

The kind of work-life-as-spiritual-life vibe that Jobs embodied, how do you think about it in relation to traditional religious categories like atheism, deism, or formal religions?

I see this as apart from any of these groups, because you could be religiously identified as Muslim or Christian, and you can also be a work worshiper. Part of the point of my project is to help us understand that secular institutions command our devotion and spiritually shape us. If we only talk about religious things as being sacred and secular things as not being sacred, then we don’t really see this. What I’m trying to do is put a different lens on so that we can see not so much what is religious, but what is sacred. To map our devotion.

Work is a really, really powerful institution because most people have to do it. Most people have to participate in it. But what really changed in the late 20th century is a very gradual shift in the meaning of work, particularly among highly skilled, college-educated Americans. This is not just a story about Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is so extreme that it helps us see what’s happening everywhere.

Talk about some of those shifts.

There’s no Wizard of Oz who’s orchestrating this. It’s just these different trends and movements happening. One of the big things is the shift in management culture: It starts to see itself as needing to provide meaning, whereas it never did before. What also changes is a growth in access to higher education. There’s this promise of college education, which I think still persists today, that you get a college education, and that means you get a good job. What does a good job mean? That you’re paid a decent salary so that you can buy a home, and you can have 2.5 kids, and you can get a car and live in this new, commodified culture. And also that you have a job that is meaningful, that gives you some kind of status and some kind of identity.

You say no one is orchestrating these moves. To what extent is it unintentional?

Say you’re in Silicon Valley and everyone has a mission and they’re “mission-driven,” and they all talk about how they are changing the world in a good way. You have to understand that in this kind of ecosystem, if you don’t have an inspired mission, you’re not going to survive. The thing that was just so astonishing in my research is that people actually believed these things in Silicon Valley. I didn’t see people being like, “It’s just a company line.” People actually tell me things like, “I want to change companies because this company’s more mission-minded.” “This is more meaningful.” “It aligns with my mission in life.” This is the way that they would talk about work.

This whole late-20th century concept that work should be providing meaning — that we see with the rise of knowledge work — is so deeply ingrained in our idea of work. I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

Many of these ideas are (at least) adjacent to what some call a post-capitalist  work culture that emphasizes employee well-being, things like work-life balance, has a kind of non-industrial ethos. How does that conversation relate to your project, or at least to what you documented in your project?

There’s a lot I’m in agreement with. What I’m trying to show is this is a kind of social ecosystem that we live in. I think what differentiates me from maybe some of the pundits who advocate that you should take up new hobbies or you should manage your time differently, is that this ecosystem — which I think exists in Silicon Valley but also in other knowledge industry hubs — is essentially the material, social, and spiritual rewards and benefits of a community concentrated in the workplace. What happens when all of these kinds of benefits and rewards are concentrated in the workplace? Workers become dependent on the workplace and they naturally go to the workplace because they need those things.

I actually think that work does love you back. That’s why people continue to give to it. We have a certain way of talking about work, which is that work is extractive. It takes from us, it takes from our time and energy. But what I saw in my study of Silicon Valley is that, actually, people were dependent on work for life. They were dependent on work for identity, for belonging, for meaning, for purpose, even that experience of transcendence. Not to mention, they were literally dependent on work for food and for the roof over their heads.

Work is not extractive, but rather attractive in this particular kind of social ecosystem — which I call techtopia.

Attractive work sounds good. But you seem to take techtopia to be a negative development. Why?

To me, it’s about building up civil society, in civic spaces, in non-work spaces. I do think that it’s good to have meaningful work. It’s also good to have work that you might not find meaningful. Work actually provides material, social, and spiritual wealth for societies. And that’s a good thing. What is problematic is when workplaces are the alpha institution, the only institution that basically determines how all the other institutions need to run.

What I found in techtopia is that as the workplace became stronger and more powerful, all the other institutions basically had to bow down in service to the needs of the workplace in order to survive. So there’s an institution devoted solely to profit and a creation of wealth? Good. But we need to have these other institutions that may be solely devoted to justice or solely devoted to creating ethical relationships. These are the institutions, the traditions, that are weakening when everything becomes sucked up by the workplace.

To what extent is this a tech dynamic just as much as a tech workplace dynamic?

What I’m describing about work is not about just the tech workplace. This is about other workplaces, too. The extent to which work has completely taken over many of our lives has no boundaries, and that is a story about the technology the tech workplaces produce. You really could be working all the time now, and you feel guilty when you’re not, and you’re constantly on call.

This is a lot of what I think about when it comes to technology and also to faith. I’m a practicing Christian, and I think a lot about what technology takes. We have a different kind of attention to life now because of technology. When I think about the spiritual life of Christians, it’s about intentional attention tension. Prayer at its most basic form is really about a certain kind of attention. Technology has really impoverished our capacity to have that kind of intentional attention anymore. It’s so oppressive, and you can never really escape from it — you can never really escape from work.

You’ve made the point that this is not just a story about tech and the tech workplace, but that tech is in some ways representative of a larger phenomenon. Will you explain that?

We see this in what I call knowledge industry hubs. These are places like Seattle, Portland, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, these metropolitan areas that have experienced the fastest knowledge industry job growth in the last 50 years. This really maps onto coastal elites and a particular lifestyle and political behavior as well.

It’s interesting: Those are the very areas where we also see that have the lowest rates of religious affiliation. So in many ways, if I could just simplify it, it is a story about the replacement of one institution for another, the growth of one institution taking over the functions of what used to be other institutions’, which is work taking over religion.

When you see this phenomenon occurring, what is your role as a sociologist? At some points, you’re definitely pointing strongly to this being a negative development.

Work-worshiping culture is the air we breathe. I want to raise people’s awareness and actually name it. When I looked at Silicon Valley and at these companies, I saw not a religion; I saw a cult. And I think that cult is really the more appropriate word in here, cult in the sense of a total institution that provides for you, gives you everything — and that also closes you off from other things because it’s so fulfilling, fulfilling both in a meaningful way and in that it fulfills everything that you need.

If you think about spiritual formation through a sociological lens, and if you think about how institutions form us spiritually, then you see that for so many of us, the workplace shapes our desires. The question is to pastors, to faith leaders, to community leaders. You can’t ask companies to pull back; they’re not going to. The answers have to come from outside of the workplaces