87,000 hours – can we find connection at work?  

For #SHW26, we’re exploring how we can champion connection in an increasingly individualised world. In this blog, Brook’s Head of Commercial Development, Cam Bewley, explores the role of work in finding connection in our lives. 

If you are eighteen and reading this, and live a life of full employment, you can expect to work 2,320 weeks. That’s 11,600 days, or 87,000 hours. Across fifty years, it will equate to just under a third of your waking adult life. 

An unreasonable amount of time to hand over, in my opinion, without asking what it’s for. 

It took me three jobs to answer that for myself, and where I have landed has made me happier. 

I want to be in the service of others, to improve other people’s lives, and I want to do it with other people. In other words, I want to feel connected both to my colleagues and to the cause. 

Past jobs 

After university, I wanted to start a career but an Ancient History and Archaeology degree didn’t point me in a clear direction. After around six months of job hunting, I was really starting to get desperate. In the final two weeks before Christmas, I had ten interviews lined up and didn’t get nine of them. But the tenth I did – I finally had a “good” job. 

Working at a large multinational company was fantastic at first. It was a well-paid role, with young colleagues in the same position as me. It had all the comforts one might see as standard from a late 2010s tech-adjacent company: free snacks, beer on Fridays, and a ping-pong table. All the trappings to make spending more time at work more appealing. 

I learned a lot in this role. It built my confidence and I probably wouldn’t have been a very good Business Development Officer at Brook if it wasn’t for this job. While I did like the people I was working with, I felt disconnected from them. They felt invigorated by their jobs, by the growth of the company, by the potential future riches they could get if they stayed long enough and if their stock vested as they hoped.  

But ultimately, I couldn’t make myself care about the purpose of the job. My favourite part of each day was reading to and from work. Two hours spent reading about lives I was not living, on subjects far more interesting to me than the cost of goods reduction sprint I was working on. 

Summer 2019 

Eighteen months in, I reached something like a crossroads. My peers had begun to progress around me, and I felt like I was languishing, largely because I was. I just didn’t have the drive and the skill set that the role needed. 

After a frank conversation with my manager about my performance, I quit. I was in my early twenties and acted largely without thinking. I didn’t have a plan of what next, but I knew it should be something different, so I focused my search in the charity and public sector. 

I found Brook whilst scrolling Charity Job a week later. I didn’t have a background in sexual health, but looking at Brook’s website, I was intrigued. I chose my degree because of the breadth it offered and thought the same might apply to a job. 

Brook had policy teams advocating to parliament, clinical services acting on behalf of the NHS, training for professionals to identify child sexual exploitation, and education for young people on topics that I and many of my peers would have benefited from. I knew people whose lives could have been very different had they had the support Brook offers. So I applied. 

It remains one of the best decisions of my life. 

What the work is 

Working at Brook means I now spend a lot of time thinking about the relationships between people and about the people who fall through the gaps without the services that should exist to support them. 

I have held six roles in seven years at Brook and none of them have been frontline positions. I do not deliver point-of-care testing, as our nurses do. I do not directly safeguard young people after an education session. I do not stand in school halls explaining to worried parents how they might help their children. But that doesn’t make me any less committed or connected to our mission. 

I have sometimes wondered whether a frontline role would make the meaning feel more real. But I’ve learned that meaning doesn’t only exist in a room where someone is directly supported. It also lives in the decisions made weeks earlier, in a tender document or a funding negotiation, that determine whether the space for that support exists at all. 

Who you do it with 

As an external processor, I find talking through a problem is the best route to a solution. I sometimes joke that a day in our office is like taking part in an eight-hour podcast, and it is usually just after a day like that that an idea will “click”. 

And therein lies the answer to the question I used to find most difficult: how do I find meaning at work? For me it’s by feeling connected not just to the cause and the environment I work in, but also to the people I work with.  

Which brings me to the part most of us discuss least, our colleagues. 

We talk a great deal about family, about friendship, about romance. But we spend close to a third of our waking adult lives with people we did not choose, doing something we mostly did not design, and we treat that as a separate category of experience, or as no category at all. I now work from home three days a week. Other than my wife, or some WhatsApps, a few hours on Teams may be the only connection I have to other people in a day. 

That’s why who you work with matters so much to me. I work with caring, and earnest people who are full of passion. That combination is rare and I love it. I have read op-eds about the “age of anti-ambition” and daily read statistics that often fill me with despair. We all live in an era where to be a nihilist isn’t just understandable, it’s admirable. But that’s not the case at Brook. Not everyone I work with is even an optimist, but they are willing to put the work in to play a small part in shaping the lives of our service users.

Every person I meet in my work, who is any good at it, shares a belief that through collective action the world can be a better place.

This isn’t an unsaid secret, it’s affirmed daily, in meetings and emails and the collective aim to solve problems together. To work in such an environment is invigorating and, for me, has made all the difference.   

What can you do? 

Connection must come from somewhere. For seven years a good deal of mine has come from work. 

If you hate where you work, or worse, find it to be a vapid waste of your potential – my advice, if you can, would be to leave. 

Take the interview, the sideways step, the pay cut if you can absorb one, or the trustee seat that costs you a Tuesday evening. Experiment with using your time and labour on something where the point of pride is not the size of the pay slip. 

If you cannot leave, and there are good reasons why many people cannot, then perhaps ask yourself what you want out of your life, and what you can do to change it. 

Look at the people you already spend a third of your waking life with and intentionally treat them as valuable relationships, rather than an arrangement.

That part, I hope, is an option open to everyone. 

After seven years I have more say over the direction of my life, and more chance of improving somebody else’s, than I believed I would at twenty-three. Work is not everything, and the most fulfilling things I do still happen away from it. But choosing to find meaning in the hours themselves, rather than treating them as the price of the evenings and weekends, has changed how I live the rest of my life.