Good Life Project - How To Make Your Work Fit Your Life | Anne Helen Petersen

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

We’re all in a process of reimagining when it comes to work, looking at the changes we’ve made over the last few years, and trying to figure out what we’ll keep, what we’ll let go of, and how else we might want to change the way we work in order to feel the way we want to feel. And, what so many are realizing is that we’ve got more power to reimagine every aspect of work now than we’ve ever had before. Question is, what do we do with that power? And what do we do with this moment of openness to new ways of working and living?These questions are what we dive into with today’s guest, Anne Helen Peterson. Anne is a journalist whose wise, often irreverent, funny, and provocative writing appeared in Buzzfeed, the New York Times and more, before leaving the mainstream to become the voice behind the wildly-popular newsletter, Culture Study. She’s also the author of four books, most recently Out of the Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home (co-written with Charlie Warzel) and Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.During our conversation, we talk about everything from where we live and work to the traditional role of the 9-5 work week and how, as we look at what’s important to us, companies, businesses and the promise of what remote work can bring, there’s an opportunity to change the way we think about work which ultimately then opens the door to shifting old-schoolwork schedules and models across many industries. One of my favorite moments of this conversation is at minute 35:03 when Anne makes a really compelling case for the 4-day work week, showing how she’s witnessed its success even in, as she calls them, “fuddy-duddy industries.” We also talk about Ann’s power move from mainstream media journalist and big city living to going out on her own as a writer, starting her own subscription newsletter, moving to a remote island, and loving it all. If you’re ready to think about working differently, this episode will be a beacon for you. You can find Anne at: Instagram | SubstackIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Charlie Gilkey about focusing on what matters in work and life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED.Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The way that we work is not natural. There is nothing natural about it. We naturalize it so that people don't question the way that we work. But like every generation is like, huh, maybe there's a different way of conceiving of our labor. And I think that right now with these different paradigms available, people are questioning the status quo in a way that is important and generative and we shouldn't dismiss. So we're all in a process of re-imagining when it comes to this thing called work. Looking at the changes that we've made over the last few years and trying to figure out what we'll keep, what we'll let go of, and maybe how else we might want to change the way we work in order to feel the way we want to feel. And what so many are realizing is that we've got more power to reimagine nearly every aspect

of work now than we have ever had before. And the question is, what do we do with that power? And what do we do with this moment of openness to new ways of working and living? And these are the questions that we dive into with today's guest, Anne Helen Peterson. So Anne is a journalist whose wise, often irreverent, funny, provocative writing appeared in BuzzFeed, New York Times, and more

before leaving the mainstream to become the voice behind the wildly popular newsletter, Culture Study. She's also the author of four books, most recently, Out of the Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, co-written with Charlie Worzel, and Can't Even, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. So during our conversation, we talk about everything from where we live and work to the traditional role of the nine to five work week and how, as we look at what's important to us, companies and businesses and the promise of what remote work can bring, there's this opportunity to change the way we think about

work, which ultimately then opens the door to shifting old school work schedules and models across many industries. One of my favorite moments in the conversation is right around minute 35, when Anne makes a really compelling case for the four-day work week, showing how she's witnessed its success even in, as she calls them, fuddy-duddy industries. And we also talk about Anne's own personal power move from mainstream media journalist in big city living to going out on her own as a writer, starting her own subscription newsletter, moving to a remote island, and loving it all. If you're ready to think about work differently, this conversation will be a beacon for you. So excited to share it.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You were in New York for a chunk of time and 2020, you make this really big move out to Missoula, Montana. A lot of people left major population areas. I'm raising my hand also. I was a lifelong New Yorker and I'm having this conversation from Boulder, Colorado right now. So I made kind of a similar move. And I'm always curious when people have made that move, what drove it? And then being where you are for a couple of years now, I'm really curious what's met expectations and what's really surprised you. So the even bigger surprise is that we actually moved from Missoula to an even smaller place. So we now live on an island off the coast of Washington state, and that was our

pandemic move. So we did like the, what a lot of other people did during the pandemic. We did that before, right? We did that like three years before the pandemic hit. And then when the pandemic hit, we were like, well, we need, we wanted to be closer to community. It was just, you know, we were living in Montana and it was really isolating because I think, you know, given pandemic protocols, it's really hard to hang out outside in the state of Montana unless you're skiing. And then also the real clarifying thing and what cemented this move, which we actually only did six months ago, was the government changed in the state of Montana. And the person who entered as the governor has a very different idea about what mitigation protocols should look like and what masking should look like and all those sorts of things. And it just felt like a really different place and a place that didn't always feel necessarily safe. And, you know, whether or not this pandemic will ever end, there will be future things. And I think a lot of people have been thinking too about like,

okay, what sort of place, like if in the longterm, when it comes to climate, when it comes to politics, when it comes to having a community of mutual support, what do I need? What sort of infrastructure of support do I need? And that, I think, caused a lot of people to make moves oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes to be closer to family, especially for parents of younger kids. And then for us, it was to be around our community of friends that we could help them. And then also they can be there for us as well. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting to see how people have been bouncing and why they've been making moves and then whether they're staying. I was reading recently that actually there's this massive influx of people back into New York City

right now to the extent where rents and home prices are now above the level that they were two years ago. And I'm wondering where those people are coming from because all the people that I know that left haven't returned. So I'm wondering what's the reverse influx about? right? Or thought it would be okay. And if you've never lived in a rural place before, it's really hard, right? Like rural life is just different. And I grew up in a semi-rural place of 30,000 people in Northern Idaho, but then I've lived in rural Vermont. I've lived in rural Wyoming where we lived in Montana. It's not rural for Montana, but other people would be like 70,000 people. That's nothing. Do you have an airport? We're like, yeah, we have an airport, but now we're living in an Island of like 900 people, but it's just what, what your standards are for, for what community would look like for what sort

of access you need. There's some people I think feel really isolated and alone and even afraid by not having things available all the time. And some people, that's just how they've always lived. Yeah. I think expectations and reality, they often collide in the weirdest ways. Totally. One of the other things that has been a big change for you over the last couple of years also is, I mean, you've been a writer for a very long time and written for a lot of major media outlets. And it's largely been in the context of writing for someone else. And you made this really interesting move also that a lot of journalists

in particular who had established strong voices and notable followings have made in that stepping away from big media and stepping into your own owned property. You started a sub stack, which for those who don't know is sort of a platform that a lot of people are using now to publish on their own and then to enroll people in subscriptions and build your own effective publication, you know, like where you're getting paid to do your own work. And I'm curious about that journey for you and how it's been. Yeah. You know, I think that it's an extension of something that I've always done with my writing, which is to like do it on the side for myself in some capacity. So like when you say like, oh, you've been a writer for so long. It's true. I've been writing for a really, really long time, but I was an academic, right? Like I was doing a different sort I went to University of Texas for my PhD in media studies. I felt really isolated while I was studying for my comprehensive exams.

And this was like 2007, 2008. And I started a WordPress blog and used that blog. It was called Celebrity Gossip Academic Style because my history or my focus for my PhD is on the history of celebrity gossip and how the way that we talk about and conceive and mediate stars has changed over time. But I wrote that for about four years. And then I started writing for other online sites during the kind of wild west of digital publishing early years in the early 2010s. And then that translated into getting a job at BuzzFeed and moving out of academia. I was a professor and moved into writing full time for BuzzFeed and moving out of academia. I was a professor and

moved into writing full-time for BuzzFeed and moved to New York. But almost immediately, like I think it was about two years after I had started at BuzzFeed, I saw people writing tiny letters, which was the kind of precursor to Substack. And I was like, oh yeah, I want one of those, right? Like it was a hearkening back to those blogging days. And I think there are types of writers who really like to focus on smaller amounts of writing and fine tune it, hone it, don't let it out for public consumption until it's exactly how they like it. And then there are people like me who just love to barf on the page, just like love to write, like you write to get your ideas out and then you hone them over time and also conceive

of writing as a conversation that you're constantly having this back and forth with your readers to try to arrive at an idea. And I also love to just have process out there to be like, this is how I do this sort of thing. And I don't think one type of writing is better or worse than the other. It's just different modes and my mode. That's just how I've always read. And I think it's also for people like me who love getting like, who crave immediate feedback. They're like, I want to put something in the world today and see what people say. And again, that's not always great. But I started this tiny letter and then migrated it to Substack when Substack started and did it for free while I was still writing full time for BuzzFeed. And it really was kind of a reporter's notebook where I talked about different stories I was doing

or like some sort of random aside that didn't or couldn't really work as an essay for BuzzFeed. Like it just was too niche or too personal or didn't have a point, right? This is the thing about a lot of writing is that it oftentimes meanders and doesn't have like a strong headline,

like a thing that could look good as a Facebook headline, right? That would translate perfectly, but that people seem to like. And I was able to grow that free newsletter that I would really do just on like Sundays when I felt like it to 17,000 subscribers. So Substack started trying to convince me to go to paid a while before I did it. And I was like, no, I don't want to turn this into an obligation. It's something that I like doing for free. It's something that I like just letting it be whatever it is. And eventually, you know, this was six months into the pandemic and the threat of layoffs just continued to hover over everyone at BuzzFeed. And we'd had, you know,

our union had come together and worked to come to an agreement about pay reductions in order to save people's jobs, which was really important and good. But I also felt like my head was always on the chopping block. Like it was always, are you next? And that feeling of precarity was so familiar to me from my years in academia. It is a really bad place to be. And anyone who has worked in a precarious industry understands how it can shadow all of the work that you do. And in that moment, it felt like moving to Substack, whether it was a permanent move or a temporary move and trying to be more in control of my own destiny for a little bit of time, that seemed to alleviate some of those fears. And I didn't know how it was going

to work. I didn't know if I was going to have the 10% conversion to paid that Substack likes to triumph, but it's worked really well. And I really like doing it. And I have a wonderful community of readers who I really conceive of myself as just part of that greater community. You know, they are doing lots of great things on their own. At the beginning of this conversation, we had to restart because like the discord beeped and that's the discord that's for my community. Got it. And they just, you know, they're great. I love it. It's a really gratifying experience. It's much more than just writing a newsletter. Yeah. I mean, I love hearing that, especially

because as you noted, and you write about this, you talk about this, this is something that's really part of the conversation with you is that, you know, we tend to have this urge to conflate the thing that we're passionate about, the thing that just, you know, we do because for no other reason than the way it makes us feel with the thing that earns us money. And sometimes that can be a great thing. Sometimes it can be a really fraught thing. So you saying yes to this and then actually having it really work beautifully for you is, I think it's a beautiful example of what's possible, but maybe also at the same time, not necessarily the right move for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the same,

this is true with so much in the quote unquote creator economy. I really like that word. I think that it's used to like blanket a whole industry of people who are doing really interesting work, but it somehow seems wrong. But I feel that there is no singular path and that's hard, right? Because you have people who email and say, how did you do this? Like, how did you create this path? How did you move from academia to BuzzFeed? How did you move from BuzzFeed to Substack? And the truth is that like a lot of it had to do with timing and luck.

And some of it had to do with really bad and toxic work habits that led to me burning out. And some of it had to do with writing about that burnout, which then became like about the somebody larger, like it's not, it's not reproducible. And I don't, I feel a lot of ambivalence about like, so how do you give advice to people if there's no path? And I think that some of that ambivalence for me also stems from the fact that like out of college, I chose the path that I thought was reproducible, that seemed reproducible to me, which was to go to grad school and to become a professor. I was like, this is stable. This seems right. And I understand that craving to have a path laid ahead of you that like,

if I just do things right, I will land somewhere stable. But I just don't know how much of that even exists in a lot of industries anymore. Yeah. I mean, like you mentioned, even the world of academia, which seems to have like, okay, you take this step, then this step, then this step. But at the end of the day, the rule has still always been as much as people try and change it, publish or perish. And tenure track positions are largely, it's not what it used to be. So there is that precarity that follows you everywhere you go. No matter, even if there's a clear path, it doesn't mean that you're going to proceed along it. Right. And I think a lot of the advice, I think this is changing actually, but the advice over the last 15 years, if you have

someone who went through a job market and went through academia during an incredibly different time, then their advice is not, you know, it's not this, it doesn't work, right? Like the advice that I got from my professors about how grad school would work for me by the time I was in school, that was no longer the case. But, you know. I was finishing up my PhD in the aftermath of the Great Recession. It dramatically changed the landscape of what academia could do and what the prospects were. You know, I sometimes think of it as like a ladder, right? You have this ladder that's set before you. And then like when you get on the ladder, suddenly that rung falls as soon as you put any pressure on it.

And then like a whole side of the ladder falls off. You're trying to get up. And yeah, maybe one person gets to the top of the ladder, but everyone else is just... Yeah. It's such an interesting point though, that people who climb that ladder, like a generation earlier when it was really stable, their only perspective when you ask them for advice, like, how did you get where you are as well? Like it was pretty straightforward for me. I'm actually thinking of my dad, as you were mentioning that my dad had one job his entire life. He was a professor and he ran a lab, you know? So he put in his time, he was tenured. And then for like 30, 40 years after that, he just showed up and ran his experiments with his grad students.

And he was the happiest guy on the planet. And it was such a profoundly different world than it is now. Yeah, totally. And I think that it takes a lot of intention and cultivated empathy to try and figure out how things have changed and to advise people differently. And a lot of successful professors don't necessarily have that skill set, right? We haven't, that's not been something that they've had to cultivate necessarily. And so the advice stayed the same for a very long time. But like I said earlier, I think that that is changing now because like the reality of

the market is just such that like you, you can't deny it anymore. But I mean, it's a real, you have, you have a student come to you or you have, you know, even outside of academia, you have a person come to you and say, I want to be like you. What a compliment, right? And so of course people are going to, their first reaction is going to be, let me try to help you be like me. And sometimes there's not a ton of reflection on the fact that that path that allowed you to be like you is no longer there. Yeah. Timing, I think is, and timing and just unique circumstance are just that they're so often not really factored into that dynamic.

We get asked on a fairly regular basis also in the podcast space or like, how do we build something similar? And honestly, I'm like, I don't have a lot of really good advice. Totally. Because you blink and it's like the landscape is profoundly different than it was three months ago. We've just been in it for so long that we sort of like, the biggest thing is we just haven't quit. Totally. Sometimes I think about that with writing too. Like, oh, how did you get where you are? Like, I just kept writing when, even when it was bad, even when it was hard, you know, and I don't think that makes me a better person in any way. It makes me a stubborn person. now. And this is something that we're seeing on such a wide scale now. And we're seeing these huge shifts. The last couple of years in the world have changed the way we live, changed the way we relate, changed the way we work in really, really major ways. And now we're seeing these numbers all over the media for the last four months to quote great resignation. Numbers just came out

for November, 4.5 million people left their jobs, which is the numbers growing every month, which is kind of mind boggling. And you've gone deep into what is actually happening in the world of work. What was happening before these times that was so dysfunctional and what's happening now and what can we learn from that? I'd love to dive into sort of like those buckets because I think it makes sense to actually talk about before times because what's happening now, my sense is the bandaid has been ripped off, but the wound was festering for decades before that. So tell me more about sort of like what you saw happening in the traditional workplace that led to this moment. So first of all, you're totally right that like, this isn't something that has simply happened over the course of the last two years. I think like so many things to do with the pandemic,

it has accelerated decisions and situations and problems that were already in place. I was listening to this really great episode of Ezra Klein's podcaster earlier this month about the incidence of gun violence in cities, right? And how everything to do with what's going on with gun violence in cities, it has nothing like, to do with what's going on with gun violence in cities, it has nothing, like, it's not really pandemic related. It is an acceleration of processes that were already in place. It doesn't even have very much to do or anything to do actually with like campaigns to defund or reduce funding to the police. Like it is all about these, gun violence is connected to precarity. Gun violence is connected to these situations of, of economic and societal woe. And it doesn't have to do with like reductions

in police budget. So along those lines, I think what happened in the workplace is that we have had a lot of people who, especially I think millennials and young Gen Xers, who may do with working conditions that were really crappy and toxic and demoralizing for a long time because a lot of these workers have a form of PTSD from the Great Recession, and that they internalize the idea that you should work any job that is available to you, and you should be grateful for that job. And so what I think happened is that people found themselves in jobs that they felt scared to leave, or they felt like they were in some sort of job lock, like they didn't have significant savings. They were dependent on health insurance

to have it for their family or for just for themselves. There were different things that were keeping in jobs that they didn't like. And then how different organizations showed their true colors over the course of the pandemic as is made it so that they either leave industries altogether. And I think this is what you're seeing en masse in retail and in hospitality, or they've just like shown that they don't actually care about their workers or care about mothers or care about flexibility or care about caregivers in some capacity. Or I think in some situations, it's like when you're dating someone and you go through something really horrible and sometimes it brings you closer together, but sometimes you're like, I can't

be with that person anymore. There's too much trauma in this relationship and like no amount of therapy is going to fix it. And the only way to start over again is to quit and find a new job. So I think all three of those things are happening. I'm really interested to see the numbers at the end of this year in schools with educators, because I think what we have there is a real mix of people who are like, OK, the pandemic is ending.

I can make it through one more year. And then this year has been really, really hard. And what you see there is a form of burnout, plus what is often called like educational demoralization, which is like you cannot. It's not even that you personally can't find the resources to to do your job well or to do it in a way that is fulfilling or adequate. It's that the resources aren't available on a structural level to do your job well anymore. And so it feels like a completely hopeless task to continue with that work. So I think we're going to see more teachers who are actually throwing in the towel in terms of like, I can't do this for the rest of my life. I need to find a different career or early retirement.

Yeah. Which is, I mean, absolutely tragic to think that a job that should be so valued and so treasured and so well rewarded might be one of the hardest ones to retain great people who just want to do good work. And I agree. I think Q1 of 2022 is going to be more decimation than the last two quarters. And I think we're going to see it across all different industries. I mean, and there are a whole lot of industries that have actually bizarrely done really, really well over the last year where the salary is bonus driven. And when those things come in at the end of the year, traditionally in those industries in finance, people would wait and then they would tap out after that. They would wait till the check cleared. This year, I think it's going to be really fascinating to see the patterns emerge over the first quarter. And I think we're nowhere close to being done with this pattern.

Yeah. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. And so much, it's interesting that you brought up the Great Recession also. So we're talking like 2008 to 2010-ish. What started out as tremendous pain for corporations, the way that you're framing it, it almost emerges into a weird permission to continue a toxic productivity work culture knowing that people are less likely to leave at this point if they have something. Is that take on what you were saying right? Yeah. And I don't know how conscious the corporations were of doing this.

Yeah. Right? So I think about like digital media that started in the early 2010s and was able to succeed in part because like so much of the online journalism landscape had been decimated and they were able to find people who were willing to work for nothing right they're like yes pay me twenty five thousand dollars to live in new york city and create content for your website every day which is something that buzzfeed actually did with fellows like which are their form of interns and they just these companies places like buzz, but other companies as well, became dependent upon that form of labor.

And then when they had like you burn out your employees, so many of the people that were creating what I think of as like vintage BuzzFeed content. So this moment in 2004, when I started, when like there was still like lots of lists, right, it was before like BuzzFeed became so much more videos and tasty and that sort of thing. And the first quizzes that just went like wildfire on the internet. Those people don't work in media anymore. They have burned out of journalism specifically, or like working in media and have found jobs that are more sustainable. And so if a company is dependent upon this like continual churn of people willing to work for very little and to dedicate their entire lives to producing, it's, I mean, maybe it's a sustainable model

if you just always have a crop of 23 year olds who are willing to do this sort of work. But then you have people who stay with the company and are like, oh, let's form a union. I mean, there's a reason why BuzzFeed's union still has not come to an agreement, right? It's because the corporation is like, oh, well, this is unsustainable for us to have labor that has a say, right? To have labor that has any sort of control over their working conditions. And I also think that this next generation, there are some people who want to work, who want to have a millennial work ethic, for lack of a better phrase. But there are a lot

of Gen Zers who are like, no, screw this, right? Like, I don't want to, like, I'm worth more than this, or I want to figure out a way to live in a sustainable way. And I think that is connected to these larger questions of like, oh, if the planet is dying, do I want to run myself into the ground in the service of this corporation? Is that something that I'm really interested in? These kind of larger existential questions that are, I think, shadowing a lot of decisions that are being made right now. Yeah. I feel like meaning and purpose are being returned to the conversation in a way that they haven't been a part of it, except for like your fringe outliers who people just thought, well, oh,

they're just going through an existential crisis, you know? But now it's all, it's like, oh, we're actually all going through an existential crisis right now. So it's like, it's become a part, it's become a normalized part of the conversation in a way that I don't remember it ever being, which I actually think is a really good thing at the end of the day. Have you seen The Graduate? Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah. So you know the part when he's like, yeah, it was plastics. And then also like Say Anything when Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack is like, I don't want to like buy anything made or sold. I don't want to sell anything. So these questions have recurred over time and they should be familiar to boomers and to Gen Xers. And I think it's important to

remember that like work is the way that we work is not natural. There is nothing natural about it. We naturalize it to so that people don't question the way that we work. But like every generation is like, huh, maybe there's a different way of conceiving of our labor. And I think that right now with these larger, these different paradigms available in terms of like, oh, what about UBI? Like what if automation allows us to have UBI? You know, what happens when we tax the super rich? Like how does that change our society? Or even just looking at having much more access to different visions in different countries, right? Which I think, you know, in the 1960s, it was like either you're America or you're the Soviets. Like if you were watching The Graduate, you didn't have a lot of other visions open to you in terms of like what

is accessible. So I just think that people are questioning the status quo in a way that is important and generative and we shouldn't dismiss. Yeah. And I think also, and I'm curious where you land on this, and you write about this a lot, especially in the new book, technology plays a really interesting role. And it's fresh in my mind because as we're having this conversation, the week is the week where the death of the BlackBerry was announced. And I remember where I was when I got my first BlackBerry. And I remember pulling this thing out of my pocket and seeing that somebody had emailed me don't want anyone to know. And there was the automatic little thing that got appended to every email you sent from it that says, send from Jonathan's Blackberry. I'm like, I don't want people to know I have this.

That was back in the day when there wasn't an automatic assumption that if somebody sent you an email, you would get it within 10 seconds. You know, that was obliterated within the following years. It's this really interesting moment because I'm thinking back then, I'm thinking now, like the company that set that entire trend in motion is now basically over. But, you know, now the tradition has just become so baked into our psyche, into our culture, into the assumptions about availability and the complete annihilation of boundaries driven by technology that, you know, this is another moment where we get to rethink that. Yeah. And it's necessary too, right? Like the subtitle of our book is the big problem and bigger promise of working from home. And I think that is technology broadly, right? Like the big problem and bigger promise of being able to email from your phone as soon as you wake up in the morning, just like roll over and respond to emails.

You know, there are definitely benefits of that in terms of the ability to work remotely for a certain section of the economy. And then there's also the ability for work to become part of every single moment of your life. Work is so slippery and without discipline, it can invade every single part of your life and really become the primary access if it wasn't already for everything that your life rotates around. And I think that like it's sometimes hard to think of working from home or like a remote work or even how we work now as a discrete skill that we need to work at. And that is the biggest thing, like as we've been having these conversations with people who are

like, tell us the tips and tricks of working from home. Like, and all those things came out in the early pandemic too. They were like, get this chair and find a discrete workplace and all those sorts of things. And like all of those tips and tricks are helpful. But at the same time, the big thing is thinking about how you or how your larger organization can come up with larger structures that make it so that work isn't expected and demanded at all times of the day. Yeah. I mean, I think that's so much of the call to

action right now. It's like we found ourselves two years ago, dropped into this moment where everything that we knew was turned upside down. Again, there were a lot of issues, a lot of cult of efficiency, toxic productivity, technology-driven work-life bleed, expectations that you were always available. That's not new. Yeah. But then when we get into like, okay, so what does that look like when now we're literally, we can sit in bed and do everything that we're doing without ever leaving the bed. Not that I'm advocating for that. I mean, I'm sitting in the bed. This is where I podcast from is from the bedroom because it's the best sound.

And after six years with a studio in New York, I happen to be recording in our bedroom right now. So what does that say about this conversation in general? Yeah. But so everything is turned upside down right now. And all the issues that were there before just get massively exacerbated. But at the same time, like you said, there's this great opportunity to – okay. So we went through the disruption and we went through a lot of pain. And now I think we're in this window where we're like, okay, if this is part

of the new normal moving forward, like what does that actually look like? And as you write, it's interesting because some people are trying to make a mad dash back to how do we recreate what it used to be, but in a remote environment, that's not something that you advocate for. Yeah. That's silly. Why would you do that? You know, it's like if someone's making an iPhone and they said, how could we recreate or like the next iPhone? And they say, how can we recreate the BlackBerry, but on this new iPhone, right? Like, no, you want to think about what do we actually want this phone to be able to do? Like, how do we want it to be a step forward? How do we want it to match with what people actually need?

And maybe how do we allow this phone to redefine how we think of what a phone can do, right? Or how we think about how access can work. And I think you see this, like, even with, I'm extending this metaphor here, but like, you know how a couple of years ago, the iPhone, instead of continually getting bigger, because it had been getting bigger and bigger and bigger, they're like, what if we make it smaller again? Right. And that was responding to this idea of like, oh, maybe people don't actually want their phone to continually get larger to the, to the point that they have like a laptop next to their faces, they actually want something that fits what they need, what the utility is, like what their demands

are. And rethinking our ethos of expansion is really important. So with work, you can kind of map that metaphor on and be like, okay, what if instead of trying to recreate this old thing only with everyone in their homes, what if we rethink about how the rhythms of our day work? What if we rethink how we communicate with each other? What our priorities are? Like even how we are organized as an organization and how teams work and how management works. it's an incredible opportunity. And I have seen some companies that are really taking that opportunity. And I think they are the ones that feel most vibrant and are attracting great talent. And then I've seen companies that

are like, we're going back into the office. You can work from home on Wednesdays from 11 to 1, like giving that small concession of you can work from home sometimes. And I think that they are going to have to catch up in 10 years when some consultant is like, yeah, you've been left in the dust. You need to catch up with all of these other people. But instead, they're dragging their feet when they could be figuring it out now. Yeah. It's like the innovator's dilemma, except most of the companies that are wanting to go back to the way it was, they weren't actually the innovators. They're the stalwarts that had so much power. They feel like they can just demand. We're ready to go back to the way things

are. So we're going to proclaim everybody else is too. And I agree with you. I think it may work for the very short term, but I actually don't even think it will. But then five, 10 years from now, it's going to be a disaster because everyone's going to leave. Let's talk about some sacred cows. Let's get a little bit specific here. So the nine to five work week, my understanding of this is it was actually never supposed to last this long in the first place. And now we're like completely reexamining this. Talk to me more about that. So first of all, the vast majority of people who worked a nine to five work week,

at least in office work and quote unquote knowledge work, which is a term I dislike, they weren't working a nine to five, right? They might've been in the office from nine to five, but then they would go home or before work or on their way to work, deal with emails, take calls. In a lot of cases, they had meetings from nine to five in the office and then they would do their actual work in the after hours. So it was not a nine to five in the first place. Work had expanded past that. point out, like, our understanding of how long the work week should be has long been in flux. And it has expanded and contracted over the period of hundreds of years. You know, it used to, when we were a much more agrarian society, work like you would work all the time during the summer and

then the spring, and then you would have much more fallow periods of rest and rejuvenation in the fall and the winter. And when we became more industrialized, it was like, let's put people in factories every day, all day. And the labor movement helped push to try to rest back some of that time. And even the eight hour workday was the result of real cultivated, concerted work on the part of labor movement for the saying was, you know, eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will. This like incredible idea of like, you could have eight hours for what you will, you know, which seems so, so foreign to us now. But over the course of the 20th century, there was a push to even decrease it even more. And

there were great, you know, incredible examples of that working very well. Kellogg's, which has been on strike for a while now, it's actually a really interesting example of a place that had successfully instituted a much shorter workday for much of the middle of the century. And it doesn't have to, like, there's nothing natural about working five days a week, working four days a week, working nine hours a week, working nine hours a day, working eight hours a day. There are all sorts of industries where people don't work those hours in any capacity. And I think that thinking about the ways in which we can restructure our days and our weeks is really interesting. And I've seen really old fuddy-duddy industries successfully

integrate a four-day week. And I've seen tech companies do it really successfully as well. So it's not even about like, oh, do you work primarily in the cloud and are you globally distributed? Then maybe you can do a four-day work week. It's more, do you have the openness to experiment with this, to even reconsider what a work week might look like? Yeah. It's interesting, right? Because I think what was underneath the nine to five day was a certain amount of distrust. Like if you're not actually in this place and working for this number of hours, the work that needs to get done won't get done. And now I think that has been blown up, but not entirely. There are still, I think,

and you write about this, right? There are people that are really saying, let's take this time to run a bunch of experiments. Maybe a shorter day works. Maybe just letting people work whenever they need to work, four days a week, as long as they get the work done, is it going to work? But then others are taking the exact opposite approach and saying, well, okay, we didn't trust people when they were in the office. Now we really don't trust them because they're in their home. So let's put in surveillance. Let's micromanage. It's interesting to see these diametrically opposite responses to the moment. is that like if you if if your workers hate their work so much that you need to install surveillance software on their computers that tracks their eyeballs and like how often they click there's something going on in your industry right like you are you are paid like with your pay with the way that you treat your workers the messaging the way that you have made your work work,

like that's broken. The other thing I'll say, though, is that I think there are a lot of things in American society in particular that are set up to protect against the very small percentage of people who defraud the system. So if you look at something like disability or Medicaid or food stamps. Like all of these systems are set up so that they're very, very complicated and they're meant to protect against that small percentage of people who are looking to cheat the system.

Instead of how do we make the system easy so that the people who really need it can access it. And when you set up a system in order to protect against the smallest percentage instead of in a way that makes it easy for the large percentage to make it workable, then you are going to create these really hostile infrastructures of work. And so what I think we see with companies that are acting as if every employee is attempting to never work again, is they create that hostile sense.

Do you know, does this make sense what I'm trying to say? Like if you have a company who understands that the people who are there want to be there and want to do the best work they possibly can, but also want to have some sort of sense of balance in their life, you're going to engender a sense of trust and respect that you're going to get good work, right? Like if you just, that's a good, healthy culture, company culture. And if you come out of the new year with a policy that is set up with the understanding that every employee wants to never work ever, right? Just wants to like be, you know, the guys in office space all the time. There's like this weird

straw man of someone who never wants to work ever, then you're going to get more people who actually don't want to work ever. Like that posture creates people who are what you were envisioning with that posture. Does that all make sense? Yeah, no, it does. It's like you're, you're unwittingly reinforcing exactly what you don't want without realizing that's what you're doing. And you're attracting people who are willing to sort of live under that surveillance state. This goes all the way back to this is what you wrote about, right? The classic Chiat Day commercial in 1984 that launches Apple into the world with the person running down the aisle with the mallet throwing it into the screen

to knock out the Borg, which is like mind-numbing monotony. It's so interesting that that commercial that came out resonated so powerfully in 84. And the culture and the circumstances that engendered so much of the emotion behind it still exists to this day. And now it's been sort of like morphed into, well, how does this actually exist in the home environment? And then how can we actually recreate that dynamic in people's houses around the country and around the world? Totally. Yeah. And that's what's like, I mean, there are some jobs that are, as David Graeber would put it, bullshit jobs, right? Jobs that shouldn't be jobs, jobs that are so route, jobs that are part of the bloat of government or organizations that that shouldn't be jobs, jobs that are so route jobs that are part of

the bloat of government or organizations that like just shouldn't be there. And people really are doing nothing, but the vast majority of jobs, like, I don't, do you know anyone who like bullshits their job? I don't know a single person. Yeah. I, I, I personally don't think I do at least maybe they, maybe they do and they they do and I'm not aware of it. Yeah. It's just that people are so scared of this person. I don't know who they are. Yeah. It is really interesting. And it's like, we have this amazing opportunity to just reimagine what we're doing. In the context of when you think about, okay, so nine to five day, five days a week, classic stuff, making sure people

quote, get their work done. What do you, because you spent now a couple of years actually looking at what's happening in the marketplace. What are you kind of seeing as the best of class approach to this moment? I think figuring out what you want from your employees, what you expect, right? And communicating that and then empowering your employees to figure out the times and ways in which they get that done best. Almost all the time, they're going to overproduce in some way, right? Like that's just how a lot of employees

are. But if you have that very clear and they can figure out like, oh, I work so well in the early morning or I work so well between the hours of five and seven. Right. And I also work really well if I take three hours in the middle of the day to play with my dog and take a nap. But I give you the best product. Right. I give you the best deliverable. Who cares when they do that work, right? You can set up, depending on what your industry is, like you can set up times when you want people to be in synchronous availability, right? Like kind of like office hours of a couple hours a day, times when you need people to be available for meetings. But the rest of that work should be flexible to when people want to do it. But I also think if you put that in place, you have to protect against the person who is like, I'm going to

always overproduce by working all the time and they're going to burn themselves out. And then they're going to be your worst producer, right? Like that's the thing that I think oftentimes managers and organizations struggle to see is that if you're playing the short game of like, I'm going to get the best work out of this person for game of like, I'm going to get the best work out of this person for a year, and then I'm going to dispose of them. Well, fine. Okay. Maybe your industry is built on that model. I mean, consulting and finance certainly is to some extent, but it takes a lot of time and money and institutional loss to replace people. If you are losing them every year, every two years, every three years? Like what sort of

culture do you want to create where you keep those your best performers? And I'll use like a sports metaphor where it's like, do you want to spend the money to recruit people every year to your team and then like all of them get injured and put on the injured list and kicked off your team by the end of the year? Or do you want to spend the money to recruit people and then have them be a powerhouse on your team for like 10 years, 20 years? Who cares, right? What matters is that they're doing that good work. And to do that, you have to come up with sustainable models of work. Yeah. It's interesting that if anything, there was a reason for some level of surveillance, it's probably to protect against overwork rather than underwork. Totally.

Which is kind of counterintuitive, but actually when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, especially if you're somebody who's now given the freedom to work in a way where you actually enjoy what you're doing more. You can fit it into the windows where it's most enjoyable and most productive for you. There is that risk of losing the boundaries. It'll be really interesting to see who sort of like puts that in place. Yeah. And we talk about this a little bit in the book in form of, we use the metaphor of like a guardrail because boundaries, like boundaries are the responsibility of the individual and

people can always break those and other people can break them very easily. Guardrails are things that are structural to the organization. There are norms that are part of the company culture and it's not okay. It's actually not okay to break them. So that might mean we don't communicate with each other after 8 p.m. If that's your peak work time, great. We know how we have the technology to delay send emails and delay send slacks and that sort of thing. So we do not have communication that is incoming and causing stress to other people past a certain time of night or before a certain time in the morning or on weekends and that sort of thing, or even really firm understandings of what PTO looks like. And that's something that I think like people on the top of organizations, part of the reason they got promoted and on the top of organizations is because they work when they have PTO.

But that sets just like an incredibly poor example all the way down the organization. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. And you've used this word culture a number of times now. So in addition to just the basics, like how, what, when, and where do we work, that being completely reimagined, also the notion of culture is this is a really powerful opportunity to reimagine. Okay, so even if we felt like you had a very well-defined and established culture in pre-pandemic times, it makes a lot of sense to reexamine that now and also ask the question, how do you create culture when instead of everybody coming into a place, everybody is working around the world oftentimes. What is culture? Does it actually still matter at that point? And how do you create it? I mean, these are questions that I think a lot of people are asking right now, but I'm not seeing a lot of people figuring out.

I'm curious what your lens is on that. Well, culture, first of all, there's the culture that a company says about itself. Like every organization has an about page that's like, this is what we are and this is what matters. And it's like a bunch of business schools speak. And then there's the actual culture, which is what people gossip to you about what it's like to work at a place, right? It's a combination of truthful glass door reviews. And like if you talk if you're like, oh, I want to talk to someone who works at this company, it's a friend of a friend. And they actually give you the lowdown on like this is what's expected. That's culture. Right. Or this is how people react to requests for time off. This is how we treat moms. This is how we treat after flexible work, all that sort of thing. This is what it's like to be a person of color at this organization. And that's the sort of thing that is very difficult to change, especially without massive changes on the leadership level.

But it actually, there's like going remote or going flexible is a real opportunity to change some of those things. One thing that a lot of organizations and people who work in DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, have told me is like, you know, a lot of these companies, they appoint a DEI officer, and they're often one of the only senior people of color at the organization, and they just have to do all this labor, and then they burn out, and there's no actual change to the organization. It's bullshit. And I think that the biggest way that you change diversity, equity, and inclusion

at an organization is you hire diverse people at the top, at the executive and managerial level, first and foremost. But then also you just hire more of those people generally, right? And one way that you can do that, especially in metro areas that are generally more white, And one way that you can do that, especially in metro areas that are generally more white, is you hire people who can work remotely. But you have to be open to

that. And I think that that's something that some companies are coming to understand. Other companies are still very closed off towards it. And then to the second part of your question about you don't see a lot of companies figuring out how to build culture remotely. It's because a lot of companies have not put their flag in the ground about what they're going to be. They are still treading water of like, we're going back into the office in January. Nope, we're not going back to the office in January. They keep pushing the ball down the road thinking we're going to figure this out when we're back in the office, at least part-time. Part of me feels very strongly that this is actually the tail end of the

pandemic. And part of me is like, there's going to be something else. So either you figure out, you decide, okay, we are going to start figuring this out. What are we as a flexible or distributed company? Or you stay in this netherland of we're just not making any decisions about anything. Yeah. I mean, it'll be interesting to see because as leaders, you've got to have enough data now. It's been a couple of years to understand what's the effect been on performance, on burnout, on the humanity of the people that actually make this entity possible. And I have to imagine that a lot of that data is actually showing that after the first six months where it was just complete

mayhem and people were figuring out which way is up, that actually things have been going okay in a lot of ways and in a lot of ways better than they were before. So it's almost like even if you have the opportunity to say everybody back, even if we, quote, get out of this particular window that we're in, if you're somebody who's really interested in both ultimately the performance of an organization and the humanity, investing in the humanity of the people who make it possible, I have to imagine that even in that instance, there would be a lot of reason to say no to going back to fully in-person. But do you know what I think the resistance is?

Yeah, tell me. I think it's that managers and leaders, their skill, if they are good at their jobs, their skill is so contingent or honed through in-person interactions that they are much more eager to get back into like home field. Right. It's like, this is what I know. Yeah, totally. And I get that. Like, I am not that person, but I understand why they crave to be back in the office where they're like, this is where people know that I am good at my job. This is where I am affirmed that like, you are doing a good job like every day. You see me and I do a good job so I can see that desire.

But you got to get outside of that. Like it's not just about people thinking you're a good leader because you like are surveilling in the office every whatever thing is at the heart of your organization, then it's time to rethink how can we continue to do this in a way that that makes people comfortable? And the thing that I'm scared of, but that I think might happen is that people are going to say, OK, we don't need this office space anymore and that's going to save us ton of money. And that's going to be great for our bottom line. But then instead of diverting some of those savings into the cultivation of culture, whatever that means, or a periodic in-person interactions that are really essential, they're going to just like use that as pure profit, but it has to be funneled into some, like move that money to a different place. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And I wonder, I'm curious how you feel about this also. Like what I'm seeing is there was already, I think, especially Gen Z and that's really the younger part of the millennial generation, a much bigger push to acknowledge

that the human condition matters, that purpose and meaning matter. And leaders already were really struggling. Conversations I've had, I'm sure conversations you had, trying to understand how do we grapple with this because they didn't rise up with that ethos. They didn't have that same expectation. So like trying to figure out how to lead and interact with and support and, you know, like a generation that actually does have that expectation was already causing a ton of friction. And now when everybody at all levels, whether you're Gen Z, any part of the multi-generational millennial, ex-boomers, whatever it is, everyone's changing their expectations. It's almost like if you don't get skilled in how to understand how to not only lead right now differently, but also acknowledge that it is really important to invest in the humanity of the people that make our jobs possible, that make the organization possible. I can't see how you survive long-term. And maybe that's just me being polyamistic and like a little bit utopian because I want it to be that way. Like I want organizations to start

saying, yeah, this matters. But I feel like the money, which is always the bottom line, is pointing in that direction now also. The outcomes, the deliverables are starting to point in that direction also and saying, no, this matters. And the time is now. I think that with higher training jobs, again, I don't like saying higher skilled, but higher training jobs within Silicon Valley engineering, you know, tech stuff. I think that's what you're going to see, right? I think you're going to see

people gravitating towards those companies. And so you're going to have higher skill, higher retainment, all those sorts of things. But I think that with lower training jobs, like in Amazon warehouses, you're going to see the market, like, you know, Amazon is already paying their workers more in an attempt to lure them away from other lower paying industries. But I think the thing that you have to have in order to force companies who otherwise don't want to consider the humanity of their workers or whose business model is contingent on them not considering the humanity of their workers, is you have to have labor rights. And I think that right now in the United States in particular, our labor laws are written to protect an idea of labor from 1965. They have not been updated to

even conceive of things like independent contracting and like the massive subcontracting that that is part of every industry. So how do you empower? Because like that's the thing when we talk about like structures or guardrails that like protect workers from their companies, like part of it can happen from the benevolence of a good leader. But sometimes you need to have a larger structure in place. And the union is that structure. And I think unions can be really crappy and really protect the wrong people, but done right, a union can advocate for labor in those forms, in those places where you don't have a benevolent CEO, or you don't have a mindful leader who's trying to think about these things. And I think also what we're seeing now, right, is so many people who are just opting out.

They're saying, I'm done and I'm not coming back until you change your tune. Yep. And, you know, I think it's interesting that there's more information about who's actually doing that, that some of it are less trained or like workers. But it's also really interesting to see that a big percentage of people who are now opting out of the workforce are people who are just retiring early. Yeah. And not because they want to stop working.

It's just because they want to work on stuff that actually really matters to them. And the money isn't necessarily the thing that concerns them the most. Yeah. Well, and I think especially for, well, Derek Thompson had a post in the Atlantic before Christmas about looking at the numbers of people who were resigning. And it was very clarifying in terms of like, yeah, like all these numbers are very real. And as we knew, like most of it is happening in those less trained industries, but people are oftentimes getting different jobs, right?

So you have this big chunk of people who are retiring early, and then you have people who quit their jobs and maybe take a little while to reenter the workforce, but they're just reentering at different jobs. They're leaving industries that have been set up in a way that particularly under COVID conditions make work feel incredibly shitty. They're just like, so who, like, what are we, who's going to fill those jobs? This is an important question because I think especially something like childcare, which is a market failure, you have people like these daycare centers are all closing because they can't find workers who

are willing to work at the wages that are available given the rates that they can charge. It's because it's like capitalism can't fix this problem. So either we're not going to have daycare available, which is going to suck more people out of the workforce, or we have to think of a solution, which most experts in this field agree is figuring out how to fund childcare care, especially down to age two and three in a way that's much more like how we fund elementary school, right? Like you have to have some sort of federal intervention. But at least at this point, we're just like, oh, no one wants to work these jobs. Huh? Funny. I don't know what we're going to do. You know, or blaming blaming covid regulations on the fact that like your favorite restaurant is only open two days a week because they can't find anyone to staff it.

Or, you know, we're in Montana or I'm sure in Colorado, too, like during the summer, during tourist season, especially in these smaller kind of gateway wilderness gateway towns, they can't staff things because no one can afford to live there. And instead of thinking about like, oh, how have we failed to create affordable housing so that people who work in the service industry can afford to live here? They're like, oh, well, it's, you know, like this is the fault of the restaurant. This is the fault of people don't want to work, you know, all those different things all coming together. Yeah. I think it's all coming together in this perfect storm of both disruption and pain, but also possibility. For those who are willing to actually say, let me take on the work of wholesale re-imagining, which is a lot of work and a lot of pain of creative destruction along the way. But also I think it's kind of the future.

One of the other things that you talk about that I wanted to just dip into is the notion of community and how it has really been changed by this sort of like overnight, you know, like dispersion to remote workforce. Like so many people started out with a lot of their community being built around work and that being centered around like being at a place. And now that's totally changed. And you're not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. No. And now that's totally changed. And you're not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. No, I think this is hard sometimes to hear because a lot of people's friends and partners are people that they made during work. So the idea of not having that as a source of friendship and community can feel very

unmooring. But part of the reason that your primary friend source, primary socialization source, dating pool, whatever was work was because you weren't doing anything else but working. And it's important to note that a lot of companies do this purposefully. The idea of a campus is so that you will effectively live there. This is true, especially for tech organizations. Like, you know, when I worked at BuzzFeed, the reason they had snacks is so that you wouldn't leave, right? Like all of these different free lunch snacks, like ping pong tables, all this stuff. It's not so that the company is cool. It's so that you just work all the time.

Or even, you know, there's a great example of like finance firms who, if you stay to a certain time at night, then you get free dinner. And if you stay to another certain time at night, like I think it's 9 PM, then you get a black car home. And so of course you're going to stay, you get free dinner and then you get a black car home. And then because of that, you never have any groceries in your, in your fridge. So you never have dinner anyway. So you might as well stay and get the free dinner and hang out with your friends who are also there for the free dinner and do some more work and then just go home. But like when work itself is that primary access of your life, it's very hard to go to like spin away from that access to find any forms of community at all. You know, and most parents I know in particular feel like they

don't have time. They're like, I don't have time to volunteer. I couldn't take an hour out of my week to volunteer for anything that isn't to do with parenting specifically, like to do with my kids specifically. And that, I mean, that's significant, right? That people feel that they cannot allocate even one regular hour of their week to something that is not specifically oriented around their work or their family. That means that we have over indexed the importance of work in our life and forgotten the importance of community, which is our real safety net. Yeah. And we've just conflated community with work and kind of assumed that's the way it has to be. Like,

that's where we find it. Um, which, and I mean, you look at like, you know, like Robert Putnam's work and sort of like the demise of all of these like local organizations and associations and clubs and leagues and stuff like that. It's interesting in that a generation ago, it actually wasn't like that. We kind of feel like, oh, this is just all the way it's always been. No, but actually this is, this has been a pretty much an aberration. And again, there's this opportunity to kind of rethink it. Yeah. Yeah. So Putnam's first important book, he's a sociologist, is Bowling Alone, which was published in, I think, 2000, right around 2000. It was really a paradigm shift for a lot of thinkers in terms of like,

oh, this is what's happening in terms of our move away from collectivism, from being joiners. And I think if your parents, grandparents were in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, they certainly were parts of these groups in some capacity. My parents, even in the 1980s, were part of so many different things in our small town. And some of that was church related and some of it was very much not church related. You know, these are things like PEO, the Elks Club, like 4-H, all sorts of different things. And that's like the collectivist ethos has declined essentially, like the decline around 1960, actually, but was still very robust. But it just kept going down. And Putnam's most recent work, though, is called The Upswing.

And it's looking at what he sees as some very early signs that like we reached the bottom of our individualist uh turn and we've realized just how toxic and solitary and scary it is to be a nation of individualists and are returning to that desire for collectivism and i think you really see that in the desire for different new forms of community um and then also like mutual aid organizations that have really popped up in the wake of both the pandemic and Black Lives Matter. There is just a hunger for a different form of connection. And this is all intertwined with these attitudes towards work too, right? None of this is discreet.

So I want to come full circle in our conversation. When we started, actually, I don't remember whether this was on tape or right before we started recording but um you said let me take a second and um just turn off like my discord yeah um so for those who don't know discord is this platform where it's like really easy to sort of like set up a server and and have your own community and be interactive in that community and your discord your discord community is built around your sub stack which is for like your writing and your topics and conversations around all the, you know, everything in culture. Do you feel like, cause so now like you've created your own living, you get to write what you want to write. Now you also host your own discord, your own community based around that writing. Do you feel like you, like that has become

the central community in your life? Or is that still just, that's part of work and work is over here. And then I've got all this other really rich community over here. And that's really important too. So the first thing I'll say about the Discord is that like, I am the host, but I've really taken the posture of this is what everyone who's here wants to make it. So people make their own threads, like they figure out where it goes. And like, there is the overarching commonality amongst readers that like collectivism is where we're headed. Like we want to work towards that, be gentle with one another. Also like recognize all these forms of privilege that people have and like how we can decenter different things, you know, all those sorts. But I really think of myself as just part

of this community. And I do think it's one of one of my primary communities. I am slowly cultivating my community here on this island. You know, there's the people that I that I knew before moving here that that are the central of it.. And we are safety nets for one another. And then there's like all of the retired people next door who like I'm slowly becoming part of that community as well. You know, like you're like, oh, here's a sourdough starter or here's a space heater when your pipes froze last week, like all those sorts of things. And that, you know, that takes time. It takes patience and it takes like doing things that you don't always want to do. Like going there, you know, we have a community library and once a month they do weeding at the community

library. It's low key. It's not what people think of as like community, right? You just show up and you do the thing, but that's community, right? And that's the sort of thing that I'm also cultivating. But I, the discord is phenomenal. Like over, we do a mutual aid fund every quarter, essentially. And I will also say that like, there are lots of people on the discord that pay, right. That are members of my sub stack and pay $5 a month or $50 a year. But then I also offer a free subscription to anyone who is unemployed, underemployed, disabled, like just tell me that you need a subscription and we'll give it to you because we want to make that available. So for mutual aid, like we just have people who make requests through a forum. There's a committee of people. And I also did

not start this. This was completely organic to the community. They were like, let's create a forum and then let's do funding rounds and let's try to fund people. And we dispersed $10,000 worth of aid in this last quarter. And that is magnificent, right? That we were able to, you know, things like buying a wheelchair for someone's mom, helping forestall an eviction. Those things matter and they're part of community. And we are quote unquote strangers on the internet, but we can also cultivate this ethos of care. And I think that's important. I love that. Yeah. And I love how you've sort of like, it's like you're seeding these different communities in different ways. And I think the really big thing is that there's an intentionality behind it that isn't necessarily there when you just sort of opt into the old model of work where this just becomes the center of your life. And you don't realize you're actually opting into this also becoming the central source

of friendship and community and all this other stuff, whereas you're at a moment, and I think a lot of us now are in this moment where we have the opportunity to really examine this and say like, okay, I have more power to choose right now. Let me really look at what matters to me. Yeah. And there's a channel in the discord that's job hunting. And what it does is it helps people who are in that position of like, my job is grinding me into the ground, but I can't even think of what job searching would look like. Like most people are so scared of networking or if they've been in an industry for a long time, have no idea what it

would look like. And here's a community of people who can help you with like what it looks like to figure out which keywords to put in your LinkedIn, you know, those sorts of very basic things, but that really matter and are useful to people trying to make those changes in their lives. I love that. That's beautiful and a good place for us to come full circle in this conversation. So hanging out in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh, I think for me, it's to be able to balance the things that have no connection whatsoever to productivity or to even outcome. Like I'm a crap gardener, but I love it so much.

To me, the good life is that balance of doing those things and being part of this community of care for other people. And then also knowing that I can be rely on others for care as well. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you will also love the conversation we had with Charlie Gilkey about focusing on what matters in work and life. You'll find a link to Charlie's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights

to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. February 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary.