If I Speak - 03: The dating trap

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Is there such a thing as a sexual marketplace? Moya and Ash debate the dating trap for straight women and respond to a listener who’s too tired from work to change their life. Plus, a quick round of Shag, Marry, Kill. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to If I Speak, the show where we try and make ourselves feel better about our lives by talking about what's going on in yours. With me as always is my co-conspirator and co-host, Moya Lothian-McLean. Moya, how are you doing? In constant turmoil. I feel that week to week, you're going to go from like very stressed out, constant turmoil, in the pit, embracing oblivion, one with the void. I am concerned at what this podcast will reveal about how often I feel in crisis, but perhaps that's for the best and will require the services of a new therapist. Who knows? Well, maybe one day we can talk about the therapists who just perpetuate people being unbearable so they

need more therapy because that is a big theory that I will bring to you one day but for now the weather it's getting colder but our inboxes have been hotting up with your personal dilemmas so we'll be discussing whether it's possible to earn a living and pursue a fulfilling career simultaneously and whether Moya's been red pilled And if you want us to chew over some of your problems on a future podcast, do send us an email at ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. That's ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. But first, it's time for our traditional icebreaker. Moya, what have you got for me? Okay, just a reminder, this is 73 questions minus 70 that's some quick rishi sunak maths for you uh so i'm gonna ask you three questions ash okay first one what is the

worst fashion trend that you have enthusiastically participated in oh my god i've got so many bad fashion trends that i enthusiastically participated in um new rave hit me really hard it hit me like a truck so there was an awful lot of very cheap h&m neon going on I would also say at a period of time where um I uh thought that the best way to have a personality was to cut all my hair off no shade and dye it um absurd colors so it was like bright blue bright green bright pink um I just don't think that was very good this is really funny because when I was growing up I don't think I participated in as many fashion trends as I could have done because I didn't see myself represented in like the Kate Mosses kate bosworth's but i did have a lot of owl necklaces

from top shop i did participate in that trend um so i'm interested in whether the demographics of where we lived made it different for us that you went straight onto new rave i didn't touch emo for example emo was something i would that was removed from me anyway i'll move on to the next question um okay second question shag marry kill kirstarmer ed miller band jeremy corbin oh okay shag ed marry jezza kill starmer obviously shag ed you can you know like um i remember i remember once i was on a train with jeremy corbin after campaigning in the 2019 general election. And he was like, do you want to, do you want to see something that's very special to me? And I was like, of course I do. And he brought out a copy of like railways magazine in which there was a

double page feature about, um, you know, his and John McDonald's plans for the British railways. And that was the piece of media that he was most proud of having secured. And he made me put on my gloves before I touched it, like an archivist. It was so adorable. So I absolutely could not shag that man. No, Jeremy doing British Library. Oh, that's so adorable. Young John McDonald, howeverald however daily nightly and ever so rightly everyone says this about young john mcdonald i have a really terrible one that i would do that i don't think i can say because it's so bad but it's not labor go on no i can't

no you have to there were a former cabinet minister in the last year, and they have now vacated that position. Not under their own volition, I might add. Young Kwasi Kwarteng? Nope. Give you a clue. Justice. Young Dominic Raab?

Maybe even middle-aged Dominic Raab. Oh my god, Dominic Raab! Jesus Christ almighty. Thing is, I know what photo you're thinking of. It's the one with the thick thighs. No, it's just, I quite like the... Not that I like him, I just think it would probably be an incredible hate fuck.

I think that would be an... He's an angry man. Oh yeah, you'd come out of it concussed, you know? I don't want concussed but oh um but that's my that's my terrible I should take that to the grave information but if I had to out of every politician it would probably be him okay last question um what is your favorite place in London oh my favorite place in London um okay it's gonna have to be food oriented because I'm a deeply food oriented person okay all right I'm torn between two places one is a restaurant called Penang Sate it is in Haringey and I've been going there since

before I was born literally because my mom's pregnancy cravings would take her there. And it's a Malaysian place. And it opened up when my eldest cousin was born. And that's when my family started going there. And we've been going there ever since for special occasions. And so it's been really wonderful to sort of grow up with this restaurant. I remember when there was a little girl and she was a toddler. And she's now grown up into a teenager who, you know, works there to help out her mom. And it just feels so

ingrained with my sense of belonging that I just love it, love it, love it. Um, and a non food related one, Walthamstow wetlands, just a nice place to cycle around. And it makes me really happy to lounge around in the summer because you get this great vista of the canal and the train line and then the kind of Victorian buildings of Hackney behind it. You are North London to your core, I will give you that. Yeah, I told you, I've got a Palmer's Green tattoo on my ribs. That's how North London I am. I will have to be dead before i leave i think you've earned your place in what is it

highgate cemetery the cemetery where mark says you've earned your own mausoleum by not leaving north london that's a spotter um you know moribund way to end um so after that nice little memento mori yeah ask me ask me about my segment so we can stop thinking about your death yeah um because actually the next segment is intrusive thoughts so maybe it's gonna be like my intrusive thought is my own death so now if you're unfamiliar comes the part where we get to share what's been rattling around our skulls for the past week or two. Those intrusive thoughts that keep you up at night. The questions that haunt you in the shower.

The preoccupations that your friends just wish you'd drop. So, Moya, other than me dying, what's been on your mind? Me dying? Everyone else dying? No. So, as you may know, Ash, I am blissfully, wonderfully single. I do not wish to change this circumstance anytime soon. I do not wish to enter a monogamous relationship at least anytime soon. But I'm dating men. I date men.

And I have a gripe that I keep bringing up to the men that I date, which unfortunately, I'm starting to wonder, is it slightly fem cell? And this is the gripe. Straight men, the pool of straight men that are out there, the standards that they have to adhere to compared to the standards that women have to adhere to, or straight women, are so much lower. that women have to adhere to, or straight women, are so much lower. Which is also when I look at my queer male friends and how much better presented they are, how much more emotionally intelligent they are. I'm like, personally, I think that straight men, they get the sharpest end of the patriarchy. They have the least sort of level to live up to to so they can dress like shit and look like shit and be like shit and still find you know a partner who's probably had to work on themselves in more ways if they're dating women and what this has turned into in my in my sort of theory my argument and the intrusive thought i'm getting is i'll talk to men who are like conventionally handsome and they are all universally very troubled I've met a lot of like attractive funny men this this

since I've been single who don't possess nearly as many traits as I would say my women friends who are like the mirror images of them have and these men they're all like but if they are attractive and if they are funny and if they're like a bit intelligent then they can literally get any woman that they want so the thought i keep having is that aaron bastani said to me the other day you should be dating footballers and i was like you've vastly overestimated my pull but i also explained to him that i can't date footballers because even if he saw me as someone and I'm going to talk about hierarchies here and this is what makes me worry I'm becoming a fem cell the hierarchy is like even if you if I found a person who

on paper looked like they would be a match for me in terms of the qualities that we possess both physical and emotional intellectual if that was a straight man he would actually be brad pitt level in the dating market because that's such a rarity whereas all the straight women i know all the women i know in general actually have been forced in the words of elizabeth bennett or elizabeth bennett's mother or actually jane austen who's writing the words to be accomplished in you know a woman what is it i think it's a mr darcy says a woman is not accomplished unless she like speaks six languages and she plays the piano and she does all this and that and then um melissa then is like oh yeah how on earth do they fit all that in that time and it

makes fun of him but nowadays it's like a full a woman who's grown up to my age usually i would say possesses has been socialized to possess some degree of emotional intelligence uh has to groom has all these beauty standards to live up to probably developed quite quite a funny sense of humor is you know pretty intelligent that's all the women i know and men are just simply not held the same standards they don't go through the same sort of societal finishing school that we are forced through whether we like it or not and told that we have to live up to under sort of patriarchy and these standards but i know that the incels have an opposite argument to this which is that women they would say women like me can choose anyone they want but i'm saying straight men can choose anyone they want whereas i'm out here being

like there's a dearth there's a real dearth of people that I'd want to date and that's why I'm worried I'm becoming a fem cell okay um I'm gonna leave aside the question of whether you're becoming a fem cell for just one moment and I'm gonna start by saying I actually think both you and the incels are right but in different ways because it is just easier and if you look at the statistics which are released by the likes of tinder and hinge it is easier to be a heterosexual woman on those apps and find anyone to shag right the number of likes that a man has to dole out compared to a woman in order to get a match it's crazy right men are just playing the numbers game to just find anyone who is interested,

whereas women within that context do get to be more choosy. So this idea of women being more privileged within the sexual marketplace, heterosexual women being more privileged within the sexual marketplace, that drives a lot of this sort of manosphere resentment. It is correct. However, that's not what women are thinking and feeling when they're thinking about how to choose a sexual partner. The idea of like, okay, well, you physically conform to some of the basics needed to perform this act. That is not what we're thinking. It's about connection. It's about attraction. it's about safety how safe do you feel putting yourself in such an intimate setting with this man it's about um a form of

arousal which is born from circumstances and environment and it isn't just a very straightforward biological response that's there in front of you. And that makes it harder for women to find people that they want to have sex with. So it is easier for a woman compared to a straight man to find anyone to have sex with. It's harder for a straight woman to find someone to have sex with that she wants to have sex with. And that is why both of you are right. in terms of you know how do you stop bridging this gap between the genders and like finding some kind of mutual understanding something funny happened um recently well it wasn't funny actually it was it was it was really upsetting

which is a friend of mine uh ended up just just having his broken. And what was not funny, ha-ha, but interesting coming out of that is the ways in which that experience has kind of changed how he feels about dating and just changed what he's looking for. And in a way, some of what I would consider to be you know more stereotypically feminine is beginning to creep in with with how he's viewing the world so it's not just about getting out there and being like okay well how I get over this heartbreak is proving how

desirable I am by sleeping with loads of women he's like no actually what I'm really yearning for is connection and it's the loss of that connection which has really wounded me and it is a kind of connection which fits in with my life and all these other values and ways of having a relationship that I want that I'm really yearning for and so that's the nature of the heartbreak it's not the loss of anyone it's the loss of someone and the yearning to find a someone again. And that's not just within a traditional, you know, heteronormative, you know, monogamous setup is a someone which I think can exist in so many different constellations of relationships. So the question about whether or not you are a fem cell, I think that what defines an incel isn't the loneliness because I think the loneliness is

real and it's powerful and I think that whether you're a man or whether you're a woman whether you're queer whether you're straight so many of us can relate to that feeling of just I'm undesirable and I am there's something in me that makes me so easy to reject and I feel so lacking in that way and it's just there's this hole in the heart of me I don't think that that's what defines an incel because I think that that is part of the human condition and I think that it's something which is made worse by the age in which we live and the way in which connection can feel so precarious and so fleeting what defines an incel is the resentment so you take that feeling of woundedness and it curdles into hatred and it curdles into hatred of the very object of your desires and so if you're in this situation and obviously I don't want to speak for you and

human emotions are ugly as well they're not they're not just sort of nice and you can't just put it on a kind of like canvared Instagram quote like no sometimes we feel really ugly things but I would say you'd be on the road to you know being a fem cell if you are starting to resent men and resent men who you desire because of that feeling of being disadvantaged within the sexual marketplace do you know what's funny I used to resent men a lot more and now I just I read the world's change so now I feel I'm more I'm more empathetic with the position they're in and the sort of emotional castration that they undergo at a very young age and because i see within these men who i perceive having this sexual capital they're all really unhappy because a lot of them i met someone over summer who was

like really searching for someone i was not that someone and i never wanted to be that someone but they were opening up to me because we didn't have that kind of like you know intimate relationship it was very much just like a quick thing um and they'd been searching for a someone for years and years and years but they had absolutely no capacity emotional capacity or emotional self-awareness to do the kind of work that would be required for them to form that connection in the first place they they just didn't have it they didn't have the resources they knew that the way that they interacted with women was not fulfilling them that it was lacking and they were like looking for they were looking for a long-term relationship but in the words of uh big shack you don't have the facilities for that

big man they they just did not they did they weren't they wouldn't have been able to do that without some serious serious work um so what's funny is that i don't actually resent men and i also don't resent i don't i don't think i resent as much like not being able to be on a level with the people that i would think i'm on a level with and i i it's not making me question my own value it's more me thinking i have loads of value like i'm i'm a great person I think I think and I see that my friends like the love that we give each other it's all like you are so lovable you are so special to me and I'm special to you I just don't think a man is capable of recognizing my value in the way that the people that I love around me are and

I don't I don't actually have faith that that will ever change. And I've had it once, I've had people like recognise it before. And I think that might be enough for a lifetime. And I know that's really pessimistic and nihilistic, but the current moment, that's kind of my mindset that I can't bank on someone else recognising my value, I have to do it for myself. And I already have all these platonic deep loves where i get that from um so the sexual capital thing is more that there ain't enough people around to be going out here and boning maybe if i didn't say boning so much i would bone more um but there aren't enough people around yeah i mean maybe have you considered you know physician heal thyself uh please ash please

of course um please who do you think you're talking to but it's more it's more complaint that people seem to think that it would be easy for you know the women i know and me to be going out there and having the sort of i guess i guess post-feminist revolution there was this idea the post-se revolution, there was this idea that we were suddenly on a equal sexual playing field. And that everything had opened up and that we would be able to pursue relationships with equality and the dynamics which meant that we could actually come to them as straight women and, you know, I don't know, negotiate what we needed from them with someone in an equal space. And that's not what happens at all. And the power dynamics dynamics are really skewed and if you are meeting someone who you know you

find attractive and is on your level they're almost out of your level because as I said of the tiny tiny sort of like within the field they are they're such a rarefied breed that sadly they're elevated above but but you know something I think there's some stuff here which sounds a little bit mixed up to me if I may and I think that maybe something that'd be worth like drilling down into is when you're talking about sex what is it that you're talking about because one of the things that I definitely had to work out, particularly in my, you know, my like mid to late twenties, because I thought that there was sex and there was love and these things were different. And I always knew the difference between wanting one or wanting the other. And it turns out that there was lots of different kinds of sex,

as well as lots of different kinds of love. There's lots of different kinds of sex and sex with another person, even when you're with another person can be masturbation all right they are a means to an end and they can kind of be anyone and so you need some sort of you know basics of chemistry and like physical compatibility but then you're well away and then there's something which is I think a lot complex, and it's not necessarily leading you always towards love, but it's maybe about an experience of building something with someone else, very intense forms of connection. Something is being validated in you. You're validating something in someone else and you're sort of like building this little, you know, intimate world together. And that very much isn't masturbation right it very much does matter who that person is

and how they relate to you and how they see you and how they value you in the wider context of your humanity and so I think very often when we're talking about this stuff we often talk about sex as if it's perfectly obvious what we mean by it right and for some people they'll be talking about sex as that sort of it's a physical release and it's the thing that I want and that's all I'm looking for but there is a space between seeking out a relationship and just seeking of that physical release and it's like we don't have a language for that middle very complex infinitely rich world of sexual connection um and it it took me a while to work that out because

there were so many times again particularly in my mid-20s where I'd have sex with someone and I'd be like we're we're doing two different things here we're doing two different things here. We're seeking two different things here. We're in the same room and we're saying the same words. We're saying the same words about what it is we want, but we don't want the same thing at all. Yeah, no, I always, when I'm talking about sex, I think I'm inhabiting that liminal space because if I wanted to have sex,

I would just go out and have sex. That is, you know, this is the thing. I would just go and have sex. And yes, sometimes it is, I would like to just out and have sex that is you know this is the thing i would just go and have sex and yes sometimes it is i would like to just go and have sex but again the aesthetic standard is being presented some of you guys just need just come to the school i will i will give you some clothes i will give you a good haircut and you will be fine and maybe even a shower and then you will go onto the streets and you will enjoy yourself. But I'm talking more about having, I like to kind of connect with people. When I'm talking about sex, what I'm talking about really is, as you do point out,

what I'm looking for is sort of a slightly deeper connection with somebody who I can occasionally, you know, go out and have a conversation with and maybe use my art path sometimes. That would be my ideal setup I I think for me the act of sex I I I want to have sex with people when I enjoy them as people that's that's the thing I have to be interesting to me as people I have to feel there is some sort of not even common language but just a general interest in them as people i don't see people as flashbacks that's not something that turns me on um and not to be i'm sapiosexual like mark ronson said before he dated about 20 billion years funny how so crazy how all his like

sapiosexualness was just directed at really beautiful women as well wow um because obviously i don't think that's true but i want to be interested you as a person i want us to have some sort of uh emotional understanding that goes just slightly deeper than just me rub body against your body i want to have a bit of a laugh and then you can leave and go and do your thing and i'll even go and do my thing and we've had a good time and then we hang out again that's that is the ideal situation it's just difficult to find somebody who or some ones who kind of fit that 360 degree and when you you know I've met a lot of people who I've had like amazing emotional connection with not so much the physical attraction I've met people I've been physically

attracted to that there is just no emotional ground and it really dulls that physical attraction so I know that if I don't have that combination of traits it's it's really hard for me to want to do that um but I think for me I don't know I've just noticed I've talked to that combination of traits, it's really hard for me to want to do that. But I think for men, I don't know, I've just noticed, I've talked to a lot of men as well this summer about them feeling in sexual crisis because they know there's something wrong with the way they've been taught to approach sex

and understand sex and what sex means to them and also what sex will give them. This idea that having sex will fill some sort of void in them and it's not going to. Like you're looking for an emotional connection a lot of the time and and they're not even aware of it and they're like that's why the post-nut clarity is so harsh and so stark and why a lot of them want to peel out of there because they're like this person hasn't actually completed me just by the act of you know orgasm um and i've talked to them a lot about the sexual crisis so i know

they're feeling it too i just don't think the language is there with straight men to start even interrogating that and understanding how to address that and until that happens i just i also i also don't think that my predicament as it were which is neither unique um nor even that serious like i have an amazing life is going to be resolved because it will take a huge revolution in the way that we think about masculinity constructing masculinity particularly heterosexual masculinity um to to sort of boil it up and in the meantime i can't resent them there's no point resenting them because it's what it is and if i resent them i'm wasting a lot of energy but i am i am lamenting that it's difficult this is the youngest and hottest I will ever be. And it feels like a waste that I don't get to use that more. That's all I'll say.

Also, it's just not true. Like this idea of like youngest and hottest being terms that are interchangeable, not true at all. Right. I have scaled the peaks of 30. I have scaled the peaks of 30. And let me tell you what life is like on the other side. It's great. It is really, really great. There is a level of self-knowledge and self-possession that I have now, which I certainly didn't have in my mid to late twenties. There is a comfort with both who I am and who I will never be, which I did not have in my mid to late twenties. And there is an ability to interact with people, interact with men in a way which is just so much less anxious now than it was in my mid to late 20s and so all of those things in my view add up to increased hotness and I think that this is also the thing about the way in which we're set up to think about sexual and romantic connection is that we're made to feel like mayflies right like you're only alive for three days and if you don't get it all out of your system and do it all by your 20s then like you're dead and that's it but that's that's not true I have heard it rumored that people even in their 40s have sex sometimes Moya I will more on this story as we get

it um but I think that part of why we feel that way about our 20s and part of why I think these things feel so urgent and why feeling disempowered in the sexual marketplace feels so bad is because that is the coercive stick to try and just make you like fling yourself at like other human beings and like establish a unit. Like regardless of whether or not that makes you happy regardless of whether or not that's the relationship format that works for you and I think that when you go actually there isn't a rush here and actually the things that I want are valuable and I should guard and protect and honor them by not just you know settling for something less than I want um I think that it takes some of that anxiety well this is the thing Ash I am I am not anxious about this I don't want to get married I don't want to have children none of the normal pressures on me are there I actually love aging I think I was you know butters both physically and emotionally

just two years ago I think I'm marinating know, butters both physically and emotionally just two years ago. I think I'm marinating like a fine wine. The problem is that my counterparts who I'm meant to be interacting with romantically are not marinating like a fine wine. They're aging like a rotten tomato because they're just sinking further into like these patterns and habits and reinforced warped emotional expressions. So it's not that I'm scared of aging it's the more knowledge I get the more self-possessed I get the happier I am in myself the more I feel like myself feel like I am the person that I am if that makes sense like you look in the mirror like that's me rather than looking in the mirror thinking that's not who I want to be that's not who I am

the more I get all that the harder it is to settle even in small encounters for something that is unfulfilling and someone who just isn't able to communicate with me on the same level that I am with both my friends and other loved ones and doesn't have you know that level of even emotional comprehension or that level of and I'm not being like I'm the best person in the world because that's not true this is this is a basic gripe that lots of my friends have i think the more you know yourself the more settled you're in self the more revealed it is that straight men are kind of in crisis and they aren't settled in themselves and they don't have anyone to pull them out we have to move on but i want to come back to this another week because

i think that there are some pretty fundamental ways in which I disagree with you um not about the crisis of straight men but but what to do about it is where I fundamentally disagree anyway enough of our problems and neuroses and on to yours so we entreated you to send us your dilemmas and just a, you can do that by emailing if I speak at navarramedia.com. And yeah, let's go through one, maybe two, if we have time. So this was a dilemma, which really stood out to me because I know we talk an awful lot about relationships and friendships, but a huge portion of our lives is work and the ways in which our identity is tied up with work. So here we have a dilemma. Dear If I Speak, I have a degree and need to find a graduate job,

but I also need to work full-time to sustain a living. But working as a chef full-time is so exhausting that I'm too tired to apply for jobs. What should I do? I mean, this sort of reminds me a little bit of what happened to me when I finished uni. So I finished my master's and I just really didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to use what I'd studied, which was English literature, but it's not as if the world is full of jobs leaping out at you being like, hey, do you want to analyze some Chaucer? And I was torn. I was thinking, well, do I want to go back and do a PhD um that was the first time that I ever did anything for Navarra Media I came on a podcast to talk about the Baltimore uprisings and the rest is history and now I'm here forever um I feel like

I'm serving out a contract that I signed with Satan um but what what that taught me is that that time of just allowing myself to work doing something that I quite enjoyed I really liked working in a pub it's very social um just doing that for quite a while allowed me to really get a sense of what was important to me I realized that I didn't want to go into the academy because communicating with lots of people was more important to me than specializing in something to like a molecular level. And I worked out that my politics was so important to me that I would have to be integrated into whatever job that I did. And I wanted space to take thinking very, very seriously. I applied for an editorial internship somewhere I

didn't get it I was utterly crushed that I didn't get it um but it really was a period of two years of just going how am I going to work out what it is I want to do now I don't know if our person who sent in the dilemma knows what kind of graduate job that they want to do or not um but I guess I would say that maybe being a full-time chef is one of those jobs that makes it really difficult to think about what else you might want to do because being a chef is so totalizing and so demanding I know that because I watched the bear um Moya what do you think it's difficult because what speaks to me here is the pessimism i think a lot of young people nowadays are suffering from a lack of hope that wasn't even

present when we were younger so even you know five six years ago when did i leave university i left university in 2016 and And I was very lost and thinking, you know, what am I going to do now? What am I going to do now? But there wasn't the same pressing feeling of a lack of options. And even if, you know, I do think that options have contracted for young people these days, I think it is even harder materially to make your way through this world. You know, inflation has gone up, the cost of living has gone up, being an adult is so much more expensive, especially a single adult, let's not play about that. But what's overwhelming is the feeling of having no options. And that can be as paralyzing as well as the actual lack of options, because you don't feel like there's any

way out of something. You don't feel like you can do something and that in the first place causes you to despair and give up it's the same thing we see with politics people disengage from politics because they don't feel there's anything anything's ever going to change and therefore nothing's going to change because people have disengaged from politics so this feeling of what i'm getting from this rather than the sort of practical advice is this feeling of catch 22 i want to apply for jobs but I can never apply for jobs because I'm too exhausted and I have to keep working I have to keep working and I definitely was have been in that place myself I think it's in line kind of what you were saying to address this even in the first place you have to just do it bit by bit you have to accept that this is not going to be an overnight shift.

I've got a friend, a really beloved, treasured friend, who at the start of the year said, I want to go and work in a particular section of hospitality. I have no idea how I'm going to do it. I currently work in administration, in the corporate world. I don't know how I'll be able to ever do this because it will, you know, it costs money that I don't have. It will mean a serious pay cut. It's changing jobs completely. Guess what? She just got her first full-time job in the line of work that she wanted to do. And she did this through bit by bit building up. So first of all all she went and at her weekends this thing she

had to put extra effort she had to put extra time and that's the problem you might not even feel that you have that in the first place but she she took she took time at the weekends to go and work in hospitality so it's actually the reverse of sort of this person's thing because they're in hospitality and they don't want to work in it in the same way but she took she took time to go and work in hospitality uh so she built up the start of that. She got trained in... It's wine, basically, she wants to go into. She's going to wine. And she did her learning certificate in wine.

This took months and months and months. And then she started doing interviews for these jobs, other jobs. And now she's bagged a job at this really cool wine place and is also going to be working with part of their office. So she's doing both sides it took a year to make that transition she'll change her financial circumstances as well so there's a real sacrifice to be made I would say practically in this dilemma you're going to have to take time off from being a chef every now and then so this is what's going to be hard you're going to have

to take a day off and in that day off you're going to have to use that to apply for jobs and if you apply for four jobs that day that's still grounds made the first step is feeling like you're actually doing something that motivates you to keep at it and you have to take it these tiny small achievable steps set realistic goals rather than this big vague amorphous I want to be over here I don't know how nophous, I want to be over here, I don't know how. No, your goal is I want to apply for two jobs on Saturday in my time off. I want to apply for one job on Monday on my day off. Those have to be your first things. You have to chip away at problems like this and realise it will take a while. Those are my advice. But I think the sense of pessimism is also something that you're going to have to address as well because when you feel despair

it might have perfectly legitimate grounds but that despair will stop you from doing from getting where you want to be as well I also think that there is a sort of bigger backdrop question here which is what sort of jobs do we feel like we should have either because that's what we've trained for and that's what we've trained for and that's what we did our degree in, or because there's some kind of expectation that we've developed within ourselves, or we're getting externally

about this is the kind of job that you should have. And now I'm saying this as someone who derives an awful lot of their identity from their job. Perhaps I derive too much of my identity from my job. But I've got friends who don't. I mean, one of my identity from my job um but I've got friends who don't I mean you know one of my best friends in the entire world she would list so many aspects of her life that reflect a part of who she is before she even got to her job and just the balance the EQ levels are somewhere else now I think that that's possible when the job that you're not deriving

your identity from, you're deriving like a decent amount of money from. And the thing which is really shit is that that is an option which is increasingly difficult for people to attain. There aren't very many of those jobs. And the promise of you go to university and then you end up with a pay packet that reflects all that time that you spent studying or that debt you accrued studying that's completely broken now and so I think that the pessimism and that feeling of real disorientation it comes from something which is society-wide it isn't just impacting you and I think that the practical advice that Moy has offered about change a little bit at a time is

the only way you can possibly navigate those circumstances the change has to be iterative because it has to be manageable for you it has to be something which is financially viable for you and also I think at the same time this isn't a and you have to do it to be a well-rounded human being but I think you have to do it in order to survive, is that you've got to share this experience emotionally with the people around you. You can't internalize it and feel that this is indicative of your own failure or your own bad choices. It's not. It's a reflection of the society that you're in. And you're only going to get through it if you can rely on people and if you can share this with people and you've got friendships which can nourish you during this time which feels very confusing because it is very confusing and it is very difficult um we have

i'm afraid come to our time one day we'll realize our ambition of doing more than one dilemma but unfortunately it is not today i don't think we should do more than one dilemma because i think that then we can give our very best richest advice and our whole as my mother used to say more you half-assed jobs well as an adult I whole ass jobs and I want to whole ass the job of giving advice we will whole ass your dilemmas maybe that should be our new tagline moya thank you so much as ever it has been a delight and we'll continue this disagreement next time yes please i don't do therapy at the moment so i need this podcast and yeah i can i can deliver my gripe with therapists another day but this has been if i speak you've been listening to Navara Media. Thank you.