The Liz Moody Podcast - Why We Have No Work/Life Balance + How To Fix It

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Simone Stolzoff, author and workplace expert, discusses the many ways work has taken on an outsized role in our lives, what it’s costing us, and exactly how to fix it. 3 science-backed ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty  How to overcome burnout Why people in the US care more about work and work way harder than people in other countries What we can learn from other countries about work/life balance (and how to actually apply those learnings in the US) Exactly what to do if you’re a writer, teacher, zookeeper, or any other job that’s societally lauded but not paid accordingly  How to work less without worrying about losing your job How to know if you should make your passion your job  Why time sanctuaries will make you more productive + way happier Secrets to WAY more workplace satisfaction, whether you work for a company or yourself And so much more For more from Simone, you can find him on Instagram at @thepizza_bagel or his website www.simonestolzoff.com. The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work is available where books are sold. To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order my new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  This episode is sponsored by: Puori: go to puori.com/LIZMOODY and use promo code LIZMOODY for 20% sitewide. YNAB: go to www.YNAB.com/LizMoody to get one month free. Cymbiotika: use code LIZMOODY on cymbiotika.com to get 15% off plus free shipping on subscription orders. Pique: go to piquelife.com/LIZMOODY for 15% off plus a special gift. BON CHARGE: visit boncharge.com and use promo code LIZMOODY to get 15% off, plus free shipping and a 12-month warranty. Previous episodes referred to in this episode: The Science Of Cravings + 3 Steps to Break Unwanted Habits with Dr. Jud Brewer Neuroscience Hacks For Creating Your Dream Life with Dr. Tara Swart Bieber How To Eliminate Bloat & Constipation (+ SIBO, IBS, Parasites, Period Poops & More) with Tamara Duker Freuman, MS, RD, CDN The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning the science of cravings and how to break unwanted habits, discovering neuroscience hacks for manifesting our dream lives, or uncovering secrets for getting rid of bloat and constipation. And yes, those are all real episodes, and they are linked in the show notes if you want to listen.

Today's episode is going to make you completely rethink. the place that work occupies in your life. I have been thinking about it a lot since we recorded, especially what Simone says about work occupy not only our best hours, but our best energy, too. I am all for loving our jobs. I think it's incredibly important since we spend so many of our waking hours at work. But also, I think in today's world, we often prioritize our jobs to the detriment of the rest of our identities, the rest of our relationships, the rest of our lives. And that is not ideal. My guest today, Simone Stolesoff, is an author, journalist, and workplace expert who's been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,

the Atlantic, and many other publications. He's the author of the brilliant book, The Good Enough Job. And in this episode, he's going to help us identify the many ways that work has taken on an outsized role in our lives, what it's costing us, and exactly how to fix it. We get into three science-backed ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, how to overcome burnout, white people in the U.S. care more about work and work way harder than people in other countries, what we can learn from other countries about work-life balance, and how to actually apply those learnings in the U.S. without having to pick up your entire life and move to Italy. Exactly what to do if you are a writer, a teacher, a zookeeper, or any other job that societally lauded but not paid accordingly.

How to work less without worrying about losing your job or making your boss angry. How to know if you should make your passion your job. Why time sanctuaries will make you more productive and way happier. Secrets to way more workplace satisfaction, whether you work for a company or yourself, and so much more. If you feel like you are stuck in a cycle of getting ready for work, going to work, and then recovering from work, just to do it all over again, this episode is going to offer you an antidote to that, a way to live a far richer and more satisfying life. I always love hearing what you think about episode, so please share and tag us on Instagram.

I am at Liz Moody and Simone is at the pizza underscore bagel. Okay, let's get right into it with Simone Stolesoff. Simone, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm curious, what are you working on right now and what's your relationship with work right now? You just finished this huge project. You put it out in the world. I know that comes with all sorts of mixed feelings as a person who's just gone through that myself. So I'm curious where you're at right now. Yeah. Well, there's a period right after the book came out where I was working on chilling. There was this great irony that I was writing this book about Americans' relationship to work and how work has come to be. a large portion of our identities and our senses of meaning and the sort of double-edged

shored. And I was just quitting my job to work on a big personal project for the first time. And it was this question of me, how do I practice what I preach? And so the first thing is, after some of the promotion of the book, I decided to take a month off, do nothing. I was actually in southern Italy where my family is from. And having that kind of structural barrier to prevent me from overworking. It was really nice. And now we're almost a year after launch, and I'm working on book two, which is exciting. I'm still sort of working out the mouth feel of calling myself an author, but I'm writing a book about uncertainty and how to get better at dealing with what we don't know, which is related to work in people's careers in the past few years, definitely, but also

feels like a big new challenge for me. I literally have written down as a podcast topic I'm looking for a guest for how to become better at dealing with uncertainty. Well, that's talking to hear. What prompted the interest in uncertainty? You say it's connected with this work relationship. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that was really beneficial of having a book out in the world is it spurred and catalyzed all these conversations where people wanted to tell me about their jobs and the things that they're going through. And one thing I heard from a lot of workers was, you know, I feel pretty good right now, but I'm not sure if I should be worrying more. There's this AI thing.

I'm also worried about climate change. There are all these existential threats to my life that makes me feel like the world in 10 years might not be recognizable. And then also at a very personal level, I think I have a lot of friends in my life that are dealing with personal and interpersonal uncertainties, whether to get married, whether to move,

whether to change course or stick to it. And there was sort of a question about whether I wanted to write another book that was work-related or work-adjacent, or I wanted to do something that was more of an idea book or more broad. And I went for the latter. So the truth is that I am uncertain about exactly what the book will hold, and maybe that's fitting for the topic. Have you learned anything about uncertainty yet that has struck your interest or you think it's worth sharing? Yeah. The general argument of the book is that certainty is very psychologically comforting. We all like to feel like we know exactly when the market is going to crash or exactly how the relationship is going to end and look into our crystal balls and be able to see the future.

And the truth is none of us actually have crystal balls. And uncertainty is really the base case for living. If we want to more gracefully adapt to the future, whatever it may hold, that would benefit all of us to become more comfortable with uncertainty. And so the book in many ways is a way to increase our uncertainty tolerance. just yesterday I was having a conversation with a researcher, and she was saying that when you're feeling kind of anxiety or worry about uncertainty, she recommends you do three things. One is to talk to that worry, so to try and see what it might be telling you. Maybe you're anxious about throwing out your back because you have had bad posture recently,

or you're anxious about your career because you haven't had a clear conversation with your manager about where exactly you stand. The second is to think about what are the things you are certain about. So she called them sort of certainty anchors. And I think one thing that increases our ability to tolerate uncertainty in some facets of our life is if we are really sure about the things that we are certain about and other facets of our life. And the third thing was to think about how you might be able to find flow states, one of the biggest antidotes to the anxiety and worry that comes.

from uncertainty is not having other places for our minds or our attention to go. And so she did a lot of researcher in COVID, and she found, for example, that people that were really entrenched in different activities were able to pass the time of quarantine much better. She did a great research study of people who were waiting to get test results back. And if they were playing a game of Tetris that was calibrated to the right level of challenge, they were able to pass the time with much more ease. And so those are some kind of snippet tidbits of what is to come.

hopefully I'll have a lot better answers for you in a few months. Yeah, we'll have you back for sure. That's so interesting. The flow state thing, too, even the calibration, we talked about in another podcast how to experience flow, something can't be too easy, but it also can't be too challenging. And often when we're not experiencing flow, it's because something's falling towards easy or too hard. Exactly. Yeah, and that's exactly what she was testing. So she would give these participants three different levels of Tetris. One was too challenging, one was too easy, and one was just right. And I think the same can be said for any sort of activity. when it comes to rest, bringing it back to the work conversation. I think a lot of people are talking

about burnout right now, and there are really different types of burnout. There's the burnout that comes from taking on too many things. There's the burnout that comes from misalignment between what you're doing, what your values are. And then I think there's a third type of burnout which comes from not being able to recharge or to rest properly. And no offense to Netflix, but a lot of us have this inclination who just want to turn our brains off and when we're not working to find activities where we don't enough to think at all. But the research finds that when we have activities that challenge our competency that are that right level of effort, it actually enables us to be able to recharge in a more generative way. What are some of those activities? So, for example, right now, me and my wife

are learning how to salsa dance. And it's nice to be back in like a beginner's mentality of something that we're not good at, and also something that we can improve at that is challenging us. It's an active form of rest. And there are other elements to it that are really nice. There's a community element of it. There's an identity element of it. One of the main arguments that I'm making in the book is one of the downsides of overindexing or conflating our identity with our work self is that it can neglect other parts of who we are. And so now, in addition to just seeing myself as a writer, I can see myself as an amateur salsa dancer or as a neighbor or as a volunteer at my local yoga studio, which is another thing that I've started doing recently.

I love that. My last thought on the uncertainty thing is I've been thinking a lot about how much my need for certainty keeps me trapped even in negative situations. I would rather be in a situation that has been uncomfortable for me for years and years and years than face the unknown and face the uncertainty. And I think that applies in work. I think that applies in life. And I'm very curious to dive more into that.

Yeah, two research studies that back that up. One was about electric shocks. And so these researchers gave participants the option to have a certain electric shock or a variable electric shock where they weren't sure whether they were going to get shocked or not. And the majority of people chose a certain bad outcome. Another is of breast cancer patients. So these are people who had received their first round of testing, but hadn't received the results yet.

And they're in this uncertain waiting period. And they interviewed them then, and they interviewed them at the end of the breast cancer journey after chemo, after surgeries, after all the recovery. And the vast majority of them said that the hardest part of the whole process was the waiting, was getting the biopsy and not knowing whether it was going to be malign or benign. I think it shows this natural tendency that we have to cling to certainty,

to want to know the future, even if it might be a bad outcome. come over embracing the unknown, embracing the possibility that might come on the other side. Which I love the three tips that you shared in light of that. How has your relationship with work differed in times where you're working for yourself, working on these things that would be considered more passion-based work projects versus when you've worked for external companies? Yeah, the majority of my career, I've had sort of a meandering career. I worked in advertising for a few years. I worked in tech. I worked in journalism. I worked in design. I was sort of playing Goldilocks trying to find that perfect job. And for a long time, I thought that the problem

was the culture of the companies that I worked for. I thought my tendency to overwork, to open the laptop on weekends was a result of the manager I had or the type of culture at the company I was at. And then I stopped working for other people and started working for myself. And I found that I was the worst manager that I've ever had. I think this is a probably familiar experience for people that have worked for themselves or worked on creative projects. It was harder to find those lines between when I was on and off the clock. There would be days where I didn't reach my writing goal or I didn't get as much done as I thought I would, which would push me to maybe overwork or work on the weekends, even though I vowed not to. And slowly but surely, I've been able to nudge myself

towards setting better boundaries and having a little bit more clear delineation between when I'm working and when I'm not working. But I think one of the problems with modern knowledge work is that it's incredibly leaky when we're all carrying around the offices in our pockets in the form of our phones, it's easy to swipe down and always be back at the office in just a moment's notice. And so one of the things that I found in working for myself is I've tried to create better structural barriers where working is not an option. One of the benefits of, say, going for a run or going to a yoga class is that you can't multitask while you're doing that. You can't be like a shark sleeping with one eye open on Slack or on your email.

It forces you to really be present with what you're doing, which goes back to that form of rest, of really being able to engage in an activity that is challenging you that you have to be present with, which is the best antidote to overwork. I have that conversation with my community all the time because I think there's a idea that it's cheating or that you failed in some way, if you have to physically put yourself in a situation where you are removed, from your phone to not want to be on your phone, to not want to be checking your email or checking social media or whatever that draw is for you. And I don't feel like it's cheating.

I feel like it's just like these things are designed to be so addictive. Culture has steeped us in it so much that it makes sense that we need that physical barrier in a way. But I do think there's a struggle with feeling like a failure. Yeah, I think presence is better protected by structural means as opposed to intentions. I think this is true at the individual level. and at the institutional level. We can all have an intention to practice self-care or to set better boundaries or to work less.

But unless those things are structurally built into our calendars that are structurally built into having your phone on airplane mode, or at the organizational level, having, say, mandatory minimum vacation requirements that require people to be offline or to have clear communication processes around how people are delivering, different types of work and what are the expectations around when people are expected to be available,

all of those individual intentions and personally imposed boundaries will crumble under the forces of the structural pressures that we all live underneath. And so that's something that I always tell managers that I talk to is the more explicit you can be about when people are supposed to be on the clock and off the clock, the better. At the company level, it really trickles down from the top. And unless the leaders or the managers are trying to model the type of culture they hope to create, it's just going to trickle down to everyone else. I remember talking to this journalist for this book, this woman, Megan Greenwell, who used to be the executive editor at Wired. And she said that when she first started the job, she wanted to be always available for her employees. So that little green icon

that showed her availability on Slack was always on. And she thought she was being a generous manager. She thought it was a way of showing her employees that she really cared and her door was already open. And she learned from her employees that because she was always on, they felt the expectation that they had to be on as well. And as opposed to feeling like a generous benefit or a way for the managers to be taking care of their team, it actually turned into this expectation that the employees were always on as well. And so I'd like to think about ways in which you might be doing that in your own life. what are ways in which you're fooling yourself into thinking that you are being productive by always being half on when in fact you're robbing yourself of the ability to fully recharge?

It's so interesting, especially in the idea of working for yourself and when you are your own manager or even if you're working for another company, but what are the ways in which we're doing that to ourselves versus the ways in which our companies are doing that to us? Like what are the ways that I'm making myself feel like I always need to be on? What are the ways that I'm making myself feel like I should always be a very important? For me, checking my email constantly is a huge thing and the idea that I need to answer an email simply because it's been sent to me. Yeah, I mean, I think there's the business case and then there's the moral case. I think the business case is that if you're on hour 11 of a 12 hour day or you've worked six weeks in a row without taking any time off or you're answering an email when you're half distracted and half watching whatever show you're watching on TV, you're not actually doing your best work.

you would be better off really being fully off when you're off and being fully on when you're on. But then there's the moral case, too, about the way in which it robs you of being able to be present with the people that are around you or the way to really engage in that book that you're reading in a way that will bring meaning to your life. And so I think both are true. You can think about it from a business perspective of, okay, it's much better if I'm devoting my attention to one proverbial tab at a time. But you could also think about it from a moral perspective and, okay, if I'm able to fully clock out, then I'm able to be a better parent, a better friend, a better neighbor, or just better to myself. And the older I get, the more I think I'm realizing

that happiness or a feeling of being content is literally just a result of being as present in every single moment as you can possibly be. Yeah, amen to that. And I think about that in the work context a lot because right now with our always on culture, it's very easy for work to be our sole identity or our sole source of meaning because it's the sole thing that we're consistently devoting our energy and our time to. It's something that I don't think people talk about enough is the way in which our jobs often don't just take our best hours, but our best energy too. And our identities, they're sort of like plants. You know, they need time and attention in order to grow. You want to be involved in your community. You have to devote your energy towards your community.

If you want to be a good friend and derive meaning from being a good friend, then you have to devote energy towards your friendships and your relationships. And so one piece of advice that I give people who are trying to diversify their identity, you know, much as an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolios, we too benefit from diversifying in the sources of meaning and identity in our lives, is to find other containers. Work can definitely be one container that has one value systems, certain metrics that matter. But to think about what are other containers in your life that might hold other versions of yourself. So, for example, I love to play pickup basketball. One of the benefits of pickup basketball is that no one cares how many

books I've sold that week or how many words I've written. What they care about is that I show up on time. I'm a good passer that I box out when I rebound. And I encourage people to find more communities in their life that could really care less about what they do to make money. I want to sit on that for a second. And then we'll roll back and define the problem in a greater way and a more nuanced way. But the energy thing I think is really interesting. First of all, you said if we're not devoting this energy to these identities, we're not going to feel attached to them. And I think that's a really important point to pull out because if I'm sitting here right now and I've devoted all of my energy and all of my identity to work and then I'm like, well, okay, I'm listening to this podcast. I guess I'll start an herb garden. My immediate reaction is like, why? Like, that's not appealing to me. I'm not really an herb gardener. Like there's no productivity there. What's the reason for it? Whatever. And I feel like you're saying that's because I haven't invested my energy yet in that identity.

Exactly. Yeah. There's an analog to work as well. So many people are told to follow their passion, and that's not very actionable advice. And the advice of some mentors of mine, like Cal Newport, say, you know, first devote the effort and then the passion will follow. It tends to be a result of hard work as opposed to the precursor. And so when people get up at college graduation and they say, you know, follow your passion or do what you love, that's the only way to do great work. I think a better piece of advice is to build skills, is to develop community, to be able to be so good they can't ignore you in the words of one of Cal's early books. And it's through that effort, then the passion will follow. It's often a result, not a precursor, to being able to work hard. Which means you shouldn't stress out and berate yourself if it feels almost a little false at first or if you're like, I don't even know if I like herb gardening. Is salsa dancing silly?

Like it's okay to feel that tentativeness at first? Yeah, definitely. And then with time, it will become a perpetuating cycle where you devote more time to it, you get better at it, you build community around it. It becomes more meaningful to you. How then do we know where to start? Like how did you and your wife decide on salsa dancing? How would I decide if I'm literally starting from nothing?

I'm like, I want to build an identity for myself outside of work. How do I know where to begin? I think there's a lot of places to start. One is just thinking about what you like to do as a child, as a kid. One of the great things about these hobbies is that they are grounded in play. I think one of the antidotes to overwork or this feeling that we always have to be working towards some end in the future is to try and connect with intrinsic motivation. What are the things that you like doing just for the inherent act of doing them? maybe as a kid you love to draw, maybe as a kid you love to play pick up sports. That's one place to start.

But another place to start is with what is accessible to you. Are there things in your neighborhood? Are there things that your friends are already doing that you can add on to? And it's through that investment that you'll be able to calibrate whether it's something you want to continue to do. I remember interviewing this psychologist for the book, and she sees a lot of type A kind of overachievers and she says, you know, what are ways in which you're investing in your non-work self? And all of these professionals would say things like, hmm, okay, I've got it. I'm going to sign up for an Iron Man or I'm going to read 52 books this year.

And in some ways, they're turning their leisure into another quantified form of work. And so what I would say is you start small. It almost doesn't matter exactly what that activity is, as long as it's something that you can be fully present with. And it's through that presence where you'll be able to figure out what are the elements of it that you might want to continue doing and what are the elements that you might want to pivot or change. I love that. And then the other thing you said is we're devoting our best energy to our work. And I think I'd love to talk about how we can move away from that in a pragmatic sense when you have to wake up, you get ready, and then you have to be at work,

you have to clock in, and then by the time you get off work, often you are exhausted. So where are you getting this other energy to devote to your other identities? Yeah, I want to first copy out by saying it is dependent on what phase of you are in life. If you are raising little kids or you're caring for an older family member, you might not have as much free time available to be able to take up salsa dancing or go play, pick up basketball, basketball. But at the same time, I don't think these investments in our non-work selves have to be very big. Esther Perel has this great line where she says that too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home. I think these identities don't have to be

an Etsy crafter or a baker on the side or the host of a wine club. They can be small. They can be the identities of being a present partner or of being a generous friend. friend or being someone who is engaged in your local community. And those investments can manifest in very small ways. If we want to diversify our identities, there's two steps. The first is to carve out time where working is not an option to find little pockets in your days, in your weeks, in your months where you are vowing not to work. And the second is choosing how to fill that time. I think there are a lot of ways in which you can make the habit more lasting. whether it's having community that is reinforcing that identity that you hold,

whether it's having an accountability partner that's also on that journey to say, go for a run with you. But there's this line from an old professor I had, and he said, show me your calendar and I'll show you what you value. And unless we are putting our values into action, unless we are carving out time for those identities that we say that we want to embody, there will always be deprioritized.

in the face of the larger economic forces I'd play. I love that. I have a tip about that in my book. If you want to prioritize in your life going for a walk with your partner, put that in your calendar because we put all these other things in our calendar. And then, of course, the things we don't put in, get shoved into the little spaces that we have left over. Amen. Do you think another part of the energy conversation is putting less energy into our jobs?

Yeah. It's something that I've thought about a lot. You know, the title of the book is the good enough job reclaiming life from work. And just on title alone, you might read it and think, oh, this is a slacker manifesto or this is a way to phone it in. And that's not what I argue at all. I believe that when we are at work, it's important to be present at work. I think there's nothing wrong with deriving identity or meaning from a job. I just think it becomes dangerous when it is the sole source of identity or meaning that you're getting in your life.

And so when I think about what it means to have a good enough job, I think about it as a job that it lets you be the type of person that you want to be. It's intentionally subjective and a little vague. You know, for one person, it might be a job that makes a certain amount of money. For someone else, it might be a job that has a certain job title or is in a certain industry. And for a third person, it might be a job that lets them get off at 3 o'clock to pick up their kids from school. But whatever your definition of good enough is, I hope people recognize when, you're going to be a job. they had it. Because the alternative is that work is just like a gas. It kind of expands into all of the open space that we allot for it. And unless we are being intentional about putting stakes in the

ground, then we can find ourselves working all the time without anything else. And in the book, you tell all of these stories of different people and their experiences with their jobs. I'm curious in those stories and in your own experience, have there been a aha moments that you could share or ways that they recognized when it was the good enough job and they should pull back and not get sucked into this foreverness of work? Yeah, I think one is related to your previous question, which is that on one side of the spectrum, you are making decisions solely based on what the market values. I'm thinking about this one Wall Street banker that I profiled. That was your typical, ambitious professional. He got really good grades in high school so he can get into a top college. In

college, he asked himself, you know, what are the most lucrative career paths that can be a doctor or a lawyer, an engineer, or a banker. He chose banking. He went to work on Wall Street. He quickly worked his way up the ladder and became one of the youngest ever managing directors at Black Rock's history. And then him and his girlfriend at the time were preparing to go to a friend of his wedding. and he was brushing his hair in the mirror and a chunk of his hair fell out. And he later found out it was due to stress-related alopecia. And he was a guy who had all of the makings for on-paper success. He had a great job title.

He had a great income. He owned his own apartment in New York City. And yet he was so stressed out that his hair was literally falling out. I think that represents one end of the spectrum. people who are just making decisions based on what the market values without considering what they themselves value. I think we all can see the trap that this provides. If you're working your way up a ladder that you don't actually want to be on,

or if you're playing a career game that you don't actually hope to win. But one of the things that I found in the reporting was I think there's a lot of risk on the other side of the spectrum too. People who are just considering what they value without considering what the market values. So, for example, I think of someone who might take on a lot of student debt to pursue a graduate degree that might not actually lead to stable job prospects on the other side. Or your friend that decides to leave their job and go all in to pursue music, but they become so preoccupied with how they're going to make rent that they can actually focus on the art that they hope to create. And so what I advocate for is more of a middle path. How can you take what the world values in one hand, what you yourself value in the other hand, and try and pursue a career that sits at their intersection?

It's less about villainizing or lionizing work. I think right now in these cultural conversations we're having about the great resignation and quite quitting, it's really easy to pull to one side of the argument and say, this is what I believe. But in actuality, what we do for work matters. You know, how we spend those hours matter. What I hope people take away is that it's important to invest in other things so that they can matter in your life as well. So, yes, people are quiet quitting.

Yes, there's a great resignation of those things. But in general, on a societal level, you would say we are probably over-investing in work in general. I'd say yes. I think there are fewer sources of meaning and identity outside of work that are giving people a sense of who they are. You look at trends in, say, organized religion in the last 40 or 50 years. And without these things like a church or like a neighborhood and community group, people have turned toward the place where they spend the majority of their time, which is the office. They're also political and economic factors. You know, one of the reason why our relationship to work is so fraught here in the United States is because the consequences of losing work are so dire when, for example, our health care is to work.

tied to employment for the majority of Americans, or if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country is tied to your employment. I also think there's social factors. We live in a culture that loves to idolize work. We plaster always do what you love on the walls of our co-working spaces. We treat CEOs like celebrities. And there is this very real sense that if I haven't found my dream job, if I haven't found my passion, maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe it's some sort of moral failing on my behalf. And I'm reminded of this conversation that I had with a mentor of mine when I was a senior in college. I studied poetry and economics, and you can already see a little bit of attention there. And I was interviewing this guy, Anise Mojgani, he's the current poet laureate

of the state of Oregon. And I asked Anise, you know, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love, and never work a day in your life? And I'll never forget what he said. I was expecting him to give me this roaring pep talk about following my passion and going out and becoming a poet. And he said, you know, Simone, some people do what they love for work. Others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working, and neither is more noble. And so I think as a society, we've gotten to the place where we love to idolize people whose jobs and their identities neatly align, the entrepreneur, the podcaster, the painter,

astronaut. And here was my professional idol, a professional poet, no less, telling me maybe it's okay for your job to be more of a means to an end. And so that's what I'm arguing for. It's an attempt to rebalance the scales. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like, if it's off-gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life, and most conventional mattresses are loaded with synthetic foams, flame retardants, microplastics, and more. Plus, if it's not comfy, you're going to be tossing and turning, you're going to be really hot, and sleep is the foundation of health. It is so important. Because of all of this, if I were not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. And in fact, I have four years well before I had much money to spend on any of these things because it is such a big needle mover.

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I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that, like, sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on. This does not do that. But it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger.

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and every time we go to a dinner party, every time we introduce ourselves to a new person, they're like, oh my gosh, tell me about your work. It's so cool. And you have to step out of that. If you're choosing a different path, you're constantly having to reinforce for yourself something that societal messaging is not lining up with.

Definitely, especially here in the United States. I remember once asking this Chilean guy, at what he did. And he said, you mean for work? He looked at me like I was asking for a social security number. And I think it's easy to assume that because productivity and workism is sort of in the air that we breathe here in the U.S., that this is true around the world. One of the inspiring factors for the book for me is my family is from southern Italy. They have a very different value system. Maybe first is faith and then family and then maybe work is there somewhere. But in the United States, you know, we wear our job titles and our careers like enamel pins on our jackets.

Not only do we ask people at dinner parties, what do they do. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up from a very early age. And so it does require a little bit of pushing back. It requires you to maybe find some communities, like I mentioned, where what you do for work is not the first question that people ask. And it requires us to change part of the cultural conversation. One thing that I've been doing recently that I found to be a bit of a hack is instead of asking people what do they do, asking what do you like to do? And just by inserting those two little words, it allows people to define themselves on their own terms, to think about, you know, how do I want to show up in this situation? And maybe my job isn't the most interesting or the most

representative factor of who I am. I tried that recently. And the person was, hadn't done anything enjoyable in their lives lately because we do live in this workism culture and you could see them trying to like pick through their brain and they were like gosh i don't know like i don't have anything for you and i felt like i put them on the spot well maybe that was a wake-up call for them maybe that was a catalyst that will inspire them to find an identity outside of what they do for work i think there's a sort of intellectual argument that we're having right now but there's also a very practical side of it and one that people saw during the pandemic, which is that your job might not always be there. If you identify first and foremost via your job title or via some company that you

work at and you lose your job, maybe do a factor that is not in your control, it can really be destabilizing. So that's one. There's another about neglecting other parts of who we are. Certainly we are all more than just workers. We are neighbors. We are citizens. We are fresh pasta makers, what have you. And then the third is just a matter of expectations. The expectations argument is that if you are always expecting work to be a dream, if you are always expecting to do what you love, it can create a lot of room for disappointment. You often think about happiness is sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality. I think part of what this culture of, of workism has created is this expectation that we all should be doing what we love at all moments

of the day. Not only does it ignore the tedium and monotony that exist in every single line of work, but it is just an unreachable standard to hold as a society. And often that standard can be used to exploit workers. There's this concept I write about in the book called vocational awe. And it's the idea that in certain careers, in certain lines of work, particularly creative or mission-driven types of work, things like education or healthcare, or even creative pursuits like being a writer, the sort of halo effect, the awe that the industry itself has can be used to cover up a lot of the exploitation that exists within it. When we treat passion or love for your work as a stand-in for fair pay or fair compensation, it makes us think that some of these issues that people are having in the workplace are individual,

when in actuality they're structural. We're seeing the pushback against this. In L.A., for example, the writer's strike, or my wife is an elementary school teacher. During the pandemic, it was as if people were talking about two sides of their mouth. They would say, oh, my God, you're doing God's work. You know, you're an essential worker and make do with what you have. And I think what we're seeing on a societal level is workers start to understand that it's not just me. It's not me that's feeling exploited.

I don't have to make this tradeoff between doing work that I love and work that can be fairly compensated or where I have job security. I think that's where the movement towards collective organizing and some of this unionization is coming from. Okay, I want to dig into vocational on a second because like when the Amazon wish list for teachers roll around and I'm like, okay, yes, I'll give you money for your wish list. But also it is crazy that this exists. Like it is crazy that you are having to fundraise to get the supplies you need to teach our future. Like what? The cognitive dissonance there is just insane to me. Same with GoFundMe's. I have such an issue with GoFundMe's. Like I'll donate to them. But I'm like, you realize these don't exist in many, many countries. in the world because they have health care for everybody. You don't need a go fund me because you've experienced a health crisis because we shouldn't need a go fund me when you've experienced a health crisis. I think it's a natural extension of late stage capitalism. It's creating a private market solution to try and protect our basic human needs. And I think slowly but surely people are waking up to the fact that something's got to give. This is not how society that thinks about the

benefit for all should be functioning. Okay. So we'll come around back to that. But I I just want to, before we get too far from it, dig in briefly to the thing you said about we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up because the first time I heard you say that, it blew my mind. Like I had never thought about the fact that we were saying like, oh, what do you want to be when you grew up? And they're like, oh, I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a firefighter.

I want to be a teacher. We're literally indoctrinating from the very first thoughts that children are having that what they do is who they are. Yeah. It's insane. It starts young. And I don't think it's malicious in any way. No, I don't think anyone is twirling their thumbs and saying,

okay, we're going to try and entwine identity and meaning because then we can get more out of workers without having to pay them more. I think it's just part of the culture. And I think what we're trying to ask when we ask children those questions are what are you interested in? What are your hobbies? What things make you, you? But I think the problem is that when we entwine identity and career,

the two can become enmeshed. You know, similar, there's this concept in sex. psychology of enmeshment where maybe you and your mom can't make decisions without first consulting each other or you and your partner become enmeshed and it's hard to individuate. The same thing can happen with our careers. We can become enmeshed with our job or our job title or our employer. And I've spoken to so many workers in the past few years that thought, you know, the way I showed up in the world was first and foremost as a Googler. And then after 15 years of working for this company, they laid me off. You really feel it in your body. It feels like a gut punch to think that,

oh, I've given this employer, all of my loyalty, and this is what they've given me in return. But at the end of the day, employers will always prioritize their bottom line above their employees. And I don't think this is necessarily a huge revelation, but slowly but surely people are having a wake-up call to maybe my relationship to work is more transactional than I thought. Employers will hire employees when they add value and fire employees when they don't. I would encourage employees to think more transactional as well and to think, okay, what is this job giving me? What am I getting from it? And if the contract is not in your favor, think about potentially making a change. It's so interesting. I've experienced that from such a personal perspective where from my earliest age, I was like, I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer.

and then I experience all of these ups and downs with it. And it's so interesting because now I'm in a pretty successful phase of my career. But I've had crises even around that, around who am I if all I'm getting rewarded for societally is my professional success? Would people love me without it? Do I have worth without it? And so it's negative if it's not working for you all the years I was trying to publish books and I was like, I'm nothing if I can't publish these books.

But now I'm publishing books and they're doing it. well. And I'm like, well, if that's the reason that I'm getting accolades, if that's the reason people love me, is that all that I am too? Yeah, it's this weird treadmill, right? And I think it works in a corporate environment too, where often the reward for being successful at work is more work. You know, we get these expectations that once I do this or when I get the promotion or when I publish my first book, then I will be happy. And this is this hedonic treadmill that continues to become falsified. And so I think the antidote to that is to have a broader foundation to have Liz Moody, the successful author, be one pillar of your identity, but not the sole pillar, so that if you have a bad day

or if your next book doesn't sell as well as your last one, then the whole structure doesn't crumble. And the research backs the sapage says that people who have what they call greater self-complexity, People who have invested into different parts of who they are tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. You know, this makes sense. If you're rising and falling based on your professional accomplishments and your boss has something discouraging or you have a bad day at work, it can very easily spill over into other facets of your life unless you've invested in other identities as well. But there's also an upside to it, which is that people who have greater sources of meaning and identity tend to be more creative, tend to be better problem solvers, tend to be able to think more outside of the box.

Because they are sourcing inspiration from a broader number of sources, they're able to recharge and reset and be fully present when they're back on the job. I've also been doing an appreciation practice. So I've had a gratitude practice for a while, but I've added on to that same three qualities that I appreciate about myself that have shown up in that day. So they're not things like, oh, you did a really great job in that podcast interview. They're like, you were warm, you were authentic, you were kind, you were caring, or things like that.

And it's been really helpful to reinforce that I have these base qualities that have worth outside of the success that I have at any given moment. I love that. Yeah, there's this woman interviewed for the book named Liz. Okay. Was it me. Another Liz. And she was a college swimmer. She was a college athlete.

And then she left college. and she did teach for America, became a public school teacher, you know, both things that brought her a lot of identity and meaning. And then in her early 20s, she was diagnosed with a chronic illness that went from her swimming four hours a day to her mom's spoon-feeding her chicken soup. And her productivity was no longer in her control. And one thing she told me is she learned from the chronic illness community about the value of defining yourself based on your evergreen characteristics,

things that no market or boss or company can take away from you. And I think it's the exact same thing as your appreciation practice of thinking about, you know, what are the traits that I want to embody in the world that aren't contingent on some sort of performance or some sort of extrinsic validation? What are the things in myself, like being warm, like being generous with your time, like showing up as a good partner that you can control regardless

of what else is going on around you. I love that. I love that so much. Okay, let's go back to vocational awe. Let's say you have one of those vocational awe jobs. What can we do if we're like, yes, I'm in a job that's being rewarded for my passion for it. I'm a teacher. I can't change the societal structure, but I still love being a teacher. But like I recognize that this is ridiculous. I can't live like this. Yeah. The term vocational awe was coined by this librarian named Fobazi Itar. And I think librarians are kind of a good example because there are these jobs that people say,

okay, you become a librarian because you care about reading or because you want to further knowledge or because you like serving the community. And Fobazi was like, I mean, yes, all of those things. And it's still a job. I think one of the biggest things that was an unlock was understanding that as librarian, you are still a worker working in solidarity with other workers at the library. And so one of the things that they started doing is organizing, of talking to other librarians, what are the things that you're seeing, what are the things that feel like are not okay

about the conditions in this working environment, and understanding that there is strength in numbers. So I think that's one great first step is having conversations with your colleagues, especially people that are at the same level and trying to figure out what are structural patterns and what are things that might be more individualistic. And then using the strength that you have in numbers to approach management or try and request the changes that you hope to see. The second is thinking about potentially making a change. And I know that it can be daunting, especially if you've devoted a lot of time or energy

into your particular line of work. There's a study that I quote in the book of zookeepers. And zookeepers are one of those professions where they say, you know, zookeepers aren't made they're born. People often find a sense of calling from my early age. And having a calling or feeling called to a job can come with certain advantages,

like being able to be very passionate about it and make the difference that you want to see in the world. But it cuts both ways. And one of the biggest things that the researchers found was that leaving a profession like zookeeping felt like a negligent abandonment of their duty. And I think this is true for a lot of people that work in these passion jobs, like working in healthcare or like working in education, is this feeling that, okay, I love teaching. The world needs great teachers. And if I leave, then I am somehow neglecting my duty. I felt this even leaving the newspaper world in journalism.

If democracy dies in darkness and I'm choosing no longer to be a daily news reporter, then I'm turning off one more light. And the truth is you have to think about your own self-interest as well. I think sometimes people use this idea that they are letting their community down or they're letting their coworkers down as a way to keep them stuck or entrenched in these situations that aren't actually serving them. And so obviously easier said than done, but I want to give people the permission

to try and find work that feels fairly compensated, work that feels like they are doing things that they are valued for. And if that isn't true, then perhaps making the types of changes that they need in order for that to be. I just struggle so much with these problems that are happening on a societal level in addition to an individual level,

because if that happened, and then we had no more teachers, and then we had no more health care workers, our society would crumble. Yeah, we need to value them. But I think one of the benefits of living in a market-based economy is hopefully it would inspire employers to make the types of changes that they need to attract good people to the job. I think we saw this a lot with service and hourly workers during the pandemic, where as people were leaving these jobs to find better work for themselves, we saw a rise in wages across the board for a lot of these specifically fast food workers or people in situations and service economy jobs that weren't being valued before. And so I wish it didn't have to come to that to find a market solution to a market problem. I wish we were more like the Scandinavian countries where teachers are revered in society and parried well. But perhaps that market pressure is what it takes in order to raise all ships. Has your wife's relationship with her job changed it all in having the conversations with you and her exposure to your book and your work?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I was taking a lot that I learned from watching her be a fourth-grade teacher in the middle of global pandemic in inspiring the work that I did. One practice that she started doing that was really inspirational to me was, you know, parent emails, if you're a teacher, can be a never-ending to-do list. There's always more to respond to. And she stopped bringing in her work computer home in a way that initially she thought might not be possible. You know, like there's all this work to do. I have to always be available. I have to always be available. I have to always be around. And what she did was she would, you know, do her parent emails and her lesson planning when she was at school. And then in the same way that you might manage up in a company, she was

showing the parents that she was working with about her boundaries. There might be a on-fire email at 8 o'clock, and she would respond at 8 o'clock the next day. And so certain practices like that, I think we're really inspirational. It also inspired her to think outside of teaching about what education could be more broadly and thinking about making a career switch. And I think that's part of the shame that you were just mentioning is, you know, she's this brilliant teacher has been teaching for seven years and has an advanced degree. And then she's thinking about, you know, leaving to go to the nonprofit or the private sector. It occurs to me, outside of the shame part, I had a climate change expert on the show,

And she said, any job can be a climate job. You can bring that passion, that interest in solutions to your workplace. You can bring those conversations to your workplace. Any job can contribute in some way to this conversation and potentially to these solutions. And it occurs to me that if you have a vocational awe job and you do feel the need to leave it, outside of the shame component, I wonder if there's parts of that that you could tease out, that you love, that you could bring to these, other worlds, these other jobs that might be more fairly compensated. So you're still getting to keep that passionate part of you, but in a slightly different career. Or in the career that you

already have, there's this body of research that's called job crafting. These researchers went into an environment that you might not think of as particularly conducive to meaning or passion. They interviewed janitors in hospitals. And they found that even though all of these janitors had the exact same job in the exact same line of work, there was a huge variation in how fulfilled they felt by their job. And they found that it roughly broke down into two groups. The first group didn't feel like their job was particularly high skill. They didn't really go out of their way to interact with their colleagues or the patients that they were serving, and they ultimately didn't feel very meaningful or fulfilled by the work that they were doing. In the second group, they saw their job as a little bit

higher skill. They did a lot of interacting with the patients in the hospital and their colleagues, but the most important factor was that people in the second group saw their job as part of this greater system of care and healing. They attach their job to this greater meaning and made the job they had into more of the job they want. So there's a narrative approach where you might be able to make your job as an educator into a climate job if you're really passionate, or to think about what are the elements of my job that I really like? And is there a way that I can craft this job to be doing more of what I like and less of what I don't like, as opposed to thinking about this black and white, either I leave or I stay and suffer? It's such a tricky balance, though,

because if you attach too much meaning, then it's taking over a larger trunk of your identity and becoming this big passion role in your life and perhaps you're working more than you otherwise would. Definitely. Yeah. And I think that's where the nuance comes in. You have to also understand what is your breaking point? And when is it no longer on the individual to have to reframe or to try and set boundaries or try and think about what they could be working towards to make their job more manageable? And I think that's why this topic is so rich, is because there aren't easy solutions. It's not black and white. But the biggest thing that I can say is to try and make sure that your job is not your only source of meaning so that you're not putting so much burden for your job to deliver

what you could be getting from many different activities and many different relationships in your life. Is there anything that we can learn from other countries that would help us in that journey without having to like up our lives and move to southern Italy? As much as I, you know, that sounds great. Yeah. One of the big things that we can learn from some of the countries that have the best happiness indexes is it's directly correlated to having better work-life balance. And a lot of that comes from things that you might not think are directly related to work, like having better universal education systems, having better universal healthcare systems. It can allow the pressure on work to be less consequential and therefore allow the whole society to be able to take some of that

pressure off of work. I think one of the tensions that we see in this conversation is that a lot of innovation in the past 30, 40 years has come from the U.S. And how much is that a result of our work-centric society? If there were better worker protections and if there was more done on a societal level to try and protect people's basic human rights, would Silicon Valley exist in the same way that it does? Would all this entrepreneurship exist? I'd like to think, yes.

I like to think that we're seeing more opportunities, more startups, more unicorns come out of places that aren't the U.S. that have better protections, that have better work-life balance. But it is a tricky tension that I think a lot of people who are trying to think about these sweeping society-wide statements are wrestling with right now. I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I do think that people who are able to live more balanced lives can also produce great work, and especially as we move from an economy that was based on manufacturing and churning out widgets into an economy that is based on primarily coming up with ideas,

that there isn't always a direct relationship between how many hours people work and the quality of work that's produced. If you're a deliverable is a headline for a marketing campaign, or a strategy for an organization or something like a big idea for a book, your brain needs space in its day in order for ideas to bounce off of each other, in order to process all the information that you're taking in. And a lot of these four-day workweek studies have shown that working less does not necessarily have to come at the expense of productivity. In fact, a lot of these organizations that have experimented with four-day work weeks

have found that they've been able to have as much, if not more, output, even though they're working fewer hours. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline, and what I've learned

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It occurs to me that a lot of this has to do with our obsession with status. Like even the idea of we're the most innovative country. you look at all these great things. And I think some of those innovations have had really positive effects that you can clearly see. And some of those innovations are just like, so we can say, like, look at this stuff we're doing. We're making more money, essentially. We're contributing more stuff to the world. And even the thing you talk about in the book about like the people who have the capacity to work less are working more. And I thought that was so fascinating because It means that it has nothing to do with how much the work is being demanded of us.

It has to do with us seeking some sort of status or some sort of validation. And I wonder if one, that rings true to you. And two, if you have any advice for not needing that status, especially in a society where status is such a big thing. Yeah. I brought two things to mind. One was a conversation that I was having with an academic that was talking about why so many of the increases in work time are coming from men in particular. And one point she was saying was that, you know, some activities like work can have a pretty direct relationship between the effort that you put in and the outcome that you get. So, for example, if you're a writer and you're sitting down at the computer, you can write words on the page and then you can see that progress increase in a linear way.

Whereas other activities like parenting, for example, don't always have that one-to-one relationship. And she was saying, you know, a lot of working dads who might be trying to invest in their relationship with their kids and not seeing that direct line of progress can put themselves into their work shoes just to receive that external validation. And I think it also brings up a point around the difference between being extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. The data that you mentioned about the average work time in America in the 1970s used to be the exact same as the average work time in France and the average work time in Germany. And now, a century later, the average work time in the U.S. is 30% percent,

more than the average work time in Germany. And the highest earners are responsible for the greatest increases in work time. And that just blew my mind. Like the highest earners are responsible for the greatest increases in work time means that the people who need to work the least are working the most. Of course. And that points exactly to your point on status. I think people aren't necessarily working out of necessity. They're working out of choice because maybe the amount of money they make is some sort of social status that makes them feel worthy or validated. But the problem with these external forces of validation, what the journalist David Brooks would call the resume virtues, is that we can spend our entire life chasing carrots without actually feeling full. We'll always

have to draw the line a little bit further out and the goalposts keep moving. There was this one study that has really stuck in my mind, which is of kindergartners. They went into a preschool and then into kindergarten rooms and looked at what kids did during their free time. Then they broke up all the kids that like to draw into three different groups. In one group, they said, okay, in this experiment, if you draw, will give you this award that has your name on it and has a little ribbon on it. And if you draw, we'll give this to you at the end. For the second group, they didn't say anything out front, but if they drew during the experiment, they got the reward. And for the third group, they didn't say anything at all.

Do the experiment, come back to the classroom two weeks later, and they found that students in the second and the third groups drew for the exact amount of time that they did before and after the experiment, but students in the first group, those that were shown the award and then attached drawing to the contingent reward they might get at the end, drew at a far lower rate. And I think this is indicative of all of the status chasing, all of the external validation is that if you're only working to be validated in the eyes of others,

it'll never feel fully meaningful or give you that same sense of purpose than you would get if you are working to intrinsically connect with something that you yourself value. I think that's why venture capitalists become Ironman athletes, and try and find another way they can succeed, even if they've succeeded in all the material. ways. It's why people chase promotions that don't actually lead to a higher quality of living just to be able to validate their hard work in the form of a title. We get caught up in these games and we start playing by the rules of the market as opposed to consulting what we actually value ourselves. I imagine the first antidote to that is simply awareness, but I'm curious if you have any

advice for not valuing that sense of status and finding that intrinsic motivation, that intrinsic sense of worth? Yeah. So one of the theorists that came up with a lot of these ideas of what he calls value capture, the ways in which the systems in which we participate in capture our own sense of value is just determining what we value for ourselves. It might sound trite, but just sitting down and thinking about what it is that I care about. These are the things that I value in my life. And then coming to the understanding that maybe some of those values will be expressed by what you do for work,

and some of those values can be expressed by what you do outside of work. It goes back to the wisdom of the poet. Some people do what they love for work. Others do what they love when they're not working. Thinking about what it is that you care about, value self-determination, trying to think about what ways that you might be able to find those values in the work that you're doing. And then the other thing that I always come back to is having communities that reinforce other values for you. Our identities, they're socially

reinforced. One thing that I've been thinking about recently is, you know, I'm Jewish. My identity as someone who is Jewish swells in periods of time when I'm doing more Jewish activities. I think this can be extrapolated to whatever identity you might hold. But when it is Passover, I'm sitting around the table with my family, I feel more Jewish than when I'm just intellectually associating with this identity label inside myself. And so for people that want to connect to those other identities, what are ways they can find other people to reinforce that identity, and that identity can be reinforced with their behavior? It might sound simplistic, but if you want to derive meaning from things outside of work, you have to do things other than work.

I love that. Okay. I'm going to ask a hodgepodge of like random questions and things I've heard you talk about that stuck out to me. Talk to me about resting before you need it. I like that concept. Yeah. I like thinking about the gas meter on a car. This is something that I'm inspired by the comic Liz Foscelain. And if you wait till your car is completely empty to get gas, you risk your car running out of gas and you being in a really dire situation. And so the advice is to rest before you need it, not to go all the way to empty and then burn out or get sick or do something that will structurally prevent you from being able to work. But being able to rest before you need it. And so you're able to continue to find sustainable levels of productivity throughout your weeks and throughout your days. And then we've touched on this a little bit, but I just want to make the concept of a time sanctuary super clear because I think it's a really helpful way to think about it. Can you explain that in the simplest terms? Yeah, as I was mentioning, one of the benefits of something like a yoga class or like going on or run is that you're not able to multitask while you're doing those activities.

They are sort of sanctuaries in time in which you are structurally prevented from working or overworking. And so the more of those time sanctuaries that you can find, whether it's in the form of a weekly walk with your best friend or 30 minutes of reading with your kid before you go. to bed where you are trying to put up structural protections that keep you from checking your email or checking in with your colleagues, the more you'll be able to find meaning and identity in those activities that you're doing within the sanctuary. How important are the people that we work with? A lot of these things come down to the culture and the people that we work with. There's this quote in the book about how we should not individualize, probably,

that are in fact structural. A lot of times when it comes to work, we think it's all about personal choice. It's all about I'm being exploited because I chose to be a teacher or I chose to become an artist. When in fact, a lot of the things that determine your quality of life

and your ability to recharge in the workplace are a function of the culture and the people that you're working alongside. At the same organization, one team can have really clear knowledge, norms around when they're on and off the clock and have a very psychologically safe environment and feel like this is a great place to work. And another team can have a boss that is micromanaging or responding to emails at all hours

of the night and feel like they're burning the candle at both ends. And so I think people really matter. I think your boss matters more than your employer. I think your coworkers are your best advocates and being able to try and create the conditions that lead to a productive and sustainable working environment and to really be choosy if you can afford to about who you're choosing to spend your time with. I have two questions on that.

One, I have read research that shows that the people that you work with matters more to job happiness than the job that you're doing itself. And you say that your coworkers or your family is sort of a trick that makes us work more, It makes us over-prioritize our work identity. So how should we be thinking about the people that we're working with and the depth of the relationships that we're developing with them in that context? Yeah, I think it's different strokes for different folks.

I really don't like the family metaphor. For one, you know, I think most families I know are pretty dysfunctional. And so I don't think that's an aspiration that we should be holding. The second is that I think that rhetoric around family that we have each other's backs works great until you come on hard economic times. Some of the biggest peddlers of the narrative of we're like a family or we're more than just coworkers are the same companies that have been laying people off for the past three years.

And so I like the metaphor of maybe a sports team better. We are all working together towards the shared goal and we all have a role to play. But we understand that at the end of the day, we're going to go home and we're going to live our lives. I end the book with this story from Tony Morrison where she was coming home complaining about her job, and her dad says, you know, you don't live there. You live here with your people.

Go to work, get your money, and then make sure you come on home. And I think one of the problems with the family rhetoric is that it prevents people from coming on home. Like, there's nothing wrong with your office providing dinner or providing a gym or whatever. It sounds great, that kind of perk. but if that is keeping you from being able to have dinner with your loved ones outside of work or be part of your local neighborhood or community, that's when those lines between work and non-work can begin to blur. And so, yes, the research shows the people who have friends at work tend to stay at jobs longer,

tend to be much more fulfilled, tend to be happier. I think the overarching piece of advice is understanding when the relationship in a workplace is material in nature. and when it is more social and making sure that you're able to delineate between what is one and one is another. And the second question that I had is, let's say we have one of those bosses who's like micromanaging us or we have a job that is putting these demands on our time outside of the workplace hours, but we don't feel like we have the flexibility to make a switch.

What should we do in that situation? I think I mentioned one, which is try and find solidarity with other coworkers and trying to think about what are the problems that are consistent. Another is trying to find someone who is not on your team, but potentially in a position of power that you can talk to about some of these issues and try and understand whether they are more of a function of the personality of the person that's managing you or a function of the culture of the organization. And then the third thing is trying to do some job crafting, make the job that you have more into the job that you want. Perhaps there's an opportunity to transfer to another team to find a role in the company where

you're doing more of the work that you want to be doing or to be having a real conversation with your manager about what is working and what is not working about the relationship that you have. I think that managers are also workers as well and sometimes they are perpetuating environments or they have blind spots that are keeping them from being the type of manager that they want to be. And if you can find a constructive way to offer feedback and speaking from your own first person point of view, speaking on the context of what will help you do the best work for the organization, maybe some of the changes that can be implemented are some things that your manager didn't even know what they were doing.

Is there a way to get around the idea that there's a million more of me and I'm in this really competitive job and I should just feel lucky that I have this job. And if I push back on it, even if I'm trying to fix the whole system, I'm tipping this precarious win that I had. I once had a manager that did something very cool, which was she encouraged me to apply for other jobs. And I thought, why is she doing that? And she said, I want you to be here if you really want to be here.

And I think you're a very valuable employee. And you can go and see what your worth is in the market. And, yeah, this is subversive. I don't think this can occur in every type of organization. But I think the point that she was helping reinforce was the fact that you as a worker have power. You are valuable. You are contributing something valuable to this organization. And if you want to be here, I want you to be here.

And if you don't want to be here, it's not serving you and it's not serving the organization. And so taking a real look in the mirror, understanding that you do have skills, you wouldn't have been hired if you're not contributing value to the organization in some way. And if it feels like it's a relationship that doesn't have legs, then you might be able to look elsewhere. I actually love the idea of not all the time, not having your mind in all these different places at once, but occasionally testing out the market and just to get a sense. of yourself worth and are the stories that you're telling yourself true. Exactly. Because, you know, if you don't feel valued, there's probably someone else out there that will value you.

Okay. Can you share with me one tip for people who are working for themselves and then one tip for people who are working within a traditional company structure? Yeah. I think the biggest thing for people that are working for themselves is to try and build your own community of coworkers. These aren't necessarily people that you're working. with in terms of finding shared projects. It's just people that can relate to the position that

you're in. People often think about writing as this incredibly solitary process. You kind of go off to Walden's Pond and you emerge with a manuscript. But having a community of other writers was the biggest thing that allowed me to get my book done. I had a writing partner, this woman, Raina Cohen, who has this fantastic book on Friendship called The Other Significant Others that recently came out. And every other Wednesday, we would talk for half an hour and just talk about the emotions of what it was like to be writing a book. We weren't necessarily always adding each other's work or providing feedback. It was just to have a space to find some shared language around the experience that we're all going through individually. And so whether you're a freelance graphic

designer or you're an author or you're a podcaster, finding a community of other people who can relate to the experiences that you're having so you don't have to burn in it all on your own. In terms of people that work within companies, I think one piece of advice that I would come back to is how can you use your experience at the company to grow in the way that you want to grow as a professional? I'll give one analog, which is, you know, I went to college and when I was in college, I very much felt like I was serving the standards of the university. I was trying to get the best grades I could. I was trying to, you know, jump over any sort of bar that the teacher put out. Then I went to grad school and my perspective shifted. And I said, how can this grad school experience

serve me? How can I get what I want to get out of this experience? How can I take the classes that I want to get out of it? I don't think being too far on either extreme is healthy, but I think it's important to have both. And I think right now workers, especially if you work within a company, index too far on the service extreme without considering what this job might be able to get them, whether it is learning the types of skills that you want to be learning, the types of people that you want to be meeting, or frankly, getting paid the amount of money that you need to get paid to support the life that you want to lead outside of work, really thinking about it as a two-way street and not just in this subservient servant role. I also love speaking of grad school, the anecdote that you shared about, do I want to have the experience of going to grad school or do I want to be a person who went to grad school? I think that's such a helpful thing to think about when we're making decisions. Yeah, it's a way to connect with your intrinsic motivation. The backstory is that I was going on a walk with a friend and talking about the pro-con list of going back to school to study journalism. And I was blabbing on for dozens of minutes. And then he just asked one question, which was, do you want to be someone who went to grad school? Or do you want to actually dive in to the craft of writing and learn what you're hoping to learn in grad school? If you could do what you're doing and not tell anyone about it, would you still go? I loved that question because for exactly the reasons you said, it helped me connect with what I cared about, as opposed to how I wanted to be perceived.

Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something that everyone can do the second they turn off this podcast to begin to have a more right-sized relationship with work? Yeah. Look at the next week you have and carve out 10 minutes to do something that reinforces an identity that you have outside of work. Maybe it's 10 minutes to play an instrument that you've been hoping to learn or to learn a new language or to call your best friend. But instead of doing it in a way that is all fitted into a time when all the stars align, put it on your calendar, do it for 10 minutes, and maybe a new habit will start to form. I love it. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your book, anything else that you want to spotlight, anything you want listeners to know about? The book is called The Good Enough Job. And it's an allusion to a theory that was devised by this British pediatrician named Donald Winnicott.

And Winnicott was observing how all of these parents wanted to be the perfect parent. They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm. And then when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or sad or angry, the parent would take it extremely personally, like it was a slight or as a reflection of their own shortcomings. And Winnicott proposed an alternative. He said, rather than valuing perfection, what if we valued sufficiency? see. And then both the kid and the parent could benefit. The kid would learn how to self-sooth and take care of some of their own problems, and the parent wouldn't lose themselves in their children's emotions. So obviously, the title of the book is a direct allusion to that, the way in which our jobs, if we value sufficiency, the way our jobs enable us to live the life that we want to live can be a healthier relationship than always demanding perfection.

I love it. Well, thank you so much, Simone. I love this conversation. Yeah, me too. Thank you for your thoughtfulness. I cannot stop thinking about the fact that we ask kids who they want to be when they grew up. I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a firefighter. I want to be president instead of what they want to do. It really does reinforce from the earliest age that we are our jobs, that our identities are our jobs. I hope you found Simone's advice helpful. If you did, please, please send a link to this episode, to your friends, to your family members, to your coworkers. because this is such a pervasive problem. And as we talked about in the episode, while there are great individual tips, there were so

many life-changing things that he shared in this episode, real lasting change is going to happen on a systemic level. So the more of these conversations that we can have, the better. If someone shared a link with you and you are new to the podcast, welcome. I am so glad that you're here. If you are not following the podcast, all you have to do is go to the main podcast page on whatever platform you like to listen on. That is going to be the one that lists all of the Liz Moody Podcast episodes. And you'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's

a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. Also, Apple just did an update that has changed things up that has made it. So even if you've been following the podcast since the healthier together days, it might not be showing up in your feed. So go ahead and go to that follow button on Apple Podcasts and click on it and click on it and click turn on automatic downloads. All of these things are just making sure that the pod shows up in your feed so you never miss out in an episode. And we do not want you to miss out. We have some incredible ones coming up. We have an episode all about dealing with grief. We have a much requested, long-awaited fertility episode. We have one of the world's leading dating experts

coming on to share a brand new way to think about dating that really reframed it for me. It was really, really interesting. And I don't want you to miss out. So make sure that you're following. Okay, I love you and I'll see you next week on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you can customize your choices based on the

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