We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - (BEST OF) The Panini Generation: Caretaking Without Losing Yourself with Ai-jen Poo

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Caregivers, you’re exhausted for a reason—and it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. Ai-jen Poo reveals why so many of us are burning out while caring for kids, aging parents, partners, and everyone in between—and why we were never meant to carry all of this alone. - The real reason caregivers are so burned out - How to care for the people you love without losing yourself - Why the “sandwich generation” is really the panini generation - How to build a “care squad” that actually supports you - Why care is the invisible work that makes everything else possible About Ai-jen:  Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Executive Director of Caring Across Generations, Senior Advisor to Care in Action, Co-Founder of SuperMajority, and a Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and what’s at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.  Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Pod Squad, if you've been feeling like you can't quite keep up lately, I want to tell you something that I wish someone had told me a long time ago. Maybe you're not failing at all. Maybe you've been trying to do a job that was never supposed to belong to one person. So many of us are caring for children while caring for parents, caring for partners, caring for friends, caring for coworkers, caring for everyone, caring for everyone around us while quietly wondering why we're so tired all the time. And because we're caregivers, we do what we always do. We assume the problem is us. If we were just more organized, if we were just more patient, if we were just more efficient, more grateful, more resilient.

But this conversation changed something for me because Aijen Poo helped me understand that what so many of us called burnout isn't just personal exhaustion. It's the inevitable result of a culture that depends on caregivers while refusing to support them. She says something in this conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. She says, care is the work that makes everything else possible. Every business, every classroom, every hospital, every family, every economy. None of it works without care. And yet the people doing that care work are so often invisible. So today's conversation is for every person invisibly holding up the sky for someone else. For everyone in the sandwich generation, or as Ijean calls it, the Panini effect trying to care for aging parents while

raising children, for everyone who has ever wondered why doing the most meaningful work in the world can also feel so impossibly, lonely, and thankless. This conversation won't magically make your load lighter, but it might help you put down something you were never meant to carry, the belief that you're the problem. You're not. Let's go. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things Pod Squad. Here's what today's going to be. Today is going to be where we figure out that the reason we're exhausted and upset and we feel like we can't keep it all together is not our fault. It's the fault of the system that we live in. And there are ways that we can perhaps make it better, even just by understanding how

the caretakers in our country became so undervalued and overtax. And the person who is here is the only person who could help us put all of this into context and is a hero, truly a hero, who is on the front lines and has been forever fighting for the rights of caretakers like so many people who are listening and who are in the pod squad right now. I Jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women's movement. She's the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, whoo, executive director of caring across generations, senior advisor to care in action, co-founder of supermajority and a trustee of the Ford Foundation. Oh, you must be tired, Igen. IJN is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and what's at stake for women of color.

She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity, preparing for the elder boom in a changing America. You can follow her at at Aigenpoo. Igen, Poo, thank you for taking time out of your unbelievably important schedule to talk to us today. You forgot the most important part of my bio, which is that I'm a proud member of the pod squad. Oh, no way! Oh, 100%. I live off of this pot.

I love this pot and I love the squad. Everyone is so awesome. That makes me so happy. How are you, Aijan? What's going on? We're going to, we've talked back and forth about this hour. And what we want to do is really go from the nitty gritty. We've gotten so many voicemails from our pod squad, just people who are trying to keep it together with caring for parents, caring for kids, caring for sick people, caring for the whole world. And then being told to just put their oxygen mask on first, but nobody

tells you what the oxygen mask is or where the oxygen mask is. It's a lot. And so we're going to ask you to help us figure out how we got here where caretakers are so burdened and under-supported. Can we play you a voicemail first from somebody who we just felt so deeply? Can we hear from Sarah? My name is Sarah. I'm 46 and then I have a little family that I adore, my husband, my 14-year-old son, my 10-year-old daughter. I also have a family of origin that I love dearly to, specifically an 84-year-old. old mom who's growing older and her knees and her care are increasing and she can be a little spicy about it, which is as admirable and frustrating at the same time. And I'm just trying to find their way through this time and life as a mom and a daughter and a wife. And I'm also a second

grade teacher. I think some people call this the sandwich generation. And yeah, I'm in it. And I'm trying to keep my sanity. And so my question is. is while I'm trying to keep my own little family, you know, my whole heart and soul as my priority. My mom's needs are ramping up. She really needs help too. And I want to model for my kids that taking care of aging parents is a loving and important thing to do. But I also want to model boundaries and self-care. So my kids, especially my daughter, feel like they don't need to do it all for everyone all the time. So how do I do this? Care for my kids. And, I'm just. And I'm and the aging parents and self-preserve at the same time.

That's my big question. Thanks, everyone. I am so grateful for the work you do. Bye. Sarah's in it. Starting with a real softball, I think. Sarah. Well, first of all, Sarah, you are not alone.

There's this incredible statistic, which is more than half of us who are in our 40s, including me and you, are caring for both young children and aging parents. So there's like more than half of us in our 40s are in the sandwich, which by the way, I think is like a metaphor that is way too gentle for this situation. I call it the Panini effect. It's because it's like being squeezed. And so it's like this phenomenon that's kind of affecting.

millions of us. And I would say that it's an impossible situation that we've been put in. Because, well, lots of different reasons, but the expectation that we should be able to do it all and just kind of warm up and figure it out is actually an impossible expectation. And it's designed that way. We have been taught that. care is this individual personal responsibility, mostly to be shouldered by women in our families, and that we should all just woman up and figure it out. And if we can't figure it out, if we struggle, we are told it's a personal failure, right? We internalize it as a failure like, I don't have the right job, I don't make enough money, I didn't save enough, I didn't buy the right

long-term care insurance. I did some set of things wrong. And the truth is, is that we're all doing the very best we can to take care of the people we love. And it's simply not enough because we're supposed to have infrastructure to support us. We're supposed to have policies and programs, just like we have infrastructure like bridges and tunnels and broadband and public transportation. We're supposed to have child care. We're supposed to have. We're supposed to have respite care for family caregivers. We're supposed to have paid family and medical leave. We're supposed to have a really strong, well-cared for, well-compensated care workforce of early childhood educators and home care workers and all these other people who are supporting us and a part

of our care squads and supported to be a part of our care squads. We're not supposed to do this on our own. It's nuts. Why don't we have this? infrastructure and are there places that do have the infrastructure and what does it look like? Yes, there's a social scientist named Jessica Carlarko who said other countries have a social safety net. The U.S. has women. It's really rough. Oh, yes. When you put it that way. But yeah, there are in most developed countries, there's an expectation that you have subsidized childcare, that you have aging and some level of disability care. And we are one of two countries in the developed world

that doesn't have any paid family and medical leave. Through a situation where one out of every four moms has to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth because we don't have paid family and medical leave. Can you imagine? That is happening all over this country. People are having to go back to work within two weeks of having had a baby. So it is dire. It is a crisis in this country that we don't have the kind of care policies and systems in place to support us.

But what's interesting about it is that I have this friend named John Rogers who always says that there's two kinds of suffering in the world. There's a kind of suffering that is inevitable that's a part of the human experience. Like we are all going to have our hearts broken. We're all going to have our hearts broken. We're all going to have. loss and grief. We're all going to have to work hard at some point. And there's another kind of suffering that is actually avoidable that has to do with systematic choices, systems problems, poverty, lack of access to child care. These are policy decisions and choices, systemic system failures that were designed by people, which means that people can redesign them to put new systems in place to fix it. And that's what we're trying to do here in this country is to build the

kind of systems for care that make sure that people like Sarah have the support that they need to take care of the people that they love and they don't feel like it's all on them alone, because that is impossible. Can you explain to us, Igen, we know whenever we say women are most affected, that what that means is women of color are the most effective of the women. How did in this country we get to a place where caregiving is so gendered, right? And then within that, caregiving is something that is mostly placed upon women of color. It's so gendered and race related, correct?

It is. It really is. It's part of our societal, we have these hierarchies of human value in our society where the lives and contributions of men, especially white men, straight white men, are valued more than everybody else. And it's why we're still fighting for pay equity. women and men can be doing the same work and their women are paid less. And it's true with work that has been associated with or assigned to women like care. It's valued less. It's compensated less. And then in the United States, care work as a profession has always been associated with black women, with women of color. Some of the first domestic care workers in the U.S. were enslaved African women. And it's always that association, the imprint of that association, has shaped the way this work has been treated

as a profession for literally generations. In the 1930s, Congress was in a moment that's called the New Deal, where they were putting in place our labor laws, the laws that would define the conditions and the rights that we all have at work. And Southern members of Congress refused to support those laws if they included protections for domestic care workers and farm workers, two occupations that were dominated by black workers. And that racial exclusion has been repeated over and over again in our laws and policy at the federal level, at the state level. And it's deep in our culture. I mean, the fact that we still refer to domestic work as help, as opposed to the dignified profession that it is for literally millions of people,

women and men, is because it is associated with women of color who have culturally been seen as the help. And it's deep, it's like not even always conscious that when we think about the types of work we really value and see as kind of a profession to aspire to, it's never care. But it should be. I mean, this is some of the most important work in our entire world. I mean, to nurture the potential of a child, to ensure that the people who raised us,

our parents and our grandparents, are able to live with dignity and have good quality of life until the very end. Like, what could be more important? That's right. And it's inevitable. It is universally true that, everyone will need care in their lifetime, but because women are the backstop of that, we know we're going to get it. It's just they, we don't have to create structures to compensate

those people because historically they haven't been compensated. And it just flows through everything. Like I'm thinking about how before women were predominantly in the workforce, men could have families and jobs because of the unpaid, invisible labor of women at home who were subsidizing the ability for those men to go have jobs. And that was help. That was not work. And then when women joined the workforce, what do then they do turn around and see the indispensable people like nannies and house cleaners and all of the people who,

who are in turn subsidizing their work as help. Because if you never see the value, then that lack of value continues to be passed down and pushed down always. That's exactly right, Amanda. Back in the 1970s, Gloria Steinem wrote this article called Revaluing Economics. And it blew my mind when I read it because she basically says that our entire economic system is built on the idea that we will have a forever resource that we can just draw from and take for granted to the planet's natural resources and the unpaid labor of women.

Wow. And the assumption is that we will have an unlimited free access to both of those things. And what we are finding is that that is actually false, that that premise upon which our economy is built is false and designed to ensure that women will continue to do this work, especially women of color, either unpaid or shockingly underpaid. And that is, it's not sustainable. It's not practical. And it's not possible anymore. 70% of kids in our country are growing up in households where all the adults in the household have to work outside the home to make ends meet. It's breaking down. To be honest, at this point, my camera roll is about 90% photos of Seamus. And if anyone can

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This is way oversimplified, but men work. Women stay home, do everything to keep all of it going while the men work. Then women start working. Most of those jobs go to white women. White women are like, oh shit, there's nobody in my house. to take care of all my stuff. So then they recruit women of color. So now women of color are doing all. Is this the train that we're looking at here? This is the train. And now, because we have such a huge aging population, baby boomers are aging into retirement at a rate of 10,000 people turning 65.

And then because of advances in health care, people are living longer. And also millennials are starting to have babies, four million babies every year. So on both ends of the generational spectrum, we actually need more care than ever before at a time when we have less of it, because everybody's working outside of the home. So we're reliant upon parents, working moms, family caregivers, overstretching themselves, and care workers who are underpaid, overstretching themselves. And it's still not enough. And you'll see more like young people are caregivers. There's a whole support network of millions of young people under the age of 16 who are spending more than 20 hours a week caregiving for their loved ones with disabilities, for their grandparents.

You'll see more men. Now, 36% of all caregivers for older adults who are aging are men. So you're seeing now it's not just women of color doing this work. It's like everybody, but everybody. but everybody is invisible because of the way that women of color and their contributions

have been devalued in our society. It's such a great example of how sexism and racism hurts everybody, including white men. Because it's like there actually are a few million white men who are primary caregivers

and they're totally invisible. You know? But not to say like the truth is who's disproportionately impacted in this whole operation that is not, it is actually all upside down, are still women who are overwhelmingly doing the family caregiving responsibilities, and especially women of color who are doubly family caregiving

and the majority of the care workforce from child care to aging and disability care. And by the way, the average income of a home care worker in the U.S. today, 2023, is $21,000 a year. So the people that we're counting on to take care of us can't take care of themselves and their own families doing this work. To me, if you're looking at co-centric circles around kind of the columns that keep societies moving, democracy, freedom, they all center from this because it's, and it's just like such a lens to see every single.

peace about our country that when you pull back a layer and you say, oh my God, that is because of that. It's just the idea of domestic labor. Like when I think of that word, you know, I come from a background of studying violence against women. And when I even think about the word domestic, it's as if, you know, for people who are like, stuff you do at your house, that's just something you do. You have your work and then you have something you do at your house. It's like, no, that is our conditioning to believe that. It's the same way if I walk out out on the street and a man punches me in the face, that is assault and violence for which I can go to the court system and get recompense. If I am in my home and a man punches me in the face, this is now domestic violence.

This has a whole separate set of rules that applies to it. Why? Because we've deemed it domestic. Because you're the property of that man. That's right. That's in our conscience. You weren't the property of the dude that punched you in the street. But, I mean, that's your private business in your house because you belong to him. Well, originally, yes.

And I think most people would rail against that in this moment to hear that. But originally that was the case that you had every right to do that because of property. But still now it's that something that happens and that is personal. But it's the same actual action that happened in the street or in your house. It's the same thing that applies to work. And it's all based on economics. All of it. The whole domestic violence thing is, too, the reason that the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act was overturned is because the federal court could not conceive of a world in which domestic violence had any national federal impact.

even though there's millions of dollars a week that go to because of victimization by domestic violence. And if you bring dentures over the state lines, oh, that's federal. We get that. But we just can't get our heads around the fact that things that women do and that happen to them have economic consequences. It's so true. And the whole domain of what is domestic is seen as the women's domain, the internal, and also the less real. Yes. The less real, the less valuable, the less all kinds of things. I mean, the fight to get people to see care work as skilled work,

it is the definition in all the economist literature of unskilled labor, show me a caregiver who isn't skilled. You know, the amount of emotional, physical, spiritual, all kinds of skills and capacities that are required to care for another human being well, it's really profound. And when you see it done well, you're just like, oh my, it's really quite humbling. And so I agree. There's something about the way that we have decided that society should be divided between the public and the private. The public matters more.

And the private is associated with women. How convenient. How convenient. But in our country, I'm just going to do a bunch of huge generalizations during this hour, for which I'm sure I will not get in trouble. But is it because we just worship money and not people? Like at the end of the day, we care about hedge funds and not about human beings. But if we worshipped money, we would value the work that makes making money possible.

I mean, Igen always says this is the work that makes everything else possible. If we had an intellectually honest accounting for why when I worked at my law firm, every single, and I will say, it's interesting that we say every woman had a nanny, every man also had a nanny. We just don't associate him with having a nanny. We only associate the women with having a nanny. But every single person had it. Why? Because it was a condition precedent to being able to be someone who worked at a law firm. Right. So it isn't, those people are the ones who make you going out and making a lot of money possible. So it isn't just the worship of money. It's the connection to the work that happens to make that possible and why we feel certain people deserve the bucket and the other people deserve the crumbs. That's right. And it's like conversely, if you were to think about what if we invested in making care jobs, great jobs that earned really great salaries and that people aspired to do that.

had paid time off and benefits and real economic security, you would not only benefit the workers and their families who do this work, but then you would support all of the working family caregivers and parents who rely on this workforce to go to work. And then you would support the kids who are being cared for by them, the older adults who are being supported, the people with disabilities who are able to actually live full lives because they have the supports and the services they need. It's like a win, win, win, win effect when you invest in caregivers and you support caregivers, it's like the best economic choice you can make. And somehow it's like the choice that never rises to the top of the priority. But that is, I think, what our generation is going to

change. There's no way. Like, even take the pod squad. If all of us actually picked up the phone and told our care stories the way Sarah called in her story to every member of Congress that represents us and says, we need you to make care a priority. We want child care. We want paid family medical leave. We want aging and disability care. There is no way. way that all of us who are affected, if we actually told our stories, we are a majority of this country, we are the most powerful force for change in the history of the United States. We are the caring majority. There's nothing we couldn't win. Yeah. Do you know what annoys me, though? Because I just like to take a hopeful moment and just be unhoopful. Tell me. Okay. So even that,

which we're going to do, obviously, I'm in. Right. But even that annoys me because it's like, now the women who are doing all the care have to care for the country by making all these phone calls. But the dudes need this care also. We're already caretaking now. Okay, real quick, we'll take care of the country by doing this because we need child care.

No, no. Like my sister always says, it's not a women's issue. It's a human rights issue for all of us. So are you seeing men getting that or is still fixing this women's work? Well, I would say both. I would say more men are getting it. More men are actually getting engaged in caregiving. And more men who are elected officials are starting to lead on these issues. So the leader of the aging and disability care bill that we worked on is Senator Casey from Pennsylvania. Congressman Gomez from California actually created a dad's caucus. of dads who are fighting for paid leave policies. So any of you pod squatters who want to run for office, look me up.

Yes. I can help because we need more people to run and to champion these issues. Okay. So if any pod squatters want to run for office, they can contact you? Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. We support all kinds of people who want to champion care.

If every woman who was doing her entire shift at work, and then doing the invisible six-hour shift at night for the kids and then doing her four-hour shift for her parents were to stop doing that, stop doing her other two shifts, and everybody did it. We would have a political response because the country would be in crisis. And it wouldn't be out of like good care and leadership. It would be because the governments, the state and federal government would say, holy shit we have a crisis that we need to address and allocate with dollars the same way we address other crises. But because women won't let their shit fall apart, because to be human

is to care and we care for our humans, there is not a crisis point except individually in our lives when we don't have the use and enjoyment of our lives because we're so strung out. So since we can't make that happen and we have to advocate to giving us what we do, deserve. What are the ways Sarah's life will change if these policy priorities, like what tangibly in her life will change? For one, if she needed to take time off to take care of her aging parent, say they had a stroke or they had to have a procedure and they were coming home and they needed extra supports. She could take time off from work if she had paid family medical leave. And what we've been fighting for is 12 weeks paid family medical leave. We actually got a

bill passed through the House that included four weeks paid family medical leave. It didn't make it through the Senate. And what we want is 12, a minimum of 12, but she could do that. And then she would have the assurance that she wouldn't have to pay more than 7% of her income on child care. So it would just make childcare much more affordable. And there would be the kinds of infrastructure for child care. Like if she worked odd hours, if she was an essential worker and had to work at night, that there would be a set of daycare centers or some options for her to be able to compensate someone to help her with that care while she's at work. And then if for her parent who was aging, it would ensure that she wouldn't have to wait on a long waiting list to get access to home.

based care through the Medicaid program, if she was eligible for Medicaid, she would be able to have access to home care. And she would know that the home care worker who's coming to provide support for her parent is also being paid a living wage and has the kinds of training and support that allow her to sustain in this job. So that's the kind of difference. Now, would it be perfect? No, because we have to figure out. We've never had a care infrastructure in this country. And so we're going to have to kind of build it and iterate and learn and improve and modernize. And this is why I always compare care to infrastructure because it's like we know that when it comes to bridges and roads that they need upkeeping.

They need modernization. They need maintenance. they need a whole construction workforce who can come in and do that work and that it's skilled work and they're compensated for that work. And the same thing is true with care. It's like we need policies that keep getting updated and modernized based off of our changing needs as families. We know that there's going to have to be a workforce in place and that that workforce should be compensated and supported. And then there's all these other systems and policies that we need to put into place. And it doesn't replace, just like, you know,

you can assemble a community to, like, carpool to work. It doesn't replace the fact that you need a bridge and a road and a bridge and a road that's upkept, you know, that's like maintained well. Just like we can assemble our care squads, which we should talk about, because it's really important that Sarah, you have your care squad in place and you have the support that you need. It doesn't replace the fact that we need these policies and that infrastructure underneath us to support our families. Well, I've done it, folks. After thinking about it for an embarrassing number of hours, I finally found this perfect

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digital cookbook. We can do hard things, but we can do dinner easier for free at hungryroot.com slash hard things. And for a limited time, get 40% off your first order plus a free item in every box for life with code hard things. I have two questions. All of these podswaters who are calling us and saying they're taking care of their older parents, how are they doing it? If they're on these long wait lists, are all of these women just figuring out on their own, how? How are they doing it? How are they? to care for aging people with dementia, are they just doing it on their own? Yeah, almost 16 million of them are just caring for people with dementia or Alzheimer's,

almost 16 million. And they're doing it on top of taking care of their kids. I mean, and everything else. It's so much. And we don't have a conversation about it in public ever. And so oftentimes people are kind of just trying to figure it out on their own, maybe through some Facebook support groups or some communities have caregiver support groups. But it's really, really hard. I mean, just that disease is brutal because you're just watching your loved one disappear right before your eyes every single day. But they're still there. It's just such a brutal disease. I don't know how people are. doing it. And in fact, my friend Richard Louis made a documentary called Unconditional about caring for his dad with Alzheimer's and the kind of mental and emotional health issues that he

dealt with and how he started to connect with other caregivers around this. And I just think it's so important. And for the pod squatters out there who are like, there's no time for me, I think the main thing I would say is, I don't know how many of you watch the show, This Is Us, I was a big fan. The final season, there was a very powerful caregiving storyline when the matriarch of the family who's played by Mandy Moore is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And the Thanksgiving episode, she calls the whole family together and she gives them a speech about, basically about how she wants to be cared for. And one of the things she says is, you will not diminish your dreams or your life because of the same. disease, this illness, this thing that's happening to me. And I think that that's like something

we forget when we're in the chaos of caregiving is like, actually we are our parents' legacies. And they don't want us to get small or to get sad or to get depleted because of the disease. They want us to live. Is it possible that even considering, considering that caring for a person is a diminishing of life. Like, is it possible that that's even our framing of like that it's because we don't value care that we say don't diminish your life by caring for me? Like, what I want to say to Pod Squaders is when I think about a woman, I haven't hit that yet, right? But when I think about a woman who's caring for their aging parent and in the same home

is caring for their children and is trying to figure out, do I be a good daughter or do I be a good mother? Because certainly these women's children's lives are being affected by caring for the older parent. I mean, I can't think of a more, you know, horrific and hard, but also more important use of a life. That's right. How could that possibly be diminished? What else is there? What's more human and like at the end of my life?

I hope to God that I have cared for the people that I love well and anything else is like, do you know what I'm saying about like? I know exactly what you're saying. You're doing actually what matters most. Yeah. Yes. And I'm sure it's harder. than anything in the world. But what could possibly be more honorable, important, and a better

legacy? It is that that is exactly right. And I think that we have to also have other inputs and yes, of course. And I think each of us has to spend the time to think about what those inputs are that nourish us because as much as caregiving should be nourishing and is sometimes nourishing and always meaningful, it can also be very exhausting and depleting. And so we have to find ways to regenerate. And all those ways are possible. It's different for every person, but I think it's equally as important to make the space for that and to live outside of caregiving too, while acknowledging how important a part of life caregiving is. How do they do that?

Because I want to talk about how we make the calls, we do the things to change the systems. And then in the meantime, what is a care squad? How do people make their lives livable? What is this oxygen mask of which everyone is always speaking? Is this the care squad? I think so. I think CARESQaeda is part of it.

And so when I say CARA squad, I mean everyone probably has somebody in their life that they go to when there's a crisis. And they know that that person is going to show up and show up well. And then there's a different person maybe when you need to really be listened to and really heard. Maybe there's a different person for when you need like sage advice to hear the thing that nobody else wants to say. or, you know, there's different. And to actually be intentional about who all of those people are, maybe even make a list and proactively reach out to them and say, I'm caring for a spouse who's really depressed or who's in recovery or who, you know,

whatever it may be. And I'm going to need my squad. And you're a really important part of my squad. And I just want to give you a heads up. And there's maybe nothing to do. right now, but I'm just putting like the squad alert out. And then it's like you're giving people this incredible opportunity to show up for you, which is such a gift. I think a lot of us feel like, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, ask for too much or be a burden. And I think it's like,

it's a huge gift to give somebody to help them care for the caregiver. And then I think there's probably also individual stuff. Like I, I need 10 different inputs a day in order to just maintain a baseline of functionality. I have an emotional support dog. I have therapy. I have a coach. I have my peloton. I do meditation and yoga. And on any given day, I have to do like at least half of those things just to maintain a baseline of functionality. And so I think a combination of figuring out what those things are for you and then also building out your squad to be like, okay, these are the people I need and make it self-conscious. Glenn, and one thing I was thinking when you were talking about how dignified that use of a life is

is to, you know, be able to care for the people you love the most. I was thinking, and yet still that's a privilege. Like an exhausting, ridiculous. awful privilege. But like that assumes that you don't have to be out of your house for 12 hours a day working a shift. And the people who do have to do that still have the parents and the children. And so it's just like some people don't even have access to the opportunity to do the impossible, awful, beautiful work of caring for people. And so really it's about value and dollars, which is about power and freedom to make the decisions as to what you choose to be the highest, most dignified use of your life.

I'm wondering, Jen, if you will take us to when you were working at the hotline and you discovered that this work was your life's work and the connections you made in that time. Yeah, so when I was in college, I wanted to get involved in the Asian community in New York City. So I started to volunteer at the New York Asian Women Shelter, which is a domestic violence shelter for Asian immigrant women. I saw a post that they needed bilingual hotline volunteers. And because my grandparents raised me, I am bilingual in Mandarin. Great gift that they gave me, even though I speak Mandarin like a 10-year-old. I could still manage hotline, at least fielding the initial calls. And so I signed up, got trained as a volunteer, and on the overnight shifts, I was just like so deeply moved and in a way kind of taken off guard by the calls that came in.

I was prepared for calls that would come in about surviving violence. but I was not prepared for all the calls that were just about surviving. It was just about how do I pay the bills now? How do I get my kid into the right child care given my work hours? And I have nobody else, no backup. I'm just on my own, like in this new strange community. Or, you know, what do I do when the numbers just don't add up, right? You're working 12-hour days, but the cost of child care is 3,000 a month, and the cost of food is X,

and the cost of housing is Y. And you are an undocumented immigrant, so you don't qualify for any benefits. And so you're just kind of out here, and your most important priority is taking care of your kids, and you've done everything right, and you still can't make it work. the numbers or anything else. And so I think I was just so shocked by the cruelty of how could it be

that there's so many people who, especially women who are doing everything right and it's still not working. They can't take care of their kids, which is their number one priority, the focal point of their life. They can't take care of their kids. And they're working really hard.

And many of them as caregivers. It just didn't add up for me. So I decided to try to figure out why there's so many women working in jobs that don't pay enough to pay the bills. And then a lot of those jobs ended up in the care economy, which by the way is like this part of the economy where all these people who don't have a lot of power are concentrated. It's like women, women of color, people with disabilities, older people, children. Talk about the aggregation. of a lot of people who don't have a lot of political power. It's really in care. So that's kind of what led me into the world of care, trying to figure out how care becomes more available to women, especially single moms, and then how the caregivers also get care.

It's kind of how I ended up here. What is helpful for single moms? What do single moms need? Single moms need affordable, quality, child care. And that is the thing. I mean, right now, we've actually shown that we can build it. The U.S. military actually has a pretty great child care program where military families can get access to universal child care. It has some gaps and people are trying to fix it right now, but it's a pretty great model for what really all of us should have access to.

they have lots of options for child care and it's affordable. It's subsidized. And if you can afford more, you can pay a little bit more. But if you can't, then it'll be there for you so you can work or serve in the military. And that's kind of what we need for everyone, especially single parents. And you know the reason why they have that is because it's mission critical. The reason why they built that is not because they're sweet. It's because that they can't do their ultimate mission unless that exists. And the problem that we have right now is we have a failure to understand that as a society, this shit is mission critical.

Mission critical. That's right. Carrot is mission critical. We're not asking for this because it would be a nice thing to do for the ladies. we're asking for this is because all the other shit you guys want, oh, you don't want elderly people on the street, you don't want kids who don't have care and are roaming the streets. Like, that is mission critical. And the only reason we don't have it is because the assumption and the faith that we're

going to keep doing this shit on our own backs for no dollars until we hurt ourselves and our souls, that we are willing to not live our lives to do your job that is mission critical to your society. Amen. That's exactly it. So what do we do, Jen? Let's say you had a million pod squatters listening to you who are now all fired up because of you and sister. And I'm seriously going to have to send sister support after this hour. Sister is firing me up. I'm so excited about this. Amanda, you're our number one's focus. prison from now. I don't know. I don't know. You're allowed to say a lot of fucks when you go in front of Congress. I don't know. Here you for it. You can. I say it all the time. Oh, good, good, good. Also,

it is annoying that the people who you have just said have the least political power are once again having to be the ones that come together to insist upon what sister just said. So also, men, it would be wonderful if this were not just a women's issue, as in everything else, if they behaved as if this applied to them. So that. And then for other people, what do we do, I Jen? I mean, I can't imagine an issue that's more important to me, in my heart. We all see the candidates who are running for office around. Like they show up at the parades and at the county fairs and at the fish fries and right we have to show up and we have to ask a question what are you going to do to make child care affordable and accessible for all of us what are

you going to do to make sure we have paid family medical leave what are you going to do to make sure we have home care ask those questions every chance you get because literally they have staff who are keeping a tally of who's asking about what issues and that becomes the priorities for their campaign agendas. And then talk to your local press, like write an op-ed for your local newspaper or call your local radio station and tell your story about care and why you think these policies should be a priority. That is actually how we change the media narrative is by making the media pay attention to our stories and what matters to us. And then finally, I think Most of us, I mean, talk about a kitchen table conversation in the homes of voters.

There's not a kitchen table in America where people aren't talking about care. But the thing that we haven't done is help people connect the dots between their personal experiences and the act of voting and policy change. There really are policies that can change our ability to take care of the people that we love. that's what we're fighting to build. And so we have to help voters know that that's the case. And them showing up to vote really matters to whether or not we're able to get the care that we need. So just pod squad's responsible for helping everyone in the community connect those dots

and for telling our shared care story, which is that we're doing too much on our own. We need these systems. We need an infrastructure to support us. And that's why these conversations are all so important because that's how it all starts with women too. It's these consciousness raising conversations groups where like pod squatters right now who are, you know, teachers, single parents, women raising kids with special needs, nannies, all of these people for whom the life seems impossible. And then they're too busy to have conversations with anybody about it. So they think that they're failing. they think something's wrong with them.

And the truth is that there's nothing wrong with you. Absolutely the system you are living in who has not created the streets and bridges that you need to have a full life. That's right. Exactly. And not only is the system failing you, the system is actually exploiting you. Right. The system hasn't just failed to provide what you need.

The system has in fact failed to provide what you need. the system has in fact failed to provide what you need precisely because the system has decided to just exploit you instead. Yeah. It's like we're the family member who just always does all the shit. So nobody else does their stuff and you're like, just tell, you know, Susie to do it. We are Susie. And that's not to say that you don't have the love and the dignity and you want to do it. It's not to say your exploitation is contrary to what your mission on earth is.

It just means that if you choose to do that with your life, you should not have to sacrifice the remainder of your life and all of your sanity and all of your resources and all of your time. Yeah. So Aijin Poo, will you come back next year and like just keep us focused on this as we get closer to the elections? I would love to. Stay focused on this. We want to be having the right conversations. And by the way, if you are a person who is not working, working, you know, 15 hours a day. It doesn't have a parent at home with dementia and two special needs kids and is a teacher and a nurse. And you have time. What an amazing use of privilege to, because a lot of the people who are, most need this, don't have the time. That's right. To be having the conversations, to be calling politicians. So if we do have the time, that is the use of privilege that makes a difference. Absolutely. It's all hands-on.

deck. And if you do have the time, we can certainly use your help. And you should know that this movement is growing. I mean, more and more of us are just saying, enough, enough. We're taking matters into our own hands. And we are so, so powerful. We can change it all. And we just have to decide we're going to do it. I believe. I believe in you. I believe in us. We can do hard things, Pod Squad. We We will hear from Igen again and again and again. And we are with you. We love you. The main message of this pod squad, say it again.

It is not you. It is them. That is my message of accountability. We love you, pod squad. We love you, caregivers. We love you, Sarah. So lift you up, caregivers. All the Sarahs who are listening.

It feels impossible because it's impossible. You are doing hard things. And Igen and the rest of us now. are fighting with her for you. Yeah. We love you. Bye. We are proud to say that we can do hard things is an independent production brought to you by us.

Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.