Woman's Hour - Late Night Woman's Hour: Work and Rest

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

Lauren and guests reflect on how we can find the right balance between work and rest. Often presented as opposites, our attitudes to work and rest are changing under the influence of a range of technological and social forces. Many people work from home, but how many of us also home from work? And how do we maintain the boundaries between the two when it's so easy to check your work email at midnight? Lauren's guests this month are:Emma Gannon: writer, blogger, and founder of the podcast Control Alt Delete. Emma wrote a book of the same name in 2016, and is currently working on a new book, The Multi-Hyphen Method, in which she's going to be looking at how we can 'design our own careers and work less.'Dr Zeena Feldman: lecturer in digital culture at King's College London. Zeena is interested in how digital media blur the boundaries between our work and home lives. Earlier this year she launched the Quitting Social Media project, examining peoples' reasons for disconnecting. Rosie Fletcher: writer, stand-up comedian and co-founder of the Rosie & Jessica's Day of Fun podcast. Rosie has M.E., which has affected her ability to work and meant a radical reassessment of how she manages her energy. She writes about her experiences for the New Statesman and Huffington Post. Ash Sarkar: lecturer and senior editor at Novara Media, Ash's work focuses on the enduring legacies of colonialism in modern Europe, the intersections between race, class and gender, as well as the political meaning of Beyoncé.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Late Night Woman's Hour. This month we're talking about work and rest, often presented as opposites. We want to explore how our attitudes to both are changing and how we can strike a better balance between the two. In the interest of transparency, it seems only right to reveal that I started work 12 hours ago, last ate a meal sitting down three days ago, and producer Laura has been tackling a weapons-grade outbreak

of tonsillitis among her family, all while trying to get this little programme to air. So we definitely don't have the answers. We do, however, have plenty of questions for tonight's excellent panel. With me in the late-night lounge are Emma Gannon. She's a writer, blogger and founder of the podcast Control Alt Delete. Emma wrote a book of the same name in 2016 and is currently working on a new book, The Multi-Hyphen Method,

in which she's going to be looking at how we can design our own careers and work less. Emma, this sounds amazing. Yes, I mean that's very click-baity, isn't it? Yeah. It's create more, work less. Yeah, and hyphens also, I'm thinking Zoolander Slashy. I want that. Yeah, don't worry, I'm not walking around LA with a backpack doing a model blogger DJ, I promise. It's beyond that. Okay, okay, well we'll dig into that later. Dr. Zena Feldman is a lecturer in digital culture at King's College London

and is interested in how digital media blur the boundaries between our work and home lives. Earlier this year she launched the Quitting Social Media Project, examining people's reasons for disconnecting. Zena, what was the most popular reason, or the most common reason? Anxiety. Anxiety was the most popular reason that people talked about quitting social media. Even if it was just a temporary break, they were anxious about having to perform their lives in this beautiful, perfect way. And they wanted no part of it. Okay, right. We'll talk about that later as well, I think. Rosie Fletcher is a writer, stand-up comedian,

and co-founder of the Rosie and Jessica's Day of Fun podcast. She has ME, which affects her ability to work, and has meant a radical reassessment of how she manages her energy. She writes about her experiences for The New Statesman and Huffington Post. Rosie, this is a programme that you're going to be able to give us a lot on, I think, work and rest. It is basically my guiding obsession, is the balance between work and rest, yes. Well, welcome.

And Ash Sarkar is Senior Editor at Novara Media and Lecturer, who focuses on the enduring legacies of colonialism in modern Europe, the intersections between race, class and gender, as well as the political meaning of Beyoncé. Ash, will Beyoncé, Ash. Will Beyoncé come up tonight? She seems to have a good work-life balance. I mean, I think that, really,

we've all got the same hours in our day as Beyoncé. The fact that we do not meet her levels of perfection means that perhaps we need more work, less rest. No, I'm just saying that we should all live like Beyoncé. Under communism, we'll all have that hip-hop yacht lifestyle. We'll all have an equal share in Beyonce. Yeah, communise Beyonce. Demand for 2018.

I'm going to write that down and pick up with you later. But I'm going to start with some definitions. Let's talk about what work means to each of you. Emma, what do you think? How do you define work and what's the difference between work and rest for you? Well, I actually quit my full-time job not that long ago to kind of make money from my hobby which sounds like the dream on paper but I've had to really look at myself in the mirror and and define what work and rest mean to me because they are the same like I don't know that I'm working

sometimes um but rest is being self-aware, knowing when I need to kick the addiction to social media. And I guess going back to being quite traditional in how I feel about rest. So just escaping from real life, really. I mean, I'm wondering, Rosie, if you can relate to that, because I know that obviously you're a freelancer. So, you know, the boundaries are a little bit more blurry between work and rest. Your office is also your bedroom. It is, yeah. Yeah, the boundaries are quite blurred. But for me, with having ME, it means that work and rest have become sort of very polarised, because for me, work is like cleaning my teeth counts as work, and rest needs to be sort of lying in bed prone.

Then it's very difficult being like, well, I'm sort of in bed, but I'm sort of writing at the same time, because when your office is your room, your office swiftly becomes your bed, and then your workwear becomes pyjamas. Yeah, and you've made a film for us for Late Night Woman's Hour. Yes, I have. A film about the subject of work and rest, but also at the same time a behind-the-scenes documentary of me

trying to work while also really needing to rest. So you get lovely shots of me typing away, sitting also really needing to rest so you get lovely shots of me typing away sitting in my gym jams at my desk with a big pot of tea we will come back to that in a little bit ash what about you you've got a lot on your plate working a lot of different places you know both as a lecturer and as an editor um what does work mean to you oh work means means to me never going home and never sleeping. But I think that is actually kind of important to get back to some classical definitions, because I think that helps us understand where we are now. So I'm going to be a really old fashioned vulgar Marxist for a

second and say that will work is when you sell your labor power, right, which is when you're selling your time, be it, it you know an eight hour shift and you produce so much value which essentially is going to someone else that's work and in our modern times where we seemingly have more leisure time than ever there's actually more work time right so when we're using social media we're generating value for someone else right when we go shopping that's value for someone else everything is work now someone once wrote that neoliberalism is the financialization of everything I say the modern capitalism is that work is everything and a radical demand is the rediscovery of like fun what do you make of that

obviously this is your bread and butter and what you study? I think one of the really interesting things about work in today's context is that we're seeing a demand that work means something to us personally in a way that perhaps it never did to, for example, our parents or grandparents' generation. I can't imagine my parents saying, oh, it's really important that I love what I do. And yet, I think for us today, we actually want that work to matter. We want this value that we're producing for other people to actually mean something to us as well. So not just financial value, but personal value, and our identity is all tied up in work. Is that what you're saying? Precisely. And I think that we've seen a lot of backlash historically against this idea that I am my job. But I think that's becoming undone precisely

because we now link kind of passion and love for the work to our work. Do you think that there's a pressure for everybody, no matter what their line of work is, to see it as a vocation to some extent or to, you know know find the meaning in it all that kind of stuff that's a great question i think that the question itself is it reveals just how class-based what i just said is so you know we we certainly don't expect people working on an assembly line to love what they do we don't necessarily expect people who say work at the Tesco checkout to love what they do. But this is a very middle class assumption. And what about rest then? So we've defined work a little bit. Is rest a separate? I think, Ash, I might ask you first, since you have such a kind

of clear and classical, classically influenced definition of work. I mean, Marx was a top, top lad, right? So said that when when we're at work we're essentially dead right we're just generating value for someone else and life truly begins in the tavern or in bed so like boozing and sleeping around and i'm inclined to agree that that's rest is larry behaviors so larry behaviors for you um what about you rosie uh well i sleep around in that i've fallen asleep in many different places yeah for me rest is I mean it can be when I'm in a sort of flare of ME

lying in bed then I have to turn the television off because I can't keep my eyes open but then it's also I have quite regimented work and rest periods when I'm trying to get things done so I'll be working for 10 minutes and then I will move away from my desk for five minutes and I'll do my knitting read my woman's weekly that's my favorite of rest at the moment um I am from the 1950s it's very nice to be here um I believe Victoria would memorably refer to the woman's weekly in the

1980s as recently as the 1980s from there but yeah rest for me I mean it is the balance between whether you are literally just replenishing your physical form or whether it's a more sort of mindful, soulful replenishment through leisure activities. Okay, what about you, Emma? Yeah, that's really interesting that you say that because I think it's a very personal thing and I think what will rest me might not rest you.

What fills me up might not fill you up and I think there's a lot of work shaming going on at the moment I think of oh you work 24 7 and you look busy and you look tired and you should take a rest and actually what's interesting to me is that you know you can tell a child oh just sit down and have a rest but a child sitting down on a chair is not fun for them like running around is fun for them so I think for me what was really interesting is I actually wrote my last book whilst having a full-time job on the weekend and it was quite fun and restful.

But to other people, they're thinking you're mad. The flip side of that is there's something perhaps lazy or wrong with you if you're resting too much. And so there's this morality really... Rosie's nodding like she might have experienced this. Just a tad. There is this moral judgment attached to these categories. And this results in things like people actively performing being busy when perhaps they're not that busy,

but actively performing what it is to be overworked, what it is to send emails at three in the morning to suggest that you're actually really committed to your work. So what do we actually know about how busy we are or aren't in general as a society? I mean, you know, Keynes back in the 1930s said that he believed his grandchildren would only have to work three hours a day if they wished. Obviously, that kind of leisure society has not come to pass. But what do we know about how hard, you know, British people are working in general and how long the hours are? Well, we know, for example, that the British work quite long hours relative to, for example,

the French. And yet our productivity level is lower than it is in France. Likewise, in Japan, a country that's known for this culture of overwork. Karoshi, death by overwork. Exactly. I mean, they have exactly they have a term for death by overwork. And in Japan, again, the working hours are quite long, but the productivity just is not commensurate with that level of activity. Okay, okay. So we're working, we're working a lot, but not very well. The recent recent study that I read found that of nine hours that we spend in the office, only three of those are spent actually doing any work.

The rest of the time is spent doing things like checking social media, making personal phone calls, chatting with colleagues about something not work related six hours of that and three hours of actual work one third i used to do that my word five hours at least of making tea that's when i was in an office i would need the loo again rosie i want to i want to ask you about this because you know when we're talking about the kind of you know the the morality that we attach to ideas about work and rest. I mean, obviously that is going to hit home for you as someone who's suffered from ME. Yes, to quite a lot of people I'm quite feckless and lazy, I think.

But at the same time, I have quite high productivity because when I work, I really work because I have to set, right, I'm doing 10 minutes and I, you know, will do things throughout the day. And but when I've got my little slots of working I'm really doing it but I'd say that sort of in the same so I've had Emmy for four years and in that time is where you've seen all the things like hustle hard and girl boss and like these phrases take off that it's very as you said performative it's like you don't have you're not just working you have to be seen to be working and you used the word femtrepreneur on your videos which yeah wow it's a it's quite tortured that that's a real thing i've heard that yeah and and it's

entrepreneur as well which you can't even say i don't like mum it's just the other one because if you're if you're an entrepreneur who happens to be a mother i think you're just an entrepreneur um but it's also the same for i think performative rest as well because um and i am as guilty of this as anyone but if you look on sort of instagram it's like people's books um i know somebody who said he was furious with everyone would put pictures on instagram and it would often say hashtag reading but the book was closed so they weren't in the middle of reading they've gone well i better take my photograph before i open the book and we i've seen so many um nice ladies on instagram with their beautiful duvet covers all messed up around them and they're

like sunday morning and it's not just that they're resting and that's a great way to spend your sunday yeah it's not you know artlessly next to a perfectly poured cup of coffee which doesn't appear to have been drunk exactly i want to be like my dad on the internet he'll post a picture of a pizza but only after he's had a good bite yeah rosie you're like you're going to be a bit more sensitive to this kind of thing because of you know having me and having your experience and i know that you've written about the fact that some people kind of don't they dispute the idea that it's a legitimate oh yes it's oh yes it's um well there's a thing that really sort of grinds my gears that um people every time somebody writes an article about me they say it used to be known as yuppie flu and no one's called it that in about

20 years but because everyone still has to start their all of their articles being like it used to be known as yuppie flu but every six months they go but doctors now think it's real i'm like i've read at least sort of four years worth of this just in my time being ill yeah yeah but people think it's sort of people have said to me i wish I could just lie in bed and watch Netflix all day I'm like oh that's very very kind of you because it's it is ideal I love being in pain and not being able to stand up yeah and and are the people's ideas about what is legitimate um in terms of you know saying I need to rest I need to take a break changing and is that changing because of digital culture do, saying I need to rest, I need to take a break changing. And is that changing because of digital culture? Do we think I mean, you know, it seems there's a lot of kind of, you know, people looking at what other people are doing. And as you say, this performative idea of performative

rest and performative work, are we becoming more judgmental about people not working hard enough? I mean, it's a function of ideology, right? And a neoliberal ideology, which says that all of us have to be these atomized self-sufficient go-getters whether we're you know a barista at pret or we're a high-powered wall street executive we all have to have the same get up and go and you know immense sense of purpose and i think that part of this um kind of social policing function comes from the fact that well yeah we might only be doing three hours of work in the eight hour shift that we're at work but the you know distinction between work and home is more

blood than ever in terms of you're checking your emails when you're at home or you know you're generating value by someone by posting that lazy sunday um slightly risque selfie right that's not um rest it's not you, unproductive time. It's homing from work, isn't it? And working from home. So once work was defined by really strict rules, you'd get up, you'd leave the house, you'd go to your place of work, you'd come home. And there seemed to be a really hard

and clear line being drawn. That's not the case anymore. And the fact that time's become so fractalized, right? So I do maybe 30 seconds of work when I respond to that email when it's, you know, 10 at night and I'm like binge watching Narcos or something, right? The fact that it's so fractalized means that wages can be calculated at just the subsistence level. So there's actually an economic function to all of this. It's not just how we feel about our work or how we feel about play. Someone is making more money out of this. And believe you me, it's none of us. Zina, what do you think about this idea of working from home and homing from work? And, you know, the fact that we are never quite in either place fully, you know, we've always got a foot in the other camp too. We have this mythology or work off of this mythology that there once was a separation between work and leisure. And I think that separation perhaps never existed in this pure sense that we think it did.

But today, the line between work and leisure is blurred as never before, I would suggest. And social media, I think, in a big way accelerates that blurring. Email, I consider part of social big way accelerates that blurring. Email, I consider part of social media. That accelerates the blurring. We've talked a little bit about how this kind of affects ourselves in a kind of recreational space and the way that we feel. What about its effect on work and the concept of work? How is that changing? So I can speak certainly from my own experience and this pressure of always being contactable, always being in touch. And so we have this pressure and it's certainly

not specific to the academic industry. This is an across the board experience that is, again, quite middle class. This expectation that we are always connected, that we will be checking our email at 10 o'clock in the evening, that we will be responding to emails over the weekend. And many of us, we bookend our days with our devices. So the first thing we do when we wake up is to check our phone for updates on Twitter or Instagram or email. And the last thing we do before we go to bed is do the

same. And Ash's perspective on this is, as you've just said, is that there's a there's an economic imperative to that. Yeah. And I'd like to differ with you just a bit is that I don't think this is just a middle class phenomenon, because you look at forms of precarious work like zero hours contracts or the gig economy. It relies on you being contactable. I was just thinking about one of my cousins who was on a zero hours contract and and yeah was absolutely glued to her phone to find out you know when she was going to be and it also means you've got to do this whole other kind of work right which is known as affective labor right a form of emotional labor so if i'm on a zero zero hours contract i've really got to be sucking up to my boss make sure that you like me enough to give me enough shifts

that i can pay my rent um thinking about like Pret-a-Manger right your your worth is being calculated on how charming you can appear and how happy you can seem in your job as you're you know slinging sandwiches and coffees so this isn't just a sense of you know middle-class people need to feel a sense of personal attachment to their work and perform it um increasingly precarious forms of labor particularly in hospitality and retail and things like this rely on those same social processes and Dawn Foster writes really well on this I can't recommend her book Lean Out highly enough is that traditionally effective labor was seen as the domain of women right it's a form of

feminized labor and as economies in the global north became de-industrialized it seems that women should be the ones to benefit because we had this skill set to you know make it in this kind of white collar proletariat setting however that's not manifested in women getting paid more all of us have become more precarious it just means that some people are locked out a bit more of those forms of work it doesn't mean that when anyone else is necessarily benefiting from those forms of work. And if I can follow up, I think you're absolutely right that this isn't, in some ways, just a middle class phenomenon. If we think about the gig economy, though, this idea that you just suck up to your boss, well, you can't suck up to an algorithm. You know, and, and I think that the

gig economy, if we look at research around what people are participating and what people are earning, people are not earning a livable wage from these platforms. They're earning subsistence wages. And this is always part of a patchwork of work for the vast majority of participants in the sharing economy or the gig economy. This is a patchwork of labour that people perform. They might put in three hours a day delivering food via Deliveroo or Uber Eats, but then they have a whole other range of work that they do to make ends meet. Emma, I want to bring you in here with your experience, and it can be your personal experience. How do you kind of draw the line between something that your work that you're being paid for and that you're earning money for and you know work that you're prepared to do as you're talking about

writing your book at the weekends earlier so I find it really interesting because my whole thing is technology has empowered me and I don't think that you have to live in London to be an early adopter to a lot of technology like you could be discovering something out in like I don't know the Scottish Highlands where you know you're an early adopter to an app that you could invest in or you could work or my my thing is actually around the fact that I'm a millennial I learned how to code in my bedroom when I was like 13 I've been earning money through my blog and other online platforms for about 10 years now so it's it's an interesting one because I think that you know I'm really anti the nine to five and I

did that I've done a nine to five for six plus years before I left it and I understand and I wanted to understand what that full-time work looked like and also I had to I had to make money but what was interesting to me is how much more money I was making on the side like a lot more like a salary that I would get in a week I was getting in an hour and so for me and this is what my second book is I want to empower people especially women especially people from not the bubble of London, to use technology to make their lives easier. And I think we can. But I also think that, you know, there are downsides to it. But from my point of view, being savvy with monetising what I'm doing online has changed my life. Okay, well, so tell us a bit more. I mean, how? If I'm a listener listening to this, who

is saying, right, I want to earn more than I'm earning, what should I do? I think it's not really an overnight thing. And I think, you know, I don't sell the whole, like, quit your job tomorrow and follow your dreams. Like, no no but I also think that having a side project that is sort of risk-free is basically amazing and I know that like the side hustle thing is huge in America but I think if you can escape even you know half an hour to an hour of your time a week finding it wherever you can to slowly drip feed into this side project. There are so many resources out there, and I just don't think people are doing it enough because we are brainwashed to hate our jobs.

We're brainwashed to, you know, be scared to take a doctor's appointment from our bosses. Like, this is the culture we live in where, you know, I got cystitis from not leaving my computer because I was scared of my boss so much. Like, I wouldn't even, like, go to the toilet. Like, it was horrend computer because I was scared of my boss so much like I wouldn't even like go to the toilet like it was horrendous where I was working and I think what I was seeing is how free you can be when you work to your own time but I also don't want to pedal this like

digital nomad go and live on a beach in Bali with your freaking mac like I don't want that to be the message but I do want people from lots of backgrounds to understand what the internet could give you um what do you think rosie digital culture is impacting work i mean obviously again you're freelance yeah i mean this is you know it's one of those kind of things where work is a bit like a liquid isn't it sometimes when you're freelance it can just expand to fill the space yeah so it can in a weird way take over your whole life even if you know you don't mean it to unless you're very good at managing your time well if I didn't have the internet basically if I'd got the as ill as I am now in say the 1980s I would never be able to

do anything because it's only through having you know an internet connection and a laptop in my room that I've been able to really do anything um and of the work and I used to work um yeah I had an office job 40 hours a week and I would never be able to go back to that um with my current levels of health so it's only through finding my own work in a very precarious position um because the thing about freelancing is it's good because you don't always have to work when I'm you know when I'm too ill to but the same time I don't have a steady income but I wouldn't want to go back to 40 hours a week because I um I think that was partly as one of the reasons I got quite so well was um I had a fixed term internship contract that the my employer kept being like hey you're um we really like you we'll find you a job

we'll just extend your minimum wage contract a little bit longer and I was like yes I'll I'll do that because I really want to work here you know I want the proper job um and then I got uh I was hospitalized with gastroenteritis and I was like well I've had my five days off and I'm only an intern so they won't pay me any more like I won't get any more sick pay so I'll go back to work and uh my mum a few like after I sort of then declined over the next year and finally got full-blown ME my mom's like yeah you shouldn't have gone back to work because I was making your bed with you in it and I told you to hold a pillow and you said that's a heavy pillow and I was like yeah but I

thought I had to go back and my friends you know who are still working uh office jobs regular hours I'll get messages from them being like oh I've got terrible cold i'm like oh you were at home what are you doing and like no i'm at work like why why are you at work if you're ill but there's a sort of need to be present and to not leave and to be so you know so many people have these zero hour contracts they're precariously employed and they feel you know that they can't take what i know and i feel like i'm sort of the warning from history it's like you have to look after yourself so what are the solutions then i mean obviously you know emma you've you've written your book to do you think that you know the future lies in this kind of idea of the side hustle and using the digital

technology to to our best advantage rosie what your is sharing your experience and hoping that other people learn from it yeah i hope so and also i mean i've got to come in and say on the economic thing of some kind of the idea of a universal basic income is obviously a strange one but it's it's not a perfect one but that sort of thing because for me i've um been ill and my my work has become resting. My health has been my work, but I've spent so much more time dealing with, shall we say, government agencies trying to get a subsistence to live on.

And much more of my health has actually become about my inability to be economically productive as opposed to my actual health. What do you think, Ash? I mean, I think that in general, there are two left-wing responses to looking at how technology has changed our working lives one is a kind of like neo-primitivism right where we all just want to be kind of modern saboteurs chucking wooden clogs make some bread start a microbrewery listen i'm too camp for like camping and allotments and

stuff right i'm not doing it right and i think like you know we have to recognize that technological innovation has the potential to make our lives easier and better but we need to recognize that technological innovation is half a revolution we've already been through one massive phase of the automation of labor and that's the invention of like washing machines and dishwashers and stuff in the 50s that didn't free women from domestic labor right in fact it just sort of created a bit more time to do more kinds of domestic labor so any form of technological innovation and embracing it has to come hand in hand with a much wider project of social and economic justice why not bring

technology into common ownership right why not rather than saying okay well uber's a bad company so it can't work and you know it can't run in london anymore why not have it run as a cooperative where drivers can collectively agitate for better wages or you know they can set the terms of their conditions and they can all profit from it so rather than just looking for apps are out there and ones that we can use more effectively let's think about bringing those apps into common ownership so we're not just generating that value from someone else and you know trying to eat off the scraps right I want that whole meal what do you think of this Emma what do you think of this idea yeah no I think that I think that's

interesting and I think also it's it's I think a lot of the moment entrepreneurs are self-taught you know YouTube tutorials and like scrapping around on the internet trying to teach yourself stuff. I definitely have. It's all self-taught what I've done. But at the same time, why are we not empowering people to go and build their own apps? Like, why are we not empowering more women, especially because, I mean, it's like 92% of software engineers are still male. And so it's like a language that we're not even speaking as women especially um but I just I think it's not having a piece of the gig economy I think

it's the fact that you need to be owning more of this stuff owning your own piece you're not just kind of tapping into delivery or uber or whatever people because you're not winning in that situation it's that whole kind of you are the product thought is that what you're talking about that kind of you know if there's if you're if you're using a service for free then online then you are the product that's the saying isn't it yeah let's talk a bit more about uh rest and specifically sleep i mean you know um how much of it we're getting remind me what that actually is you haven't had any in a while you're not getting enough ash i haven't had a day off in a month woman don't do it to yourself it's fine it'll be fine but if you look at something like the the kind of sleep proponent

of like ariana huffington loves sleep you know she was written a book about reclaiming thriving on sleep and and um it's but again that's kind of the performative of i tell you all to you know arrange your bedroom like this and make sure you sleep this much and so there's nothing even our sleep isn't without it's sort of controlling or suggesting from the outside it seems to be as well that that's often kind of you know the the idea behind that it's presented as because then you can perform you know at a top level it's not actually about you really feeling better it's kind of will make you more effective when people say when you take your rests at work then you're more productive in your time which

actually is quite useful if you then get to set your own work hours because if you're doing only three hours of your in your office day well you might as well only come in for three hours and spend the rest of six hours you know baking cakes or tinkering in your garage or whatever it is that you find exactly i know what you're thinking it's my guilty well no not even i'm unashamed pleasure i just hate that everyone has to be a morning person because i'm not a morning person and if i have an early morning, I have a nap. Like, I just do not do it. And there's so much stigma.

People listening will probably be like, oh, she's so lazy. No, but you're meant to get up at 5am to do your yoga and meditation and drink your green tea and do your affirmations. I believe it's called a power hour, Rosie. They're getting up at 5. See, I have power hours when I clean the bathroom. And having a blow dry. Christ almighty.

I mean, the thing is, it's interesting how atomized these discussions become right so we start thinking about sleep as something that you do for yourself when you're alone well i mean not that i have kids but i hear that they're a handful and they demand a lot of attention and i mean like you know my big brother telling me just about how much you know my little baby niece demands and stuff like that so even in these conversations when we're being very critical about work and rest we're still imagining ourselves as these isolated atomized social units who are abstracted from social networks of family friends lovers i mean i don't know why i'm using the plural i mean i know other people have lovers um etc etc right we think of ourselves as these isolated units rather than you know so how does sleep also tie into a more equitable distribution of domestic labor and not

just our relationship to our own individual careers um you know you have kids you're going to be woken up at night so how can you spread that work in a more equitable fashion right well and let me pick up about about that because the concept of emotional labour, I think, ties into this and the idea of kind of restfulness. There is this idea of emotional labour, which is people are writing about a lot, work that falls primarily to women in society. Is it something that you recognise, Zina? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. There was recently an article in The New York Times around the headline was something provocative, like, your wife is not a nag. And it was the idea, the idea in the article, the proposal in the article is that women do the bulk of this emotional, invisible labor,

like arranging for an appointment at a doctor's for a child or thinking about what are we going to buy at the grocery store? What are the meals that we're going to cook? And maybe the woman's partner will be cooking the meal, but it's still the woman who's planning the shopping and so on. One thing I really wanted to add is around this idea of, so the food metaphors, the detox, the dieting, the addiction. So theing, the addiction. So the addiction metaphor is something we hear a lot about. And one of the ironies, I think, or one of the paradoxes of digital culture today is in thinking about, for example, the sleep apps that you mentioned or the idea of sleep. How much do we sleep today?

A lot of people are using apps to monitor their sleep. And the fact that we're using or relying on digital technology to escape digital technology, in a sense, I think tells us something really significant about the role that the digital plays in our everyday life. You know, the fact that we're looking at the problem to offer us a solution to that problem is really problematic. Yeah. So what's the answer to that? Well, we know a lot of people take digital detoxes in various ways. So you can pay a couple hundred quid to go on a digital detox holiday. And Theodora Sutton and Adam Fish, they've separately written recently about this digital detox camp for adults in

Northern California, where you go, you submit your, you give them your smartphone, all your devices, you're not allowed to wear a watch. You're also not allowed to have any alcohol, which doesn't sound like that much fun. But you pay a couple hundred dollars, $600 in that case, for the privilege of doing so. And so you have these various experiments. With awareness, Gary. Yeah. You have these various experiments in digital detox. But you also have quite accessible modes of resistance.

For example, don't put your work email on your smartphone. You know, don't check your email, your work email after a certain time in the evening and don't check it on weekends. So I think that there is a collective solution to this. But in some ways, it does start with our individual resistance. I mean, another form of individual resistance is something like a women's strike. So emotional labor has often been called the third shift, acknowledging that women are economically productive in the workplace, we still do the majority of domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning, etc. And then we do all this emotional labor as well, which is, you know, just dealing with everyone's wellies are type thing right like just like you

know the kind of fraff police at home um and there have been two quite interesting challenges to this one is the campaign which was started by salma james wages for housework which kind of said well look what women do in the home is essential to producing the worker the economically productive unit either ourselves, our children, who will be future workers, or caring for our partners. And then the other thing was a kind of explored, you know, roughly, I think in January,

earlier this year, is the idea of a women's strike, right? And so this was kind of prompted by the challenge presented by Donald Trump and this idea of like, you know, women have had enough of seeing misogynists flourish, the response to this being a woman's strike, like, we're not going to do this work anymore. A feminist called Camille Barba Gallo was a real strong proponent of this. And I

think that these strikes are sometimes very difficult things, especially when you have kids, it kind of presumes an emotional distance from the emotional labor that you do which I think is sometimes a very privileged way to look at it but I think that's another way of resisting not just in terms of our paid employment but that emotional labor it's challenging those around us saying well if I opt out that means that you've got to opt in and pick up more and understand what it's like to be me putting in this graft so I wonder about in context, the idea of restorative activity. You know, it sounds like actually women are largely in a bit of a bind because, you know, they're kind of working more.

They're working from home. They're homing from work. You know, work is kind of everywhere. And actually there isn't this third space, this room for recreation in their lives quite so much um is it something that anybody on the panel makes time for for a kind of a hinterland of of activity and and restful restorative pursuits yes i i have four o'clock is when i get my tea tray and uh this is what I like to do because obviously I have my own workout.

So you can't really do this, I suppose, if you're working nine to five is just plunk it down. But I like to sit down and watch an episode of something usually quite terrible. I worked my way through some Doctor Who series 10 and now I'm watching a terrible program on Netflix called When Calls the Heart, which is an original by the Hallmark Channel

set in a Canadian mining town. And that is incredibly, I genuinely, i'm like this is terrible and i love it so much and i've got my big pot of tea and uh and it's just but it's making time for myself that i'm not going to do anything else in and i think it's regardless of whether you like to go running in your time or you like to go and bake or you just want to sit and do nothing it's making it the time in which it's only doing that because so much is multitasked I think that's absolutely right for me that's what I'm trying to get at really this idea of a third thing that is neither you know in my particular case I'm not doing it as work and I'm also not kind of doing it for the benefit of my family Emma what about you what's

your kind of restorative activity your restful space I would say it's hanging out with my school friends because they don't care what I do for my work and I don't care what they do for their work and we won't talk about it in the pub and yeah we just I totally switch off I think it's just because I got to that point where I'd be hanging around with people I found very, very interesting working in the media, you come across brilliant people and you find yourself talking about work all the time and even though we love our work, it's not good

and so yeah, I'd say that's my switch off time. Ash, going to take us back to Karl Marx and the tavern or is there another hobby? Jigsaws or something like that? Boozing, causing a scandal um yeah I mean all these things are restorative I was just listening to you and I realized that I don't have that at all I don't have that restorative space where I feel like I'm not

working I'm either reading to prepare for lectures or for a piece that I might be writing or I'm running like somewhere to work or my friends are people who I have a great deal of fun with but we're talking about a future project that we want to do together or I rely on social media for a lot of my work so I've got people telling me to go back where I came from or shave my um hairy upper lip that's as restful as it gets that's not that relaxing I don't think you can probably do better than that have a break essentially consider jigsaws consider do you find that you don't have a weekend then? Oh no, I've worked the last four weekends in a row

I think this is why We haven't really spoken about boundaries The word boundaries And I think that's why meditation has become so popular Because you literally can't do anything else While you do it And it's a solo activity And the rise of mindfulness

Is if you take time and you say i'm meditating for 10 minutes you literally can't do anything else that's why it's been like you can meditate in five minutes at your desk but it means that at your desk you still have those meditation jigsaws knitting maybe listen to like a six hour house mix or something like that i mean yeah but genuinely like if that's what it is if that's what it takes yeah you need you need Room, if that's what it takes. Yeah. You need a third thing. I mean, I find that. I have a very busy kind of work at life and you need this extra space.

Zina, what about you? Do you have that? I definitely watch a lot of series. This Hallmark series is not yet on my list, but it may be soon. And I try to make time to meet with friends because that social experience where we don't talk about work,

where maybe, you know, we have some nice wine, we cook something together, we talk some crap about other people we might know, that is really restorative. Okay, well, that sounds very tempting. In fact, I might have to schedule that in with my friends. Thank you very much to my guests tonight, Emma Gannon, Dr. Zena Feldman, Rosie Fletcher and Ash Sarkar. Thank you. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies.

I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in.

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