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Hello, TED Talks Daily listeners. I'm Elise Hu.
Today, we're bringing you another Sunday Pick, where we share an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you.
Tomorrow is Labor Day in the U.S. It's a big national holiday, and for many, this long weekend marks the end of summer and a chance to relax and spend time with friends and family.
But what if you're struggling with burnout, exhaustion, and just don't want to go back to work?
In this recent episode from How to Be a Better Human, host Chris Duffy speaks with Sarah Jaffe, author of the book Work Won't Love You Back.
How devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone.
They dig into what's behind the dread some of us may be feeling at work and at home and offer some thoughts on what we can do about it.
How to Be a Better Human is a show that looks in unexpected places for new ways to improve and show up for one another.
If you wanna hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts. and learn about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.
I am your host, Chris Duffy, and I love my job.
I feel so lucky that I get to host this show and have conversations with incredible, interesting people about their ideas.
And yet there's this weird thing for me, and honestly for almost everyone else I know, where if you have a job that you like, that's rewarding and meaningful, you feel compelled to give it all of yourself, to organize your life around the work rather than the work around your life.
But we're worth more than just the parts of us that can make money.
That's true whether you have a job you love or a job that you despise.
Today's guest, Sarah Jaffe is a writer who has been exploring this complicated nature of work and life and self and identity for years.
She struck a real chord with people across the globe when she wrote the book, Work Won't Love You Back.
How devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone.
Sarah is currently a writer and a journalist, her dream job.
She's doing it. But before that, she worked a whole slew of other jobs.
And here is a clip where Sarah gives me a brief glance at some of the other items on her resume.
When people ask me why I wrote this book, my joke is always like punk rock and crappy jobs.
My first job was picking up trash at an outdoor concert venue when I was 15 years old. which was cool because I got to see like David Bowie for free, which was great.
Also dating myself a little bit, but you know, it's fine.
Yeah, I scooped ice cream. I worked in like a record store, but not a cool record store, like a suburban strip mall record store.
All this when I was in high school, I waited tables for years.
I went to university in New Orleans, which is where I also live now.
So I did a few stints in working in a couple of jazz clubs, which was you know, fairly cool, but still waiting tables, not fun.
And I, let me see, I managed my parents' bicycle shop for a little while so I can change bike tire.
I can't true a wheel, but I can fix your brakes.
And what else have I done? Let me see. Yeah, I worked for a nonprofit for a little while with some kids.
I've done a lot of miscellaneous things.
From random odd jobs to dream jobs, Sarah argues that no matter what we're doing, we need to reevaluate our relationship to work and to make sure that we don't give all of ourselves away.
In her latest book, From the Ashes, Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, Sarah takes that idea and she goes even further, weaving her own personal story of grief after losing her father, with the broader societal grief at job losses and the pandemic and the climate crisis.
In both of her books, Sarah is exploring how our humanity is so often limited by the very narrow confines of the work that we can do that makes money.
These are big topics. This is weighty and challenging stuff.
And I'm so glad that Sarah is here with us today to talk through it.
I'm Sarah Jaffe. I'm a journalist and the author of, among other things, Work Won't Love You Back, How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. and From the Ashes, Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.
So let's start by talking about your book, Work Won't Love You Back.
You've done a lot of jobs. You've done a lot of jobs that are service jobs and that are looking at people.
And then, of course, now you're a journalist.
So you've kind of been on both sides where you work for yourself in a more creative way and trying to cobble things together.
And then you've also been one where you're very much interacting with the general public.
Yeah. Across the board... The title of your book kind of says it all, right?
Work Won't Love You Back. Can you tell us about how you arrived at that conclusion and why it's important to realize that?
Yeah. I think really like you hit the nail on the head there, which is I went from all of the service industry work that I more or less hated to to, oh, this is exciting.
This is my dream job. I'm a journalist now.
I went to grad school. I did the whole thing, redid my life.
And my working conditions weren't that much better.
And as I joke on my website bio, I didn't make more money at first when I was a journalist. than I had been making in restaurants.
And so realizing that there was a lot in common there, and actually I will tell people all the time that waiting tables is great training for journalism because you have to be able to sort of keep a straight face no matter what someone says to you.
It's a really useful skill. And being able to talk to people and smooth things over when feathers get ruffled, all of these things that I learned waiting tables actually have stood me in great stead as a reporter for the last 16, 17 years.
But that sense that like, oh, my life hasn't changed as much as I thought it was going to.
I am still struggling to pay the bills. I was living in New York City when I started work as a That understanding that like, oh, like this is cool and I'm glad I'm doing this and, you know, don't get me wrong, I do not want to return to restaurant work.
But recognizing that at the end of the day, work is still work, and we are still doing it at the end of the day because we've got to pay the rent. not because we just like woke up that morning and decided that slinging sushi to tourists in Denver would be great fun. when I think about it in my own personal life, I often think that like school is such a clear system, right?
Like whether it works or not for you, it's like, We are doing work on this topic and there will be a test on this day.
And if you get enough of the questions right, you get this quote unquote good grade.
And it feels like one of the really important pieces of the conversation that you have started with Work Won't Love You Back is that maybe the approval and the sense of worth should actually not be coming from the place that is paying you money. like at the end of the day, I need to have other things that give me meaning and give me validation and give me the sense of doing something important in the world.
And like, look, I still do the work that I do, which like, let me tell you, there are many subjects that I could cover as a journalist that would pay better and have more job security than being a labor reporter. but I keep doing it because I think it's important.
And I still talk to a lot of people who do jobs I talk to a lot of nurses.
I talk to a lot of teachers. You know, I talk to a lot of people who are in these kinds of jobs where they are doing it because there is meaning in it. for them.
And we would want that, right? I don't want my nurse or my doctor to only be in it for the money, right?
You want your kid's teacher to be... engaged and care about kids, right?
I would be a terrible teacher because small children terrify me.
We don't want to get rid of that entirely, but we do want to have the understanding that your life is more than this workplace. and you get to have demands on your workplace.
And again, when you think about doctors and nurses, It makes sense, right?
I would like the hospital to be run by the people who know about providing health care rather than the people who know about counting budget numbers.
I think it's really hard if you're doing work that is like, like you said, a nurse or you're working at a nonprofit that's fighting to clean up the environment or you are working on cancer research.
Right. Like these things where it's like you are doing something that is so important.
Yeah. And I'm sure it is extremely meaningful.
Right. And Maybe having a little bit more of a sense of like we can be agitating for a better world and we can push for better conditions rather than just thinking like, well, I have to take it as it is because this is. the dream job or whatever.
I think that's a really different way of thinking about work than many of us have.
Yeah. I you know, the place that I started that I think really got me going down this particular front was the Chicago Teachers Union.
And in 2012, they went on the strike that was the first big teacher strike in the US in a long time.
And the argument that they made was our working conditions are our students' learning conditions.
And it was this really great way of it now, labor scholars and academics, organizers call it, marketing for the common good.
And what they're saying is that actually if we are given better working conditions, if we are paid enough to actually live near the school that we teach in, if we have smaller class sizes, They were literally bargaining to get toilet paper in the bathrooms on the first day of school.
And so they sort of demonstrated their worth to the community by going on strike, which is the classic sort of labor tactic.
But they also really had this innovative argument that was saying to people, You want our conditions to be better because it's actually good for everyone.
And the same thing is true of these nurses that I've been covering, nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans. which is it used to be Charity Hospital, right?
And Charity Hospital was never reopened after Hurricane Katrina. but its purpose to be an open access hospital that serves everyone regardless of your ability to pay, that's been folded into university medical center.
And these nurses are fighting and they've unionized and they're planning now their third strike because they're still not getting what they want.
This is where we can also bridge the line between the two books because you talk, I thought, very, very movingly in your more recent book, From the Ashes, about...
You draw a line between people who worked in coal mines and people who were working in care work and how for the coal miners, Striking was very difficult, but in some ways the care workers struggled more with the emotional side of striking because they didn't want to leave the people they were taking care of. even though the conditions were unbearable.
Yeah. Kevin. Oh, my goodness, Kevin. I love him so much.
So Kevin was a former minor. in England and he had been a coal miner through the 1984-85 strike. after which Margaret Thatcher basically crushed the British coal industry.
And this had been nationalized. So in England, the government owned the mines.
So they were striking against the government, not just some faceless mind boss.
And they lost. They got crushed. And a lot of them had to go into different industries and not a lot of the men for somewhat obvious reasons went into care work.
But this guy, Kevin, that I was speaking to and, you know.
You know, he's this big guy who had been working down a mine for decades.
And then the mine shuts down and he goes into care and he's working with... adult men who have various special needs.
And you think about it, right? Because a lot of the people who do care work are like my size and I'm, you know, I'm literally the average size woman.
I'm five foot four and one hundred and thirty something pounds like.
If I have to restrain or lift or like physically interact with somebody who's a lot bigger than me, I'm going to hurt myself.
A guy who's six foot one and has been working down a coal mine really, really does bring something else. to that work that like, you know, there are reasons to have a big dude do that work sometimes.
But also he really loved it. And he found it meaningful in a totally different way than the coal mine had been.
But as you said, the conditions still sucked.
You know, he was saying and he was sort of more used to going on strike than a lot of the people that he worked with.
And he had a lot of the women that he worked with because the coal mines were literally all men.
It was illegal for women to work down the mines.
So that whole thing, you know, he was like, okay, I'm ready to go on strike.
But a lot of the other people were like, oh, this is really hard for me because, yeah, we don't want to walk away from our patients because they need us.
The boss is the one screwing us over, not our patients.
I also thought that a really moving piece of Kevin's story is that Kevin's experience of being in coal mine with a labor union involved a lot of really caring for other people. for the men that he was down there with in a dangerous situation and knowing that you could trust people and that they had your back, even if the bosses or the organization didn't.
And that that actually was a directly transferable skill to caring for people because it was in some ways that the union was care work.
It was just care work that they hadn't thought of in that way.
Exactly. It was so striking to talk to him.
And also to talk to Chris Kitchen, who is the head of the union now, you know, and mostly his job because actually they call.
They closed down the last coal mine in Britain between when I finished writing this book and when we're talking.
And so there are literally no active members of the National Union of Mine Workers anymore.
There are just retirees and people who have gone into other industries.
When I talked to Chris Kitchen, so much of his job was He's either fighting for retiree benefits and health care and things where they have lung disease and things like that from going down in coal mines and breathing that air.
And then he's going to commemorations and celebrations because there are a lot of Horrible things happened over the years, over the centuries, really, of the British coal mining industry.
And so it really struck me that like this man who is, you know, the leader of a coal miners union, his job is care.
His job is fighting for his members' health care, and his job is commemorating its grieving, right?
It's commemorating the disasters and the people that were lost. and that that was really true of the practice of solidarity, of being down the mine, where it didn't matter if you liked the guy next to you.
If the wall starts to cave in, you're going to grab him and get the hell out of there.
And then when I thought about the sort of entire social world of the miners outside of the mine that was built by the union.
So the union had the miners welfare hall, which was where you would go have a beer. after work with your buddies.
And it was where you would have your wedding and it was where your children would be, you know, christened or baptized or I don't know, I'm Jewish.
And like... That space, that social space, all of that is what went away when the mines went away.
What they miss is having a job that had some sense of purpose and having a decent wage that you could actually maybe send your kid to college so they didn't have to go down the mine. to have a decent home and to have that kind of social life that was built in these places around the mines, because the mines are not in the center of a big city, right?
They're in rural Appalachia in the US. They're in the north of England.
The destruction of that entire way of life means these towns are just, you know, they're wiped out.
And one of the things that to bring this back to care work.
The first monument that I saw to COVID workers, right, was in Barnsley, which is the same place that the headquarters of the Mine Workers Union was in the north of England.
And I don't think that's an accident because they're used to commemorating workplace disasters.
And COVID was, among other things, a workplace disaster.
When I was teaching in an elementary school, it's never like I was politically right-wing.
But I realized that I had some ideas about unions that... ended up changing.
Because I was working at a charter school without a union, and I believed I didn't like choose the school because I just chose it because that's where I could get a job.
But when I was working there, I believe like, oh, well, the union would just hold us back.
It would just like protect the worst teachers.
It would like make it so that And over time, I came to understand that there's all these structural forces at play and There's all these reasons why this job is really hard.
And there's all these reasons why these kids are struggling or not struggling.
And having an organized piece where we all were in it together.
Yeah. Would actually be like a dramatic thing, even if this particular building didn't need it.
It's a broader thing than just that. Yeah, and it's so funny, right?
Because the story that we were told about teachers unions, right?
I remember hearing that growing up. You know, oh, they just protect all the bad teachers and the rubber room myth and all that stuff.
Right. And like the charter schools are going to be better because they make it easier to fire the teachers.
You know, and again, I live in New Orleans, which like our school district has one directly operated public school and it opened last year.
But since Katrina, otherwise it's been 100% charters and like the results haven't gotten any better.
But what you have is just a lot of turnover instead.
I worked in a nonprofit very briefly with kids who are like 9, 10, 11 years old and like, oh, my God, they're exhausting.
They're amazing. They're exhausting. Teaching is hard. it gets better like most skills do over time, you know?
And so you don't want to just like turn it over with like the new smart kid from this week who probably has zero patience with the kids, you actually get better over time.
And so protecting your ability to get better over time really important.
But also there's places where you're having conversations with other teachers.
So you can say to them like, Hey man, I had a really rough day this Tuesday.
And like, This happened with this kid and I don't know what to do.
Can you help me out? Like those structures, too, are part of what the union does.
Right. This may be a kind of question that you don't get that often, I think, which is like a person is listening to this.
Yeah. Or they've read your book and they're thinking about their own relationship to work differently to their job.
Yeah. What are three things that someone should do to start to reevaluate the way that they think about work in general and their own relationship to it?
So the first thing I always say is like, yeah, talk to people.
What do your coworkers think? How is everybody feeling about the job?
Is it just you? It's probably not just you.
Also, don't use your workplace email to do that.
That's my number one bit of service journalism is if you're talking about organizing...
Don't do it on your work email or the work Slack.
Find out, get people's phone numbers, use Signal, use a protected app, something else.
That's my number one bit of service journalism.
If you're doing your organizing, don't do it where the boss can read it.
But those conversations, they are the building blocks of everything that comes next, right?
If you are thinking about organizing, you can also reach out to an organization, a union in your field. depending on what that is.
The rules are, for instance, you don't officially have to, if you are in the US, be a member of a union in order to have your collective rights on the job protected.
So you have the right under U.S. labor law to organize and talk with and advocate for better conditions on the job with your coworkers. whether or not you're in a union.
This is something that I jokingly call the Newsies rule from the Disney movie musical where he goes, if we strike, then we're a union.
American labor law basically says that's true.
So also keep that in mind. And then, yeah, think about what your demands are and then what leverage you have to meet those demands right because sometimes you know the thing that's true in a lot of these labors of love jobs right is that the boss will say to you There are 20 other people just outside the door who would love to have your job.
And that might even be true. be less true than they think.
But we are in a somewhat tight labor market, but mostly still, the good jobs are still hard to find.
Most of the jobs in the economy still are those waitressing jobs that I was doing.
What leverage do you have? Where is it that you can do a little something that makes your boss's life a little bit more difficult and convinces them to give you what you want.
I talked to a young woman who, she worked for the Parks Department doing construction on historic buildings. that the Park Service maintains.
She thought this was a great job. She's out working on roofs in 20 degree weather, which doesn't sound great to me, but she loves it. and also think it's important.
These questions of leverage are actually really important and interesting right now.
It's not so simple as just like, get all your buddies and walk off the job.
Sometimes it's easier to stay on the job and you can sit down on the job.
You can do work to rule action, which is where you do your job. exactly to every possible last little rule in your job description, which turns out the boss never actually wants because they want you to be doing so much more and you probably know how to do your job way better.
We're going to take a quick break while I do another part of my job, which is to play you some ads.
We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Capital One.
Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI, they already deployed one.
It's called Chat Concierge. and it's simplifying car shopping.
Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love.
It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value.
Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack.
That's technology at Capital One. Ever feel like you're carrying something heavy and don't know where to put it down?
Or wonder what on earth you're supposed to do when you just can't seem to cope?
I'm Hesu Jo, a licensed therapist with years of experience providing individual and family therapy, and I've teamed up with BetterHelp to create Mind If We Talk, a podcast to demystify what therapy's really about.
In each episode, you'll hear guests talk about struggles we all face, like living with grief or managing anger.
Then we break it all down with a fellow mental health professional to give you actionable tips you can apply to your own life.
Follow and listen to Mind If We Talk on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget your happiness matters.
And we are back. We're talking with Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back and From the Ashes.
You talk in From the Ashes about grief, both personal, professional, and societal.
I think that a lot of us of a certain age feel like a form of grief or sadness or regret at not being able to have this kind of collective experience that it seems like existed in the past.
My dad worked for the Port Authority. Yeah.
And I wouldn't say that he was ever like, you know what my passion is, is like helping manage toll collectors.
Like I think he would. But but. The idea that he could come in and do a job and have a pension at the end of his career, and he would know that he was taken care of.
And he took a lot of pride in doing a job well and being a good steward of public funds.
Right. And that for me and for certainly for people who are younger than me, the idea that you would be at one job for 30 years is so the exception and not the rule.
We're living through this moment where the public sector is just being demonized.
And it's also really interesting because I think people are starting to realize that that's wrong. part of what's happening and part of what the folks I've been talking to a lot at like the Federal Unionist Network and others, they're really making a defense of the idea of the public good.
You know, the idea that there are jobs at the Port Authority, that there are jobs at the Park Service, that there are jobs at the Army Corps of Engineers.
I live in New Orleans, again. I would like the Army Corps of Engineers to still be well-staffed, please, because they keep us above water.
These are jobs that people do. You know, you take a pay cut when you work in the public sector, right?
You don't make as much money if you are an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers as you could out in the private sector somewhere.
But you do it because you believe in the idea of the public sector.
You believe in the idea that these are things we should do for the public good.
Again, to go back to those nurses in New Orleans at University Medical Center.
They are saying, we want to work in this kind of public hospital, this kind of open access hospital, because we believe everybody should be able to get care.
And I'm in Barcelona right now. I'm at a writer's residency in this beautiful museum building.
We're on like the second floor of this museum.
And they gave us a tour of it earlier in the history of it.
And there were pictures of snow. And they were like, oh, yeah, it doesn't snow here anymore.
In the last 80 years, it has stopped snowing in the mountains in Barcelona.
We have been productive. We have been so productive.
We have sent thousands and thousands of people down holes in the ground to dig up black rocks to set on fire.
And what it has gotten us is a rapidly warming planet, exhausted, and a lot of people with horrible diseases that died young.
And what would it look like to actually say that, like, we want to run the world for the good of all of us? rather than the good of Elon Musk getting richer.
The good of everybody who drives a car or takes a train or a boat in New York Port Authority or New Jersey or...
Yeah, New York and New Jersey. Yeah, New York and New Jersey, right.
So everybody who takes the Staten Island Ferry, which is one of my favorite public institutions.
I love the Staten Island Ferry. It's free and you can get a beer on it.
You know, these things like wouldn't that be amazing if we had more public transit that was free and you could buy a beer on it?
Maybe not everybody needs to buy a beer on it, but still.
So there's also this idea that we have tried efficiency and productivity.
I think a really new idea I got from From the Ashes was the way that grief works in our personal life.
How it's not linear. It comes in waves. It's circular.
Sometimes it's incredibly intense and then it goes away almost entirely and then it comes back.
And how that personal grief can actually be in some ways a roadmap for societal and communal ways of thinking about progress and of thinking about dealing with problems that it doesn't have to just be this. straight, incredibly efficient line from we are A, which is bad, and we're going to B, which is good.
That's not how it works. Yeah, for people who haven't read the book from the ashes.
And please tell me if I'm wrong. It's both the story of you grieving your father who passed away.
And it is a story of COVID-19 and deindustrialization and racism and societal failures.
You're explicitly connecting the grief of losing a person you love with the grief of losing a community or a sense of self or career.
How and why did you choose to do that? My father died in 2018.
So to look around at the stories that I was covering and the work that I was doing and realize like, oh, there's grief everywhere.
You know, I had lost people. I lost my grandparents.
I had certainly had my heart broken before.
But losing a parent was something totally different.
And it was so destabilizing and so transformative.
And suddenly everywhere I looked, there was grief.
And I was like, oh, and also, like, I was trying to find things to read because I'm a nerd and I wanted to get an A in grieving the way I want to get an A in everything.
And so I was looking for like, what do I read?
What do I study? What do I whatever? And like nothing, nothing really captured what I was feeling.
And so I on some level, I wrote the book that I needed to read.
And also, the way I deal with everything is to write about it.
And this one has been harder to metabolize than most.
It's been hard to talk about. Doing press for this book has been rough.
It's been... challenging to return to those feelings over and over again, you know, but they returned for me anyway.
You know, we just passed the anniversary of my father's death.
And so like that month, I know it's coming for me.
But it also comes for me at other moments.
It comes for me in... You know, moments that I won't even know what's going on and I'll sort of and then I'm like, oh, it's just OK.
That's that's what's happening. That's there.
And that sense that it's not just an easy thing to get over.
It suddenly made sense when I was doing stories on factory closures.
In 2018 was Trump 1.0, and I was doing a lot of stories on factories closing.
I had been in Indiana. I had been in Ohio.
And actually, the story is in the book where I was in Ohio.
I was covering the closure of the Lordstown plant, which is kind of a famous auto plant, General Motors plant. just outside Youngstown, Ohio.
And I was sitting in the office talking to Tim O'Hara, who was at the time the vice president of the union.
And Dave Green, who was the president of the union, is now the regional director for the UAW in that area.
You know, he just comes in and flops on the couch and looks over at me and goes, You know how they say there's seven stages of grieving?
Well, we can't go through them because we don't know.
We're stuck in the middle, you know? And I was like, huh, right.
This is a grief story. Except it's a sort of disenfranchised grief is one of the terms for things like that, right, where you can't really go through it because it wasn't clear what was actually going to happen to the factory.
It has closed now since. Some of the workers are now working for a battery plant in the area.
Some of the workers got scattered all over the country.
But at the time, they didn't know it was still early and they were still trying to fight to keep it open.
And yeah, to realize like, oh, I'm already writing grief stories.
I'm writing stories of immigration and talking to people about what they leave behind.
You know, then 2020 hits and we get COVID and then we get the George Floyd uprising and we just get this double whammy of talking about grief in public, right?
And whenever we say Black Lives Matter and we say their names, We're talking about grieving.
We're talking about that George Floyd should still be here, that Breonna Taylor should still be here.
There was this moment when Joe Biden got elected, and he sort of talked about his personal grief.
And I think that was meaningful for people.
That was really part of the reason people voted for him.
You know, and then they had sort of one commemoration for COVID and then it was quickly like back to normal, back to normal, back to normal.
Right. when I was working on the book, I talked to sort of therapists and clinicians and practitioners about grief and about how they deal with it and how they help people deal with it.
And so these are, you know, where I sort of learned these terms and disenfranchised grief is Again, a grief that can't be acknowledged, a grief that isn't recognized.
People are carrying around a lot of unacknowledged pain.
And that comes out, if we're lucky, it comes out in ways that are just sort of messy.
If we're really not lucky. it gets toxic and it can destroy your relationships, it can destroy your grip on reality, it can destroy all sorts of things.
It can destroy your health, right? It was so shocking to me how physical grieving was.
Talking to clinicians and people, it was like, yeah, I see people with flare-ups of autoimmune conditions when they're grieving.
All of these things happen. And we just have no place for it, for the most part. in sort of late capitalist society, right?
We just sort of are supposed to get back to work.
We're going to take another quick break and then we'll be back.
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T's and C's apply. And we are back. You say in the book that grief does not happen on the clock of capitalism, that that's not how it works.
You're talking about how grief is not work.
And you say that. So just to read it. Many languages have a middle voice, which is less concerned with agency.
In the middle, the subject does not do or have something done to them.
Neither can they simply opt out from or reverse the action of which they are a part.
They undergo change while engaged in interactive processes from which they cannot simply withdraw.
They are not and cannot be exterior to the process.
And then you say, you are grieving, but grieving is also doing you.
That really hit me in the gut. It is both you doing it and it doing you.
And it is active and passive and both. That messiness of grief, I think, is what a lot of people really struggle with.
And that struggle with... not being able to articulate.
I joked about wanting to get an A in grieving, but it's really true.
I was like, I'm going to be good at this.
I'm going to go to therapy. I'm going to do the thing.
I'm going to get over it in record time, and I'm going to be good at grieving.
And like, Oh, no, that's not how that works.
That is so not how that works. In fact, the more you try to do that, the more you're going to screw yourself up, I think.
I certainly did anyway. to be willing to allow it to happen on the clock that it happens at.
You know, it was easier for me in a way because I work from home.
You know, I'm freelance. I had plenty of work I had to do.
But I could kind of do it on my own time.
So if in the middle of the day I needed to take a break and just cry for an hour, I could go do that. and that sense of some degree of freedom that I had. which most people don't have, right?
If you're going to work at the GM factory and you got to, you know, do the same thing all day long and you're, you know, lifting up the thing and drilling out the hole or putting a screw in or attaching a door or attaching a steering wheel or any number of things you might be doing on an assembly line.
You just got to do that. And you can't pause the line so that you can cry.
And you can maybe cry while you're attaching the steering wheels, but you might screw it up.
So you probably don't want to do that. and also you probably don't want everybody to watch you while you cry while you try to attach a steering wheel on the assembly line while the cars are going by you, you know.
That middle voice, it was from a piece that was sent to me by the author Namwale Serpell, who wrote this beautiful book, The Furrows, about grief.
It's a novel, it's incredible. And the piece that talked about, it was talking about the concept of drift.
And I interviewed Namwali Serpell for Book Forum, and we were talking about grief.
And it made me think about a lot of things that aren't work in that way.
They aren't sort of volitional in that same way.
But I also think that love is kind of like this.
It happens in the middle voice. you know, I would sort of think like I have to be actively doing things all the time.
And one of the things that grief sort of taught me is that I don't become unlovable because I need things for a while from people and I'm not always capable of immediately reciprocating.
Like, when my father died, the people who knew what to say and what to do were people who had lost a parent.
And they reached out to me and were like, I heard your father died.
I'm sorry. Some people would be like kind of gallows humor about it and say, welcome to the dead dad's club.
But it was people who had already been there.
And so sort of by definition, they didn't need me to do it back.
So the only way that I could reciprocate was to reciprocate to other people.
So that when I had friends in the months, weeks, years after my father died who lost somebody, I'm really annoying with this with people in my life, actually.
I'm like, not to be relentlessly on brand, but you're grieving, honey.
And not just deaths, but also you lost a job.
Also, you moved across an ocean. Also, you had a really bad breakup.
You got divorced. I will be that person who's just like, it's grief. and here's what you will probably need at some point and, you know, what can I do, but also asking what I can do is kind of not helpful because you probably don't know what I can do.
So I'm gonna offer, I'm gonna make you breakfast, I'm gonna make you cookies, I'm gonna come over and drag you out of the house and make you go for a walk. you know i'm just gonna text and be like here's a very silly meme that made me laugh here is a picture of a cute dog I want to read two quotes from the book that are from really different parts.
This first one is from towards the end. This is why I think I cannot stomach the grief platitudes industry.
Grief is not joyful or peaceful. It is a war inside me.
It is an alien chewing its way out. It is a tornado somewhere beneath my lungs.
It is breaking me and somehow people can't see.
I want them to see and I'm terrified they will see.
And I am both of these things at the same time being pulled in opposite directions, like there's a team of horses attached to each end. except somehow unbelievably I am stronger than the teams of horses and I do not get torn apart.
That is such a unbelievably accurate description of grief to me.
And yet so incredibly specific. And that's the personal side of grief.
And then I just wanna pair it with something you wrote at the beginning of the book, which is you say, I've covered social movements for the better part of two decades.
And one thing that the ones that stuck had in common was that they provided solidarity in a material way.
They offered care that was physical. food, a place to sleep, masks, and hand sanitizer during COVID-19, they offered life even when protesting a death.
We lack a word in English for this kind of life-making, like the missing middle voice.
I've struggled in writing this book with the need for such a word, one that encapsulates the kind of world I want to live in and the way I want to live in it.
It does not exist I think because we are not there yet.
And to me, those two quotes... really capture so much of the beauty of this book and also the thread that I had never seen someone else draw between that intense personal suffering and the way that we can find a path forward together, that it isn't something you solve on your own, that it is actually something you solve in community.
I would not have gotten through the last six, seven years without the people who love me.
And I was very bad at asking for help. I'm still pretty bad at asking for help, but I'm getting better.
Last talk that I did for it in public, my interlocutor was somebody who loves me very much and who literally held my hand through the conversation.
Those moments. where I had to realize that this is part of it. that one of those two people who squished me between them in the back of the car, you know, I was apologizing for being a mess and needing to sleep on her couch, and she was just like,
That's what friends are for. And I hear that in her voice still whenever I'm sort of being difficult to myself.
It's just like, oh, right. This is like what we build these relationships for is to be there.
And, you know, I... I'm honored when those people call on me in those moments too, you know, that I want to be able to show up as much as they showed up for me.
And I want to be able to pay that outward to new people who haven't had to show up for me that way yet.
And that's what makes living in this screwed up world worth doing?
And that's also what gives us the the energy and the power not only to change it, but to believe we can change it, to believe that actually we're better than the worst things that we're told about each other.
One of the federal workers that I was talking to, Colin Smalley, he's with the Army Corps of Engineers.
And, you know, he was saying, like, that these attacks on the federal workforce are attacks on the entire idea that we should care about each other as humans.
And the way that we have organized that care in this world is through government.
And it's a little bit more complicated than that, obviously.
What would it be like, again, to organize a world around making sure everybody is cared for in that way?
And not just because those people have like worked really hard at building up good personal social networks, but because we all deserve it.
And we deserve that time off when we need it.
And we deserve to rest when we need it. And we deserve to be fed when we don't have the energy to cook for ourselves. you know, he deserves things as basic as a roof over our head.
Like just these basic, basic things that like we can do.
As a world, as a society, we can make sure that everybody is cared for.
Anyone who has been through grief and through suffering understands that one of the things that it does, and you say this explicitly, is that it just erodes your ability to...
Take bullshit. You have zero capacity for like the way things are for people saying like, what's going on?
Nothing much. You know, like you can't do that.
Absolutely. The line that gets repeated all the time and is credited alternately to Slavoj Žižek and Frederick Jameson is that, It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
And the Jewish tradition teaches that every life is a world.
So the end of every life is a whole world ending.
And so when you have to imagine the end of your personal world, somebody that close to you that is gone. that you can't sort of just go through the world in the same way.
At first, you can't imagine anything. But then slowly, it's like... oh, well, I have to imagine everything anew anyway.
And maybe in that space there is a possibility of imagining it better.
Sarah Jaffe, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you. It's been great. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human.
Thank you so much to today's guest, Sarah Jaffe.
You can find more about her work, her writing, and all of her books at sarahljaffe.com.
That's S A R A H L J A F F E.com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who I love working with and who I think are more mindful than most about finding life outside of work as well.
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