Breaking News Has Broken Us

This is a classic session of How's Work? A large and scattered network of journalists meet for a virtual session with Esther. Over the past year, they've reported on the biggest stories of their careers, but they are burned out, isolated, grieving, and disconnected from the very thing that supports and energizes them all: their newsroom. Over the last few years, workplace culture has been transformed by remote work, inconsistent in-office presence, and an intergenerational workforce. Where Should We Begin? At Work is a new game designed to transform your work culture – one story and one relationship at a time. Brought to you by Esther Perel and Culture Amp, this isn’t your typical icebreaker. It’s a new data-backed game that will help you create community at work. Details at https://game.estherperel.com/products/where-should-we-begin-at-work Want to learn more? Receive monthly insights, musings, and recommendations to improve your relational intelligence via email from Esther: https://www.estherperel.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What you are about to hear is a classic session of How's Work with Esther Perel. How's Work is a one-time, unscripted counseling session focused on work. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names, employers, and other identifiable characteristics have been removed. But their voices and their stories are real.

• 0:28Esther Perel?

  For so long, relationships in the workplace were considered soft skills, highly idealized in principle, but then disregarded in reality. And a major shift is taking place in the workplace now, where relational intelligence is on the forefront. It is not the soft skills, it's the hard skills. So in my work studying relationships in the workplace, I found that there were four pillars that are foundational: trust, belonging, recognition, and collective resilience. With trust, I mean, do you have my back? Can I rely on you? Can I disagree with you without having to face the consequences? Are you here for me?

• 1:13Esther Perel?

  Trust. Belonging: am I a part of the system? Am I taken into account even when I'm not here? Am I seen? Recognition is, am I valued? Are my contributions valued? And collective resilience, which I think is really the significant one, especially for this episode, is when there is a crisis, can we come together and tap into the social resources, the collective resources here, to help us deal with this crisis, rather than to fracture and fragment, which often happens in crisis situations? So this is an episode that I did during the pandemic with an entire newsroom.

• 1:58Esther Perel?

  I've never forgotten it. I never forgot it because I remember always the sentence that the editor in chief, when he said, "I'm running this whole newsroom and I have never met anyone in person." And at that time, that was inconceivable. People were trapped into their little homes. They were parenting at the same time. All their roles had collapsed in one place. They were straddling multiple roles all at the same time. And when I listen to this episode again, I was instantly projected back into COVID era. But so many of the things that we are talking about today when we discuss relationships in the workplace, how they affect culture, how they affect performance, it was right

• 2:43Esther Perel?

  there. So let's listen.

• 2:53Speaker 00

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• 3:32Speaker 02

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• 4:09Speaker 03

  It's an understatement to say that this is the hardest year that our newsrooms have had.

• 4:16Esther Perel?

  I'm not meeting co-founders or colleagues for this session. For this session, I chose to meet an entire team. In fact, an entire newsroom of 70 or so people. They've asked me to come and do a session with them because they have felt that dealing with breaking news has broken them.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  We all just cover terrible, traumatic, sad things all the time, whatever the daily horrors are.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  We are always on, and that's true for any newsroom. People care about their jobs, and they are on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• 4:56Esther Perel?

  Journalists during this COVID year have been essential workers of their own kind. They are frontline workers themselves. They're interacting with the visceral experience of people.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  You can't turn away from the thing that is stressful and upsetting because it's your job to be turned toward it. There's no escape. I wrote an obit for the woman who ran the front desk at my gym who died.

• 5:28Esther Perel?

  And they don't even have the possibility of getting the support from each other that they typically have when they are in the newsroom.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Such a big part of being a journalist, I feel like, are those moments of walking across the newsroom and striking up conversations.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  That's how ideas spark. You hear someone do a phone interview and you go like, wait, I actually know someone who also does that. The collaboration is so much harder to do when we're all so far away.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And then also just the fact that like we've had a big change in leadership. We had layoffs and so we've just lost a lot of staff. And yet we've had more work than ever before because of the nature of our jobs.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  We are going through a huge racial reckoning. We have lost so many women of color through layoffs and also through them just not wanting to be here anymore.

• 6:28Esther Perel?

  A newsroom that's in a state of grief that has experienced tremendous losses over the past year. A newsroom that has experienced a state of collective trauma and that is exhausted. They are participants of the very stories that they are witnessing.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  So friends, I'm so excited today to introduce psychotherapist Astha Karath, a bestselling author of multiple books on relationships and sexuality. And so therefore you might be thinking, why do we have the world's most famous sex therapist chatting with our newsroom? And that's because her latest podcast, How's Work?, is focused on work and work relationships. And with this year of hell, we thought we could have her come and talk to the newsroom about the impact of crisis on the workplace. And while anyone who has engaged with her work at all knows that Astha will make you rethink your whole life and every relationship you've had, she did want to make clear that

• 7:34Speaker 04

  she won't be so bold as to claim that she can fix anyone or solve anything in one session. She makes no promises of quick fixes, unfortunately. And so with that, since you're all muted, can you please give me a best jazz hands or clapping and welcome Astha Karath?

• 7:53Esther Perel?

  Thank you, thank you. And hi, everybody. So let me ask you just very, very briefly, you're all in your homes, I imagine, but broadly, you said, okay, there's this conversation, it's a therapist, she's going to talk about what happens to us individually and to the newsroom in this time. Give me just a few things so I have a pulse check from you.

• 8:21Esther Perel?

  Anybody?

• 8:22Speaker 06

  I'd be the sacrificial victim, just to prime the pump. The thing that I was thinking the most of is the sense of isolation that's accompanied all of this. It's been many months now. And although I normally work out of San Francisco, and so I'm already at a remove from the people in New York, it's been significantly worse. I felt much, much more isolated from my colleagues since this has all began, and I'm really struggling with that.

• 8:55Esther Perel?

  Can you say one more thing about it? Because it's such a theme. It's not just your experience alone. You're talking, you know, anybody who's gonna say something here is gonna be talking for many people. Everyone's individual experience is part of a collective experience. So the isolation, what about it specifically? What aspect of it?

• 9:18Speaker 06

  Well, in part, it makes it harder to do my job, which involves coordinating work products, how they flow from person to person as they move. So it just makes my job harder. But it also has made my life much harder. It's just hard for me not to interact with people all day. And I have noticed that it asks a lot more of my partner as a consequence of that, because she's the only person that I see most days. And so where I would have seen a lot more people in my small office on a day-to-day basis, I don't anymore. And all of a sudden, there's just one person who's asked to bear all of the weight of

• 10:03Speaker 06

  my in-person interactions.

• 10:05Esther Perel?

  Right.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  And I struggle with that. And she struggles with that, and it's hard.

• 10:09Esther Perel?

  Yep, yep. Can I just ask you all just to raise your hand in case that resonates?

• 10:17Esther Perel?

  Just so you get a sense as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just gonna listen for a minute before I say more. But yes, who else?

• 10:28Esther Perel?

  I would love to add to that.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Um, and just like a slightly different version of that experience. Which is that I live by myself and I know there are others here as well who live by themselves. Um, I think our version of that might be that most of our kind of interaction. Comes very intensely from work now in a way that it didn't before. And that, at least for me personally, has made me feel very intensely about everything that happens at work and every interaction that I have. It just is like, there's so much more weight attached to it.

• 10:59Esther Perel?

  Yeah, let me hear a couple more.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Um, I would, I would throw in that it feels like because there's so much happening in the world and. My desk is in my bedroom, like next to my bed. And I feel like I am often like scrolling through Twitter until midnight, even though I don't have to and then like. Thinking about work so much of the time that it's easy to get burnt out even when you're not actually working. Um, and it feels like a self-control thing, like I could just decide to save it for work, but it's hard when work and life bleed together so much.

• 11:36Esther Perel?

  So, um, the context in which this conversation takes place. I think that we are not working from home, we are working with home.

• 11:49Esther Perel?

  And that's very different. There has never been such a strong collapse of the boundaries. Between all our roles, where we are the worker, the boss, the parent, the teacher, the tutor, the partner. The cook, the cleaner, all of it. And I probably missed a few, you know. Um, at the same time, without anything that usually is called contextual living. We are highly localized generally. We work in one place, we go to eat in other places, we exercise in a third one. We go see friends in a fourth one. There is time and space in between that delineate and demarcates between these various activities.

• 12:31Esther Perel?

  And it is intensely organizing for us to dress differently for different places, to go to different places. To have a beginning and an end in that place, to move back to the next one, to have a space called commute or travel or something in between. This collapse of the boundaries is intensely psychologically taxing. And then to turn the home into a gym and a restaurant and an office and a laundromat and everything else as well. So that, you know, what you describe about, you know, I'm already lying there and I'm on Twitter and I'm in bed and the bed is next to the desk and, you know, we've never been more physically apart and we've never been more intimately involved in each other's private spaces.

• 13:16Esther Perel?

  I mean, people are literally entering bedrooms when they've never even been in other people's homes. You know, and how do we counter that has everything to do with creating routines and rituals and boundaries. You know, it's like a tiny gesture to make sure that, you know, you clean the table on which you have worked so that it becomes a dining room table. But it actually is intensely important to create these demarcations between activity and between state of being and state of mind. So that's the first thing that I was going to highlight with you actually is this,

• 13:57Esther Perel?

  on the one hand, the request to become more flexible and more open and more understanding of who we are as people, but on the other hand, also a real need to strengthen the structure that usually comes as part of the way we live and that this time we must deliberately do ourselves. You know, that's the first thing. There's a few things for me also that have stood out with this. One is the living with a sense of prolonged uncertainty. We have been in this constant, you know, like a total pandemic hum.

• 14:35Esther Perel?

  And this sense of prolonged uncertainty is gnawing at people, you know, in a real constant way, even when we allow ourselves the positive aspects of the quarantine. You know, the slowing down, some of us, the opportunity to reconnect with certain parts of ourselves or with others or with our families. There is this thing underneath and we tend to call it stress.

• 15:01Esther Perel?

  But it is much more multidimensional. You know, if you break it into parts and you start to give it names, it's called sadness, confusion, irritability, despair, hopelessness, loneliness, that's stress. It needs to be named. Unfortunately, when we just call it stress, we tend to also highly physicalize it and just look at it as a physiological response. We tend to medicalize it, look at it as symptoms. And most and foremost, we tend to see the answer to stress through a prism of self-care. And self-care, which you have heard plenty of in the newsroom, I'm not going to tell you more about self-care because everyone hears about mindfulness and meditation

• 15:45Esther Perel?

  and all of that all the time. When in fact, much of the self-care that is needed in a time of collective experiences is tapping into the resources of other people.

• 15:59Esther Perel?

  With the prolonged uncertainty comes something, and I've just kind of tried to create a vocabulary for this period, what is often called ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is a term that was created by Pauline Boss way back when to talk about situations of unresolved mourning.

• 16:21Esther Perel?

  So for example, you have a parent or a family member that has Alzheimer. They are still physically present, but they are psychologically gone.

• 16:32Esther Perel?

  Or you have people who have disappeared. They are still psychologically present, but they are physically gone. Miscarriages are ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is what we are experiencing right now for a world that is still somewhat physically present but doesn't resemble itself.

• 16:53Esther Perel?

  And you can't fully mourn it, but you know that there is a sense of mourning that is taking place. You know that there is a sense of collective grief over the world of the world that you knew, over the plans that you had made, over the weddings that got cancelled, the birthdays that didn't get celebrated, the anniversaries that were not even looked at. It's all of those tiny losses connected with that sense of collective grief. But grief over deadness, not just over the actual physical death, that we all know, but the deadness that is creeping up inside of us, the isolation that you're talking about, it's more than just isolation.

• 17:36Esther Perel?

  It's connected to what I call the loss of eros, but not eros in the sexual sense. Eros as in the life force, the curiosity, the mystery, the playfulness, the imagination, the spontaneity, the exploration. That side of life that is on the other side of security and stability, that is everything that has to do with reaching out, has suddenly become so tinged with danger that we live with the loss of eros. If it's dangerous to be curious because curiosity takes you outside of yourself, the only trips you're allowed to take at this moment are the trips inside of yourself. And yes, everybody who has lived in real confinement for a long time

• 18:20Esther Perel?

  knows that freedom under confinement comes through your imagination. Anybody in jail has known it, anybody in a hospital has known it, any child knows it because a child can turn around 360 and suddenly be the new sheriff. Because they have the capacity through their imagination to switch the borders of reality like that.

• 18:44Esther Perel?

  So we don't go on a walk. We imagine ourselves going on a walk with somebody. We're each on our own phone, but we're having this walk. And slowly, we begin to believe that which our imagination is creating for us. So that's, we have prolonged uncertainty, ambiguous loss, collective grief. And then with that, I think that one of the concepts that has also been very, very useful in dealing with this whole period. And when I think of this period, I think of COVID as an environmental disaster linked to the storms, linked to the fires, linked to the election, linked to the economic upheaval,

• 19:26Esther Perel?

  and linked to the social unrest, and linked to what it means when these devices that we have for decades now said are making us completely disconnected have remained the one and only main way to stay connected. So we are really dealing with stuff that is very hard to process when you're in the middle of dealing with it. But one of the terms that for me has been really useful, because it's existed and the test of time, is the notion of tragic optimism. You know, tragic optimism is the opposite of what we tend to do here often, in the US especially, that kind of believes in mastery, you know, which is, we either go back to the old normal, we go back to the old ways.

• 20:08Esther Perel?

  No, we're not going back to anything yet, and we don't know what we will go back to. But tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and to find meaning despite the pain, the loss, and the suffering.

• 20:24Esther Perel?

  And that, for me, means that when you say that you're isolated, when you have a meeting, that you don't just plunge into, you know, what are the stories that you're going to write, or what are you going to assign to whom and what, but that you actually take a moment to check in with each other and ask each other a slew of questions that have to do with who you are and how you're living now and what you're facing now, rather than just pretend that this is business as usual and you need to continue work, produce, perform, and perfect. And these questions may be basic questions. You know, are you taking care of anybody at this moment?

• 21:08Esther Perel?

  That is more than the usual care you typically do. How many of you are sending portions of your salaries to other people than yourself? Who is taking care of you? What are some of the vulnerabilities that you have grappled with? You know, have you been able to go outside and meet people in 3D? For distant walk, whatever. Have you lost certain people? And if you, and how have you lost them? What has been the loneliness for those of you who are alone? Do you, do you have a plant that you can grow? Do you have a pet that you can touch? How many of you are suffering from touch hunger at this moment? A total famine. We are, we can live without sex, but we can't live without touch.

• 21:50Esther Perel?

  We become desperate, angry and irritable. I mean, it's just, you know, so what are we doing with touch? When we spend that much time alone? And to have all those things part of your conversations will actually help strengthen the emotional health and the relational health and the sense of trust and the sense of accountability amongst each other. So this is some of the things that I've been thinking about as I came to the meeting today.

• 22:27Esther Perel?

  What's very important for me to convey to this newsroom is to counter the pervasive notion of trauma from an individualistic perspective. I.e., you're having a problem with this. You're having challenges, issues, rather than pandemics, disasters, major upheavals in society. Create consequences of grief, of confusion, of loss, of distrust, of fear. And that those are normal. They're part and parcel of large-scale psychosocial disasters. They're not your individual challenge.

• 23:11Esther Perel?

  And that collective traumas need collective healing.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Brief break. Stay with us.

• 23:43Speaker 04

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• 25:44Esther Perel?

  Let me just ask you. Give me a tiny bit of a pulse check. Response of what you hear, what strikes you, what irks you, all of it.

• 25:55Esther Perel?

  Yes?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  I was gonna say something about the trying to do routines. I found it much harder. But in pre-COVID, I was very routine oriented. And now I find that I like really struggle to keep them for like maybe a week. And then something will happen and it completely falls apart. And I feel like I sink even further than I was before trying to institute these routines in my life. So I don't know if you have any advice for for that.

• 26:27Esther Perel?

  Do you have a few routines?

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Uh, like just maybe doing something um in the middle of the day. Like when I start working, I kind of go into a work hole and like five hours will pass and I'm still on my computer and I won't move for a long time. So that's something that I've tried to institute, which I just can't seem to keep consistent.

• 26:51Esther Perel?

  Are you are you solo? Do you have people in your orbit?

• 26:54Speaker 04

  I'm solo.

• 26:56Esther Perel?

  And do you have people outside in your orbit that are not too far away?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Not really. Uh, I just moved like six weeks ago, so um.

• 27:05Esther Perel?

  Okay.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:06Esther Perel?

  I will I will simply say this.

• 27:11Esther Perel?

  It's very, very hard to be completely alone and disciplined about some of these routines in general. And maybe you were good in the past, but in this moment, I think that one of the most important ways to create any routines or any changes is to be accountable to others.

• 27:34Esther Perel?

  It's not to do it alone. You know, if somebody shows up at your door, or if you have a call that you need to make because you've made a date with someone that we're taking a 20-minute break and we're going outside, you will go outside.

• 27:49Esther Perel?

  I, I, I've done a few of these things from the beginning, and what I can say is they become cohesive forces. They become not just routines. They become ways that are part of a new structure of your life. So whichever your routines are, if it has to do with exercise, if it has to do with taking a break to eat, if it has to do with going outdoors, if it has to do with taking a moment to, to close all the devices for 10 minutes, plan them with somebody else who shows up with you on your team, among your friends, doesn't have to be related to work at all. You find two or three people who have the same need as you and the same complaint as you.

• 28:33Esther Perel?

  And the most important thing is that you do the most you can in motion. We have never, never been that sedentary as we have had to be these last months. It is sedentary and in front of a screen, and in front of a screen in which I'm looking at you now, and I think I'm making eye contact, but I know damn well that I'm not. There are no mirror neurons here converging. And so my brain is constantly aching to make an effort to make me feel like I'm taking you in and you're taking me in and we are actually connecting. And so I am putting out an enormous amount of energy to create that interpersonal energy between us. And we're succeeding in some way, but at the end of the day, I am exhausted and you are all too.

• 29:18Esther Perel?

  And so when the body moves while you do that, you can do it while you're on the phone or even if you look at a screen while you walk, you, you are creating a very different physiology and with that physiology, energy, state of mind, and et cetera, et cetera. So those are my micro changes on this one.

• 29:38Esther Perel?

  Um, if I can jump in a little

• 29:40Speaker 04

  But I, you know, it really resonated with me what you said about the, you know, the loss of Eros, which you defined as kind of the loss of, you know, adventure, curiosity, spontaneity, because I think that that's, that's actually, I think, especially hard for us journalists, because part of our, our work is going out into the world, talking to people, you know, oftentimes traveling. And I feel like I've really felt the loss of that really hard this year. It's just, it just feels like this, this sort of weird lost year almost, where even though so many momentous things happened, like all of my days kind of looked the same. I guess like I almost feel kind of a sense of

• 30:24Speaker 04

  like anger at this time, sort of just being such a strange, empty time. It does make you kind of question the value, even the value of your work, right? It's like, oh, what am I really doing? Like, how am I really contributing? And so I don't really know exactly. My question is just sort of like how to, how to kind of come to terms with that.

• 30:45Esther Perel?

  Well, I think that, first of all, the anger is part of the grief. And the grief is part of the experience, this collective loss that I'm talking about. It's not just like, this anger is, is very much part of that acute stress that is in this grifting. What you have as journalists, I mean, I think journalists, psychotherapists, we are a type of essential worker. Different from this narrow definition that has been given, but we are, and you are, and people need you in order to even know what's going on in the world they're living in. But what you have as a journalist is that you even more than a therapist,

• 31:27Esther Perel?

  because we have a few people that we remain curious about for a long time. You have your curiosity dispersed on a daily basis in front of new people. You thrive on the encounter with the stranger. Some of you, every one of you has different beats here, but, you know, this pandemic fundamentally changes the relationship to the stranger.

• 31:49Esther Perel?

  The stranger who now becomes an element of danger, to which you can be danger to as well. And so that is an amazing loss of errors. Happenstance, serendipity, chance encounters, which you have in a newsroom. You are one of those places where you walk around, you hear somebody on the phone and you say, "Oh, I know about this. I can to connect you with that." This is an enormously enlivening essential dimension of a newsroom is that happenstance, chance, non-planning, that you stumble upon like that. And when you live without that dimension, you mourn. And sometimes it's important to create little rituals together

• 32:33Esther Perel?

  as a team when you meet, you know, that bring that back so that you create little experiences of surprise, of unknown, of whatever. It could be recipe sharing. It's a channel for creating new things, inventing something, stumbling upon something that you didn't know. Now, when you add it like that, now what does that have to do with, you know, big issues? But these small things remind you that life is actually lived in the details. The stories may be about big topics, but like you know, you're honing in into the unique details that make that story compelling. And it's those small things. So it's the same when you create rituals with each other.

• 33:18Esther Perel?

  But yes, at this moment, you have more than many, but you have lost more than you like

• 33:27Esther Perel?

  of that dimension.

• 33:31Esther Perel?

  Yes?

• 33:32Speaker 05

  I guess, I think also just kind of being in a sort of a kind of like fight or flight mode all the time.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  We had the initial shock of it happening. And then we had sort of a, a, a sense of doom about like our industry. And then we had layoffs. Um, and then we had the election, which also bred a sense of doom. And so I, I found myself often just kind of feeling like I'm in a, in the, in the bunker. Uh, like in, and then kind of realizing occasionally like, wait, this is, this is not a fight or flight moment right now. You know, but, but feeling like my, my sense of what is and what isn't is kind of, uh, been screwed with a bit. If that makes sense.

• 34:18Esther Perel?

  Yes. Because when you have danger and you basically activate the more primitive brain. It takes a while to realize that the lion is gone. You're going to spend time at first in a state of hypervigilance or hyper alertness. And it takes a while to realize, no, no, no, I can come out. You know, nobody comes out of a bunker just running.

• 34:46Esther Perel?

  You come out of a bunker, whatever the bunker metaphor is, it's a beautiful, it's not just the, the literal sense of it. You know, and you just make sure, is it safe? Is it okay? Can I go? And then slowly, slowly, slowly, you know, liberation just takes you, you know. And in other situations, you just walk in a daze for a while. You stay calm, quiet. Different temperaments here. And you just realize, oh my God. And then slowly, slowly your shoulders open up and go down. And your neck straightens again and you start to breathe deeper. That's the first thing you notice is that you, you, you, you're no longer in the shallow breath of. You know, that is the vigilant breath, you know, if you let it go down.

• 35:31Esther Perel?

  But because we are in a prolonged uncertainty, you can't completely relax because it ain't over.

• 35:41Esther Perel?

  It ain't over and it's not just the pandemic. It's your job security. It's your sense of what is the relationship, you know, between management and between journalists and reporters. You know, what is stable here? You know, you've gone through, you, you know, it's not easy to have a new chief in the middle of this. There's a lot of things that, that talk to, you know, the challenges to a system, to an organization and the resilience of the organization to be able to.

• 36:12Esther Perel?

  Deal with every one of these steps. These are difficult in and of itself, so imagine at that moment. But what's very interesting is because you are, you know, you wouldn't be there, all of you, if you're not high achieving people. High achieving people tend to not really do this to themselves very often. We did this quite okay. On occasion, we aced it, you know, and on to the next challenge. But generally, you know, you are very, very good at analyzing cracks. You're less equipped sometimes at looking at the light that shines through the cracks.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Ah, yes, so I guess I was shaking my head yes, because what you said felt very true, like analyzing the cracks seems more of a reflex to me than not, or noticing where there aren't cracks. And the thing I've been struggling with the most

• 37:10Speaker 04

  uh is trying to understand, like, how do I feel proud of myself, or how I feel satisfied with myself in this environment? And I guess like part of my story, I guess, which everyone here has heard about in great detail, is that I'm a, I'm a parent of two young kids. I had a baby in December. It's been very hard and, you know, I frankly feel like I am failing at everything. I mean, I truly don't use that as a turn of phrase or anything. It's a very deep seated feeling like,

• 37:50Speaker 04

  you know, work is hard and parenting is hard and trying to be a good partner is hard and

• 38:00Speaker 04

  I don't feel like any of them are getting the attention they deserve and I feel like, you know, sometimes when I say this, people think that what I want is like external validation, or that like maybe I'm fishing for compliments somehow. But that's not it. It's like really right now lacking a sense of um achievement or something. And on a daily basis, like not knowing when anything that you decide is really the right decision.

• 38:34Esther Perel?

  As it is, if you happen to live in a nuclear family with one partner and two children,

• 38:42Esther Perel?

  to put it really bluntly, it is a fucked up arrangement.

• 38:47Esther Perel?

  It's the least effective arrangement that was ever created. Two adults for two little schmerfs and a full-time job for each.

• 38:59Esther Perel?

  I'm looking at your reactions, but you know, um, and if there is a time where that

• 39:07Esther Perel?

  construct, that arrangement needs to be blasted, it is now. So if it's not gonna be your parents, you're gonna look around and you're gonna think pods. This word that has come up in these last few months is a real beautiful image of interdependence.

• 39:25Esther Perel?

  It's others who are going through similar challenges as you because one other adult in the house or close by or another child is gonna change the dynamic of a family and generally for the better.

• 39:42Esther Perel?

  And if you are alone, it's about moving in with one or two other people. If you are not alone, but you are close to other people, it's about sharing food so that you don't have to eat the same leftovers three days in a row. But you can eat somebody else's leftovers that will make for you a very new dish. It's really thinking in ways that is not natural to the dominant culture of the United States, but it is natural to many people in the United States. You know, in this moment, there are, to me, kind of three essential experiences of the, of relationships. There is the people who are twenty-four seven together, and just kind of, you know, gasping for air. There is the people who are alone,

• 40:28Esther Perel?

  and longing for connection and touch. And then there are the people who are alone, even though there are people right around them, because they no longer connect to those people. I think that that kind of covers the main relational feelings in the moment. So, this is a moment where you choose your people, and you find around you, from another family that, where their child goes to school with your child, and you create a canopy around you, and you begin to deal with the next three months differently. It's like the loss of the resources that you would have relied on doesn't prevent you from creatively thinking about other resources. It won't be perfect, but you cannot do what you're doing,

• 41:13Esther Perel?

  as you're doing, without having the feelings that you have. The feelings that you have are exactly the feelings one would expect you to have at this moment. Given that you have just simply too many demands and a certain sense of wanting to do them well, well doesn't mean alone. This I see looking at you, but I think that pieces of this may apply to many, many of you.

• 41:38Esther Perel?

  Yes, I'm listening.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  How, how do I find myself to care about my job at a time when like the world is collapsing? And I'm like, you know what, what if I just get stoned and watch TV instead?

• 41:55Esther Perel?

  Okay. Disasters and crises function as accelerators. They function as accelerators in relationships, and they function as accelerators to people, and they function as accelerators in terms of our priorities. And maybe the things that you're caring about at this moment, they have carried you, they have nurtured you, they bring you joy, they bring a smile to you, and they help you deal with the big issues that are taking place in the world.

• 42:28Esther Perel?

  You know, what you're asking is, am I less committed in my work as a journalist if this is not the one thing and be all that's at the center of me all the time?

• 42:42Esther Perel?

  Artists deal with that all the time. Am I a painter when I'm not painting?

• 42:47Esther Perel?

  Am I an actor if I'm not performing? How much do I have to do it in order to be it? And how much do I have to do it in order to think that I am really it? That's the identity question.

• 43:02Esther Perel?

  In all and all, you may not have produced any less. You just feel inside like you're coasting a little bit. Or like you're thinking about other things and this is not the only thing. I think that is totally normal. And if, and, and, and, and if there is a baby in the house, there are times when one is also not thinking about it with the same degree of, of enthusiasm or focus.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  We'll be back with a session right after this. And while we love our sponsors, if you want to listen to this session ad free, click the try free button to subscribe to Esther's office hours on Apple Podcasts.

• 43:48Speaker 05

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• 44:36Speaker 04

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• 45:22Speaker 04

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• 45:54Speaker 04

  You mentioned the changes at work and how much more they kind of hit because of our current situation. And it has for everybody in this newsroom. I think friends, colleagues have been let go. Our bargaining committee has been going back and forth with the company over a lot of things that we care very passionately about. And there's discord there. And we had a big reckoning with our company's diversity issues over the summer. There's been a lot. And when we're all in the newsroom, like that human connection that we have, like

• 46:34Speaker 04

  seeing leadership every day and having those little interactions, like that helps rebuild trust and helps rebuild morale. And in some ways, like remind us that, yeah, people are complicated. But when in this situation, it's like you have to take agency. There's no bumping into somebody and exchanging a few words. There can be, you know, and especially if you're hurt, you don't, you're not in a position to reach out. Like, why would you want to? You want to lick your wounds and heal by yourself. But I'm wondering, like, how, when we all go back to the office, if we do, what's that going to be like? And even worse, like, how do we maintain these bonds that are so normal?

• 47:19Speaker 04

  When we're all in the newsroom together, that like, the camaraderie, the, you know, just how we feel about our colleagues and our work? How, how do we maintain that or rebuild that um in these times?

• 47:32Esther Perel?

  So can I ask you something, for example? Yeah, somebody was gonna say something.

• 47:37Speaker 06

  I was gonna say, that's a very important question for me too. Because I started in the time of Zoom meetings. Since I've been editor in chief, I've never once been able to walk through the newsroom. I've never once been able to see somebody in a hall and just have a quick conversation. There's not a single time that I speak to somebody that is spontaneous. And that's true for every single person in this newsroom and has been true since March. We've not once had a spontaneous meeting. Every meeting is a phone call or a Zoom call.

• 48:24Esther Perel?

  I'm staying quiet because I want you all to take that in. This is a collective experience.

• 48:35Esther Perel?

  This is a moment where you're united in a shared experience and a shared reality.

• 48:45Esther Perel?

  Regardless or despite of the bargaining differences that may have been.

• 48:54Esther Perel?

  And the other reason I want to stay quiet for a moment is because this is not a thing you just have a solution to.

• 49:02Esther Perel?

  The most important solution to things that we experience around acute stress or loss is the ability to sit with it together.

• 49:16Esther Perel?

  And to experience empathic resonance.

• 49:21Esther Perel?

  Now, may I ask you if you have ever had any meetings outside, socially distant, for work?

• 49:32Esther Perel?

  One, two, two few, three, no, okay. So, the research on, on, on screen and relationships is this. They've done it on couples who live down distance. Is that if you actually sit together like we're doing now and we're just, it, it's, it's fine, but it's quite exhausting. Whereas if we were both doing stuff in parallel play, like when people play in parallel and I'm cooking, you're cooking, or I'm at my desk working and you're at your desk working, but I see you, like people used to be in a library, that that actually is a lot better for fostering the connection and not feeling this kind of frozen state.

• 50:16Esther Perel?

  You can create slightly office mentalities by have your screens open so that you can write and, and then you lift your head and you say, you know, um, I'm gonna take a 10-minute break. You wanna take a 10-minute break too? And then we come back. Break the walls, basically. And it is, of course, your imagination who will do it, but it is a very interesting experiment. For you as the editor, you have got to find ways to meet your people.

• 50:44Esther Perel?

  Part of me, this for me, is I, I think it's because we still think that this is a temporary thing that's gonna go back to something. You know, I don't know that we're, what we're going back to. Honestly, I don't know. What I know is that we want hybrid. Everywhere people are researching what people want vis-à-vis work, they want more hybrid. There is something about not commuting as long for some people that people have liked. But I also think that it depends what kind of place one lives in. Many of us don't live in a place where we're comfortable to work. So coming to the office is actually a much bigger space than anything we live in.

• 51:24Esther Perel?

  And there is light and there is food for some of us, which is not always something we have at home in ample amounts, et cetera, et cetera. So the workplace is a great equalizer. The workplace is not just a place where you come to work. It has massive psychological meanings. You know, a newsroom is probably one of the tightest places where people come together and therefore the more risky one. But people can create news hubs outdoors in the meantime, as long as we don't freeze our fingers and people can type something away and have meetings like that where you come to discuss how we're doing, you know, everything that has to do with the need to bump into people, right?

• 52:05Esther Perel?

  The serendipity, the mentorship, the negotiation, the licking the wounds, all of those elements can be done in person. I just think that we should not become too rigid about those tiny boxes.

• 52:28Esther Perel?

  An organization that goes through massive transitions faces the question of what are the things that we want to hold on to? And what are the things that we want to let go of? Where do we see an opportunity to bring in something different and better? And this is the opportunity that comes with big transitions as it's happening to this newsroom. It's also happening to our society at large. All disasters bring reprioritization. We ask ourselves, what must be rebuilt? And what must we build anew?

• 53:17Speaker 00

  You just heard a classic session of How's Work with Esther Perel. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. To apply with your partner for a session on the podcast, for the transcripts or show notes on each episode, or to sign up for Astera's monthly newsletter, go to asterparell.com.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  Astera Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity in the State of Affairs. She also created a game of stories called Where Should We Begin? For details, go to her website, asterparell.com.

• 54:09Speaker 04

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• 54:46Speaker 04

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.