How to stop devoting yourself to your job (w/ Sarah Jaffe)

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keep Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. She and Chris discuss the emotional toll of modern work culture and the importance of community. They also dive into Sarah’s newest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, and explore the idea that between pandemics, climate change, and economic inequality, many of us are feeling a huge (and often unacknowledged sense of grief. Sarah explains the concept of “disenfranchised grief” and how collective mourning can invite meaningful social connections. Follow Host: Chris Duffy (Instagram: @chrisiduffy https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en | chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/) Guest: Sarah Jaffe (Instagram: @sarahljaffe https://www.instagram.com/sarahljaffe/ | Website: sarahljaffe.com/ https://sarahljaffe.com/) Links From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-the-ashes-grief-and-revolution-in-a-world-on-fire-sarah-jaffe/21156243?ean=9781541703490 Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keep Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone https://bookshop.org/p/books/work-won-t-love-you-back-how-devotion-to-our-jobs-keeps-us-exploited-exhausted-and-alone-sarah-jaffe/14597284?ean=9781568589374&next=t Subscribe to TED Instagram:@ted https://www.instagram.com/ted/?hl=en YouTube:@TED https://www.youtube.com/@TED TikTok:@tedtoks https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks?lang=en LinkedIn:@ted-conferences https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences Website:ted.com https://ted.com Podcasts:https://www.ted.com/podcaststed.com/podcasts http://ted.com/podcasts For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.

• 1:16Chris Duffy?

  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

• 2:01Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I can't throw 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, I've done a lot of miscellaneous things.

• 3:18Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  I'm Sarah Jaffe. I am 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.

• 4:11Chris Duffy?

  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, 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.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:30Chris Duffy?

  Across the board.

• 4:33Chris Duffy?

  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?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  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, oh, this is exciting. This is my dream job. I'm a journalist now. I've got, you know, I went to grad school, the whole thing, redid my life. And my working conditions weren't that much better in it. As I joke on my website bio, like 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 like smooth things over when feathers

• 5:24Speaker 02

  get ruffled, like 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, I'm not, 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 full-time journalist, which like, yeah. And 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

• 6:09Speaker 02

  and decided that slinging sushi to tourists in Denver would be great fun.

• 6:12Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  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 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, I don't want my nurse or my doctor to like, only be in it for the money, right? You want your kid's teacher to be engaged and care about kids, right?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  I would be a terrible teacher because small children terrify me. Like that, we don't want to get rid of that entirely, but we do want to have the understanding that like, 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 healthcare rather than the people who know about, you know, counting budget numbers.

• 7:56Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:10Chris Duffy?

  And I'm sure it is extremely meaningful.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:13Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, you know, the, the place that I started that I think really got me, you know, going down this particular front was the Chicago Teachers Union. And in, in 2012, you know, they went on the strike that was this 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 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, if there's toilet paper, 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

• 9:16Speaker 02

  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 another third strike because they're still not getting what they want.

• 9:52Chris Duffy?

  This is where I, we can also bridge the, the line between the two books because you, you talk, I thought, very, very movingly in your more recent book, From the Ashes, about, you could, you draw a line between people who worked in, 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.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, Kevin, oh my goodness, Kevin, I love him so much. So Kevin was a former miner in England and he had been, you know, a coal miner through the, the 1984, 85 strike, after which Margaret Thatcher basically like crushed the British coal industry and this had been nationalized. So in England, right? The government owned the mines. So they were striking against the government, not just some like faceless, you know, mine boss. And, you know, they lost. They 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.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  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 130 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 gonna 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 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.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  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 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 that whole thing, you know, he was like, OK, 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.

• 12:19Chris Duffy?

  I also thought that a really moving piece of Kevin's story is that Kevin's experience of being in a coal mine with a labor union involved a lot of really caring for for other people, for the 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 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.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was so striking, right, to talk to him. And also to talk to Chris Kitchen, who is the the head of the union now, you know, and mostly his job, because actually, they 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. And so When I talked to Chris Kitchen, so much of his job was he's either fighting for retiree benefits and healthcare and things where they have lung disease and things like that from going down in coal mines and breathing that air.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  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 this man, who is the leader of a coal miners' union, his job is care. His job is fighting for his members' healthcare and his job is commemorating, it's 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 entire social world of the miners outside of the

• 14:16Speaker 02

  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 christened or baptized, or I don't know, I'm Jewish. And 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?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  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, 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 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.

• 15:29Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:43Chris Duffy?

  And I believed, I didn't like choose the school because I just chose because that's where I could get a job. But when I was working there, I believed 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 like, 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.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:08Chris Duffy?

  And having an organized piece where we all were in it together.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:13Chris Duffy?

  Would actually be like a dramatic thing, even if this particular building didn't need it. It's a broader thing than just that.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  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. It had 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 were like nine, 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?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  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. Like you actually get better over time. And so protecting your ability to get better over time is, is really important. But also there was 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?

• 17:32Chris Duffy?

  This may be a kind of a question that you don't get that often, I think, which is like,

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:36Chris Duffy?

  Like a person is listening to this.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:39Chris Duffy?

  Or they've read your book and they're thinking about their own relationship to work differently, to their job.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:47Chris Duffy?

  What are three things that someone should do to start to reevaluate the

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:53Chris Duffy?

  way that they think about work in general and their own relationship to it?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  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, 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, my number one bit of service journalism that I always use. 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, 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.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  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 US 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, you know, 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

• 19:21Speaker 02

  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. Might be less true than they think. But we are in a somewhat tight labor market, but mostly still, you know, the, the good jobs are still hard to find. Most of the jobs in the economy still are those, you know, waitressing jobs that I was doing. So, you know, 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 sort of construction

• 20:03Speaker 02

  on historic buildings that the Park Service maintains. She thought this was a great job. This is, you know, she's out working on roofs in, you know, 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 a 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.

• 20:45Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 21:00Chris Duffy?

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• 21:42Chris Duffy?

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• 22:52Chris Duffy?

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• 23:53Chris Duffy?

  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 like collective experience that it seems like existed in the past. My dad worked for the Port Authority.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:24Chris Duffy?

  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 like 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.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:43Chris Duffy?

  That. For me and 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.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  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 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. But 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

• 25:36Speaker 02

  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 like, these are things we should do for the public good. Again, to go back to those nurses in New Orleans at University Medical Center. You know, they are saying like, 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 and the history of it. And there are 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.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  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 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?

• 26:56Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, New York and New Jersey.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, New York and New Jersey, right. So, right, it's everybody who takes a 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.

• 27:14Chris Duffy?

  So, there's also this, this idea that we have tried efficiency and productivity. I think a really new idea I got from From the Ashes was the, the way that grief works in our personal life.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:29Chris Duffy?

  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 that's not how it works.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:01Chris Duffy?

  For people who haven't read the book From the Ashes, and please tell me if I'm wrong, it's, 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?

• 28:24Speaker 02

  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, and I wanted to get an A in grieving the way I want to get an A in everything. 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.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  And also, you know, the way I deal with everything is to write about it. And this one has been harder to metabolize than most. It's been, 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, okay, that's, that's what's happening. That's there.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  And that sense that it's not just an easy thing to get over. It suddenly made sense when I was doing stories on like factory closures. You know, in 2018 was, was Trump 1.0 and I was doing a lot of stories on, 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

• 30:36Speaker 02

  know how they say there are 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

• 31:21Speaker 02

  and we just get this double whammy of talking about grief in public, right? And whenever we say Black Lives Matter and we say, you know, say their names, we're talking about grieving. We're talking about, you know, that George Floyd should still be here, that Breonna Taylor should still be here. There was this moment, right, 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

• 32:06Speaker 02

  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, like I see people with like flare ups of autoimmune conditions when they're grieving, like all of these things happen. And we just have

• 32:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:56Chris Duffy?

  We're gonna take another quick break and then we'll be back.

• 33:09Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by ADT. It's that time of year again when life gets busy. Back to school, back to work, back to routine. When everyone is out the door and on the go, it's comforting to know your home is taken care of while you're away. ADT makes that part easy. Enjoying the little moments with friends and family is easier when you have one less thing on your mind. With their customizable systems that can be professionally installed, ADT has your home security covered. The ADT Plus app lets you access your whole system from your phone. You can arm, disarm, and even check live camera feeds. Visit ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP. When every second counts, count on ADT.

• 33:54Speaker 00

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• 34:37Speaker 00

  It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/Bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 34:54Chris Duffy?

  Hey, everyone. Thank you for making our podcast a part of your routine. We really appreciate you listening, and we want to make the show even better. We want to make all of your favorite TED podcasts better. So we put together a quick listener survey. We would love for you to take it. Tell us what's working. Tell us what we can do better. Tell us things that you're interested in. It just takes a few minutes, but it helps us to shape all of these shows and to get to know you a little bit better, which is really fun. Head to the episode description, and there's a hyperlink in there. Click that link and take our survey. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 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

• 35:37Chris Duffy?

  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 apart. 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.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I joked about wanting to get an A in grieving, but it's really true. I was like, "I'm gonna be good at this. I'm gonna go to therapy. I'm gonna do the thing. I'm gonna get over it in record time and I'm gonna 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 gonna screw yourself up, I think." Or I certainly did, anyway. To be willing to allow it to happen on the clock that it happens at, it was easier for me in a way because I work from home. 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,

• 36:50Speaker 02

  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 gotta do the same thing all day long and you're 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 gotta do that. And you can't pause the line so that you can cry. And you could 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,

• 37:33Speaker 02

  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 Namwale Serpell for a 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 like, 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.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  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. You know, some people would be like, kind of gallows humor about it and say, welcome to the dead dads' 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, you know, 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.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:36Chris Duffy?

  I want to read two quotes from the book that are from really different parts.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:40Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:24Chris Duffy?

  And then I just want to 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.

• 40:59Chris Duffy?

  And to me, those two quotes really capture so much of the beauty of this book and also the, 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.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  I would not have gotten through the last six, seven years without the people who love me. And like, 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 like, this is part of it. That one of, 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, and needing to sleep on her couch. And she was just like, that's what friends are for.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  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 am 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

• 42:48Speaker 02

  that we're told about each other. You know, one of those, 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, that these attacks on, 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 like, it's a little bit more complicated than that, obviously. But like, 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.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  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, we deserve 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.

• 43:54Chris Duffy?

  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.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely. The line that gets repeated all the time and is credited alternately to Slavoj Juzjak and Frederick Jameson is that, right? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. And the Jewish tradition teaches that when every, every life is a world, right? 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."

• 44:53Speaker 02

  And maybe in that space, there is a possibility of imagining it better.

• 44:58Chris Duffy?

  Sarah Jaffe, thank you so much for being on the show.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's been great.

• 45:05Chris Duffy?

  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 dot com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffycomedy.com.

• 45:28Chris Duffy?

  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. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Ben Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Latt, Tansika Summa Nivong, Antonio Le and Joseph DeBryne. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who in work and in life, value the facts. On the PRX side, they grieve the audiobites that could not be salvaged while moving forward into the crystal-clear recordings of the future. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. You are a crucial ingredient in this podcast. Share this episode with a person in your life who makes your life outside of work meaningful.

• 46:12Chris Duffy?

  We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again for listening. This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them.

• 46:55Chris Duffy?

  None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One, N A, Member FDIC.

• 47:44Speaker 00

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• 48:12Speaker 04

  Hi there. It's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. And this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.