How to Reclaim Your Life from Work and do a ‘Good Enough Job’

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“What do you do?” is one of the first questions we ask when meeting new people. And that’s part of the increasingly common American belief that our jobs define who we are. Journalist Simone Stolzoff is a recovering “workist” himself who interviewed more than 100 people — from corporate lawyers in Manhattan to fast-food workers in California — about the role that work plays in their self-identities. Stolzoff joins us to explain why thinking about our jobs as “good enough” can help us separate what we do when on the clock from who we are. His new book is “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work.” Guests: Simone Stolzoff, independent journalist, designer and consultant, author of “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Key QBD Podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport. At SFO, you can shop, dine, and unwind before your flight. Go ahead, treat yourself. Learn more about SFO restaurants and shops at flysafo.com. Switch to Comcast Business Mobile and save hundreds a year in your wireless bill. Comcast Business, powering possibilities.
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0:23.1	Comcast Business Internet required.
0:24.5	Comparates two unlimited intro lines and lowest price 5D plans of top three carriers.
0:27.4	Tax on fees extra, reduce speeds after 30 gigabytes of usage.
0:29.8	Data thresholds may vary.
0:32.1	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Rachel Myro in for Mina Kim.
0:53.5	For many white-collar professionals in the U.S.,
0:56.4	our careers are kind of like religion. Seriously, we look primarily to our jobs to provide us
1:02.8	with a sense of self-worth, meaning, social status, even community. But this is a lot to ask of any job,
1:10.0	no matter how good a fit it is. And at some point
1:13.2	in adulthood, even if your career has been a wild success, most of us start to ask ourselves
1:18.6	a very different question. Are we working to live or living to work? Simone Stalls-off
1:24.3	explores this question and so many more in his new book, The Good Enough Job.
1:28.9	That's next after this news.
1:34.5	This is Forum. I'm Rachel Myro and Fermina Kim.
1:38.6	Every single one of us is more than who we are at work.
1:42.7	And as labor journalist Sarah Jaffe once wrote,
1:46.1	Work won't love you back, Simone Stolzoff has wanted to be a journalist, a designer, a lawyer,
1:53.6	a diplomat, a poet, and a shortstop for the San Francisco Giants. Most recently, he's wanted to be a
2:00.1	published author, and he is one now, of the
2:02.6	new book, The Good Enough Job. We'll talk with him this hour about what kind of fulfillment we can
	...

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