Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the past few months, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” The second was Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article on “workism.” The two pieces speak to each other in interesting ways, and to some questions I’ve been reflecting on as my own relationship to work changes. So I asked the authors to join me for a conversation about what happens when work becomes an identity, capitalism becomes a religion, and productivity becomes the way we measure human value. The conversation exceeded even the high hopes I had for it. Enjoy this one. Book recommendations: Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennialsby Malcolm Harris White: Essays on Race and Cultureby Richard Dyer The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914by Philipp Blom A Visit from the Goon Squadby Jennifer Egan If you’ll be in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 25, join us for a morning of live podcasts in celebration of our fifth birthday. RSVP here: http://voxmediaevents.com/vox5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	burnout is an accumulation of stress related to the idea that like basically you should
0:06.3	just work all the time and anytime that you're not working is bad and anytime that you
0:10.4	are working is good.
0:12.2	Workism is the idea that work should be the nucleus of our lives, the centerpiece of
0:17.2	our identity, and the fundamental organizing principle of our society.
0:30.0	Hello and welcome to the Esther Clancho on the Vox Media podcast network.
0:37.1	I've been thinking a lot about work lately.
0:39.2	I've been thinking about work because in part I had a kid and it sharpens a lot of questions
0:43.6	about how much you work and where you work and what parts of your life work had colonized
0:48.5	that maybe actually need to be preserved for other more important or more meaningful
0:53.6	things.
0:54.6	I've also been thinking a lot about work because I think a challenge to how we think about
0:58.3	it is driving a lot of our politics right now and a lot of dissatisfaction.
1:02.0	I had read in recent months two pieces that have influenced me a lot on this.
1:05.8	One was by Anne Helm Peterson in Buzzfeed, an incredibly viral piece you probably saw
1:09.9	it about millennial burnout.
1:11.7	And the other was by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic about workism.
1:14.9	I want to read a quote from both these pieces that I think sort of set the table here.
1:20.0	Anne Helm Peterson's piece is about this feeling that the chia identified and that it went
1:25.0	viral, it became definitional in the way it did because so many other people resonated
1:28.5	to it.
1:29.5	I've just constant burnout.
	...

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