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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler.

It's a few days before the midterms. It's all over about the shouting.

And so since fate is very close to seal, we thought, why not pull back from the election and

shine a light on a different kind of all-consuming politics? Office politics? Or more generally,

the work half of the work-life balance in America. We've been cursed to be living through

interesting times for the past several years, but the way American work culture has changed

recently is genuinely capital-I interesting. So from my lay perspective, the story of the past decade

or decade and a half in American work-life goes something like this. Millennials started

graduating in high school and college after the last really strong labor market was ending,

and they mostly started their adult work lives in a pretty meh economy or worse right into the

mall of the Great Recession. And then we spent a decade clawing out of that recession in a way

where unemployment slowly fell, but not in a way that gave workers themselves a lot of control over

the jobs they had or what their workplaces were like. Then there was the pandemic, which had

this split-level effect of decimating many kinds of jobs, service sector jobs in particular,

while thrusting the professional and creative classes into a kind of trial by fire,

of trying to figure out how to persevere under circumstances that required most people to work from

...