2025-05-08 00:33:00
AMIDST THE UNENDING LAYOFFS and the edicts to use nonsense-making machines, the forced commutes, the increasingly lengthy and arbitrary interview processes, and the retrenchment of already minimal efforts at diversity and inclusion—a question is lurking in the minds of many workers, cautious and careful, afraid to poke its head out of the den it has safely hid in until now, but each day getting a little braver, a little more certain that now is the time: what if I cannot fucking do this anymore?
That question tucks itself in the back of our heads because facing it directly is often difficult and unpleasant. If you’ve built up a good career for yourself but after multiple layoffs and months on the market are finding that all the jobs are terrible, facing that question can feel like being asked to climb a steep cliff face with nothing but your bare hands. You want to throw a tantrum, to demand at least a length of rope—surely that’s not unreasonable. But no rope appears, and you’re left standing there, wondering and seething. It’s not that the question itself is dangerous. It’s the response, the part of you that shouts or whispers or sobs out two horrible but liberating little words: I can’t. Or, I won’t.
The first thing you’ve got to do when those words show up is take some time to really sit with them, to listen and let them move through you, let the knowledge drift across every part of your body, until it’s in your fingers and toes and breath and spirit. Know that the grief and shock of this realization is likely to hit you like a ton of racist executive orders. It hurts, is what I’m saying. But pain is a useful signal: it demands that we slow down, that we attend to it, that we lick our wounds and let time and rest do their work on us.
The second thing is you have to start thinking about what comes next. This isn’t a linear sequence so much as a messy oscillation, moving between grief and imagining, between rest and contemplation, between mourning and experimentation. The good news is there is one tried and true method to work through both, and it’s to talk to your people. Kin, friends, respected elders, current and former colleagues, mentors—all of these people are here to think with you as you both process the loss of something that should never have been taken from you, and begin to build anew among the ruins it left behind. Start talking about what’s on your mind with those who will listen carefully and attentively, and ask them to help you notice what comes up, what thoughts or ideas or desires are just now coming out of the shadows and into the light.
There often comes an immense relief from saying out loud that you may be ready to leave one career behind, that it’s now time to do the difficult work of moving towards something new. Relief and fear, of course—but the latter is your comrade in safely navigating the road ahead, a presence that can keep you on your toes as you venture into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. And once it’s said out loud, some space starts to open up to imagine yourself into: maybe there’s work ahead that gets you away from the desk more often, or work that brings you closer to the kind of people you most enjoy spending time with, or work that makes a better world. Maybe there are also changes that may be less welcome, sacrifices necessary to successfully make it across this terrain: a move to a new city, a trip deferred, time spent mending and repairing instead of buying new. The nature of work under capitalism means there are always costs to making a change, and there’s grief that comes with that too—grief that demands our attention as a precondition of moving itself along.
But it will move along, and you will get through this. And odds are you won’t like every part of the change that you’re going to go through, but if you keep your head up, if you stay focused on what’s important to you, if you keep talking to the people around you and weave trust and love and care among them, you will get to the other side. Maybe it won’t be the future that you once imagined. But your imagination is a beautiful and changeful creature, capable of shapeshifting into new beings you couldn’t have foreseen. Trust that the cautious but curious being that is just now starting to poke its head up will take you somewhere that has life and room for living, room to make a life for every part of you, the wounds and the dreams, the grief and the kinship, the old work and the new.
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2025-04-25 19:09:00
Applications are open now for the summer speculative fiction work/shop. The work/shop will gather a small group of people eager to imagine what comes next in their work, and all too aware that the usual tricks—the planning and projections, the goals and milestones and objectives—aren’t the right tools. We’ll use speculative fiction to break out of those ruts, to open up a lens on how we think about work that creates more awareness, more opportunities to revise and re-story our work, more room to maneuver—even on the darkest of days. If you (or someone you know) feels stuck, uncertain, or lost in their work and wants to open up some space to imagine different futures, if you want room to think more expansively and in community—this is for you.
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2025-04-24 19:53:00
ONE OF THE RHETORICAL moves I often observe in response to fear about work is a kind of casual dismissal. Someone will say to a friend or colleague that they worry about ageism in their industry, and the response will come that, oh, no, they shouldn’t have to worry about that, they’re so accomplished. Or, surely that’s paranoia or imposter syndrome talking; or, of course they’re privileged enough that they don’t need to concern themselves over that kind of thing. It can almost seem as if it isn’t respectable to admit being afraid, as if fear is irrational, nonsensical, uncouth.
I think those responses are, more often than not, well-intentioned. Dismissing fear is one way of diminishing it, keeping it small enough that we’re not paralyzed by it, unable to get through the day. And often the person who responds this way is also managing their own fear, keeping their own demons at bay. But in my observations, fear tends to get louder and more insistent when we ignore it. If we don’t attend to it during the day, it erupts into the night, disrupting sleep, sending nightmares. We expend a great deal of energy trying to keep it down, and end up exhausted from the effort, ever more paralyzed and fearful as a result.
I want, as always, to be plain here: there is nothing irrational about being fearful of our workplaces. A good job is our livelihood, our comfort, our needs being met; a bad one can bring incredible misery, and no job at all is often worse. Given the amount of harm that can emerge from work, it may in fact be more unreasonable to claim that fear is out of place, especially these days. Between the layoffs and RTO plans and the dystopian AI-fueled prophecies, the unmasked plans to resegregate our workplaces, the blatant misogyny and racism and bigotry—we’ve got a lot to be afraid about.
So, what then? What happens when we don’t dismiss those fears? When we don’t reach immediately for behaviors that numb or console? The fear doesn’t go away, I’m sorry to say. But with the right attention, it becomes a useful partner instead of a haunting. When you acknowledge a fear, when you name it and bring it into the light, you open up some space to think with it, to converse with it, to consider what it’s trying to tell you. When you admit in conversation with a friend that, yes, ageism is real and it’s coming for you, you don’t diminish the threat, but you do give yourself some space to consider what you want to do about it.
And, critically, you don’t have to occupy that space alone. The threats and dangers in our workplaces are collective, not individual. That does not mean that they are evenly distributed—they are not. But none of us is without risk, and none of us can thrive on our own; a risk to some of us is a danger to all of us. And our ability to respond and attend to those dangers is so much greater when we do it together. One person trying to navigate ageism or misogyny or the unholy alliance between them has only so many moves to make; but when several or dozens of people attempt the same, more opportunities emerge. Not only strategies for changing our workplaces or creating different ones, but also ways to practice collective care and support, to weave stronger connections, to produce an interdependence that’s creative, generative, constructive of something new—to plant the seeds for a different world.
Sometimes the best response to make when someone admits to being afraid is to say, “I’m afraid of that, too.” And then to sit with that for a moment, to let the connection between you spark and then settle in, to see where it takes you. It’s not that some brilliant solution will reveal itself, or that you will suddenly know how to defeat these interlocking systems of oppression. But that together you might start to explore where that fear is making itself known, what shape it’s taking for you both; you may be able to design some experiments or investigations to better understand it, to discover what paths are open for inquiry or study; to learn how others have moved through this terrain before you. Instead of letting your fear drag you around, kicking and screaming, you get to tell it where you need it to go. Because it’s oh-so-ready to walk alongside you, to be your guardian and co-conspirator, to warn you of the dangers ahead and to arm you against them. It just needs you to admit that it’s real.
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2025-03-28 19:33:00
IN THE PRACTICE of listening to people talk about their work, I collect a lot of stories. It’s one of the ways I see my work, as both a reader and a gatherer, a sort of editor of an unfolding, ongoing history and future anthology of work. Being in this position affords me a unique perspective when events cut across industries and geographies and impact disparate peoples in different but connected ways. Over the past few months, I’ve observed a number of patterns emerging in the moves and countermoves that workers are making in response to the direct, violent, and unconstitutional attacks on human rights, life-sustaining infrastructure, and work itself. Here, I offer them not as guidelines or directives, but as entryways, starting points, notions or suggestions. If you’re feeling stuck or uncertain, perhaps one or more of these notes will give you a stone to upturn or the energy to shift your feet a little, to move, even slowly and cautiously, towards the work that makes all our lives better.
The most reliable antidote to despair is action. The always-on, always moving news cycle and shock doctrine scale of destruction is designed to make you feel hopeless and feeble, as if there’s nothing to do but numb yourself to the terror. This, like so much else we’re confronted with today, is a lie. There is so much that every one of us can do, and so much to be gained by doing it—not the least of which is a sense of your own agency, the connection to the deep well of power that each of us has in our bones and blood.
Right now, workers are organizing in their workplaces and in their communities. Much of that organization takes the form of unions, but there are many other patterns to draw from, too: setting up a backchannel to talk to your peers away from company surveillance; coordinating care and support for trans and immigrant colleagues; leaking company plans to eviscerate diversity efforts and resegregate the workplace; refusing orders that are illegal, immoral, or both. Remember that organizing can be both about building up living systems and structures as well as stopping or slowing others from tearing those same systems down.
Organizing can also look like building alternative infrastructures, planting seeds for different ways of working together, modes that have more resilience against the capricious and violent desires of billionaire investors and their crackpot minions: think here of mutual aid groups and worker cooperatives, of decentralized communities and leaderful assemblies. A crisis is as much an opportunity to imagine—and move towards—new futures as it is a moment to grieve the futures we’ve lost.
Strength comes in many different forms: not only physical strength but spiritual and communal, the strength of materials but also the strength of friendship and kinship. This could look like bringing more attention and practice to whatever your mind and body need to be strong—not in the sense of controlling or asserting power over others, but in the sense of being sturdy, steady, able to carry some weight. Maybe that means strengthening muscles and bones, or maybe it means strengthening your ability to sit with fear and uncertainty without giving in to despair. Perhaps also it’s the strength to practice hope, to trust your own inner wisdom in the face of so much outward confusion.
Strength can also mean gathering resources, and under capitalism, few resources are as useful as money. Now is a good time to increase your savings, if you can; to consider your options if lean times are either upon you or likely to be up ahead; to invest what money you do have in people and organizations that are working towards collective futures. Don’t presume that this kind of strengthening is only something you can do on your own, however; a small group of people pooling their resources are much more able to care for each other than any individual, alone. Real wealth is always measured in people.
Now is also the time to kinwork—to reach out to people you know, people whose company you enjoy, whether you’re old friends or new, whether you met on the street or at work or at your local coffee house. As I’ve said before, this isn’t about making a series of transactions, or amassing favors; it’s about making connections, about building and sustaining relationships which grow more strength and agency for you both.
It’s especially important in times of crisis to do the work of making kin: isolation breeds its own kind of discouragement, the sense that nothing can be done. To contemplate lifting a huge boulder on your own is overwhelming; but do it with a dozen other people and the task becomes easy, even joyful. We need that ease and joy, now as ever.
Remember also that as work changes—by your own choices or others—your work friendships need not come to an end. Making kinworking a part of your work means that even when faced with a violent rupture, you don’t walk away with empty hands but with a full heart, a bundle of group DMs, and the collective wisdom of your people.
If you’ve been working for any length of time, in any kind of work, you’ve likely become quite good at planning. A good plan is a glorious thing and it’s a great skill to be able to make one. But uncertain times resist planning. Without being able to predict what might happen, creating a plan is like making a map in a thick and unrelenting fog—you’re either making it up or else stuck waiting for the fog to clear. But where planning leaves us short, experimentation and play can open up space. Instead of making a plan, think of one small step you can take and then see what happens. Talk to someone about an idea that’s been on your mind but you haven’t given voice to yet; ask a question in a meeting when no one else is speaking up; publish that blog post you’ve been sitting on; reach out to someone for a referral on a job that looks exciting but seems out of reach; gather a group of colleagues together to talk about what’s happening and what you might do about it together; close your laptop and take a walk in the middle of the day and follow wherever your mind takes you. Then: see what happens. Notice what patch of ground or sky you can see from this new position, and take another step.
Lots of small experiments can add up quickly, the same way hundreds of steps can cover tons of ground. Maybe you can’t clear the fog away entirely—we live in strange times!—but neither must you sit around, stuck and morose, hoping for it to lift. Remember that there is no such thing as a failed experiment: every effort to try something is a lesson, whatever happens. Step lightly, but keep moving.
Among the people I’ve witnessed working through crises in their work and lives, the one pattern that comes up over and over again is making art. Art brings us back to ourselves, helps us root in our own agency and creative power, makes space for the joy of craft and play, and reminds us of our purpose in the world. On dark days, it’s easy to think that there’s no room for art, because the work of survival is so demanding. But art doesn’t merely take time—it gives time and energy back. It renews our spirits and the spirits of everyone who sees or hears or experiences the art, who receives the art as it’s intended: as a gift.
I take an expansive definition of art here, including writing, painting, weaving, knitting; dancing, singing, performing on a stage or in the street; baking, rock climbing, throwing a rave, streaming a poetry reading, dropping flyers at the farmer’s market. Art is the creative power to make something, whether an object or a story or a brief but genuine smile. To make art is to change the world, to recall that the world is ever changing, that nothing is certain because so much is possible.
And that’s what all of this is about, really—holding on to the awareness that however terrible things might seem, no future is preordained. If there are to be brighter days ahead—and I believe there will be—it won’t be because of some mysterious or magical power, but because we planted the seeds to bring those days about. Because we refused to give up without a fight. Because we kept moving.
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2025-03-15 22:38:00
Defector has a series of interviews with federal workers, including this one with Sabrina Valenti who was a budget analyst at NOAA. It’s abundantly clear reading these pieces how much the administration is attacking workers themselves as well as the work they do to make the world a living, thriving place for all of us. In Valenti’s own words: “The work that we do benefits the American people. And when I say the American people, I mean all of them, not just the ones who are wealthy, not just the ones who live in certain locations. Every single person who lives near body of water, whether it’s a river, a gulf, an ocean, they benefit from the work that NOAA does. For the dismantling to be proceeding apace, it’s destroying the hopes of thousands of people who have dreamed of public service. I have colleagues who were fired who wanted to work at NOAA since they were in elementary school. And the reason that we do our jobs is because we’re passionate about the subject. We’re passionate about the mission. And we’re passionate about serving the entire country, everyone.”
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2025-02-28 02:11:00
TWO EMAILS LAND in my inbox in succession, lining up as if they mean to work together. The first, from Sabrina Hersi Issa, calls out that the Trump administration’s assault on government is also a war on work. On the work of truth-telling, on the work of making sense of things, on the work of order and care and safety. The second comes from Liz Neeley, who notes that the proposed cuts—really, that’s too light a word, these are eviscerations—to the NIH and USAID, among others, amount to a death knell for thousands of jobs, not only within government but in the universities and other institutions who depend on government support.
This all comes on the heels of a boom in so-called AI, an industry whose overwhelming and oft stated purpose is to automate people out of jobs; and after years of round after round after round of layoffs, all handled with a studied carelessness that is designed to instill a deep sense of precarity. Whether or not most of those jobs are truly gone forever is no where near as likely as the oligarchs want us to think it is; but the alternative—that a great number of jobs are rapidly being deskilled, diminished, and demoralized—is even more dispiriting.
Issa references former Washington Post editor Marty Baron’s assertion that “we are not at war, we are at work.” Baron was claiming that if journalists presume themselves to be at war, they may abandon the principles that make journalism what it is; that a wartime mentality would subvert the very principles that undergird the work. I think this imagines journalism to be a fragile, very small kind of work; a work that cannot stand up to the pressure of tyrants and criminals, of billionaires and wannabe despots. A work that cannot recognize that there are times one must take cover, and times one must fight back. It likewise seems to preclude others launching a war on the work itself, and the necessity of a response. But a subject of war is at war, like it or not. As Issa says, and as Neeley capably demonstrates, “Whether or not we choose to accept it, the war has come to work.”
I’m wary of wartime analogies. We’re awash in them—the war on drugs, the war on terror. War too often seems a shorthand for something unwinnable and wasteful, something that directs a ton of bodies and money in profligate, haphazard, and bloody ways. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of “war” as we’re going to get. But these metaphors are the tools of the people who wage the war. What of the people who are subject to it?
What’s under assault right now isn’t jobs. A great many jobs are being extinguished, and each lost job is a measure of misery for many people. But the greater heartbreak is the loss of work—the separation from meaningful, changeful work, and from the impacts of that work, from the world that comes into being when our work is oriented towards the living. It’s telling that so many of the jobs currently under attack are those of technology people performing civil service: these are people who chose work that was less glamorous, and less remunerative, than the standard tech path, but also more purposeful, more likely to actually deliver on tech’s otherwise empty promise of a better world. The message is clear: you will work for the needs of capital, or you will work not at all. That means it’s not enough to simply get the jobs back; we have to fight for the work, too.
When talking to people about their work, one question I often ask is, “what is your work now?” Not what is your job or career, but what is your work. Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us. This is the work that rarely shows up on a job description but we can never let go of, the work we yearn for even when we’re tired, the work we grieve when we’re cleaved from it.
This isn’t to ask what’s on the to-do list. Tasks and chores are sometimes in support of our work, sometimes at odds with it, sometimes simply the daily rhythm of being a body. This is to take a moment to look up from the ground, to peer out at that little bit of horizon you can just make out between buildings, to think about where you want your next steps to take you. It’s to do the daring and life-giving work of imagining change, to have the audacity to believe that the way things are is not the way things must be.
Maybe your work is to make sense of what’s happening, to gather up the millions of breaking news headlines into something that helps beleaguered bodies and minds better understand the moment. Maybe it’s to be a listener, the person others can come to when they need to share their fears and grief, to have those fears held and acknowledged instead of dismissed. Maybe it’s to organize, to create the containers for people to come together and imagine different worlds, and then to begin to define the steps to get there. Maybe it’s to refuse the nihilism and despair that the warmongers want you to feel, to cultivate a sense of peace that everyone around you can draw from. Maybe it’s to do your art, art that gives you life and life to everyone who encounters it, art that keeps us going on the darkest of days.
Maybe your work is simply to refuse to do what you’re told.
I find that asking what is my work now? is a kind of bracing, steadying move, like leaning into the walking stick I forgot was in my hand. It won’t take all my weight, but it gives me some connection to the ground, some extra power in these sometimes tired legs, the energy I need to look up. Because the to-do list will still be there no matter what, and you do need to respond to that email, and someone has to get to the grocery store if dinner is going to happen. But what keeps you going isn’t all that. What keeps you going is knowing what you’re good at, knowing what you have to give, and then giving it all you’ve got. Some days, that may seem like nothing much; but millions of small steps, one after another, can cover a lot of ground. And if you look around, you’ll see you aren’t the only one moving towards a better future. Lots of us are right there with you. And we’ve all got our work to do.
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