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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2025-02-22 22:32:00
This memo from a group of lawyers contains brief, eminently readable, and plainly argued context for why the new administration’s targeting of DEIJ programs doesn’t change the underlying legality of those programs nor does it require organizations to proactively eliminate those programs or to scrub their websites of mention of them. The memo is oriented towards universities but reads (to this non-lawyer, at least) like the kind of argument that would also apply to companies both large and small. Perhaps most critically, it points out that the January 20th executive order “concedes that DEI initiatives are not inherently unlawful,” and that the order “is constitutionally suspect because it appears to rest on pernicious stereotypes that presume the intellectual inferiority of women and Black people.” To me, that’s the strongest counter to anyone who says that the order compels an organization to jettison it’s DEIJ programs: to comply with the order is to reinforce those pernicious stereotypes. Anyone who chooses compliance should be reminded of that, loudly and persistently.
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2025-02-22 00:34:00
Megan Marz is in The Baffler talking about the horror movie that is present-day hiring practices, and it’s worth reading in full. What strikes me most here is the way the narrative that every application is reviewed by a human is designed not to calm the anxieties of job seekers (who aren’t buying it, anyhow), but of the people doing the hiring. It’s the users of the hiring tools who are the audience for a story that neatly papers over deskilling with a gloss of productivity; while the beleaguered applicants on the other side are the ones being used. The whole system is very obviously terrible, and it’s past time we talked about that plainly. Be sure to stay for the kicker.
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2025-02-14 00:51:00
THE DAYS ARE DARK, but in the northern latitudes at least, you can just glimpse them getting a little brighter each day. As we all reel from the events of this past month, and look for ways we can care for ourselves, our kin, and our communities, it’s as important as ever that we permit ourselves to dream and hope for better days. Moreover, it’s clear that how we work—whether that work is the work of government and care; of art or of community; of the technology and practices that allow us to communicate, organize, and build together; or of the solidarity and reciprocity that inevitably arise in moments of crisis—all of it is critical to the world we live in now, and the worlds we may yet live in in the days ahead.
In that spirit, I am gathering a new cohort for the speculative fiction work/shop this spring, starting April 2. Together, we’ll practice new ways of thinking, being, and acting through our work, recognizing that we have the power to shape that work, and in turn, to shape the world around us. We’ll build practices for shifting and reframing our insights to work, including how to use skills of observation and inquiry to better understand the moment and our place in it; when and how to ditch the goals and plans for experimentation, improvisation, and play; and why it matters that we dream big dreams even on the darkest of days.
One of the ways I think about and use the word work is to signal something bigger than a job or career. At their best, jobs and careers are the means by which we do our work in the world, where that work is the action and movement of change, the use of our unique gifts to make more space for life for ourselves and for all our living kin. That’s the spirit I invite you to bring to this work/shop, too: to see your work as something more than a job, more than what it is right now, to recognize the great potential in your life and work, and to move towards it, one experimental step at a time.
As before, and as with all my engagements, the work/shop uses a sliding scale pricing model that respect’s people’s varied circumstances and opportunities.
Space will be very limited; apply now to be a part of the gathering. And if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out.
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