The Life I Want: Pandemic as Highlighter
What has the pandemic highlighted about your work and life?
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Since our last newsletter in March (which feels like a very long time ago), the Coronavirus has been working as a giant highlighter, spotlighting the fissures in our work, relationships, and societies. Like many of you, we vacillate hourly between optimism—that the calls to “build back better” will amount to something—and despair about the rush to return to the broken “normal.”
One of the issues the pandemic has highlighted is the relationship between mental health and work, which Eva explored in a deep dive for our blog. Before COVID, poor mental health was a quiet crisis that was predicted to cost the global economy $16 trillion by 2030. Now the crisis is poised to get much worse because of the Coronavirus.
What will happen to our mental health in the future of work? Some emerging trends could worsen mental health, such as job precarity and the loneliness of remote work. But if we frame work as something that creates more than just economic value, as something that fuels our well-being and contributes to the collective good, it’s possible to imagine a better future.
For the piece, Eva spoke with experts including Dr. Vikram Patel, a Harvard Medical School professor Time magazine dubbed the “well-being warrior.” “If we really adopt that idea of work being central to well-being, it then becomes a much more important conversation than the way it’s currently framed,” Dr. Patel told Eva. “It means that governments need to ensure that everyone is at work for their own sake and therefore the sake of the larger community that they belong in.”
The perspective of well-being warriors like Dr. Patel—and Dean Yates, pictured above, who experienced PTSD as a journalist and is now committed to supporting others’ mental health—gives us hope.
What’s giving you hope right now? What has the pandemic highlighter shown you about your life and work?
To discuss these questions and others, we’d like to invite you to an informal conversation on June 11 to connect with us and each other and talk about your experiences and questions about creating the lives we want. If you’d like to join us, just visit this Google doc and introduce yourself with the main topic or question on your mind.
We’re also excited to share our other recent posts with you: Christine interviewed Lauren Sandler about her remarkable new book, This Is All I Got, for the L.A. Review of Books blog, then wrote a post for our blog about how vividly the book illustrates one of our central tenets: that fixing work is not a D.I.Y. project.
We also checked in with John Kim, who left his job at Disney to move his family to Vermont—with a seven-month detour at sea. They headed back to shore once the pandemic hit, but still have some valuable lessons for those of us confined to our living quarters with our kids.
In addition to our own writing, here are a few more links you might enjoy:
We can’t stop thinking about this New Yorker Q&A with Tunde Wey, a New Orleans artist, activist, and chef who believes the restaurant industry is badly broken. He poses some questions we have been debating in different contexts: Is it possible to fix a broken system? As he put it: “Can you renovate a burning house? Can you renovate a single room in a burning house?” What do you think?
Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of Law wrote about how the pandemic is exposing the myth of the “ideal worker.”
Amid the many stories of media cutbacks and furloughs, we were heartened to read in NiemanLab that The 19th, a new news site on women and politics, is forging ahead. We love that in addition to their unique lens on the news, they are doing work differently, with flexible work, paid leave for new parents and other caregivers, and “work from anywhere” jobs.
Speaking of women and the news, we loved “The United States of Anxiety” podcast on Ida B. Wells, a journalist who rejected the idea that newswomen couldn’t have a point of view and took an important stand against lynching. This year, Wells was awarded a Pulitzer, posthumously.
Christine was a guest on the Waste Not Why Not, Office Baggage, Eco Chic, and Work.Shouldn't.Suck. podcasts. Also, she and her seven-year-old daughter wrote a little book, It’s O.K. to Be Sad.
Please tell your friends and colleagues about The Life I Want, and let us know if there are people, organizations, and topics you think we should cover. Ping us anytime at hello@thelifeiwant.co, and find us on Twitter @EvaDienel and @christinebader.
We’re grateful that you’re here with us.
Until next time,
Eva & Christine