When Work Bleeds into the Everyday
We return from a short hiatus this week to talk about Severance and office life
This week’s post comes from New York after two days on the floor of my hotel bathroom recovering from diarrhea. I don’t know why I think I can still do redeye flights.
Musings
Dua Lipa has been doing interviews with authors like Min Jin Lee of Pachinko, Paul Murray of The Bee Sting, and Hernan Diaz of Trust for over a year and people are starting to notice how amazing she is at it.
ArsTechnica published a piece on the Enshittification of the Internet which covers not just the terrible AI experience on every webpage with useless chatbots but also the horrendous smart home devices we were promised that turned into $300 eyesores. If Honeywell, Kodak, or Thoughtcatalog were looking for the moment to make a comeback — it’s now.
People are moving out of major cities year over year and that’s having an effect on our electoral college with California, New York, and Illinois estimated to lose 7 by 2030 while Florida and Texas pickup 8 - making it that much harder for Democrats to win the necessary 270 electors for President. Ezra Klein covers the problem and some of the issues plaguing dems.
Building an Outtie
This week is the season finale of Severance which will unfortunately mean the end to Ben Stiller’s promo tour of the show along with its interviews. I’ve learned that Jerry Stiller was his father, the Zoolander gasoline scene could have been minutes longer, and that he and his wife had to separate before finding themselves and getting back together. So what better time to talk about work than now.
I have been working for 18 years now - almost half my lifetime. For eighteen years, I have had to file a W2 informing the US Government what they already know while amassing a 401k that I hope to spend before I die. Over those years, what I work on and how I do that work hasn’t changed much but how I think about it has.
When I first started working, I wanted to learn as much as I could while trying to build friendships - at almost any cost. I played World of Warcraft with my coworkers, joined the company softball teams which led to heavy drinking, and worked late hours on SQL scripts to understand whether our clients were going to have issues in the morning. This is all during a time when you had to solve it yourself or through the company intranet - before Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and the latest TikTok excel sheet influencers. I didn’t care much for promotions or networking - I just wanted to know if I was going to make batting practice, troubleshoot my dashboard, and whether the next work project would be fun.
I find myself still building out dashboards and monitoring the health of my teams but long gone are the Thursday night softball games with drinking. Rather than evaluating whether a project will be fun - I’m asking whether it will give me face time with leadership to ensure I’m working on something that aligns with company strategy and receive any feedback/instructions directly rather than filtered through 5 middle managers. With my limited time, I’m making decisions bias’ing towards work/life balance over learning with regrettable tradeoffs.
I have to remind myself that work is just work. I keep trying to find ways to make it feel less like work or do some of it outside but I think it’s a losing battle. Work is a place for my innie to do his best work; working on his autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And maybe that’s where it should stay. But when you’ve spent half your life working and building your sense of self around it, how do you compartmentalize it all? Hopefully Adam Scott and Ben Stiller answer it in this week’s episode.
Oliver Tales
This week I dropped Oliver off at daycare when one of his friends ran up to him to ask if they were best friends. “No, my mom is my best friend” Oliver said to the dismay of his friend and me.