This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Last week, when I trying to do all the things and then had to deal with a very sudden flat tire threatening to ruin all of my carefully laid plans, I was on my way to a long planned relatively short vacation. Wednesday through Monday. A very good number of days. I wrote last week’s newsletter on the plane, scheduled it to go out on Sunday, scheduled some social media posts to accompany it, and allowed myself four days of pretty much nothing. I read a book a day. I did not feel compelled to do anything touristy or otherwise edifying. I slept nine to ten hours a night. My body felt like it was caught in a long exhale.
I think a lot about all of this also in terms of (no surprise) how we build our communities for cars not people. Everything about car-centric infrastructure that makes walkability almost impossible in many places has a lot to do with the unspoken sense that driving everywhere serves a need for efficiency. Walking places becomes a luxury, something that you either do because you’re well off enough to have the luxury of that time and flexibility, or that you have to do amid inadequate sidewalks, crosswalks, etc., because you can’t afford a car and so have failed at life somehow. Walking places, like a vacation, can be fulfilling and restorative and a gift of human existence but instead our profit-at-all-costs society has made it either impossible or a pubishment.
Oh boy this was a punch in the gut today. I made my morning coffee and decided to take 20 minutes to sit on the couch and read this very newsletter before I fire up my laptop on a Sunday in a desperate attempt to get on top of my workload so that I can enjoy the Thanksgiving break the way I planned it. My work life has been a long string of "if I can just get through this week things will be ok..." only to repeat the next week. I wonder if I'm just broken and I can't hack it because I can't work every minute of my waking life and it seems like everyone else can.
If we can learn anything from science fiction, it’s that not even robots want to be robots. I really appreciate the conversation you’re igniting here. And my initial thoughts are that systemic grace comes from a collective turning away from “the need for speed” and a turning towards the slow unfolding of curiosity. Emphasis on slow lol. Anyway, thank you again for the post and for having the courage to share your personal efforts to cultivate grace and community on this swiftly tilting planet.
Oh man this. I just signed a new part-time contract and am spitting mad at the reminder of how harshly we're penalized for going part time. I have a sick husband and 2 young kids. Part time is the only way I can manage and have even a few hours in the week to just breathe (and run errands and book appointments and and and). But I don't get sick days (or benefits)! So in trying to value and protect my own time I lose... down time!! The worst.
In my small day-to-day life, this is what my spouse and I navigate - how to try to honor our needs (for rest, play, not everything hitting the fan if we "miss" a day of productivity).
My partner worked in tech for 7 years before we met, and on our pretty-early-on dating, not so casually let me know she was about to turn 30, with negative big six figures in net worth due to graduate art school student loan debt that was necessary at the time to gain entry in tech. Next month, celebrating our 9th year together, we will *just* surface out of this soul crushing debt with the final student loan payment, and now in our late 30's, can finally breathe again and dream about "the future" or a trip somewhere for pleasure.
I think what was more painful was the isolation she feels from her peers and newly hired 20-something year olds in her company making 6-figures with zero higher education, as it's no longer necessary. People we know assume we're secret multi-millionaires, and don't understand that there's fields in tech (cough cough, nonprofits and government) where you're paid $30k - $70k. This is our first year making a reasonable private sector salary, yet we feel like at almost 40, we're just starting to build a nest egg, retirement, etc. Our peers reached these milestones in their late 20s... because so many of them received help (cough, cough, connections to people with power who put them into roles they otherwise would not get without their parents and high salaries, trust funds, "gifts") from their parents and we missed the boat that that was a thing that allowed them to take risks, work *if* they wanted to, and so on. Last year when we both left tech in nonprofits, we've promised each other - just for pleasure and volunteering, never for work again. We simply can't afford it in this system.
I sometimes find myself falling into a "we need to catch up" story versus the system is so dehumanizing.
What has been slowly shifting is, we've been seeing individual somatic therapists since cov-id which has been supporting us to process, repair, and heal the inner wounds of this "system revenge on rest" and the recovery space our nervous systems greatly lacked in trying to stay afloat all these years.
I had a job where, pre-pandemic, I spent the week working hard but reached Friday night feeling that kind of satisfying tired, like when you’ve just had a good workout. I loved it. But then the pandemic hit, my team’s workload doubled, my kid didn’t go to school for 18 months, and I was the only mom on the team at a company where the pandemic response was basically, “Well, we were already remote and we have unlimited PTO, so, you know, take time off if you need it” while the work piled ever higher and it got harder and harder to get away from work. Even sleep was no relief; I was waking up at 4 AM thinking about my to-do list.
It was the perfect storm of everything you talk about in this newsletter. Of course, I burnt out severely, and when it became clear that I could not keep that job, the strangest thing happened: it got EASIER to get out of bed each morning. I was getting downstairs an hour earlier every day. Knowing that all that work was soon going to be not my problem felt amazing.
I got enough severance to take the summer off. I took my kid to the pool several times a week, read books, took up crochet, but most importantly… slept the whole night, every night. It was amazing.
Often it feels like not taking a day (or heaven forbid, days) off is a better option, because then I'm not left playing catch-up. Like if I jump off the treadmill I don't have the energy to jump back on.
This is made worse by my anxiety telling me that I need to get back to work ASAP, which just makes me more anxious, and that anxiety makes it difficult for me to focus and delays actually getting any work done, which just increases the anxiety, and the cycle continues.
I think a lot about all of this also in terms of (no surprise) how we build our communities for cars not people. Everything about car-centric infrastructure that makes walkability almost impossible in many places has a lot to do with the unspoken sense that driving everywhere serves a need for efficiency. Walking places becomes a luxury, something that you either do because you’re well off enough to have the luxury of that time and flexibility, or that you have to do amid inadequate sidewalks, crosswalks, etc., because you can’t afford a car and so have failed at life somehow. Walking places, like a vacation, can be fulfilling and restorative and a gift of human existence but instead our profit-at-all-costs society has made it either impossible or a pubishment.
Oh boy this was a punch in the gut today. I made my morning coffee and decided to take 20 minutes to sit on the couch and read this very newsletter before I fire up my laptop on a Sunday in a desperate attempt to get on top of my workload so that I can enjoy the Thanksgiving break the way I planned it. My work life has been a long string of "if I can just get through this week things will be ok..." only to repeat the next week. I wonder if I'm just broken and I can't hack it because I can't work every minute of my waking life and it seems like everyone else can.
If we can learn anything from science fiction, it’s that not even robots want to be robots. I really appreciate the conversation you’re igniting here. And my initial thoughts are that systemic grace comes from a collective turning away from “the need for speed” and a turning towards the slow unfolding of curiosity. Emphasis on slow lol. Anyway, thank you again for the post and for having the courage to share your personal efforts to cultivate grace and community on this swiftly tilting planet.
Oh man this. I just signed a new part-time contract and am spitting mad at the reminder of how harshly we're penalized for going part time. I have a sick husband and 2 young kids. Part time is the only way I can manage and have even a few hours in the week to just breathe (and run errands and book appointments and and and). But I don't get sick days (or benefits)! So in trying to value and protect my own time I lose... down time!! The worst.
Systemically, I'm all for UBI.
In my small day-to-day life, this is what my spouse and I navigate - how to try to honor our needs (for rest, play, not everything hitting the fan if we "miss" a day of productivity).
My partner worked in tech for 7 years before we met, and on our pretty-early-on dating, not so casually let me know she was about to turn 30, with negative big six figures in net worth due to graduate art school student loan debt that was necessary at the time to gain entry in tech. Next month, celebrating our 9th year together, we will *just* surface out of this soul crushing debt with the final student loan payment, and now in our late 30's, can finally breathe again and dream about "the future" or a trip somewhere for pleasure.
I think what was more painful was the isolation she feels from her peers and newly hired 20-something year olds in her company making 6-figures with zero higher education, as it's no longer necessary. People we know assume we're secret multi-millionaires, and don't understand that there's fields in tech (cough cough, nonprofits and government) where you're paid $30k - $70k. This is our first year making a reasonable private sector salary, yet we feel like at almost 40, we're just starting to build a nest egg, retirement, etc. Our peers reached these milestones in their late 20s... because so many of them received help (cough, cough, connections to people with power who put them into roles they otherwise would not get without their parents and high salaries, trust funds, "gifts") from their parents and we missed the boat that that was a thing that allowed them to take risks, work *if* they wanted to, and so on. Last year when we both left tech in nonprofits, we've promised each other - just for pleasure and volunteering, never for work again. We simply can't afford it in this system.
I sometimes find myself falling into a "we need to catch up" story versus the system is so dehumanizing.
What has been slowly shifting is, we've been seeing individual somatic therapists since cov-id which has been supporting us to process, repair, and heal the inner wounds of this "system revenge on rest" and the recovery space our nervous systems greatly lacked in trying to stay afloat all these years.
I had a job where, pre-pandemic, I spent the week working hard but reached Friday night feeling that kind of satisfying tired, like when you’ve just had a good workout. I loved it. But then the pandemic hit, my team’s workload doubled, my kid didn’t go to school for 18 months, and I was the only mom on the team at a company where the pandemic response was basically, “Well, we were already remote and we have unlimited PTO, so, you know, take time off if you need it” while the work piled ever higher and it got harder and harder to get away from work. Even sleep was no relief; I was waking up at 4 AM thinking about my to-do list.
It was the perfect storm of everything you talk about in this newsletter. Of course, I burnt out severely, and when it became clear that I could not keep that job, the strangest thing happened: it got EASIER to get out of bed each morning. I was getting downstairs an hour earlier every day. Knowing that all that work was soon going to be not my problem felt amazing.
I got enough severance to take the summer off. I took my kid to the pool several times a week, read books, took up crochet, but most importantly… slept the whole night, every night. It was amazing.
Often it feels like not taking a day (or heaven forbid, days) off is a better option, because then I'm not left playing catch-up. Like if I jump off the treadmill I don't have the energy to jump back on.
This is made worse by my anxiety telling me that I need to get back to work ASAP, which just makes me more anxious, and that anxiety makes it difficult for me to focus and delays actually getting any work done, which just increases the anxiety, and the cycle continues.