This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. At some point yesterday afternoon, I was attempting to go back and forth between updates to the NYT live feed and the book chapter I’m working on, periodically responding to various text groups and making sure my partner, who’s covered MAGA/conspiracy movements for the last four years, got some food while he was
Thank you for writing this. I am so angry that capitalism has us continuing on today like nothing happened. I am in tears writing this. Four years ago, I had a lot of traumatic things happen in my life and then Trump got elected, and I was afraid for this country. There was no time or ability to stop and process any of it and I ended up mentally breaking down in January 2017. I went to an inpatient facility for depression and while I was there my employer let me go because I didn’t qualify for FMLA because I had only been employed there for less than a year.
Yesterday confirmed everything that I feared from four years ago, with all of the trauma of 2020 layered on top of it.
Our capitalist society doesn’t allow us time to grieve or to process anything, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve been on the edge of a mental breakdown for a while and I need a break but I’m not in the position to take one. Like four years ago, I am now in a job where I have also been employed for less than a year. Even if I had been there forever, I would still be afraid to take leave out of fear of conveniently being fired for another reason due to my past trauma of being fired. I don’t know what to do.
I was having a straight up nervous breakdown for the first few months of the pandemic. I could not take time off (a coworker was retiring and I had to train for 4-6 hours a day to take over her job), I was crying off and on all day. I got the worst review of my life and was written up every few weeks during that time. I was the only one doing my own job and nobody knew how to do mine, so I could not just not be working.
You have no choice but to keep going. Period. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.
Similar experience, but sort of flipped: coped well initially, then was ordered to report back to work in person. Advocated passionately for myself and my staff--teachers of adult education--to continue working remotely, but was unsuccessful. Was retaliated against in a number of ways, was/am mad stressed out, living alone, the COVID numbers are rising, I'm in my 65th year and would like to keep living, got written up, and verbally reprimanded, and now just feel that I will be pushed out. In a very specific field with few job opportunities in leadership roles, and I'm pushing 65. I'm very scared and just heartbroken that my career will end in this horrible way--unsupported, disrespected, cast out.
I'm so sorry to hear this, Judith! You're around my mom's age and horribly sour career ends have happened to so many people she knows because of ageism.
She ultimately chose to retire during the pandemic but not everyone in their mid-60s has the means or desire to do so. She made a smart choice because a covid outbreak did happen at her work, but this wasn't the way she wanted her career to end, either. Like a high school senior who missed out on prom, spirit week, graduation day, and a party, she didn't get a "proper" ending - no celebratory last week, no final day, no retirement party, not even a gift from her employer of 26.5 years. Her last day at work with her coworkers was in March and she retired to no fanfare when they reopened at limited capacity in July.
Thanks, Laura. I have worked in the nonprofit sector my whole life and figured I really kind of need to work til I'm 70, but now that's down the tubes, and I am afraid for my future. Oh, and no kids to help me later either. Sorry about your mom, too.
I know a lot of people retiring now (or in my mom's case, was forced to) because the way things are going, it's not safe and you might as well GTFO, unfortunately. And yeah, nobody can really party any more either.
If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that I need to take the time I can to truly rest on the evenings and weekends. I need to keep taking walks and “water cooler” breaks throughout the day. That’s easier said than done but when I do it I feel a little better.
Thank you for this. My company hasn't said anything at all, so it's just people making sense of it quietly on their own or through slack DMs with like minded colleagues. It's impossible to focus and I feel like this ignoring of a huge, violent, white supremacist elephant in the room just normalizes events like these. I mean 2 weeks ago we didn't even bat an eye when an entire block was decimated in Nashville.
This essay was spot on and I almost wish it was in the paid subscription because there are such good discussions there. I shared with work colleagues (the ones I was texting with nonstop yesterday) and am considering sending to management. I wonder, though, when the crises keep hitting one after another, how do we do anything but put our heads down and work?
As an office worker who eventually just got up and went for a bike ride because I needed to stop looking at screens, this definitely hit home. Of course I also have a job that lets me do that. But later it was wild, I'm running for something locally and still was sending off emails, texts, and calls trying to hustle votes and it's like...maybe not today? But it feels like that so much these days
In other countries where there have been coups and coup attempts, it’s very likely that the citizens didn’t have the privilege of setting around, watching the news and reflecting on it. They had to make a living.
I was thinking about this, and had a poorly-written paragraph in an early draft of the piece about it — I think there's a difference (and here's where [American] capitalist work ethic comes in) between "complete tasks for the day" and "focus on your emails." Did I make dinner (frozen pizza) and walk the dogs yesterday? Yes, those things needed to happen, and people will always have to keep doing that work: the animals need to get fed, the food needs to be harvested. But the necessity of productivity-focused work feels different.
It’s interesting to read your perspective as a freelancer, and as someone whose partner is doing the essential work of covering the news. Since you work for yourself, as do I, there’s a different mindset. Beyond making a living, work is also something that gives us purpose.
That's a good point. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since my grandparents survived the Siege of Leningrad, how people have to work and feed their children and do all kinds of "normal life" things when the world falls apart.
I have been thinking about this as well. Whether or not we've had the privilege to watch current events unfold, all of us have felt them. I put dinner on the table every night and showed up for my kids...but was I the best, most patient parent I could be? Not by a longshot. I find myself creating a "new normal" to paper over the heartache of the past years - a coping mechanism to continue forward momentum and show up productively at work. Yesterday that meant softly crying on the couch while watching the news, taking a spare moment to explain sedition and treason to my 12 year old, and then getting back online for conference calls all afternoon. Somehow I couldn't give myself more than 60 minutes during the work day to just sit with the heaviness.
That kind of describes my day, too, with too much Twitter refreshing in between. I don't even have a Twitter account; I was just stalking around reading everything. I had to persuade my husband that we needed to explain what happened to our 13-year-old because he was just going to read it online anyway. And I choked up trying to decide whether to say the institutions will hold and it will end up okay or ... not. And realizing I can't say because I don't know, which has been true too often since having kids. I don't think I've even given myself time to sit with it. That's a good point. How much time do we spend coming to terms with grief versus how much time we spend trawling the web hoping to find answers or at least hope? <<hugs>>
This is true. My employer, a SLAC, is scheduling circle time via Zoom in order to process events. but I confess I just pretended to join the circle and instead have been scouring news stories and twitter in an attempt to find out WTF the happened and for real. It doesn't help that my elderly mother is in the hospital with pneumonia and they want to discharge her to rehab but they can't find a bed.
9/11 happened at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I remember us students wanting to get more news, and the teachers wanting to just carry on teaching. So, at least in a small town in Wisconsin, things didn't grind to a stop even then.
My fondest teacher memory is of the days after 9/11, when one teacher chose to dedicate two class sessions to processing what just happened. I was lucky enough to have plenty of teachers who were good at what they did and got me interested in their subject, but only the one who actually defied the school directive to carry on so we could have some space to grieve.
I lived in Brooklyn on 9/11 and it was my son's first day of pre-K and schools there stayed in session because they were worried that kids wouldn't have parents to come pick them up. I have to say I was grateful for the teachers who were willing to keep on teaching.
My god, thank you. Had multiple direct reports reach out to me yesterday to say they were distracted, too upset to have a 1:1, anxious, etc. I kept "working" because that is all I know how to do, while telling them yes, of course, please step away. I need to extend the same compassion to myself that I do to others and this was a good reminder.
Thank you for writing this. I'm DC-based and my company yesterday sent out an email that said "please reach out" and that they could "direct [us] to additional wellness resources." As you wrote, while well-intentioned, that still puts the onus on the employee to do the work of outreach to the management structure—not to mention that corporate "wellness" resources are so often completely inadequate and focus on individual self-optimization as a response to stresses and negative feelings caused by large-scale systemic problems/events. I wish they had provided a more robust statement denouncing yesterday's hellacious events (unmentioned except for the subject line "DC Protests") and taken the initiative themselves to collectively offer us something (though what I don't know—additional PTO?). I had a meeting yesterday at 4:30 pm and everyone was acting like nothing was wrong; it was so surreal that we had to put on that facade (as I half-listened and doomscrolled).
This this THIS - straight into my heart. It's exactly right: "Over the course of this past year, I’ve been on the receiving end of corporate messaging that says: feel free to take some time if you need to. But that sort of opt-in strategy, while well-intentioned, can be incredibly pandering — with the potential to position people as “under-achievers” simply because of their identity, their proximity to events, or the way they process grief."
I was working in a different area yesterday 1-5, without internet/cell phone reception, and walked out to a torrent of delayed texts/calls. In that same are where I don't really know people today, and no one has mentioned anything at all! Meanwhile, I'm stewing trying not to yell at the world in front of patients or freak out at anyone. HOW IS THIS NORMAL?? We continue to exist in these different realities and I don't know how we move on.
Ugh, yes. Took me hours longer to do basic tasks. Then I asked myself why I was still bothering to do them. The black heart of capitalism is beating. :/
YES! My friend teaches third grade and said the coup happened while she was teaching math class. She texted me saying she didn't know if she should stop teaching math or talk about what happened. Ultimately, she finished the lesson because "what's the framework for talking to 8 year-olds about a recent attempted coup??"
This made me cry because it put into words everything that I'm feeling. I just went and unloaded on my director, who gave me permission to send all of my staff home for the rest of the (paid) day. We're a nonprofit and the compulsion to keep working to support our clients "out of compassion and duty" is so difficult to fight against, so this unusual and probably won't happen again - but if not now, when?
Thank you so much for this. Many of us have experiences in cultures that have discouraged us from understanding and processing our feelings, cultures that can be work and productivity and output oriented, that make us feel bad for having negative feelings or simply suggest the most constructive thing to do is push past them. Many of us only learn from therapy or books how to do the processing. I think those of us who can't work, who are deeply disturbed and want to do something about it, need to trust that instinct. Ignoring this ugliness only makes it worse, uniting together to address it in an honest way seems the only way to bring meaningful change.
Sorry last thing — the thing that did make me feel productive today was calling and emailing my Congresspeople and asking them to impeach and investigate and hold accountable everyone who orchestrated what happened yesterday. Speaker Pelosi who called for impeachment said her phone is "exploding with calls for impeach, impeach, impeach." My point isn't that everyone needs to do this (I know some people don't have the time or energy) but rather that this is the benefit of listening to my frustrated and anxious and angry feelings and not my "just keep working" voice of productivity.
Thank you for writing this. I am so angry that capitalism has us continuing on today like nothing happened. I am in tears writing this. Four years ago, I had a lot of traumatic things happen in my life and then Trump got elected, and I was afraid for this country. There was no time or ability to stop and process any of it and I ended up mentally breaking down in January 2017. I went to an inpatient facility for depression and while I was there my employer let me go because I didn’t qualify for FMLA because I had only been employed there for less than a year.
Yesterday confirmed everything that I feared from four years ago, with all of the trauma of 2020 layered on top of it.
Our capitalist society doesn’t allow us time to grieve or to process anything, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve been on the edge of a mental breakdown for a while and I need a break but I’m not in the position to take one. Like four years ago, I am now in a job where I have also been employed for less than a year. Even if I had been there forever, I would still be afraid to take leave out of fear of conveniently being fired for another reason due to my past trauma of being fired. I don’t know what to do.
I was having a straight up nervous breakdown for the first few months of the pandemic. I could not take time off (a coworker was retiring and I had to train for 4-6 hours a day to take over her job), I was crying off and on all day. I got the worst review of my life and was written up every few weeks during that time. I was the only one doing my own job and nobody knew how to do mine, so I could not just not be working.
You have no choice but to keep going. Period. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.
Similar experience, but sort of flipped: coped well initially, then was ordered to report back to work in person. Advocated passionately for myself and my staff--teachers of adult education--to continue working remotely, but was unsuccessful. Was retaliated against in a number of ways, was/am mad stressed out, living alone, the COVID numbers are rising, I'm in my 65th year and would like to keep living, got written up, and verbally reprimanded, and now just feel that I will be pushed out. In a very specific field with few job opportunities in leadership roles, and I'm pushing 65. I'm very scared and just heartbroken that my career will end in this horrible way--unsupported, disrespected, cast out.
I'm so sorry to hear this, Judith! You're around my mom's age and horribly sour career ends have happened to so many people she knows because of ageism.
She ultimately chose to retire during the pandemic but not everyone in their mid-60s has the means or desire to do so. She made a smart choice because a covid outbreak did happen at her work, but this wasn't the way she wanted her career to end, either. Like a high school senior who missed out on prom, spirit week, graduation day, and a party, she didn't get a "proper" ending - no celebratory last week, no final day, no retirement party, not even a gift from her employer of 26.5 years. Her last day at work with her coworkers was in March and she retired to no fanfare when they reopened at limited capacity in July.
Thanks, Laura. I have worked in the nonprofit sector my whole life and figured I really kind of need to work til I'm 70, but now that's down the tubes, and I am afraid for my future. Oh, and no kids to help me later either. Sorry about your mom, too.
I know a lot of people retiring now (or in my mom's case, was forced to) because the way things are going, it's not safe and you might as well GTFO, unfortunately. And yeah, nobody can really party any more either.
I am so sorry you went through that, Jennifer.
If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that I need to take the time I can to truly rest on the evenings and weekends. I need to keep taking walks and “water cooler” breaks throughout the day. That’s easier said than done but when I do it I feel a little better.
I did that to the best of my ability at the time! Thank you.
Thank you for this. My company hasn't said anything at all, so it's just people making sense of it quietly on their own or through slack DMs with like minded colleagues. It's impossible to focus and I feel like this ignoring of a huge, violent, white supremacist elephant in the room just normalizes events like these. I mean 2 weeks ago we didn't even bat an eye when an entire block was decimated in Nashville.
Yeah, no kidding. Christmas Day bombing? Same old, same old any more.
This essay was spot on and I almost wish it was in the paid subscription because there are such good discussions there. I shared with work colleagues (the ones I was texting with nonstop yesterday) and am considering sending to management. I wonder, though, when the crises keep hitting one after another, how do we do anything but put our heads down and work?
Let's make it a topic for tomorrow's discussion!
Thank you. I so look forward to the discussions there.
I think it really depends what your job is and how much your performance is affected.
But haven't you heard that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a coup?
Shakespeare didn't have news alerts and the Internet going the entire time :P
LOL!
As an office worker who eventually just got up and went for a bike ride because I needed to stop looking at screens, this definitely hit home. Of course I also have a job that lets me do that. But later it was wild, I'm running for something locally and still was sending off emails, texts, and calls trying to hustle votes and it's like...maybe not today? But it feels like that so much these days
In other countries where there have been coups and coup attempts, it’s very likely that the citizens didn’t have the privilege of setting around, watching the news and reflecting on it. They had to make a living.
I was thinking about this, and had a poorly-written paragraph in an early draft of the piece about it — I think there's a difference (and here's where [American] capitalist work ethic comes in) between "complete tasks for the day" and "focus on your emails." Did I make dinner (frozen pizza) and walk the dogs yesterday? Yes, those things needed to happen, and people will always have to keep doing that work: the animals need to get fed, the food needs to be harvested. But the necessity of productivity-focused work feels different.
It’s interesting to read your perspective as a freelancer, and as someone whose partner is doing the essential work of covering the news. Since you work for yourself, as do I, there’s a different mindset. Beyond making a living, work is also something that gives us purpose.
That's a good point. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since my grandparents survived the Siege of Leningrad, how people have to work and feed their children and do all kinds of "normal life" things when the world falls apart.
I have been thinking about this as well. Whether or not we've had the privilege to watch current events unfold, all of us have felt them. I put dinner on the table every night and showed up for my kids...but was I the best, most patient parent I could be? Not by a longshot. I find myself creating a "new normal" to paper over the heartache of the past years - a coping mechanism to continue forward momentum and show up productively at work. Yesterday that meant softly crying on the couch while watching the news, taking a spare moment to explain sedition and treason to my 12 year old, and then getting back online for conference calls all afternoon. Somehow I couldn't give myself more than 60 minutes during the work day to just sit with the heaviness.
That kind of describes my day, too, with too much Twitter refreshing in between. I don't even have a Twitter account; I was just stalking around reading everything. I had to persuade my husband that we needed to explain what happened to our 13-year-old because he was just going to read it online anyway. And I choked up trying to decide whether to say the institutions will hold and it will end up okay or ... not. And realizing I can't say because I don't know, which has been true too often since having kids. I don't think I've even given myself time to sit with it. That's a good point. How much time do we spend coming to terms with grief versus how much time we spend trawling the web hoping to find answers or at least hope? <<hugs>>
This is true. My employer, a SLAC, is scheduling circle time via Zoom in order to process events. but I confess I just pretended to join the circle and instead have been scouring news stories and twitter in an attempt to find out WTF the happened and for real. It doesn't help that my elderly mother is in the hospital with pneumonia and they want to discharge her to rehab but they can't find a bed.
9/11 happened at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I remember us students wanting to get more news, and the teachers wanting to just carry on teaching. So, at least in a small town in Wisconsin, things didn't grind to a stop even then.
My fondest teacher memory is of the days after 9/11, when one teacher chose to dedicate two class sessions to processing what just happened. I was lucky enough to have plenty of teachers who were good at what they did and got me interested in their subject, but only the one who actually defied the school directive to carry on so we could have some space to grieve.
I lived in Brooklyn on 9/11 and it was my son's first day of pre-K and schools there stayed in session because they were worried that kids wouldn't have parents to come pick them up. I have to say I was grateful for the teachers who were willing to keep on teaching.
Yes, I was in eighth grade and they wouldn’t let us watch the news, even as parents began picking up their children. It only frightened us more.
My god, thank you. Had multiple direct reports reach out to me yesterday to say they were distracted, too upset to have a 1:1, anxious, etc. I kept "working" because that is all I know how to do, while telling them yes, of course, please step away. I need to extend the same compassion to myself that I do to others and this was a good reminder.
Thank you for writing this. I'm DC-based and my company yesterday sent out an email that said "please reach out" and that they could "direct [us] to additional wellness resources." As you wrote, while well-intentioned, that still puts the onus on the employee to do the work of outreach to the management structure—not to mention that corporate "wellness" resources are so often completely inadequate and focus on individual self-optimization as a response to stresses and negative feelings caused by large-scale systemic problems/events. I wish they had provided a more robust statement denouncing yesterday's hellacious events (unmentioned except for the subject line "DC Protests") and taken the initiative themselves to collectively offer us something (though what I don't know—additional PTO?). I had a meeting yesterday at 4:30 pm and everyone was acting like nothing was wrong; it was so surreal that we had to put on that facade (as I half-listened and doomscrolled).
This this THIS - straight into my heart. It's exactly right: "Over the course of this past year, I’ve been on the receiving end of corporate messaging that says: feel free to take some time if you need to. But that sort of opt-in strategy, while well-intentioned, can be incredibly pandering — with the potential to position people as “under-achievers” simply because of their identity, their proximity to events, or the way they process grief."
I was working in a different area yesterday 1-5, without internet/cell phone reception, and walked out to a torrent of delayed texts/calls. In that same are where I don't really know people today, and no one has mentioned anything at all! Meanwhile, I'm stewing trying not to yell at the world in front of patients or freak out at anyone. HOW IS THIS NORMAL?? We continue to exist in these different realities and I don't know how we move on.
yes!!! we're still in crisis!!!!
Ugh, yes. Took me hours longer to do basic tasks. Then I asked myself why I was still bothering to do them. The black heart of capitalism is beating. :/
And you work for yourself! You're not even going to get fired if you can't work for 15 minutes!
I wish I worked for myself haha, nope, corporate cog. :)
Whoops, mixed you up with Anne!
YES! My friend teaches third grade and said the coup happened while she was teaching math class. She texted me saying she didn't know if she should stop teaching math or talk about what happened. Ultimately, she finished the lesson because "what's the framework for talking to 8 year-olds about a recent attempted coup??"
This made me cry because it put into words everything that I'm feeling. I just went and unloaded on my director, who gave me permission to send all of my staff home for the rest of the (paid) day. We're a nonprofit and the compulsion to keep working to support our clients "out of compassion and duty" is so difficult to fight against, so this unusual and probably won't happen again - but if not now, when?
Thank you so much for this. Many of us have experiences in cultures that have discouraged us from understanding and processing our feelings, cultures that can be work and productivity and output oriented, that make us feel bad for having negative feelings or simply suggest the most constructive thing to do is push past them. Many of us only learn from therapy or books how to do the processing. I think those of us who can't work, who are deeply disturbed and want to do something about it, need to trust that instinct. Ignoring this ugliness only makes it worse, uniting together to address it in an honest way seems the only way to bring meaningful change.
Sorry last thing — the thing that did make me feel productive today was calling and emailing my Congresspeople and asking them to impeach and investigate and hold accountable everyone who orchestrated what happened yesterday. Speaker Pelosi who called for impeachment said her phone is "exploding with calls for impeach, impeach, impeach." My point isn't that everyone needs to do this (I know some people don't have the time or energy) but rather that this is the benefit of listening to my frustrated and anxious and angry feelings and not my "just keep working" voice of productivity.