Show Notes
Patricia and Nicole chat about the common pressure to link people’s identities and worth to their jobs and ways in which they are rallying against it for themselves.
This episode is based on Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Vol 1, Issue 18: I Do Not Have a Dream Job
Mentioned on the show:
- The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff
- How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, LPC
- The other show Patricia co-hosts: Book Riot’s All the Books!
- It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On by Malaika Jabali with illustration and design by Kayla E.
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Sound editing by Jen Zink
Transcript
Patricia: Happy New Year, nerds! Welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle.
Nicole: And I’m your co-host, Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We are recording this show on January 1st, 2024.
Patricia: Ah, we made it to 2024.
Nicole: We did! It was even a sunny day today.
Patricia: It was, here in Oakland. And we went on a long walk, which was lovely.
Nicole: Yeah, it was gorgeous out.
Patricia: Met some new dogs in the neighborhood.
Nicole: We did meet some new dogs, it was nice. There was a very tiny dog. His name was Moose.
Patricia: And there was a dog that had all black fur and her name was Morticia, so it was a pretty good day for dogs.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: I think one of the highlights of my Christmas holiday was that someone got us a karaoke machine. Which is very culturally affirming for me as a Filipina, like it’s, it’s very much part of our culture. And my friends and I do a lot of karaoke and we used to go every Christmas. I used to have karaoke birthdays and all kinds of things before the pandemic.
So to have a machine in our home where I can now just serenade you is amazing.
Nicole: I look forward to being serenaded, and I apologize in advance for serenading you.
Patricia: I don’t know. You say that, and I’ve heard you sing along with the music, and you can hit notes. You can even hit the right notes.
Nicole: I don’t know what those notes may be called, but I’m doing my best.
I think the other half of it is I have zero training in singing, and in comparison, I feel like I do not sing nearly as well.
Patricia: Well, yeah, but it’s not a competition.
Nicole: I guess so.
Patricia: And also This year, for Christmas, we decorated. We have never had a tree in our adult lives together. And my mother had loved Christmas decorations, and so we decorated this year. And I got an absolutely absurd pastel rainbow fake tree.
Nicole: It also had some, like, just transparent shimmer. Not pine needles. I don’t know what you call them.
Patricia: It was, like, iridescent, tasseley.
Nicole: Yeah, as part of its general absurdness.
Patricia: Yeah, it was great. It was the best tree, and I am typically not a huge Christmas decoration person, but I was a bit sad to take it down this year.
Nicole: Yeah, it felt like
it could have just lived up for, lived, up for a little longer.
Patricia: Live its plastic life.
Nicole: I got, I mean, we’re supposed to keep it for at least a decade to get its plastic life out of it or something weird like that. Yeah?
Patricia: I don’t know, but it’s great. And I was really happy putting up lights and a tree this year.
Nicole: It was kind of nice, uh, just to do that with the two of us. I think the last memories I have really of trees and stuff was when I was living with my parents as like a teenager.
And so I was going through that like, “ugh, I don’t want to decorate the tree” phase.
Patricia: Mmm
Nicole: So it was kind of nice to do it with you and not be doing that.
Patricia: Yeah. Yeah. To actually do it on our own terms.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: Today, today we have a meaty show for everyone. I have decided that I am ripping off the band aid and I want to talk about work and identity. I’m sure it will be a theme of this podcast and, Nicole, it’s something you and I talk about frequently.
Nicole: Yeah, it is.
Patricia: Before we met, and even when we met, I had a dating philosophy, and it was, while dating, it was to learn something from every person I went out with, so it would never feel like a total waste of time, even if we weren’t, you know, a match.
Sometimes I learned something like a random fact, or sometimes it was something I learned about that person, or me, or my own likes or dislikes. I was also on a streak of dating a lot of people who were not Americans, and a guy I was seeing who was from Montreal said something that really stuck with me all these years.
He said, “Americans live to work while we work to live,” and he was talking about how back home for him people would still go out and have life and do things after work on weekdays as opposed to here where people get off work, go home and stay home. Clearly, he and I did not last, thankfully, but this one conversation absolutely radicalized me.
Nicole: Yeah, this concept of Americans living to work is, when you start to look at it, it’s really deeply embedded in the culture here. As we were talking about this as a topic to discuss on the show, I started thinking about like, even in elementary school or kindergarten, you get people asking these questions like, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Which is funny in a couple ways. One, because that’s not the question that people are actually asking, which is where, why it seems so funny to us when kids are like, “I want to be a giraffe when I grow up.” Because the question all these adults are asking is “what do you want to do for work when you grow up?”
“What do you want your job to be when you grow up?” Which is an absurd question to be asking a five year old.
Patricia: Right? You’re, we’re basically looking at five year olds and saying, “how do you want to participate in capitalism?”
Nicole: It’s, oof. It’s rough.
Patricia: And we say, like, we ask that of children. We also ask that even of young people going to college, “what are you studying?”
With the undertone of what is your job going to be? Like what job are you working toward? And it’s even how we’ve been socialized to interact with other adults that we meet. Which is, it’s so second nature to ask people, what do you do? And when we’re asking, what do you do? It always implies, what do you do for work?
Like, people, if I answer, what do you do? With, I am great at making beans.
Nicole: Which you are.
Patricia: Or I love to bake, or I play piano really poorly. That will throw people off.
Nicole: Yeah. There’s a couple things here. One, I am fascinated that we’ve developed this whole coded language around this, or I guess kind of secret like second language around this.
Patricia: Yeah, it’s almost…
Nicole: Where we dance around this question, which is so strange, because we know what everyone’s asking. But also, I am so tired of the question, what do you do for work? Like, I don’t want to talk about it. Can we talk about anything else? I spend at least eight hours a day, five days a week, at my day job.
Can we talk about anything else, please?
Patricia: Yeah, and some people that is the only thing they have to talk about and it is also… I get it It’s a way that it’s already in our social fabric and it’s a way people connect. You work I work too. We both hate it hardy har har and It is also, and I’m speaking to mostly the United States, that our work, that is our day jobs, are very much tied up with our sense of self worth and identity, which again is heavily tied to capitalism. It’s very much pounded into my brain, in the primarily white institutions where I went to school, that it’s the dream to do what you love and you should always aim to do what you love and what was never said and what is rarely recognized is the vast amount of privilege that comes with being able to do what you love. I have worked retail for minimum wage. I did not love it, but it is what was able to pay my rent and get me food. And there are millions of people who have jobs they don’t love. And they are not less than for that.
Nicole: Yeah.
There’s also this weird kind of corollary to that where. It’s like the culture in the U. S. is trying to teach us that you should love working, you should love labor and having a job and everything that goes along with that. It’s so imperative to your identity as someone in the U. S. that you should work.
Patricia: It’s so insidious because capitalism was built on the transatlantic slave trade, and so a lot of my fellow black folks and myself, and even some of my family members, we have this generational trauma where we constantly feel like we have to be useful.
And we have to be, like, that we aren’t worth rest or worth any other sort of things unless we are somehow contributing to capitalism, unless we are, again, useful and It is very much tied to identity and people are like, oh, slavery was so long ago. But it is still, the effects of it are still so present.
Nicole: Yeah. That’s, that’s heavy.
Patricia: Yeah. It is, it is. I often, like many other black people I see on the internet tell myself like, it’s okay if I am doing a good job and not a great job. I still deserve rest. I still deserve peace. I still deserve everything good, regardless or rather in spite of what I can produce.
Nicole: Yeah, and that’s I mean, thinking about it, that’s, that’s coming on the backs of multiple generations being told that the amount of labor that you can do is what will literally save you, what will literally save your back.
Patricia: Right.
Nicole: Like, that’s a lot to bear the weight of.
Patricia: Yeah, and then it’s also then now tied to the lie that If we work hard, then we will achieve whatever. We will achieve, whatever.
It’s so funny. I was speaking with someone at work who is also a queer person of color. And I was like, do you think that Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg actually works hard? Do you think they actually work hard?
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: Do they work hard in an equivalent amount for the amount of wealth they have amassed?
Nicole: I mean, I guess I shouldn’t say yeah, I should say no.
I, yeah, that’s the question that gets asked a lot, right? How much does your average, say, Amazon warehouse worker make? And what does that come out to as an annual salary? And how many like, what’s the multiplier to get that up to, say, Bezos’s salary?
Patricia: Right.
Nicole: Is he actually doing that multiplier’s worth of additional labor?
Patricia: Right.
Nicole: And that, like, that’s impossible. It has to be no.
Patricia: It has to be no.
Nicole: It has to be no.
Patricia: Yeah. And I think one of the things that keeps people in this cycle is this idea of a dream job. Like, what is your dream job? And there is a clip, some people attribute it to TikTok, some people attribute the quote to James Baldwin, that, uh, the quote is, I do not dream of labor.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And I mean, I don’t. I dream of doing things. I dream of fun things, but I never want to do what I love for a paycheck. I don’t want, you know, I love baking. I never want the roof over my head, the health insurance that we have. I never want that tied directly to that thing I love because it’s going to make me want to not love it anymore.
Nicole: Yeah. And it’s so funny though, because going back to the culture we have in the United States, as soon as you have something that you love and you’re good at, everyone starts saying things like, “oh, you could sell this. Are you going to sell these things? How much would, you could probably make a lot of money with this?”
And it, it immediately comes back to turning the thing you love into work.
Patricia: Right. People have asked that about our making marshmallows.
Nicole: Ugh.
Patricia: “Do you sell these? Would you sell these?”
Nicole: No. I don’t want to do that all the time. I love doing it for gifting. I don’t want to do it all week. I wouldn’t love them anymore. And that’s the thing, right?
When you have something like this you love and you turn it into labor, I don’t know about your experience, but in mine, it sucks the joy out of it.
Patricia: Right. I’m also finding this with monetization of things online and content creation and, you know, posting pictures of the process of making the thing or the process of learning a song.
And I’m really this year trying to find joy in doing the things for the sake of doing them and not immediately having to share them on the internet. Because in its own way, that attention is a form of currency.
Nicole: Is the term social capital?
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: Yeah, the attention economy. I still think a lot about the idea of your job being your identity.
Like, I am a teacher. I am a librarian. And sometimes those things will be tied to lower pay because you’re doing it because you feel called to doing it and things like that. But at the same time what if you get fired from your job? You shouldn’t be able to be fired from who you are.
Nicole: Yeah, I see what you’re saying, it, your loss of job should not be loss of identity.
Patricia: Right. As well as beyond firing what if you become disabled, or what if you are already disabled and you aren’t able to do the same work you have done or something like that.
And it’s also ageist, right? When people, we have a big problem in this country where, when people kind of age out of being able to work. There is not enough recognition of a person’s worth if they aren’t contributing to capitalism. And I have had a conversation with multiple of my mentees that often makes its way to me asking something to the effect of what if your job isn’t the ultimate thing?
What if the job is not the achievement? What if your job is not who you are? What if instead your job is the tool to do what you actually want to do and be who you want to be?
Nicole: Yeah, I have, I have a similar conversation with some of my co-workers.
Patricia: And, and also, you know, how can I leverage my job to learn things that can benefit me in other ways?
And I recently read a book titled The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff. And I maybe don’t fully recommend it, or I recommend it with reservations. I do think it is a good springboard if you want to get more into what we’re talking about today. These are my reservations. The book’s philosophy skewed very white and heteronormative, and it doesn’t really take into consideration communities of color and queer communities, which, to be fair, the author isn’t necessarily the person to address these things.
So on one hand, I’m like, gold star for staying in his lane. And on the other hand, I have now I’m just going off on a book tangent and a book rant. When Casey Davis writes in How to Keep Houseball Drowning, and she gets to a part where she wanted her book to address Black hair, but Casey Davis is a white woman, instead of not addressing it at all, or instead of even getting in there and doing the research herself and trying to address it herself, what she did was she brought in another therapist who is a black woman to address this thing. Like I’m not asking people to also dig in and do the research. Like you can pass the mic, you can pass the mic. And so that’s why I’m like, “mmm gold stars for staying in his lane.” I don’t know, but that my friends is one of the reasons that Nicole and I are doing what we do with this show and my newsletter.
All that being said, the book could be a nice addition to folks who want to chew on some of the things we’re talking about in this episode.
Nicole: So if your job is not who you are, then this begs the questions, okay, who are we? If I’m not my day job, who am I? That’s a really big question.
Patricia: Yeah, and a difficult one.
I think this is what the great philosophers were asking about, right?
Nicole: Yeah, who am I?
Patricia: Who am I? I think therefore I am, you know? And that someone was like, you are your job is insulting. But it’s a question that we’re actively working on answering for ourselves.
Nicole: Yeah, it really is. And it’s, it’s an evolving question.
Patricia: It is, and I kind of break it into two separate questions, which is, who am I not in relation to other people? So, yes, you may be a spouse, and a child, and a cousin, and a nibbling, and a mentor, and a fairy godparent, and a friend. But who are you without mentioning your relation to other people? And then the flip side is that we live in a gosh darn society and not a vacuum.
So of course it matters who we are in relation to others. So what communities are we a part of? Or do we wish we were more active parts of? Are we neighbors? Or are we just people who live next door to other people whose names we don’t know?
Nicole: Oof.
Yeah. And I think this is one of those areas where we have been working on a lot. And I think it’s interesting for myself and for us as a couple, like this has changed a lot over the last, you know, what, 10, 11 years we’ve known each other.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: We were talking about this before. We used to be Disney adults.
Patricia: We absolutely used to be Disney adults. We would go to Disneyland multiple times a month when we lived in Southern California. We had annual passes with no blackout days. We won the trip to the, like, Hong Kong Disney…
Nicole: Yeah
Patricia: …and Shanghai Disney. And yeah, it was a big part of our identity.
Nicole: Yeah. And similarly, we were Wizarding World adults before we realized how terrible She Who Shall Not Be Named is, but.
Patricia: Yeah, we definitely were. Your, your job at the time had actually gotten us into a preview of that part of Universal Studios.
Nicole: Yeah, in Hollywood, yeah. We had wands and all kinds of things.
Patricia: All the things.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: We had all the things. And, yeah, this, these things change over time, and even people, this was within the past, you know, 12 years, but people also can look at their teen selves or their college selves and realize they were different people.
Nicole: Oh, I was definitely a different people in my teen selves and college selves. Yeah, it’s been a real interesting ride of discovery and asking myself, who am I, especially over these last, what, seven years since I started my transition that long ago. That was a really big question of who am I on a very fundamental level.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: But it also had repercussions through other parts of my life where I spent almost a decade, like, heavily practicing martial arts, and I, that was a big part of who I was, what I claimed as part of my identity back then, and I’ve kind of walked away from all of that.
Patricia: Yeah. Our identities… I think we’re never static.
We’re never static. We change and evolve. Ideally.
Nicole: Ideally. Yes.
Patricia: Ideally. And sometimes, yeah, it’s thinking about what, what do you give up? What do you gain?
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: And sometimes two different parts of identity can’t coexist really well in the same person. And when thinking about these answers, I also think about the things that are outside of the labels our families or communities or elders have put on us, which is definitely a whole thing in many communities of color, lots of expectations.
And as we talked about in episode one, also about those rules we make for ourselves and the stories we tell about ourselves, like you tell yourself, you’re not a dancer.
Nicole: I still don’t think I’m a dancer, but that’s okay. Maybe that’ll change someday.
Patricia: And maybe a good starting point is thinking about your hobbies.
Thinking about maybe you’re a reader, or a writer, or a baker, or a gardener, or archer, musician, and these things don’t pay the monetary bills, but they fill your heart and they reflect who you are. So I am thinking about that portion right now, and I’m really trying to lean into some of the things I used to love, and that used to be a big part of who I was, like music and crafting, and that’s why piano and crochet are on my 2024 agenda.
Nicole: Yeah, I think, for me, some of that is similarly going back to things I loved, or things I didn’t necessarily allow myself to love when I was younger for a whole host of reasons. But, like, I have my chaos garden that’s starting to sprout again, and I don’t know if I’d call myself a gardener, but I definitely enjoy the plants and stuff, like, finding new things always, I don’t know, definitely a reader.
Patricia: Definitely, we are definitely readers in this home, yes. And, I think I really need to make sure everyone realizes, like, you will get pushback. You will get pushback when you are trying to identify yourself outside of your day job.
Nicole: Oh my gosh. The amount of people who will, okay, but what do you do?
Patricia: Right.
What do you do? I remember years ago, I was in the elevator at my old job and I was working at a university. I still am right now, but I was working at a different one and I was in the elevator with someone and someone asked a question and I said, “I’m a writer” and her immediate reaction was a snooty, “oh, what books have you published?”
Like she was ready to invalidate my identifying as a writer, if I didn’t have anything published in a book, which is a whole problem. And the hilarious part was I actually had a story coming out in an anthology like in within the next couple of months. So I absolutely loved ruining her day by mentioning that.
But I share this to say that there are people out there who will push back against who you say. you are. And there are people out there who are super into capitalism and work as their identity. And you know what? If that is working for them, we aren’t judging. We just want to offer that there are other options.
Nicole: Yeah. Other options that do not involve dreaming of labor.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: Okay, so what are we supposed to do with all this?
Patricia: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of deprogramming…
Nicole: Yeah
Patricia: …ourselves, and I can think of two things. One is work on figuring out who you are outside of your job. And I mean, we are all inherently worthy. And if you need to tie it to something, find a hobby, find something, you know?
And I recommend something that is. Both connected to people. So yeah, some people find their worth as a partner or a parent, but at the same time, I think it’s healthy to, if you are able, some people don’t have the privilege, they’re caretakers or they are working multiple jobs and they do not have the time for a hobby.
But if you can start cultivating an identity, whether it’s the music you like, whether it’s the genres of books you read or the shows you watch, and really start thinking about who you are, that’s not your day job. Yeah. We’ve been working on it for years.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: We’ve been working on it for years. And I don’t think it’s a process that ever really ends. It’s just a constant state of discovery.
Nicole: I also just think about, like, I’ve had so many different day jobs. Like, I don’t know how many of them I’ve actually identified with because I’ve had so many different ones.
Patricia: Right.
Nicole: And it’s a lot more fun to have a shifting identity to answer this with.
Patricia: Yeah. Well, and what you’re alluding to is our other recommendation.
Nicole: Which is to start answering that question, “What do you do?” differently. Stop supplying your job.
Patricia: Stop supplying your job. Watch people freak out because they don’t know what, what to do with that information.
Nicole: Yeah, I just love the idea of I, I love seeing this happen in real time, like someone’s like, at a party, like, what do you do?
And someone’s like, I’m a horror movie nerd. Blink, blink, blink. Like, it just
Patricia: And they’re like, do you get paid to do that? Or do you, like no.
Nicole: No.
Patricia: That’s what I do.
Nicole: And I am not saying that I’m a horror movie nerd. We are not horror movie nerds in this house, but I think it’s a funny example.
Patricia: Right? Yeah, I think I need to be better about curating and coming up with my answer to that question so I have it ready because it always catches me off guard.
Nicole: Yeah.
Patricia: Because I’m currently in the state of, I don’t want to answer with my job, but I don’t know what I do want to answer with.
Nicole: Right.
I think we’re both kind of in those. One of those in between phases where we’re cultivating new hobbies and trying to sort all that out. So it’s a little harder. Other than answering like, I like to read books.
What do you like to read? All of them?
Patricia: All of them. All the books. Wah Wah. All the books. Get it? My other show.
Nicole: You’re on another show?
Patricia: Oh, stop it.
I do have a related resource this week, which is, of course, a book. It is a book that came out within the past few months, I think near the end of last year. It’s titled, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On by Malaika Jabali with illustration and design by Kayla E.
The overarching metaphor in this book is of capitalism as a toxic romantic partner who constantly puts you down and gaslights you and is just using you. And the author is not only telling you that, but they tell you there’s a healthier and more supportive option available. Surprise, it’s socialism.
While this metaphor isn’t necessarily everyone’s vibe, it does serve to make the content so much more accessible and relatable. This book is written in a way that clarifies How capitalism is at play right now in our own lives, and not just some nebulous thing that we have nothing to do with, that we hear about on podcasts, or on Instagram, or TikTok or wherever you happen to be.
This book gives really clear definitions of capitalism and socialism, and spends most of the pages giving examples of these frameworks in action. I love a book that gives me something to really take my time with digesting, as well as a book that makes me even more curious about something after I read it.
This book offers so many names of activists and events and all kinds of things that I want to look up and read more about. I really recommend it. The title again is It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On by Malaika Jabali with illustration and design by Kayla E.
Nicole: I should really put that on my TBR.
Patricia: You really should. I don’t think we have a physical copy. We should order a copy from the bookstore.
Nicole: Okay. Do you know if it’s on audiobook?
Patricia: There’s a lot of illustrations, FYI.
Nicole: Oh, okay.
Patricia: So, there’s a lot of infographics, illustrations, so if you are able to read a book with illustrations, I don’t know how it is on audiobook.
Nicole: Fair, fair. So, Patricia, I have a question for you now.
Patricia: Yes?
Nicole: What do you do that’s filling your cup right now?
Patricia: mmmmmmm
Well, this is going to sound weird for people who know me anyway, but we do a bunch of cleaning before New Year’s. And I was really enjoying cleaning. Like, I’m really motivated to keep cleaning. And cleaning is filling my cup right now, which I never thought I would say.
Nicole: As long as your answer to what do you do is not clean. Not, not to look down on anybody who cleans things for a career, but I don’t think that’s you. But also, yes, let’s keep this place clean.
Patricia: It’s not me, but it’s filling my cup right now. So let’s just ride the wave.
Nicole: It’s actually, it’s so funny how, if we want to allude back to one of our previous episodes, where we talked about, I think it was episode three, where we talked about the concept of treating your home like a zoo enclosure, and you need to have enrichment, you also need to have a well maintained enclosure.
Patricia: Yeah.
Nicole: And, and having a clean enclosure right now has, it’s done a lot for, for the mood.
Patricia: Yeah, the vibe around here is pretty great right now, actually. What is filling your cup right now?
Nicole: You know, it might be partially the mood elevating effects of having a clean home, but I am I have this little wave of optimism coming into the new year, and I’m not entirely sure what it’s about, but I want to try to hold on to it for a while.
Just some optimism in my life.
Patricia: How novel. Well, that’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com, and we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes.
Nicole: You can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com, that’s e e d a p o d dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our Bookshop link, the podcast email list, and a link to the ongoing Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter.
You can also find us on Instagram and BlueSky at eedapod, and email us at eedapod@gmail.com.
Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent.
Nicole: We would appreciate it so much if you would subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts that allow ratings. It really goes far in helping other people find us.
Patricia: A big thank you to folks who have already given us ratings. I do a little happy dance every time we see them. We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support is going to help us keep this show going, especially without ads. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod. In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water, make good decisions, and we’ll be talking to you soon.
Nicole: Now I gotta go figure out what we’re gonna do next.