The agony and the ecstasy of the modern job hunt

25:50And were there questions in this book that kind of resonated the most with you personally? So right now I'm a writer and editor primarily working in the civic design and civic tech space. And the civic design civic tech space is focused on making public services easier to access. So, you know, often takes place in government, but there's a lot of nonprofit work, advocacy work around public benefits, that sort of thing. So I do kind of word work and some research within that space. I've also been a learning designer within that space. So creating learning platforms, courses, educational opportunities that teach people about ethical research and design methods and a content designer within that space too.

26:31So working more on like a design level of, you know, how does this application for benefits look and what are the words on it? Websites or public government services, those sorts of things. A lot of the work I've done is work that I didn't know existed. You know, I've sort of made a path for myself by just following my nose, doing a lot of research. I am lucky in that this project, Words of Mouth, exposes me to, you know, I'd like to think like everything you can do. So I know. So I've been able to be like over the years, OK, this is what I want to do. I want to get into that. And that gives me a huge leg up over a lot of people who just were not exposed to all the things that we can do with our lives.

27:18I just read this article about how, you know, these elite institutions, they just train everyone to go into finance and consulting. And if you show up really wanting to do good for the world and, you know, help your communities, like you might never learn that you can go work for a civic tech or a civic design organization, or you can become a public servant and make a good living and you just aren't exposed to those kinds of opportunities. So yeah, I think my my career has been a product of the newsletter as much as the newsletter has been a product of my professional situations. I've made so many career plans that haven't gotten to plan, you know, like you just can't really plan your career if you're not going to be following something with a very set path, like going to med school and becoming a doctor.

28:06Like you can set out to become a journalist, but then you might end up an off-field producer. Like, Like, you know, you just can't really plan. So I have stayed open. And I think that's been to my benefit. It's also been a challenge in that I, you know, I'm 37 and I'm still like really struggling to tell you what I do and to tell you what I'll be doing in five years because I'm also really in the crosshairs of AI, like my work specifically. So, you know, it doesn't matter what plans I made or didn't make to get here. Like, I could have to totally pivot in the next few years. And I'm still constantly like, what do I want to do with my life?

28:45And I have a pretty good situation right now, but I'm still constantly, constantly thinking about it. And I do think sometimes having the newsletters just made it really hard for me to be kind of happy where I am because I'm still like, oh, that sounds cool. That sounds cool. How can I get there? So that's just an everyday conversation for me. Yeah. So from the book, like the questions of unlived lives and trying to understand ourselves through the search and the search really as a search for identity. That's what really, really is, has always been the most interesting to me. And maybe that's why Ghosts is the first chapter.

29:23Yeah, it's inspiring and comforting to hear you talk about the fact that you've kind of kept redefining your career path along the way. Like one thing I'm curious, sort of your thoughts on this as maybe a cultural mentality shift, but I feel like it's now maybe like a past myth of having to think about your position strategically. There's almost like maybe a negative association with hopping from one thing to the next. But I think it's actually like a really freeing thing and it's kind of more realistically reflective of the job landscape now. I know that for me, I guess I'm like, even in my last job when I got promoted and I went from being sort of a front of house, like producer, reporter to being a manager.

30:03I had a lot of trepidation about, is this going to keep me from ever doing that again? If I just go to being like a manager and just doing strategy and managerial kind of stuff. And right now I'm learning it's like, yes, and it's no. part of me is like oh I feel like I don't have like anything to like show for my past oh my god two and a half of the five years I spent at this organization being behind the scenes yeah I'm lucky that I have a lot to show with Cujo but I mean it just has to do so much with like our ideas of progress and yes are just myths that to a large extent like if you're being rewarded for being a manager with more money but you're being essentially demoted from doing the thing that you want to do is that progress.

30:46I mean, it takes that happening for you to really understand that that's not something that you want and that that doesn't equate to your sense of progress in your career and your life. And we don't learn that when we're starting out. Like, that just has to happen to us. And I think there's a reason that people are not shouting from the rooftops like, don't make any plans. It won't matter anyway. You know, it's not like the most helpful advice to someone who's starting out. I'm pretty glad, I guess, in some ways that nobody hammered that into me because I think trying to make plans and then failing is how I learned a lot about the world and just about the way the world works.

31:27So there's a balance. You have to try to make sense of what you're doing, but it doesn't mean that there's going to be steps that you can anticipate and that those steps are going to manifest in the way that you think. yeah exactly it's a constant there's no like also maybe there isn't unless you're like a doctor maybe even if you're a doctor i don't know but like i know doctors who have done career pivots and decided to go from working in a hospital to working in a school or you know but i don't know if there's this like one of one unitary like distillation of who i am or what i am meant to do there is to an extent and you have to perform that work but it's also a constant negotiation between the self and the outside world and like what opportunities the zeitgeist is throwing up at you and the structures that exist at the time.

32:17And it's kind of you have to allow for some degree of fluidity, it seems. Totally. We literally don't know what kind of jobs are going to be available, what jobs won't exist anymore. Like we just have to, yeah, stay fluid, stay open. And that's really hard when I think a lot of people, at least I'll speak for me, like I want to plan. I want to know what I'm going to be in 10 years just because I feel like it would give me a sense of comfort. But at the same time, someone offered me a contract, a year long contract last year. And at first I turned it down because I was like, that's too long. I don't know if I'm going to want to be doing this in 10 years.

32:53And then, of course, I've re-upped it like three times. And so I'm still opener. But yeah, there's something scary about, you know, locking yourself into an idea of yourself and a job at work because there's so many other things out there. But also it's I at least feel like it would it would ground me not only in terms of like what I can buy and what I can afford, but like who I am. So totally as much as I know and think about the fallacy of that, like how my job is not me and having a secure job, a stable job won't make my life easier. It's still a fantasy that I think about. It's wild. I just can't.

33:33It's so deeply conditioned in me. It's funny. I feel like the being locked into something really is just like a myth that we tell ourselves. Because if you're at a job and you're realizing it's not for you, because I think search work too, and your book does a good job of dispelling this, but we tend to associate it with being unemployed and needing work but it's just as much I think part of the experience of being gainfully employed but wondering what else is out there what's next you know and like forgetting that even if you are employed and you take that job and you're not sure it's right for you or you're like is this going to lead me to the right path you can leave it at any time if you figure out what everything is you know what I mean but it's funny it's funny I think like spiritually like the significance of the fact that like we have that trepidation of adhering to something and feeling like we lose our agency by taking that thing when that's in fact not the case, you know?

34:26If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.

35:01You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. so you mentioned earlier that part of why the book is coming out is to celebrate 10 years of the newsletter but besides that why put this book out now what sets this particular moment apart from maybe past eras of search work because i think that that experience has evolved so much in 10 years as well and and what makes exploring this part of our lives feel particularly urgent right now. Yeah, I will say I got lucky with the timing in that the 10 year anniversary coincides with what is a really, I'll say, painful and turbulent moment in job seeking history.

35:50Lucky is kind of like a cynical way of putting that. But so much is shifting under our feet right now. You know, we can start with the layoffs. Now it's just there are always layoffs happening. It's not that we had a layoff season earlier this year. It's just that they are now continuous. And I'm just constantly seeing updates about, you know, people from this area of media or this company or whatever. It's just, it's constant and relentless. So you really don't know when it's coming for you. If you're gainfully employed, there's no reason to think that you will be next week or next month or next year.

36:31So if people were two years ago feeling like, well, I have a job and I know what I want to do and I'm here and I'm good. Search work may have not been of interest or relevant to them then, but it is now because even if they're not searching now, they know people who are and they're thinking about it being them. You know, like the the ways that we used to search also are shifting or are not, you know, the ways we search now. Like the last year, I just really like even this time last year, I think AI was so not a part of the conversation in terms of job hunting the way it is now. I mean, the numbers are wild.

37:12The numbers of applications that jobs are getting now because you can complete an application with AI and what that has done to the experience of looking for work in that people are not really engaging with their own materials in the same way, whether they want to or not, because if they're not using AI, they're thinking about all the people who are. And so they're like, oh, God, like, OK, maybe this cover letter actually would be better if I had had AI do it. So there's that whole kind of psychological change, the experiential change of engaging with the process itself. There's then, you know, the fact that jobs are getting like hundreds of applications because people are using AI.

37:50So the competition is so fierce and people are just literally not hearing anything back after sending out hundreds of applications and the sense of just meaninglessness, like futility in seeking work now, if that's you like sending, sending, sending and just hearing nothing, you know, that's always been a part of it is silence and rejection and ghosting. But now it's really, I think, probably the dominant way that people are experiencing looking for work is just silence and feeling like you're just not being heard, like almost like you don't exist. And yeah, just the, I talk about this in the introduction, like there's just this real sense of inhumanity, like the possibility of connecting with another human being through the process is so much smaller.

38:36Like it's, you can be searching for work for weeks or months and just never engage with another person. And I think in my experience, it used to be that searching for work was a great way to actually meet people because I'd have interviews and I wouldn't get the job, but I'd stay in touch. I mean, I have people I know who I still talk to, who I met, who interviewed me for jobs that I didn't get. And I think that's just not really happening anymore for a lot of people. I was talking to one of my co-editors, my contributing editors, Dorothy Jibril. She is also like an HR professional. She's a people ops person, in addition to being a performance artist and a choreographer.

39:16And she was saying that now because people are using AI to essentially create personas to get jobs that they're not qualified for, referrals mean more than they ever did in the past. So those people who don't have a network, it's even harder now for them because people need to actually like refer you like this person is a human being. This person is real because otherwise it's like, well, they, they might not be, you know, like, so those referrals mean even more than they ever did in the past. So networks, you know, how, how networked you are means more. So the people who were already just starting out without a network who are going to struggle anyway, are struggling more to just get attention, to just get, you know, anyone to respond because they're not having people on the inside be like oh I can vouch for this person they're real they're human so it's just getting really cuckoo like it's just wild out there with the like in terms of the things that we've never seen before that we don't really have ways of dealing with and we're just trying to make sense of everything that's going on while also just trying to find a job so yeah it's uh it's unfortunately a really good time for this book to come out I saw a really interesting piece on Business Insider called like how technology broke the job market.

40:37I think it talked to like economists and it was saying that the way that the job market works currently, especially on sites like LinkedIn, it's like an ineffective, over-congested market where there are too many people applying for every job, most of whom are just sending out like not really applicable candidates because people can more easily just like apply for anything and it's like they compared it to dating apps which is also are apparently like similarly congested markets where men in like heterosexual matching like men apparently like on these apps tended to bombard the inboxes of women and then the women got overwhelmed and the women didn't reply so then the men messaged even more women and just sent like the word hey generic haze that they could recycle over and over again like like the equivalent of like crappier and crappier applications and then nobody finds love like nobody women are completely overwhelmed they don't want to talk to anybody yeah it just breaks yeah and even like it on the inside of like jobs that i've worked recently and watching people try to hire external candidates they are completely overwhelmed too because i'm sure they would love a referral because like they love solid referrals because that would allow them to circumvent the entire process of having to go through everything.

41:58It's just yeah, it's just like more unfortunate, but it's a systemic issue. It's really hard for people hiring. Absolutely. Like it's just, you know, it's all the slop is it's it's happening here, too. And I get it. Like people are desperate and they're like, if I apply for 100 jobs, I have a better chance of getting a return call. But that's actually not true. It's just not. And I speaking from personal experience, I my personal job seeking philosophy is only apply for the jobs that I actually think I have a good shot at. There's just no point in this market in spending time on an application for something that I'm a reach for because there are so many people applying who are not reaches for that.

42:40And it's just like economics, like don't waste your time on something that's not going to pan out. so I think for a long time the job the advice was apply apply apply apply and maybe that worked before it does not work now and we haven't like the job the advice the the myths have not caught up so yeah I think it's it's really hard for for both sides to I feel like the new equivalent of that is to spend your spend your time like making connections with people and like networking and like taking people out to coffee and so that way when you do send in an application it's like if there's name recognition or like oh yeah I remember I like had a good conversation with that person like that's the new equivalent of that I think or the more effective way to be spending your hunt time absolutely yeah I mean relationships have always been important but they are like maybe the only thing they're the only thing that matters now it's crazy yeah yeah so we've been talking a lot about how there's a lot of anxiety and stress and precarity with the job search and most of us associate associated with being it being kind of a negative process that way But I think one of the more surprising and inspiring aspects of this book, and especially in that first chapter, Ghosts, is really about how the process can be something that sparks desire and even kind of exhilaration.

43:57Rachel, tell us a little bit about what some of those more uplifting aspects of this process, what they can be, and the ones that kind of came through when you began sorting through all of the submissions. Yeah. So one thing I've always said the newsletter is good for is daydreams, dreaming, like dreaming of possibilities, dreaming of what you can do, even if it's not something you can do right now. Because like I said, people, we're just, we have limited access to role models. And, you know, there's only so many jobs we see in movies and books. And I wanted to give people a bigger view of what is possible that, you know, what they can do every day to make money.

44:43And maybe they can even enjoy it and be interested by it. So I did see that come through in the submissions and some of the pieces that we ultimately published. There's this one quote that is in one of the text collages in the book that was submitted by someone named Juhi Gupta. They said, for me, searching for work isn't just about employment. It's about imagination. Each listing is a portal into a different life. I could be living a new school. I could a new skill. I could acquire a version of myself I might want to become. And I think there's one way of looking at that, which is that like, oh, I just, you know, I don't want to have to think about all the things I could be and will never be.

45:22But there's also the sense of, you know, possibility and something to move towards and what we can learn about ourselves through this process. So one of the pieces in the book by Anna Rogers, they talk about all of the lies that they've told in interviews. And they have one line about how, you know, maybe it wasn't a lie, but a New Year's resolution. How job interviews gave them opportunities to actually articulate their own hopes for themselves, which they didn't realize until afterwards. And so they would kind of inventory the lies and be like, well, what did I really mean? And like, OK, if that's what if I said I would, you know, wake up at six every morning because the time difference and because I was working remotely.

46:08Do I want to wake up at six every morning? Do I want to be an early bird? So being able to imagine new new ways of living that you only learn about through this process. And that was a really nice kind of spin on that that I hadn't thought about. And there's another piece by Kelsey Andura, and she talks about how the job search, she had a really difficult job search one summer and she had built all of these rituals. She had built this ritual around it that was allowing her to kind of come back to herself, which was getting her aura picture taken because she was sort of losing touch with herself through the process because she was showing up to all these interviews and putting on these masks and pretending to be the person who wants the job, you know, selling, you know, makeup or whatever.

46:49and she was losing touch with herself. So she started getting her aura picture taken and she writes about other rituals that people use to get through these moments of uncertainty and liminality and what they actually teach us about ourselves. She was like, I think she said that the process allowed her to come face to face with the root of her dissatisfaction. So why was she so unhappy in the job? She was able to actually kind of excavate that through the hunt because she had to figure out why she was so unhappy so that she would be able to make a decision for her next role that wouldn't place her right back where she was.

47:25So they give us opportunities to really ask ourselves hard questions. And that's not like that doesn't always happen that way. But if we choose to or if we get lucky enough to be forced into that way of thinking through the job hunt, it actually can we can end up with that in the end. And then there's, you know, a lot of pieces like I mentioned, where people are talking about the way the job hunt has or how they're connecting with other people, other generations through their job hunt. There's one piece in the last chapter where someone actually maps, she maps constellations of all the people who supported her through her job hunt.

48:03She's still looking for work, at least she was, you know, when the piece was being made. So, you know, it's been a year, she hasn't found a job, but what she did get out of it was this deep gratitude for all these people who supported her. So she knows now that there are all of these people, dozens of people in her life who will bend over backwards for her, give her things, support her, feed her, house her, that she wouldn't have known prior to the job hunt. So it makes us really vulnerable and other people have to show up. And if we're lucky, we can take a step back and reflect and be like, wow, I have a lot of people in my life who will help me.

48:36So there are a lot of ways that people articulated things that they get out of the job search that are not the job itself, which I just, you know, I think of this every day when I hadn't, I didn't know about those because they hadn't happened to me. So. I've been a subscriber to Words of Mouth for a while now. I don't know exactly how long, but definitely a couple of years. And I'm curious, like, how much of that project is inspired more by the like the positive aspects of the job search or like the more exciting like it's not for example like I'm a journalist there will sometimes be jobs that would make sense for me to apply to but mostly I just compulsively open it because I'm curious about like what like you said like what is out there what possible potential types of roles could make sense for me at one point.

49:27Yeah, I would say, you know, 95 % of why I do it is because I feel like it serves that need for people to give like the job search is such can be such a hopeless ordeal. And I get messages from people saying, your email is what gave me hope that there's a job that I could find a job that I would want. And it's, you know, where I gives me ideas of what's possible. And I learned about jobs and organizations and projects that I would have never known about. And I am so happy to facilitate that kind of experience through what can be this very bleak and isolating experience. So it's so much of why I do it is because of those positives.

50:12And then, you know, of course, I'm a compulsive person, too. So I cannot stop looking. Like I sometimes think about if I quit the newsletter tomorrow, would I keep looking for work every day? Like, would I keep my, you know, alert emails on? Would I be able to quit it? Because I learned so much. I'm so interested in seeing, you know, who's out there doing what and who's hiring, what they're hiring for and what that job gets to do. So I am also just a freak who thinks it's really interesting, you know, to, you know, like that job descriptions contain multitudes and that we can really learn a lot from them.

50:49But for the most part, it's that there is this community that's grown around the project that really, really takes away something that I don't think is available elsewhere because we don't have any kind of hopeful or communal frameworks for engaging with this. I shouldn't say we don't have any. There are actually more and more examples of this, of like a kind of communal search work approach. I see them more and more every day. So I'm actually hopeful in that regard for the job hunt is that There's people sharing more and more. People are now, I just got an email today from someone who's like, I just started a newsletter like yours, but for my city.

51:27And I've gotten emails like that a lot. People starting their own kind of curated lists of jobs that they think are cool and sending them out to people. And I see a lot of people now posting job roundups on LinkedIn and on Instagram. And people want to share, I think, because of a lot of the same reasons as me. is like, it's interesting and you learn about cool projects and new projects. And but also it's just really gratifying to be like, you know, this isn't for me, but I know that there's so many talented people in my network and one of those people is going to get this job or should get this job.

52:01So I do see more and more of it, which is really wonderful. So the second chapter of the book is about the tools of looking for work. I expected this to be about like, given what we've just been discussing navigating the agonies of LinkedIn, AI, legible resumes and things like that. But the chapter ended up taking, I think, a much broader view of the tools that we use to get through the process. For example, I love this story about someone who was, I think, an MFA, I don't remember in what, who is earning their living as a gardener. And their tool is that They understand the psychology of the rich people who will be hiring them.

52:43They understand that they are more likely to get hired and paid fairly if the rich person believes that they are only poor or like have less money by choice. They're choosing to live this more bohemian, lower paid lifestyle, which I thought was a very interesting example of a tool. From sorting through the submissions, one of the tools that you found beyond the like obviously knowing how to do a resume, but like what are the tools that you found actually make the biggest difference for people or some tools that you found make a big difference? So that story that you mentioned is by Jake Maynard and it's really funny.

53:20And it's actually, you know, thinking about this question, it's kind of one of the only stories in the book that really speaks to like what works because that's not what people wanted to write about. That's not what came in. It's mostly what doesn't work or what it feels like to have to contend with the tools that are available to us, the necessary evils. It's what are the tools that are required, not necessarily the tools that work. You know, there is a piece on LinkedIn, but it's not about how to use LinkedIn. It's about, you know, some of the like wacky contradictions of that platform, which is really interesting.

53:55And, you know, there's one piece about the cover letter, but it's about Katya is looking at her mom's first cover letter from right after she moved to America and she was applying to be an engineer. And she's like, oh, I want to know more about my mom. I'm going to read this cover letter. And it's just empty. She finds nothing there. So it's about, you know, looking at these things, picking them up. I mean, what? Why this thing? And more like why this doesn't work. There's this George Perret quote that I always say to myself, which is question your teaspoons. It's from this really great, very short essay called Approaches to What.

54:27And he's just talking about like, why don't we question these things that we work with every day? They're like the invisible things, you know, we only notice them when they break. And that's really what I think this chapter does is it's like, wait, why? Why this thing? And sometimes making fun of it, too. We've touched on this a little bit, but so much of what search work is about kind of comes down to identity. Tell us a little bit about what you uncovered about from compiling this, the ways that we internalize work in the job search into our own identities. and maybe conversely how our identities impact how we look for work and present ourselves.

55:10Yeah, I mean, I mentioned this earlier, but the kind of psychic work that goes into search work where we have to create these vivid fantasies or imaginings of ourselves in the future, I don't think that's some like innocent kind of trivial activity that leaves no imprint. You know, we do that and it stays there. It stays with us. And, you know, we come to and we're in our lives as they are. And if we had just spent, you know, two hours putting together an application for a job and thinking about all of the contingencies that would have on our lives, you know, where we live, what we can afford, who we see every day, how we move our bodies, what we wear, you know, our role in the world and whether we do good or bad.

56:00And then we just kind of like snap back to our lives, you know, all of that imagining that sits there in our brain somewhere and it creates some filter for how we understand our lives as they are. And if we're doing that constantly for days and weeks and months on end, you know, like it really kind of contorts our sense of ourselves and our desires, I think, or it can, it leaves a mark. we talked about performance like how much of the job hunt is performance you know showing up talking about what we want as if we're incredibly sure when in reality we have no idea or we want a bunch of different things and then we you know we have to do the same thing the next day for something else like that's very confusing it's very confusing for our desires our sense of self and I think it's really for me has always opened up questions about like what elements of our lives like tether us to and show us our true desires and which ones will kind of lead us down the garden path.

56:58And what can we make excuses for? Like, how can we kind of convince ourselves that like this job is good for me because X and like, where are we going to make compromises on our values and our ethics and what really matters to us? And I think we really see that when it comes to job hunting. And yeah, I think the way we rationalize our job choices and like the jobs will take and not take can tell us a lot about what we value or, you know, how we're lying to ourselves about what we value. It's also just incredibly self-alienating to be like, which version of myself or which parts of myself will have the greatest chance of achieving like product market fit or whatever.

57:38Yeah. And then you're like, oh, am I that kind of person that's going to sell myself out and like just have, you know, one of those jobs because I need the money and I to pay rent and what does that mean about me when like my cousin never gave in and now they're a really successful poet you know yeah you're not gonna also be that successful poet that doesn't happen twice in one family but yeah we can be not so nice to ourselves when we just have to exist within capitalism and you know we don't really have a choice like we can be anti-work and anarchist and you know have all of those values and then good luck like this economy does not this, you know, political reality does not value that.

58:19So what are we going to do to pay rent next month? I can be a very practical person. And sometimes it comes down to that, like the newsletter. Sometimes I'm like, am I propping up capitalism with the newsletter? But yes, like we need to work like before the revolution, like until then, like, yes, we do. We really do need to work. And so ideally, we're working in a way that does the least harm and can somehow enrich us in the meantime. And also, are there like parts of ourselves that we value that we, you know, will choose to kind of put into the marketplace? And are there parts of ourselves that we decide that we withhold from the marketplace and those sorts of pressures?

58:56Yeah. Yeah. And I think sometimes we forget that that's a possibility. Yeah. I mean, in that vein, one of the difficulties of searching for work is that there is often a discrepancy between what we want to be doing, who we imagine ourselves to be, and the cold, hard realities of what the job market is looking for at any given time or what is accessible to us. How have you personally gone about navigating this and how have you seen other people navigating this successfully? Personally, I've always, I've made some compromises and then there are some compromises I've refused to make. So one motto is just keep your name clean.

59:35I've always tried to keep my name clean in terms of who I'm associated with with my work. You know, for instance, like when I was initially getting into what was then called content strategy and it's now mostly called content design work. And that's when you're like embedded on the design team, but you're responsible for thinking about the information and how it's written and how it's presented. And I was doing this within government mostly. So, you know, a website that helps people learn about affordable housing options and stuff like that. And at the time, this was like 2017, 2018, the content strategy, content design world was kind of concentrating in big tech.

1:00:10And like, it was still Facebook at the time. Facebook had all of the quote unquote, like all of the talent. And like, if you could go there and like work on the content strategy team, you could like learn the most and, you know, have that like really great experience and like just sell out for a year. And then you could leave and go back to government. And that was kind of like what people were doing. And, you know, I was just like, no, I just know that that could never be worth it. So that's always been really important to me. But I know that there are a lot of people, people I know and love who say things like, I just I need this job at Meta.

1:00:41I can't leave this job at Meta because it's the only way I can live in New York City. And you know what they're leaving out is with the lifestyle that I've become accustomed to. Because sorry, you know, like lots of people live in New York City without working for Meta. If you want to work for Meta, okay. But don't tell me you have no choice, you know. So what I think it comes down to is knowing the options. You know, I've talked about this a lot, but people don't know that you can work for a civic tech organization that builds software that makes it easy for people to apply for benefits and make over 100K doing it with a great team, learn a ton, really talented people, get time off, get benefits and have a lot less self-deception, you know.

1:01:20So I think if you take a larger view of what's possible, you will not have to make those kinds of compromises. There are ways to live in this world without selling out to evil corporations to pay your paycheck. You know, I think that's true to an extent. I don't want to speak about like the people who are doing data annotation work for AI companies because they live in third world countries and that's like literally the only job available to them that pays them what they can live on. I mean, barely. They can't live on what it pays them, but it's the only job there, period. So I'm not going to speak for them.

1:01:53What I'm speaking to is really more of like a white collar kind of situation and kind of like a privileged perspective of like, I can choose where I sell my labor, basically. You know, again, like people working in an Amazon warehouse, like I'm not talking about this is, you know, my kind of personal privileged way of negotiating like what I will and will not compromise on. Did that answer the question? Yes. Yes. I think sort of the existential nature of that does kind of go into the next thing I wanted to touch on, which is the book's last chapter called Threads, which I just devoured. The whole book is actually quite literary in quality, but this one, like, especially, so Threads appropriately sort of ties all of the book's other themes together and takes an even broader view of work and search work as just sort of a device for the larger questions we ask ourselves.

1:02:44And it's about the kind of personal existential landscapes that inform how we navigate search work. Talk a little bit about the role that our pasts, our families, our cultural backgrounds, all that kind of stuff play into search work, either consciously or subconsciously. It feels kind of obvious to say our experience looking for work is the product of our circumstances, our identities, our age, our location, class, but it really is and yeah like the person who said that about meta might have a certain background or expectations that had been instilled in their mind that was like this is the only job i can have and that's their own belief system you know yeah and you know i i might regret saying that later because of course there's so much of like a scarcity mindset that has to do with coming from like having nothing or having very little and feeling like you need something that's really stable it's going to pay you the most it's going to set you to the upper echelons of society like if you want that because you're compensating for what you didn't have like all of these things are our expectations for ourselves the things we feel like we need that has so much to do with what we don't have at other points in our lives so i probably was being insensitive but i don't know in context like your point made a lot of sense yeah but yeah like the last chapter threads like we hear about like Kazia.

1:04:08So she's a writer who was born in Poland and her dad was a photocopier technician and her mom was like a nanny and a stay-at-home mom. And she's like, I had no role models for this. I wasn't taught what to do. So I didn't have any help finding a job. But what I really needed a job, but I also really wanted to prove to myself that I could get a job. And her piece is really nice because it basically talks about just all these great people she met when she was looking for her first job out of undergrad like 20 years ago. And like Gabriela, she is looking at the job hunt in the context of her parents' death.

1:04:44Both of her parents died within the same year from cancer. That piece made me cry. Oh, every time. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's incredibly beautiful in addition to being really, really sad. I love that piece because it shows how search work or looking for work, Like, it doesn't care what's going on in our lives at all. That's another story. But this piece, she talks about her mom and how her mom, like, didn't really want to be alive while she was alive. And then when she was dying, she didn't want to die. And it's about hope and, you know, that people can kind of still change, like, even in their last days and how when there is hope in the job search, like, it can be incredibly generative.

1:05:26It's just testament to the fact that we are always changing, always becoming, that there's always something that we could do that we haven't done yet. And a lot of that is kind of implicit in the piece, not explicitly stated. And then there's, you know, Eduardo has a piece in the last chapter where he's talking about how he's looking for work after a year of taking care of his kids and how he used all these skills from his first year and a half as a dad to look for work. But what I think is really powerful about that piece is how he has this kind of clarity around the job hunt and what it means and what it doesn't mean about his identity because of his kids.

1:06:02And he's making that connection where he's like, it's not really a referendum on who I am or my identity. And he knows that because of this year and a half he spent caregiving. Yeah. And then there's this piece by Regina Medingui, and she talks about her grandmother's job hunt or lack of job hunt and her mother's, and she connects it to her own. And through those stories, she kind of weaves this connection across the generations where she's like, we all were pursuing acts of self-determination through our job seeking. And she's able to kind of uncover that connection between herself and her grandmother and her mother through these conversations that she has for this piece specifically.

1:06:44So she was able to not only learn a lot about their lives in asking them questions about how they found work, but also make connections to herself and where she is now and how she got there because of how they found their way to work and what they were kind of up against and what they settled for and didn't settle for. Yeah. I think that chapter is kind of the most diverse in that they're really all talking about different things, but they're talking about how, what we can take and learn from the job hunt. There's a piece by Tatiana Scott where she really frames, she asks the question, like, isn't this an act of hope?

1:07:24If we are looking for work. Like we can't submit a cover letter believing the world is going to end tomorrow. And so it's really a question. It's not a proclamation. Like, yes, it is an act of hope. It's more like what happens if we start asking that question? Like what gets activated when we do this labor? Yeah, I thought that piece is really interesting, too, because there's that level of ironation. She's writing this from the perspective of someone who has become employed. But the job that she found after struggling to find work was being a career advisor. at the art school where she got her degree and subsequently couldn't find a job in the art field from.

1:08:03So she ended up doing that, but then came to find inspiration on advising sort of the next generation on finding work. And yeah, brought this element of hope in there. And I think that's one of the book's defining questions. Is search work ultimately an act of hope, to your point where you were just saying? Yeah, which I think surprised me a little because it can feel so hopeless, but it did come up a lot. Yeah. If we're doing this, like we must believe on some level that there is a place for us in the future. And that's true. I mean, inherently like for applying for work, it means we believe in the future.

1:08:38We have to, we want to. And that's personally, I, I've taken a lot of comfort in that from the book and being in the position that I'm in currently as well, as opposed to feeling, you know, there are days where I definitely feel like this is this sisyphean task and like you can be doing the very best and like a leader in your community and all this stuff and like it's feeling like it doesn't fucking matter because you can still get laid off tomorrow and be back at square one tap into your sleeping again you know but it's like but no you do this because there is something bigger that you believe in if you're lucky or you know what i mean and i have a lot of gratitude right now because of that yeah and there are a few pieces in the book that do talk about how our ideas of work and the sorts of jobs we can have will change, like especially if we're facing constant rejection, you know, we might decide that, OK, maybe looking for the office job or the W-2, that actually isn't what I should be doing right now.

1:09:31Admitting that doesn't mean you can't still have hope for the future. And maybe admitting that is actually how you gain hope for the future because, you know, that's not working. So but something else is going to. And I'm only going to get there if I start trying for something else. Exactly. Well, Rachel, this has been such a lovely conversation. I think a nice way to look towards the year ahead. And I think everyone can agree. It's just been a kind of shitty year. You can now sign up to pre-order the book. Where can people do that? And I'll follow your work. Yeah, so you can pre-order the book at orbooks.com.

1:10:08So Orbooks is the absolutely wonderful independent publisher that's publishing the book. So orbooks.com and you can find search through their catalog and it might be on the homepage now. It's also on a little banner on my website where you can sign up for the newsletter, which is wordsofmouth.org. So you can find links to the newsletter, links to every past newsletter since 2016 on that website. And I always encourage people to look at recent issues because there are some jobs that are still open. Also, it's just a fun way to, you know, like we've talked about a lot, get inspired, learn, expand your aperture on what's out there, what's possible.

1:10:46And if you pre-order now, you get 15 % off, right? Thank you. Yeah, yes. Please pre-order. Pre-order the book. Yeah, you get 15 % off and we'll have some kind of fun festivities in the new year to celebrate the official publication.

1:11:06This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominik. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.

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