New Foundation

Summary

Cannonball with Wesley Morris

Episode: "New Foundation" (November 15, 2022)

Host: Wesley Morris (New York Times)

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Episode Overview

In "New Foundation," Wesley Morris and co-host Jay Wortham dive deep into the seismic shifts in American work culture prompted by the pandemic, reflecting both personally and culturally on the meaning, value, and future of work. Using anecdotes, pop culture references, and thoughtful critique, they unpack how new work paradigms—remote work, shifting labor practices, and mass reevaluations of purpose—offer both opportunities for deeper human connection and challenges to our ideas of dignity and community.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Histories in Work

• Jay Wortham recounts working at a sports bar in high school, describing how the camaraderie and diversity of colleagues opened up their worldview.
  • Quote: "I loved the camaraderie of it, and it really shaped my psyche around the importance of being open to new types of people..." (03:14)
• Both hosts reflect on how these early, communal work experiences shaped their views on diversity, tolerance, and connection.

2. The Pandemic & the "Return to Office"

• The pandemic surfaced a major societal and labor shift few could have predicted.
  • Wesley: "As many as… 40% of the American workforce had a job number they could do from home." (05:30)
  • Jay: "For the other 60%, there was clarity perhaps about what it meant to be someone who could not work from home..." (05:58)
• The mandate to "return to the office" glosses over widespread personal changes, lessons learned, and new opportunities for defining work.

3. Work, Popular Culture, and the American Sitcom

• Wesley explains how American TV and sitcoms have long romanticized the workplace:
  • "I got this idea of loving work in some ways from the American sitcom because there was never a hardship. It was very easy to just go to work and be surrounded by your work family." (08:06)
• Both note that sitcoms rarely depict the actual struggles of labor—unionization, overwork, or exploitation—and instead focus on a harmonious, idealized version of office camaraderie.
• Jay: "Leaning too much into the romance of work hides the reality of the ways in which work can become… all-encompassing in our lives..." (11:42)

4. Work as Identity and Purpose

• Both reflect on the deep connections between work, identity, and historical legacy:
  • Jay, referencing Bell Hooks and Black women's labor: "Amid all these dominations, it is still possible to find work that you love and find work that gives you purpose no matter what it is. Work can make life sweet." (13:18)
  • Wesley: "I am just as you are—the great, great, great something grandchild of people who did that work and were never paid what they were worth." (14:11)

5. The Impact of Remote Work & Accessibility

• Hosts emphasize how pandemic-required accessibility surfaced barriers and needs previously experienced mainly by disabled communities:
  • "For the first time, the world… had to think about barriers that disabled people have to think about every day." – Jay (16:31)
  • Concerns are raised about losing these accessibility gains amid pushes for "normalcy."

6. The Great Resignation & Re-evaluating Work

• The pandemic triggered introspection and resistance to toxic work culture:
  • Jay: "I've had a spiritual awakening—I do not have to do this job. I will not tolerate these microaggressions or macroaggressions." (17:25)
• TikTok and Gen Z’s approach to labor are celebrated for critiquing traditional work narratives and exposing futility in exploitative roles.
  • Memorable TikTok moment: "No, no, no, I'm going to just write my job description in my email because you keep telling me to do things outside of it." (18:04–18:11)

7. Severance—the TV Metaphor

• The show "Severance" is discussed as a dystopian metaphor for how work and life are artificially split in contemporary culture:
  • "They become a person with a work life and a person with a home life... The person with the work life doesn't know anything about the person with the home life." – Wesley (21:20)
• The severing of work and self mirrors how the modern workforce is encouraged to compartmentalize in ways both liberating and dehumanizing.

8. The Roots of American Work Culture

• Jay and Wesley contextualize America’s relationship with work as fundamentally tied to exploitation, referencing the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of Africans:
  • "A country that was founded on the toxicity of work." – Wesley (24:14)
• The current questioning of work is rooted, they argue, in an ongoing legacy of labor exploitation.

9. New Normals and Hopeful Transformations

• Recognition that hybrid work models and increased labor organizing (union drives, strikes across industries) are positive changes:
  • Wesley: "I am a four-days-a-week person. That feels normal now… that's the new normal." (25:18)
  • Jay: "We saw thousands of graduate students at Columbia asking for better pay… You can just look at how many people are organizing unions." (27:17)

10. The Limits and Possibilities of Collective Work

• The hosts express desire for a humane, purposeful approach to work for all, while acknowledging the deep-seated social and cultural barriers.
  • "If pop culture… can be a vehicle for learning how to hold each other's needs, abilities, life experiences with more care and expansive compassion, I'm so here for it." – Jay (31:07)
  • "The implications of us not all being at work together are going to not be great for the country… even the little bit of tolerance… came through some combination of workplace culture and popular culture." – Wesley (30:55)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You got to meet people you never would have met otherwise and make some kind of connection… It makes it hard to be categorical in your hate." — Wesley (03:40)
• "Leaning too much into the romance of work hides the reality…" — Jay (11:42)
• "Amid all these dominations, it is still possible to find work that you love… Work can make life sweet." — Jay, quoting Bell Hooks (13:18)
• "I am a four-days-a-week person. That feels normal now." — Wesley (25:18)
• "A country that was founded on the toxicity of work." — Wesley (24:14)
• "If pop culture… can be a vehicle for learning how to hold each other's needs, abilities, life experiences with more care and expansive compassion, I'm so here for it." — Jay (31:07)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Jay's sports bar experience & work as expanding horizons: 00:58–03:40
• Pandemic as labor shift—remote vs. in-person work: 05:16–06:26
• Sitcoms and the 'romance of work': 06:26–11:13
• Cultural and racial legacies in conceptions of work: 13:18–14:49
• Accessibility and disability justice in new work models: 16:30–17:23
• The rise of the Great Resignation & TikTok labor satire: 17:23–19:36
• Severance and compartmentalization of work/self: 21:23–24:14
• Labor organizing & hybrid work as 'new normal': 25:18–27:17
• Reflection on collective work and care: 30:26–32:16

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Tone and Style

Conversational, reflective, and incisive—balancing passionate personal storytelling with cultural criticism and a call for greater compassion and systemic change. Both hosts blend humor and philosophical inquiry, using pop culture and real-world examples to make complex social shifts relatable and urgent.

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Summary

"New Foundation" is a profound meditation on the transformed landscape of American work culture. Through candid reflections and sharp cultural analysis, Jay Wortham and Wesley Morris contend with the pandemic’s upheavals, the persistent legacies of racial and economic exploitation, and the enduring possibilities for solidarity, meaning, and change in how and why we work. The episode is an invitation to bring the lessons of disruption forward—ensuring dignity, access, and purpose remain central as we define what work will mean in the years ahead.

Transcript

[Jay Wortham]

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[Wesley Morris]

Hi, Jay.

[Jay Wortham]

You know a lot about me, but there's something I don't know if you know about a place I worked in high school.

[Wesley Morris]

Oh.

[Jay Wortham]

I worked at a sports bar called Damon's.

[Wesley Morris]

Not Damon's.

[Jay Wortham]

Yes, Damon's. With a red and white striped awning, the type of place that served ribs. And the ribs were good. This is the place I'm talking about. Carpeted.

[Wesley Morris]

Oh.

[Jay Wortham]

Walls of television, stadium seating, carpet and furniture. Ooh, yes, I know. Take it there. Correct.

[Wesley Morris]

I can see it.

[Jay Wortham]

It was a way to make extra money so that I could go on my Hot Topic shopping sprees. And, you know, I wanted to so I could buy all the spiky chokers I wanted and have enough money to put towards my college applications. That was the real motivation, because at some point my sophomore junior year, I realized how many colleges I wanted to apply to and did the math and tallied up 60 times 10 and was like, that's a lot of money. And my family wasn't resourced in a way that that would be a negligible burden. So I decided to pick up a couple of shifts, but there was actually so much more on offer there because until that point, my world was really insular. My high school was pretty small, and it was that kind of thing where you just know everything about your classmates. So when I got this job at Damon's, it was like an entirely other world opened up.

[Wesley Morris]

Oh, wow.

[Jay Wortham]

There's so much downtime when you work in a restaurant. You're doing a lot of side work, which includes wiping down the tables, refilling the salt and pepper shakers, refilling the ketchup jars. We were always standing around shooting the shit. And I met other high school kids. I met artists. I met single parents. I met people who were just out of college and trying to figure out what their lives were supposed to be and just trying to make cash in the meantime. And I remember the other hostess went to a different school. And she was cool in, like, the way that the, you know, next door best friend in a teen movie is always cool. Like, she was maybe a year or two ahead of me, and this young person is, like, showing me books that she's into, and, like, here's what I'm into. It was, like, this genuine exchange between two curious people who shared one thing in common, where they worked. And that's honestly why I stayed in the restaurant business as long as I did, which was pretty much my only job until I got this job, because I loved the camaraderie of it, and it really shaped my psyche around the importance of being open to new types of people and, you know, always having a kind of collective approach towards work.

[Wesley Morris]

You got to meet people you never would have met otherwise and make some kind of connection with them. And I think that in some ways, it really does make difference tolerable for people. It makes it hard to be categorical in your hate in some ways. And, you know, for people who. Who do work in an office, coming back to work, it's been the thing that we have basically all been talking about for most of this year. These companies are trying to get us to come back to the office and, like, what's it gonna be like to go back?

[Jay Wortham]

I think it means there's a huge opportunity to tune in and to take stock of everything we felt and everything we experienced and apply it to our lives right now. And even if our lives look maybe how they did before, we can be forever changed on the inside. And I think today that's what we're going to talk about. The way you and I are showing up differently or not. And just sit with the journey that we've been on.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jay Wortham]

And where we are now, which is officially returned back to work. I'm Jay Wortham.

[Wesley Morris]

I'm Wesley Morris. We're two culture workers at the New.

[Jay Wortham]

York Times, and this is still processing.

[Wesley Morris]

Can I just ask a perfectly obvious question?

[Jay Wortham]

Yeah, sure.

[Wesley Morris]

Where we meet?

[Jay Wortham]

Right here. Apologies for that.

[Wesley Morris]

We met at work. We met in the building right here at this office place. And I just think we should be clear about who we're talking about when we're talking about office work. I found this Pew Research poll, and at the height of the pandemic, they found that as many as, I think 40% of the American workforce had a job number that they could do from home. So I feel like 40% of the American workforce is a big deal.

[Jay Wortham]

And for the other 60%, there was another clarity perhaps about what it meant to be someone who could not work from home, what it meant to be someone whose work required them to. To put their health and their family's health at risk. So a lot of questions came up.

[Wesley Morris]

Like, we're talking about a huge labor shift.

[Jay Wortham]

I mean, it's a labor shift. It's a culture shift. It's a societal shift. We cannot overstate how big of a deal this is in American culture.

[Wesley Morris]

And I cannot overstate how big a deal it was for me to go back. I was really eager to go back to work. And I just think that what I believed what we would want to happen was, was that we all were sick of being in the house. I thought we were all just. There was a gate that was gonna go up, and I was gonna look outside on either side of me and just this flood of people walking down fifth Avenue or whatever. Like those scenes in Working girl and Tootsie. But it was not like that. It was like, I am legend. It was just Will Smith by himself and him and a dog all day. I think where I got that idea, really, I mean, I'm mentioning all these movies, but it was actually the American sitcom. A good dispatcher has got to be impersonal, separate, aloof. That's why you notice I never fraternize with you drivers. Like, if you watch enough tv, right? Every single show, it's either about coming home from work or about the workplace itself. You know what I don't get? Who says you get to be boss? I do. As boss, I have that authority. You can't do that. Yeah, I can, and I did. Whether we're talking about Amos and Andy on TV newsroom.

[Jay Wortham]

Hello.

[Wesley Morris]

Mary Tyler Moore, WKRP in Cincinnati. Now it's time to go to our live remote man on the scene at the Pinedale shopping mall for the big WKRP turkey giveaway.

[Jay Wortham]

Roseanne eventually is a great workplace comedy, as you know.

[Wesley Morris]

Yes. I mean, I got this idea of loving work in some ways from the American sitcom because there was never a hardship. Right. It was very easy to just go to work and be surrounded by your family, your work family. So I don't know what a work from home sitcom looks like, but we've really never had it.

[Jay Wortham]

I don't think it would work.

[Wesley Morris]

I don't think it would work.

[Jay Wortham]

Imagine living single if Khadijah's character made her magazine from home. And keep in mind, this is a grassroots publication.

[Wesley Morris]

Can you imagine? Regine under those circumstances, happens to belong.

[Jay Wortham]

To my new boyfriend, Brad.

[Wesley Morris]

She's gonna be bringing men Home while Khadijah's just doing her job.

[Jay Wortham]

Well, if we didn't have so much work to do here, we'd love to hear more about your latest canine kiss. Oh, would you?

[Wesley Morris]

Anyway, I just think that there's so much great television about work and the camaraderie of these different people from different backgrounds with different personality types, a different class relationship coming together. I just had the randomest thought, Jay, about this show that kind of exemplifies this, but in a weird way it's about like the split between the two things and the way the one thing kind of enters the world of the other. And it's frasier. This is Dr. Frasier Crane. I'm listening. Because Frasier was interestingly about these very educated, high class people.

[Jay Wortham]

Sherry, Niles. Thank you.

[Wesley Morris]

And these less educated working class people. And they shared space both in the office. Cause Roz was basically, you know, she was qualified to be a producer, but she didn't know anything about being fancy.

[Jay Wortham]

Well, excuse me for not being rich.

[Wesley Morris]

Enough to shop at the International House of Tight Ass. And then Frasier and Niles would have to go home and deal with their cop dad. Oh, Niles, to you. A sketchy neighborhood is when the cheese shop doesn't have valet parking. And I don't know, I feel like 60 years of that has just made an impression on me to also feel a certain enthusiasm about having a job and doing that job among other people. The tension on the shows was never about how hard it was to be at work. They were never about unionization or working too hard. That was not a part of the American sitcom.

[Jay Wortham]

Right.

[Wesley Morris]

The sitcom was a romance of work.

[Jay Wortham]

Yeah, right, right.

[Wesley Morris]

My first real job was at the Richard the Boris movie theater. I was an usher. So all those years I just felt I loved my co workers. Right. I loved going in there. And I didn't really love. Okay, I didn't love my coworkers. I didn't love them all. But there was something about going in and just not knowing what you were going to go into, who was going to be like, what today. And that sitcom version of my life is a thing that I missed during the height of the pandemic. I wanted that back.

[Jay Wortham]

I want that for you. But we are in different places.

[Wesley Morris]

Oh, no.

[Jay Wortham]

I think that when I watch the shows that you're watching, I just had a very different response. I was like, look how they're living their lives. They never eat, they never go to the bathroom, they never seem to get.

[Wesley Morris]

Tired, they never go home. They Never go home. They're only ever at work.

[Jay Wortham]

And what I think I'm trying to say is leaning too much into the romance of work then hides the reality of the ways in which work can become, and I think has become so all encompassing in our lives because work is inherently tethered to these systems of labor and capital that don't allow for the dignity, the humility, the humor on television, which is why it's on tv. It's marketing to say that it's very good marketing. But before season one of the pandemic, I had already shifted to working from home. So I was already in that flow by the time the offices shut down.

[Wesley Morris]

That is true.

[Jay Wortham]

You know, I loved my morning routine. I got into my work faster, and I think I had a much healthier balance. So I had already been experiencing this possibility of trust, of reorganizing my home life to allow work in when it made sense, not the other way around. I deeply love the work that I get to do. And I like saying I get to do, not I have to do, because I make a choice every day to do this work. And I think about women like Ethel Payne, and I think about early black journalists and the work that they did, they felt they had to do for the sake of our people. And I feel like I'm in that lineage. And it's very important to me. And I. And I really, I don't take that lightly. And, you know, during my sabbatical, a huge text that was foundational for me was rereading Bell Hooks, Sisters of the Yam. And there's an essay in this book called Work Makes Life Sweet. And so one of the things she says in the book is the historical legacy of black women shows that we have worked hard, long, and rarely have been paid what we deserve, and we rarely get the recognition that we deserve. And then she says, but even amid all these dominations, it is still possible to find work that you love and find work that gives you purpose no matter what it is. Work can make life sweet. And she understands that not everyone gets to make that choice. But I think she's just offering a framework that we don't have to show up and do back breaking labor and tell ourselves, well, this makes life sweet. We can be honest about it and have an honest relationship to the labor that we do. And that's radical.

[Wesley Morris]

Well, part of the reason that I feel so compelled to come to work is because I am just as you are. I'm like the great, great, great something grandson of the people who did that work and were never paid what they were worth. And I was one of the few people in my family to go to college. I am one of the very few people to go to an office for work to this day. And so there is this sense that I am bringing all these other people to my desk with me when I.

[Jay Wortham]

Get there, of course.

[Wesley Morris]

So these are the people that I'm bringing with me when I come back to my desk.

[Jay Wortham]

Hmm. What I find really interesting about this particular moment in time is that it's being branded as return to office. But what we're talking about is the opportunity to allow the changes that happen to stay with us despite the pace of everything, urging us to go back to normal. We don't have to.

[Wesley Morris]

And I think that, you know, for as much as I want to be here at work, I also am aware that there really are people whose lives improved by just staying home and their work didn't suffer, but their peace of mind improved.

[Jay Wortham]

Right. You know, a lot of my body issues, a lot of my chronic issues come from working beyond my capacity in my youth. Lifting heavy trays of glasses, carrying big boxes of wine. I mean, I was never thinking about my body except how much money it could get me. And as a result, now all I'm doing is trying to figure out how much money I can invest back in my body to try to restore it to some shadow of its former self. Yeah, it's easy to forget how much we put our bodies through in the name of work and how normalized that expectation has become. One of the really incredible byproducts of this huge shift in thinking about how we stay connected with was borne out through accessibility and digital accessibility. Right. For the first time, I mean, the world, like the vast majority of the population, had to think about barriers that disabled people have to think about every day. Can I go to these places? Can I get into them? Is it safe for me to be there? And I do worry that those lessons are being forgotten in the name of convenience.

[Wesley Morris]

Returning to so called normalcy and just.

[Jay Wortham]

Forgetting that how beautiful it was when we took care of everybody, not just the able bodied parts of our society. That is something that gets left out when there are these blanket calls about what's possible when we are all returning to, quote, office and what are some of the things that work for some people that don't work for others. That's why the response is people choosing to leave their jobs.

[Wesley Morris]

People. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Jay Wortham]

I want something better for myself. I've had a spiritual awakening I do not have to do this job. I will not tolerate these microaggressions or macroaggressions. I will do something else.

[Wesley Morris]

I mean, part of the public health emergency for a lot, a lot of people was to think about how they want to be spending their lives. Opportunity to have an existential moment.

[Jay Wortham]

That's right.

[Wesley Morris]

Nationwide.

[Jay Wortham]

I mean, some of the best criticism of American attitudes towards work, I think appears on TikTok. Hi, Jazz.

[Wesley Morris]

I have a really fun, exciting project for you to work on.

[Jay Wortham]

I'm Dre Brown is absolutely hilarious on TikTok.

[Wesley Morris]

What are you doing now? No, no, no. I'm going to just write my job description in my email because you keep telling me to do things outside of it.

[Jay Wortham]

His entire feed is just his impressions of gen zers in the workplace. And there's one where he's doing a job interview.

[Wesley Morris]

So can you describe a typical day in the life of somebody in this role? You're going to need to be able to dedicate a lot of your free time to this job.

[Jay Wortham]

And they're like, go above and beyond. And he's just like, no. He slams the laptop shut. And so there's two things happening here. One, a generation of people who have said, perhaps I've watched my parents and probably grandparents go through recessions, lose money, have difficulties, and to say, I don't want that for myself, I'm good. And then also raising up this idea that what we understand to be work needs to be reorganized and recategorized.

[Wesley Morris]

I agree. I think that one of the other things that these TikToks are picking up on is, like, this kind of sense of futility about work. Like, what is the point of working more than I need to when it's not going to advance me anything? I work at a big company that if we're being honest, like, if I don't do this job, you're gonna find somebody else to do it.

[Jay Wortham]

The futility that you're identifying in this TikTok is shared across a very broad section of TikTokers who are asking themselves big existential questions about work and capitalism while living under multiple pandemics, escalating climate crisis. I think people are asking themselves, what is the point of work?

[Wesley Morris]

Why is this position open? Do people keep quitting? Why are people quitting this job? Is there something I should know?

[Jay Wortham]

Like, what is the point of this daily grind? And it's not like these people aren't working.

[Wesley Morris]

You know, that's not the point.

[Jay Wortham]

That's not the point.

[Wesley Morris]

You can only have this perspective. If you have worked right in these jobs, right. And have been spoken to that way, right.

[Jay Wortham]

Work is not a small part of the American life. It is the vast majority of the thing you spend your time doing. So you better enjoy it. You better find a way not to be miserable at it if you can.

[Wesley Morris]

It's your headline to unpack.

[Jay Wortham]

It's your one story to follow week by week.

[Wesley Morris]

It's your wordle to work through.

[Jay Wortham]

It's your team to track.

[Wesley Morris]

It's your 36 hours to explore.

[Jay Wortham]

It's your marinade to master.

[Wesley Morris]

It's your opinion to figure out.

[Jay Wortham]

It's your mattress to upgrade.

[Wesley Morris]

It's your day to know what else you need to know today. The New York Times. It's your world to understand. Find out [e-mail] yourworld A lot of these issues around work that we're talking about today came up on this show. It's called Severance. It was on Apple plus and it's basically about this company called Lumen Industries. And Lumen is basically implanting these devices into their employees brains.

[Jay Wortham]

I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure colloquially known as severance.

[Wesley Morris]

They basically become two people.

[Jay Wortham]

I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life.

[Wesley Morris]

They become a person with a work life and a person with a home life. And the person with the work life doesn't know anything about the person with the home life and the person with the home life knows nothing about the work life.

[Jay Wortham]

Do I have a family? You'll never know. So the severance procedure that has caused them not just to forget everything about themselves when they arrive to work, it's also severing a lot of other things that we don't understand. The full extent of the fact that they don't remember their children, they don't remember if they have spouses. Like that's what interests me about severance, which is painting a picture of a world within which our opting out has a direct impact on our personhood.

[Wesley Morris]

Well, I mean, opting in is an affront to your humanity too, right? There's a lot of perks for doing your job well. They seem like they suck. They're infantile. By reaching 75% refinement on Siena, you have earned for you and your fellow refiners a five minute music dance experience. Like you did your job well. Here's a dance party. You may choose one genre and one accessory.

[Jay Wortham]

I choose defiant Jazz, what I find really interesting about severance is the way work is this paternalistic feeling force and how it's not just that the workers don't know what they're doing because they've been severed. They also don't know what the severance procedure has done to their brain.

[Wesley Morris]

And it's scary to not know what your work self is doing because you don't know what your work is. And there's something creepy, dangerous, nefarious evil happening at this company. They're making something bad. Look, I found a department, one they don't tell us about, one where you don't get to leave. As in there, down there, right now. Either way, work is a problem, right? Work is a source of toxicity. Work is a source of unhappiness. And interestingly, this mediocre show that has some moments of great sort of philosophical brilliance is basically the story of America in some way.

[Jay Wortham]

Right?

[Wesley Morris]

You know, a country that was founded on labor. You know, a country that was founded on the toxicity of work.

[Jay Wortham]

A country founded on a genocide of indigenous people who they couldn't enslave, and then the enslavement of people they were able to figure out how to traffic and enslave.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah.

[Jay Wortham]

So the most exploitative.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah.

[Jay Wortham]

The most harmful.

[Wesley Morris]

So much so that, you know, we are still dealing with the implications of that labor practice to this day. So these questions about work are fundamental to who we are as Americans. Right. We have a severe belief in and distrust of labor and its practices.

[Jay Wortham]

And I don't think work has to be that way.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah. Our ancestors would probably agree. Now, having said that, you know, a lot of these companies have said, come in X number of days a week, not all five. And a lot of people, many people have taken advantage of that. I am a, you know, four days a week person. And that just feels normal. Now, that is the new normal. That is the thing that has come out of these last two years that feels good to me.

[Jay Wortham]

You know, I mean, what we're talking about today, you and me, is the ways in which work can be helpful, healthy, and can offer a sense of purpose and place and the value of that. Right.

[Wesley Morris]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Jay Wortham]

And the ways in which the pandemic held up a giant black light to reveal, you know.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah.

[Jay Wortham]

All the messy bits that nobody wants to think about or deal with. Things like healthcare, childcare, wealth dynamics and disparities, poverty, disability and disability justice.

[Wesley Morris]

Check.

[Jay Wortham]

Education, Check. Food and work. Right. All of these disruptions created a paradigm of thinking differently, where for the first time in a Very long time. People like you and me who sit in very cushy, very expensive chairs to do our work, had a moment of recognition, awareness, alignment with.

[Wesley Morris]

Yes.

[Jay Wortham]

People who are standing on their feet all day and making the lunches when we step out for our lunch break.

[Wesley Morris]

Yeah.

[Jay Wortham]

It is the most inspiring thing that I've seen in my decade plus years working at the New York Times. People organizing at this very place we work at. The biggest takeaway, I mean, what we keep coming back to in this conversation, Wesley, is the value of work and the ways work needs to get better.

[Wesley Morris]

Yes. So.

[Jay Wortham]

So this was a real opportunity to examine our world. And it's not a window that's closed. We saw thousands of graduate students at Columbia asking for better pay. All the teacher strikes, all the people organizing, from Kellogg's to John Deere to taxicabs to nurses. You can just look at how many people are organizing unions. A ton of workers from different parts of Amazon are organizing. Chris Smalls being one of the most visible among them. And maybe we are starting to understand ways in which to reorganize how we think about what we do at work and how much we come into work. You know, I want your version of the workplace. I want that for myself. Like, I want to feel that romance of work, too.

[Wesley Morris]

Oh, I do.

[Jay Wortham]

I actually really kind of do.

[Wesley Morris]

You do.

[Jay Wortham]

I mean, that type of thinking is really interesting to me because it reflects something more humane that I would love to see implemented for everybody.

[Wesley Morris]

But we're talking about a bygone era when it comes to what I want. Because if you think about what the last 15 years of the American sitcom has looked like, the ones that are about work are about some kind of mockery of work in some way. Right, right. Where I'm thinking about Parks and Recreation.

[Jay Wortham]

My name is Leslie Knope, and I work for the Parks and Recreation Department. Can I ask you a few questions?

[Wesley Morris]

And now I'm thinking about Abbott Elementary.

[Jay Wortham]

I'm Jeanine Teagues. I've been teaching second grade here at Abbott elementary for a year now.

[Wesley Morris]

These are shows that are about work, but they're also what we would call a mockumentary at the same time.

[Jay Wortham]

Right, right, right.

[Wesley Morris]

Where there's a crew filming the show, calling attention to both the madeness of the show, but the artificiality of the work environment. I actually interviewed here and got it, but then, I don't know, something happened. I go to the same church as the superintendent. Caught him cheating on his wife with the deaconess. I needed a job. So it's like this convergence of reality television, the workplace, and the American sitcom.

[Jay Wortham]

Okay.

[Wesley Morris]

And I think that in this convergence is a real distrust of the workplace.

[Jay Wortham]

Yes. To me, a show like Parks and Rec undermines the seriousness with which we've been taught and conditioned and socialized to take on all kinds of work. Like, the funny thing about Parts and Rec is that very little about what they do matters. And they take it so seriously, or Leslie takes it so seriously, and everyone else is kind of responding to that. What I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring loudly at me, but the camera is always their witness. Right. Like, it's. Again, it's like we perform this labor of, like, validating their experiences because we've had them too. Yes, Right. It's the way in which we get invited into that workplace conversation and the ways in which our own anxieties get soothed.

[Wesley Morris]

You know, there are lots of examples that we all know about the problems of being in a workplace with other people. Right. And yet I hold on to what it means to do that work together because, you know, part of me believes that the implications of us not all being at work together are going to not be great for the country. I'm not saying that being in the office is going to stop being bad things from happening in this country. They're happening anyway.

[Jay Wortham]

Right.

[Wesley Morris]

But I do think that the, like, even the little bit of tolerance for each other that we had, I think it came through some combination of workplace culture and popular culture.

[Jay Wortham]

If pop culture like TV and I'm going to include social media like Twitter and TikTok can be a vehicle for learning how to hold each other's needs, abilities, life experiences with more care and expansive compassion. I'm so here for it. I just don't want that to be the only thing that we rely on as a society to build out those skills. Because I do think that no matter how much you're coming into the workplace, if you're not someone who's also working on your self or you're working on your ability to just be kind, being back in the workplace can only do so much. Being back in the workplace really matters. If the amount of care and caring that became the number one conversation in March of 2020 carries.

[Wesley Morris]

That'S our show.

[Jay Wortham]

Still Processing is produced by Elissa Dudley with Christina Josa and Hans Biuto. We are edited by Sarah Saracen and Sasha Weiss.

[Wesley Morris]

The show is mixed by Marianne Lozano and recorded by Maddie Masiello.

[Jay Wortham]

Digital production by Mahima Chablani. Our photo editor is ESLA Attar.

[Wesley Morris]

Thanks to Wendy Doerr and Paula Schumann.

[Jay Wortham]

Our theme music is by Kindness. It is called World Restart from the album Otherness. And yes, you got that right. We will be back next week.