Podcast Summary: "How to Stop Devoting Yourself to Your Job"

Podcast: TED Talks Daily (Sunday Pick: How to Be a Better Human)
Host: Chris Duffy (from "How to Be a Better Human")
Guest: Sarah Jaffe, journalist and author, "Work Won’t Love You Back" and "From the Ashes"
Date: August 31, 2025

EPISODE OVERVIEW

On this special “Sunday Pick” episode, TED Talks Daily features an insightful conversation from "How to Be a Better Human." Host Chris Duffy talks with Sarah Jaffe, acclaimed journalist and author, about the complex, emotionally-charged relationships people have with their jobs. The discussion explores why work has become so central to our identities, often at the expense of personal well-being, and unpacks how workers reclaim power, meaning, and community in an era of burnout and societal upheaval.

While rooted in both Jaffe’s personal experiences and her reporting on labor movements, the conversation seamlessly weaves together themes of devotion to labor, grief, and rebuilding a sense of self and society beyond the workplace.

KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

1. How Work Became Central to Our Identities

• Changing Attitudes Towards Work: Jaffe reflects on her trajectory from "crappy jobs" (waitressing, retail, ice cream scooping) to her current dream job as a journalist—and how even so-called ‘dream jobs’ come with similar exploitative structures.
  • “Work is still work and we are still doing it at the end of the day because we’ve got to pay the rent. Not because we just woke up that morning and decided that slinging sushi to tourists in Denver would be great fun.” – Sarah Jaffe (06:23)
• "Work Won’t Love You Back": The title of Jaffe’s book encapsulates the idea that workplaces benefit when employees go ‘above and beyond’ but seldom reciprocate with true care or security.
  • “Your life is more than this workplace, and you get to have demands on your workplace.” – Sarah Jaffe (08:29)

2. The "Labors of Love" and Systemic Exploitation

• Service & Care Work: The conversation delves into professions like teaching and nursing—jobs people pursue for their meaningful impact. Even these are subject to exploitation under systems that demand self-sacrifice.
• Organizing for the Common Good:
  • The Chicago Teachers Union’s mantra “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions” is highlighted as an example of how collective worker action often benefits the larger community. (10:12)
  • “They sort of demonstrated their worth to the community by going on strike…they also really had this innovative argument: you want our conditions to be better because it’s actually good for everyone.” – Sarah Jaffe

3. The Emotional Cost of Devotion to Work and Striking Parallels with Grief

• Grief Beyond Personal Loss: Jaffe draws connections between her own experience of grieving her father and the collective grief communities experience from factory closures, deindustrialization, and the pandemic.
  • “Everywhere I looked, there was grief…suddenly, everywhere I looked, there was grief.” – Sarah Jaffe (28:26)
• Middle Voice of Grieving: Jaffe explores the idea of the “middle voice” in language to describe how grief is both something we do and something that happens to us—paralleling the passive and active experiences of work and burnout.
  • “You are grieving, but grieving is also doing you. That really hit me in the gut.” – Chris Duffy (34:22)
  • “I joked about wanting to get an A in grieving, but like it’s really true…I’m gonna be good at this. I’m gonna get over it in record time. And, oh no, that’s not how that works.” – Sarah Jaffe (35:12)

4. The Loss of Community and the Role of Solidarity

• Unions as Spaces of Care: The coal miners’ union, for example, became an endowed social network providing support, care, and a sense of meaning—structures that vanished with the coal industry’s decline (14:33).
  • “The leader of a coal miners union, his job is care. His job is fighting for his members’ healthcare…and commemorating the disasters and the people that were lost.” – Sarah Jaffe (14:33)
• Rebuilding Together: Personal grief is not healed in isolation, and neither is societal loss. Material solidarity, not just emotional support, is necessary for genuine communal healing.
  • “It isn’t something you solve on your own—it is actually something you solve in community.” – Chris Duffy (40:21)

5. Rethinking Demands and Action at Work

• Practical Advice for Listeners: Jaffe advises reassessing your relationship with work beyond the myth of passion. Steps to reevaluate include:
  • Talking (safely) to coworkers about workplace conditions and collective feelings.
    • “Don’t use your workplace email to do that. That’s my number one bit of service journalism.” – Sarah Jaffe (19:39)
  • Learning your legal rights: “If we strike, then we’re a union.” Typifies how collective action matters regardless of official recognition. (19:39)
  • Considering leverage and forms of collective action: Not all organizing involves walking out—sometimes, “work to rule” or ambiguity around job descriptions are effective tools.

6. The Societal Consequence of Productivity-Obsessed Cultures

• From Personal Loss to Systemic Change: Jaffe makes a case for shifting from hyper-individual productivity toward structures of mutual care, using public service jobs as a model for organizing society around collective well-being (24:54).
  • “What would it look like to actually say that we want to run the world for the good of all of us, rather than the good of Elon Musk getting richer?” – Sarah Jaffe (24:54)

NOTABLE QUOTES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS

• On Meaning at Work:
  • “I don’t want my nurse or my doctor to only be in it for the money…But we do want to have the understanding that your life is more than this workplace.” – Sarah Jaffe (08:29)
• On Unions and Community:
  • “It was so shocking to me how physical grieving was. We just have no place for it for the most part in late capitalist society. We’re just supposed to get back to work.” – Sarah Jaffe (31:59)
• On Care Work and Gender:
  • The story of Kevin, a coal miner who became a care worker:
    “A guy who’s six foot one and has been working down a coal mine really, really does bring something else to that work...But also, he really loved it and found it meaningful in a totally different way.” – Sarah Jaffe (12:06)
• On Grieving as Transformation:
  • “Grief is not joyful or peaceful. It is a war inside me…It is breaking me. And somehow people can’t see. I want them to see, and I am terrified they will see.” – (Jaffe, as quoted by Duffy, 38:36)
• On Mutual Support:
  • “What we build these relationships for is to be there…I am honored when those people call on me in those moments…That’s what makes living in this screwed-up world worth doing.” – Sarah Jaffe (40:21)

IMPORTANT SEGMENTS & TIMESTAMPS

• 04:02-06:23 – Jaffe’s personal job history; the myth of ‘dream jobs’; work as survival
• 07:54-10:12 – Value-based professions (teaching, nursing) & the Chicago Teachers Union
• 12:06-14:33 – Story of Kevin, the miner who became a care worker; union solidarity as care
• 19:39-22:26 – Concrete steps for rethinking your relationship to work and organizing
• 24:54-28:26 – Personal vs. collective grief; the public good & climate crisis
• 34:22-38:36 – Grieving as a communal, not isolated, act; the “middle voice” concept
• 40:21-43:12 – Why mutual aid and support systems are crucial for coping & changing society
• 43:12-43:58 – Grief and social imagination; why loss can spark new possibilities

CLOSING THOUGHT

Sarah Jaffe’s deeply empathetic and analytically rigorous take challenges listeners to reclaim self-worth, community, and agency both within and beyond the confines of paid work. The episode is a powerful reminder that neither love nor healing can be outsourced to our jobs, and that rebuilding meaningful lives after loss—whether personal or collective—requires both solidarity and the courage to imagine something better.

[To hear more from Chris Duffy and Sarah Jaffe, visit sarahljaffe.com and chrisduffycomedy.com]