Working, writing, running
The things I can't stop thinking about, including a book that's going to stay with me for a long while.
View from my (very) frigid run yesterday. Traverse City, Mich.
As we head into the weekend and reach my favorite day of the week (is there any better day than Saturday?), a few things from the past several days have dominated my thoughts enough that I wanted to share them here. I’m hoping these spark some conversation—I’m interested in hearing if anything here resonates and also would like to know what’s on your mind right now. Maybe this kind of newsletter will become an ongoing, occasional Friday occurrence. An end-of-the week exhale of sorts. The first part of this post, by the way, is for all subscribers, with the entire post for paid subscribers only. I’m happy you’re here.
1.) The way we work—is it changing for the better?
Several months back, on a Monday, a video of a woman going about her first work day of the week slowly and intentionally popped up in my Instagram feed. Rather than hit the ground running come Monday morning, Marisa Jo shared how she does the exact opposite: she eases into the day, making her post-weekend morning routine less about getting a jump start on the week and multi-tasking, and more about going easy on herself and focusing on one thing at a time (like enjoying a brewed-at-home iced coffee, followed by stretching, then reading before sitting down at her desk).
She called her approach to the start of a new work week “bare minimum Monday,” a concept that piqued my interest—and has gotten plenty of others talking, as I learned when I did a little more digging into this idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we hear stories of widespread burnout and consider how we’re addressing our mental health, and as we hear workplace buzzwords like “quiet quitting” and read headlines about the success of four-day work weeks (lots more came out just this week), “bare minimum Monday” definitely strikes a chord. Marisa Jo’s approach isn’t necessarily novel, though naming it and sharing it with the world seems to be. In a video, Marisa Jo described the trend as “rejection of all the pressure I felt on Sunday and Monday” and prioritizing well-being over productivity instead of giving in to the hustle culture. “I had to tell myself to do the bare minimum in order to not make myself sick over how productive I was being,” she says in the video.1
I’ve long been fascinated with work—the myriad ways in which each of us spends our days and finds ways to make a living, the life circumstances that dictate and inform our work, the choices we make (or don’t make) that impact our careers, our families, ourselves, and the different styles of work and what constitutes “being productive” and “being a success.” There’s a lot of nuance, privilege, complexity around this topic, which is why I have been an avid reader of
and Anne Helen Petersen’s reporting and writing, a good amount of which focuses on how we view work, hurdles and roadblocks related to work in our culture, what needs to change, and how it could be altered for the better. She tackles a whole lot more, too, on so many different and important cultural topics that will get you thinking, and the community she’s built offers some of the best conversations I’ve seen here on Substack. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already.2.) I’m drowning in great writing, and it feels so good.
I’ve been on a bit of a reading kick lately, staying up late savoring newsletters from favorite writers here, like Laura McKowen of
, Rebecca Woolf of , and , discovering new-to-me writers including Kara Cutruzzula of , Jane Ratcliffe of , , and also starting a new book I will likely finish this weekend but also kind of don’t want to because I want to sit with it as long as possible—it’s just that good.Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
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