Friday Thread: Work, Ratios, and More
And some updates
Friends,
Today I have something of a roundup: some updates, some news, and a question to follow Tuesday’s post.
Last Friday we finished the My Ántonia Read Along. I’ve compiled the complete guide to Cather’s novel below. Please share freely with anyone who might be interested or dig in yourself, if you were one of those who told me privately that you were overcommitted in April and May. I might paywall this series in the future, but for now it is free.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the Cather project, I’ve decided to return to a weekly publishing schedule (on Tuesdays, as usual) to allow space for summer travel and for other pursuits. Roughly half of my posts will remain free; the other half will be for paying members.
I’m so grateful to everyone who supports my writing by reading, commenting, and sharing it with others. And there’s a special place in my heart for all of you who keep me going with your payments each month or through an annual plan. It means more than you know! Substack isn’t a full-time job yet, but it is a significant part of my current work life, and I’m grateful for it.
A few other exciting developments:
On Thursday, June 20, from 12:30-2pm EDT, I will partner with
to host a virtual workshop on Defamiliarization. If you are interested in participating, I believe I can offer you one-time access (ask me for details). You can find more information about the Foster Cohorts here. also offers a great introduction to the current theme, Foundations.You might have noticed that some of my headshots have changed. Big thanks to Savita Sittler for working her magic. This all happened because I’m partnering with a designer (thanks Elizabeth!) to overhaul my professional website. We’ll be building a store where I can sell replays of webinars and workshops, registration for workshops, ebook bundles of essays from my archive, and more. If I get my act together, I might offer a poetry collection from my wilderness ranger days, and possibly even the novel that I’ve had on the shelf for four years.
My coaching clients have had some big wins lately.
published an essay that we workshopped in Science. Jason Browne signed with Jill Marsal, of the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency (more news to come for Jason’s book). I have a client getting ready to launch a Substack that I know you’ll love (sorry, top secret right now). I’m presently working with two memoirists on fascinating books (one features Satanic Panic, the other a 32-foot wood schooner about to set sail). And my most recent client is transforming her genealogy research into a work of historical fiction that follows her parents’ escape from Czechoslovakia after the 1948 Communist coup. I am rich in stories!I’m heading back to Montana with my kids in July and will return to Prague and Brno with my Aunt JoAnn (a faithful reader of this series) and Uncle Dan in August. Aunt JoAnn has never traveled outside the U.S., except for Canada (which doesn’t count). And neither she nor Uncle Dan have ever seen our ancestral sites firsthand. You might recall my sadness two years ago, when I discovered that there were no surviving headstones in the graveyards where I knew my forebears lay. What a marvelous gift to share those places with family this year.
I’m sure I’ll have more news throughout the summer, but that’s the scoop for now. Which brings me back to Tuesday’s post and a question that I’ve been pondering for two and a half years now. I’ve framed it in different ways over time, asking whether a work self can be a whole self, and whether you can become stronger at your broken places after leaving a career that you love.
Today I’m curious about your thoughts on the magic relationship ratio as it applies to your work life. These aren’t mutually exclusive questions, but they help dig a little deeper into this week’s thought experiment:
Can we realistically expect work to give us five good things for every one thing it takes in the form of our energy, time, or talent? (Might this be an extremely privileged view?)
Or do we need to accept that work will drain us more than it fills us up, and that the 5:1 balance is best achieved in our leisure hours?
I’m still trying to decide how much my working class roots are helping me move forward and how much they might be holding me back. For instance, there is a kind of grim satisfaction in keeping my nose to the grindstone for hours on end. I’m quite good at that. But that perspective tends to frame potentially positive things — like self-care through fitness — as competing with “real” work, which is ostensibly supposed to exhaust me, compete with my life, present chores that I need to recover from during leisure hours.
And so sometimes that 5:1 balance is hard to achieve, because I end up feeling guilty about things that should be tipping the scale back toward the sun. I’m working on it, but I’m curious: how do you answer these questions for yourself?
Take care,
Josh
Josh, I would say that work is one aspect to a person’s life. For some it is a source of identity, a way to measure one’s material success, a place where people find their main friend base, etc. It has even been a place where people find spouses. In short, jobs do so much that it is often given an outsized portion of the pie in terms of a person’s self-esteem.
One’s relationship with work should be very fluid though. We can’t expect too much of it, as we can’t expect too much of our partners. Marriages are rarely 50/50. They often tip back and forth from 20/80 to 90/10 to 60/40 — and hopefully it will average out. But that’s just in terms of effort and resources. Some of us work hard hoping that the tough days will yield much easier days in the end. Sometimes you have to know whether the job or the system or the partner is just abusing you.
My examples for jobs with heavy investments are doctors and military personnel. Residency and boot camp are baptisms by fire, but there are rewards. But I have also seen suicides in these professions.
I am acutely aware of employee happiness because I used to work for a number of years in Human Resources, and I was the person who did new employee tours and introduced everyone by name. I loved people and wanted everyone to be happy.
The thing about work is that you can always find a new job. Or the same job at a company that is a better fit. Or has better management. Marriage and family relationships are presumed to be forever. Those ties are binding in ways that jobs are not (unless one makes it so by choice). However, there are divorces and family estrangements. Siblings that don’t talk for decades, even until death.
Unfortunately I am running out of time, and I’d like to get back to this. Ping me later if you want to hear more. I think we need to find a way to make all aspects of our life realistically positive. (I am wary of positivity for its own sake, which people are quick to label toxic. I think that may be the wrong word.) We need to pay better attention to each other and care about the good of others. I think the pendulum swing toward “self” is a reaction to abusive systems. But we have tipped almost to cultural narcissism.
I may very well be off base but it’s been a musing I have had for a while. Perhaps it’s from watching my young adult / teen children and their peers trying to navigate this world. The lack of volunteering. The wariness of taking jobs. It’s really different from when I was growing up. They’re interested in protecting their boundaries and exposure to negative stimuli but at the expense of not interacting with the world which is sure to hurt them at least a little but that’s also how we grow.
Work can meet the ratio test with this caveat: you have to credit work with the avoided negativity of the counterfactual of not having work, both the negative material implications of that lack as well as the absence of feeling productive.
So if you count the material and spiritual rewards of work even if the day to day does not meet the ratio, then I say yes.