here* is a weekly newsletter exploring how things like tech, culture, and politics are changing the way we work. And how work is changing the way we live.
Let’s get into it.
This week:
Headlines: Analog products are having a moment ☎
Shortcuts: Say hi to a stranger 👋
Good jobs: Personified, Leaders We Deserve, and Assemble are hiring! 💰
Things I’m loving: Slow, quiet media and community mixtapes 🫶
The main bit: 9-5, M-F for a whole century 💯
Headlines & happenings
Work, life, and technology are ever-evolving (it’s exhausting). here* is the latest.
Would you rather: a higher salary or more flexibility? Many workers are pushing hard for the latter. A growing body of research suggests that workers are often just as productive (or more) in hybrid work environments and significantly less likely to quit a company when flexibility is treated as part of the job and not a temporary perk.
Analog products are having a moment: The same generation raised almost entirely online is now catalyzing an offline revival, boosting local craft shops, retro tech brands, and hobby communities as digital exhaustion pushes people toward experiences they can get in touch with - literally.
Ben & Jerry’s keeps fighting the good fight (and I love them for it): Ben & Jerry's has spent two decades operating under a rare agreement that let the brand maintain an independent board and outspoken social mission after its Unilever acquisition in 2000, but tensions heightened in recent years over positions on Palestine and racial justice, leadership changes, and moves to halt the activism that made the institution so culturally distinct. Now investors, activists, and allied brands like Patagonia and Dr. Bronner's have pushed back on the eroding of the independent governance structure that has protected their mission for years. For decades, Ben & Jerry’s has been defined not just by it’s ice cream but by it's social justice and care for humanity. It feels like the activism was never incidental to the business. In many ways it was the business. (I mean imagine an ice cream flavor like Cherry Garcia without a social angle. It doesn’t make sense!)
PS this is not an ad for Ben & Jerry’s I just really love corporations that do right by humanity. It could be though. If you work for Ben & Jerry’s call me!
Shortcuts
There are only 24 hours in the day. here* are your weekly shortcuts.
When in doubt, listen to your mother: Or someone else’s mom. Across hundreds of recent submissions, a common thread of advice emerged this past Mother’s Day. the most enduring maternal wisdom was often surprisingly ordinary. Rest when you can. Keep perspective. Be kind to people. Leave situations that make you feel small. Most of the advice was less about success and more about learning how to live a life you love.
Oh hey, fellow millennials, we’re turning 45! A new “Longevity Preparedness Index” is challenging the idea that aging well is all about retirement savings, showing that long-term wellbeing also depends on things like friendships, housing, caregiving plans, mobility, community, and whether your life still has structure and purpose. If anyone can figure it out, I know it’s us, millennials 😉
Say hi to a stranger: In a moment shaped by loneliness, remote work, and phone dependency, you can reframe casual social interaction as something more than just being polite. Brief moments of acknowledgment can reinforce the feeling that we are part of a community and not just moving through the void all alone.
Good jobs
I scour the job boards so you don’t have to. here* is a list of jobs that I think are really good.
If you love tech and progressive causes: Our friends at Personified are hiring! If you want to work alongside some of the best tech minds, powering some of the most progressive causes at a time when it matters most, check out their open jobs here.
If you love electing young people to office: Leaders We Deserve, a PAC investing in young people running for state leg and Congress, is hiring an Executive Director. Apply here.
Have a good job you want added to the next issue, reply to this email!
Things I’m loving
The things I’m loving on and off the internet.
The Inaugural Edition of Quiet Media, a print-first publication founded on the simple belief that our attention is our most valuable resource, and it should be treated with care.
And special shoutout and extra love to the For Starters newsletter written and sent every Friday by Danny Giacopelli for introducing me this special publication!
Maya Shankar, who I had the pleasure of working with several years ago, wrote a brilliant and incredibly timely book about what we do in the face of change. Check out The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. (and if you think I should host a book club for it…I could be persuaded..jussayin’)
Ok last thing I’m loving is Vivek Murthy’s (yes my Surgeon General crush) new Substack, Staying Human — but more specifically, this community mixtape he put out recently. Yes, you read that right, a community mixtape (for the modern era, of course) full of playlists like The Anthems of Resilience, The Soundtracks of Innocence & Nostalgia, and Songs for the Quiet Moments. So wholesome. So pure. Such a perfect way to leverage technology and build community. No notes, Dr. Murthy, thank you 🫶
The clock that never changed
In May 1926, the five-day workweek was a radical idea. A hundred years later, it is the most unquestioned assumption in the American workplace. We have reimagined nearly everything about how we work, where we do it, the tools we use, the things we actually produce, and yet the schedule has remained untouched.
Into the Light by Zach Elwart
The 9-5 was built for a different kind of work entirely. Henry Ford’s factory workers clocked in, produced a measurable output, and clocked out. The workday had edges and the building acted as a physical container. The five-day week made sense in that world because in that world, time and output were measured and were one and the same.
That world is largely gone. The hours, the container, and the output are all little more malleable which really means that work is essentially boundless. “Laptop work” (as I recently heard it referred to) has no natural stopping point, no assembly line that goes quiet at 5pm, no sound of a whistle that signals the day is done. It expands to fill whatever container you give it. Often times that container is now an entire existence; a smart phone on the nightstand, a laptop on the kitchen table, a Slack notification at 9pm on a Sunday.
What we lost when we gained all that flexibility was the thing that flexibility was supposed to protect. Not the schedule itself, but the boundary it enforced. The five-day week for all it’s rigidity told work where it ended. We modernized everything around it and forgot that the edges were doing an important thing.
A hundred years is a long time to leave a question unasked. The five-day workweek was never a natural law or a biological imperative. It was a negotiation between the demands of industry and the limits of humans, struck at a particular moment in history for a particular kind of work. That moment as we know has passed. The negotiation somehow has not reopened.
The workers who fought for the five-day week in 1926 weren't asking for less work. They were asking for a life that existed alongside work. That distinction mattered then and it may matters now, when the boundary between the two has become so thin that most people can no longer say with confidence where one ends and the other begins.
That’s all for this week.
I’ll be back in your inbox next week. Until then, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what content you liked or what you’d like to see more of in the next issue. You can reply to this email for a direct response from me.
<3
Meg