Fixable How to stop devoting yourself to your job w/ Sarah Jaffe | from How to Be a Better Human
Dec 29, 2025
In this insightful discussion, writer and journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back and From the Ashes, delves into the emotional toll of modern work culture. She unpacks how devotion to our jobs can lead to exploitation and isolation. Topics include the idea of disenfranchised grief related to loss and crises, and how collective mourning fosters community connections. Jaffe also shares practical steps for organizing at work and emphasizes the importance of solidarity and care in labor movements.
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Don't Let Work Define Your Whole Life
- Loving a job often leads people to organize their entire lives around it rather than the other way around.
- Sarah Jaffe argues that meaning from work shouldn't replace other sources of validation and identity.
From Trash Pickup To Journalism
- Sarah Jaffe recounts many early jobs: picking up trash at concerts, scooping ice cream, and waiting tables.
- Those roles taught practical skills and shaped her view that all work remains, fundamentally, work.
Dream Jobs Don't Erase Precarity
- Transitioning into a "dream job" didn't remove the economic pressures and precarity Sarah experienced.
- The idea that meaningful work automatically improves material conditions is often false.