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Another edition of Discovery, a link roundup

Sep 18, 2022

Welcome (back) to Discovery—the Celebration link roundup—where we celebrate great writing, explore new ideas, keep abreast of newsy items, continuously reframe our understanding of the world, and also (ahem) laugh at memes.

Here we go!

Work and Life

At work, I write a newsletter on leadership which ends up being mostly about work and life, and how the two intersect, make room for each other (and/or step on each other’s toes).

In the most recent edition, I had the opportunity to beg readers to stop calling work-life boundaries “quiet quitting,” a buzzy phrase that seemed to strangle the entire internet last month. I wrote this about “quiet quitting”:

“The term has a negative connotation and conjures images of loafers lazily idling away their work hours. But a closer look reveals that the term is a misnomer: It doesn't mean giving up on your work duties or shirking your responsibilities, it doesn't mean ‘quitting’ at all—it simply means delivering a satisfactory performance while exercising boundaries around going above and beyond the agreed upon scope of your job description.”

To back up my argument against the term “quiet quitting,” I shared several supporting links, some of which I’ll share here too because the phrase still hasn’t suffered the ignoble death it deserves, and I’d like to help put the nail in its coffin.

Jo Constanz from Bloomberg News had some great coverage about the backlash: “All of the attention around quiet quitting says more about the extent to which companies depend on unpaid labor than about any individual employee’s work ethic.”

Amina Kilpatrick wrote for NPR about how “quiet quitting” is an irritating misnomer: “Quiet quitting doesn't actually involve quitting. Instead, it has been deemed a response to hustle culture and burnout; employees are ‘quitting’ going above and beyond and declining to do tasks they are not being paid for.”

Then, there was the rebuttal to the term quiet quitting—”quiet firing”— defined in this Insider post as a phenomenon wherein “employers treat workers badly to the point they will quit, instead of the employer just firing them.”

The discourse overall was giving me rage palpitations so I was grateful when Derek Thompson with The Atlantic succinctly summed the whole thing up in his recent piece, “Quiet Quitting Is a Fake Trend”: “What people are now calling ‘quiet quitting’ was, in previous decades, simply known as ‘having a job.’” There, that’s settled.

Thompson also wrote another recent piece I enjoyed in The Atlantic entitled, “Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life,” which offered a beautiful perspective on work’s place in our lives. I relished this tidbit of advice in particular: “Work is too big a thing to not take seriously. But it is too small a thing to take too seriously. Your work is one-sixth of your waking existence. Your career is not your life. Behave accordingly.”

People pleasers and perfectionists, please heed this wisdom (and yes, I’m outing myself as both—but I'm working on it).

Writers on Writing

I’m in an eternal battle with my raging ADHD, a disorder which cripples executive function and often leaves me paralyzed in the face of competing interests and demands on my time. Often, this means I am unable to do things I very much want to be doing.

Usually, writing is the thing I most want to be doing, but am avoiding for any number of reasons. Every waking moment, and even sometimes in my dreams, there is a voice inside me scolding, “you should be writing,” instead of whatever it is that I’m doing instead—even when I’m performing basic life requirements like exercising, drinking water, preparing and eating food, sleeping, socializing, or working—the voice doesn’t care, it always wants to fight.

And I fight back with procrastination, the ADHDer’s dearest friend and most despised enemy.

When I can’t get myself to write, one of my favorite ways to productively procrastinate is to read other writers’ advice on writing. I figure that reading about the craft is writing-adjacent and should temporarily stave off the nagging inner voice. (Also, I secretly hope I’ll finally unlock the answer to defeating my brain chemistry and vanquishing writer’s block. That hasn’t happened yet but I’ve read some sage advice on my quest along the way.)

I loved Summer Brennan’s explanation of “invisible ducks” in her recent substack essay: “The invisible ducks are the things you’re not writing about, but which inform your writing nonetheless. Maybe they start out as part of the text, or maybe they are never written down, but shape the tone of the piece in some way.”

Jane Friedman’s newsletter is a reliable treasure for writers and I loved a recent guest post from Tom Bentley, “Persistence Pays the Weary Writer,” which details how he harnessed “the power of incremental writing,” to finish his memoir in short little bursts—“I wrote every workday, five days a week, for a scheduled half-hour. Be in the chair, manuscript up, cursor blinking, even if on that day the word pipe is clogged. A half-hour’s writing might be only 300 words, 500 words, sometimes a mere 100 words. But a half-hour’s writing over 7 or 8 months: a book’s worth of words.” I’m always drawn to advice about consistency and incrementalism even though I chronically struggle to apply it to my own routine. Maybe you’ll have better luck!

Since I’ve been writing a novel for two years now (oy vey), I devour advice from successful novelists. I found valuable insight in this Ask Polly interview with Julia May Jonas, author of the hot debut novel from earlier this year, “Vladimir,” (which, full disclosure, I haven’t even read yet).

Here’s Jonas’s answer to the question, “Do you have any good advice for those who struggle to believe in their work?”

“When my daughter was five, she took this page-a-day inspirational calendar from the giveaway pile in the laundry room in our apartment building, and became briefly obsessed with taping every page to her walls. I usually hate inspirational sayings, anything like that, but there was one page she taped up that said, ‘Do not let doubt reap what was sowed in faith.’ I actually would repeat that to myself on jogs before I would write my novel, as mortifying as that now sounds. It helped.
The point is, trust the initial impulse, that shiver, and don’t trust all the subsequent lawyers in your head who are trying to tell you that it’s actually a bad idea. The other way to look at it is: finish. What makes an artist is not, in fact, the impulse to create, it is the impulse to finish what you started.
But also your work doesn’t need to be believed in! Least of all by you. The more that you can remove the evaluative voice, the better. Move forward, without hope or fear, feel the wins, when the writing feels alive, and don’t worry about the slogs, when the writing feels dead. The part in Vladimir that I enjoyed writing the most was the part that I had to rewrite the most. Some of the sections I wrote that felt like I was trudging uphill lugging an animal carcass are now some of my favorites. When it comes to writing, your feelings don’t matter, and they often lie. So don’t worry about them. Keep going.”

It’s funny, I’ve probably read hundreds of thousands of words worth of writing advice in my life—and they can all be tidily summarized by the final two words in the excerpt above: “Keep going.”

COVID

Do not miss Ed Yong’s comprehensive explainer on brain fog: “One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood.” As someone who struggles with invisible disabilities, I know firsthand that the pain of non-apparent conditions is compounded by people downplaying or willfully misunderstanding the severity of the symptoms.

After I read Yong’s reporting, I felt bad about my instinct to trivialize brain fog, which one expert calls “by far one of the most disabling and destructive” symptoms of long-COVID: “Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue.” In fact, it’s a disorder of executive function, “the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses.”

This quote, in particular, was heartbreaking, from a women who was studying theoretical physics when COVID decimated her career path, “I used to sparkle, like I could pull these things together and start to see how the universe works . . . I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day, like an ache.”

And, Finally, Some Tweets

Bake Off is back! Yes, in America, it’s technically called “The Great British Baking Show,” but it will always be "Bake Off” in my heart. The show, for those who’ve been living under a rock, is a baking competition set in a charming tent in the English countryside. Bake Off is so devoid of toxicity and drama, it’s the entertainment equivalent of a “puppy of the day” desk calendar, and it’s here to soothe our beleaguered psyches as midterms approach—not a moment too soon.

Here’s some fun tweets about it.

Prue loves her booze.