Draft Four: The price we pay

On making your own choices.

This has been a confusing week, which translated into difficulty writing this letter. No through line was showing, and the ideas wouldn’t gel together. Which is why, on Saturday morning, I decided to go out for a run.

It’s been a terrible year for running – barely 350 kilometers, with just over one run a week, on average. “Terrible” is not measured against “no run”, but against 2021, where I closed in on 900 km and more than 100 runs. My Nike Run Club chart for that year shows a satisfying pattern of 7-10 runs a month.

This year? The chart is like a patient dying and the heart rate jumping back up before going flat again. (Yup, that about covers 2023).

There’s this thing about running though: even when I feel like shit and feel no joy putting on my shoes, once I’m outside, and one of my fave podcasts is playing, and some sun is sneaking through the trees of Izvor or Cișmigiu or Herăstrău parks (see you out there!), I’m content.

I’m not a good runner. As in, I’m sure my form sucks, and I don’t know what to track, and I’m probably breathing like I’m weightlifting under water. That’s not why I run – although I would like to also run better for the sake of it. I run to regroup, I run to think, I run to imagine, I run to enjoy, I run to slow down. It’s an in-between that almost always delivers. I know that. If we meet over beers, I’ll tell you that.

And yet, in 2023, I often chose to skip runs. I paid the price for skipping, and I’ve made peace with having chosen to do so. Kind of.

Not the worst Bucharest view for a run.

This has been the thing I’ve most thought about this week: paying the price. Or, better said: acknowledging that having it all is not possible, and then sacrificing, knowingly, something you’d like to have more of. It hit me as I was listening to a podcast last weekend, in which a person I’ve long admired talked about what made teams work. A lot of that advice, you can predict: clarity of purpose and roles, enjoying your colleagues and being authentic together etc.

But then, he added one last thing he’d been pondering. Agreeing, together, on the price we pay for doing the work. His example made me wince – he and a bunch of students recently met an entrepreneur who fired those who wanted to work remote, because being physically together through a journey of scaling (which the company had embarked on) was the price to pay. For that journey, the entrepreneur told the group, the price he was willing to pay personally was spending less time with his family.

OK, shit. I would never do that, but point taken.

I also saw a former colleague who runs the local chapter of one of those international companies everybody knows. The days are often rough, she told me. Sometimes she falls asleep on the couch with the kids at night. But she is so damn proud of what she gets the company to do in the community – mostly outside its scope of work. For that impact, the price is worth it.

My good friend from college, who I’ve been struggling to catch up with in person, told me the next six months looks like an apocalypse with all the projects their NGO has embarked on. But it’s also the place, he told me a few years back, his daughter will be proud to know he was involved with. So, for now, juggling everything is worth it.

Then there are my friends who opted out, who turned towards a house in the country, or their garden, who decoupled their identity from their profession, or redefined what it meant to be ambitious or succeed. Yes, they are farther away from the city, they see less of some of the people they hold dear, get less public praise or whatever, but it’s a price they are fine with.

*

None of the one above choices is prescriptive.

They don’t rub their choices in your face, or package it on social media as a recipe for happiness #inserthashtag. They don’t sell personal development classes. They don’t expect anyone to follow, not do they think anyone should. They understand the privilege of being able to choose the price to pay. And they do it knowingly.

This all rushed into my head on Wednesday when I invited a few newsroom leaders from Recorder, Scena9 and Panorama to speak to my students. They are all my generation or thereabouts – 40ish journalists, all as equally tired as they remain thrilled by the work. We all grew up in a mockery of a system: underpaid by newsrooms who didn’t take time to teach us, who delighted in publicly highlighting flaws, making it a hunger games-style atmosphere, where only the cynical survived. Business models prioritized profit over impact. Collaboration was almost impossible. Burnout was a guarantee.

All of them stepped away from mainstream newsrooms – a couple actually doubted they’d ever come back into the field. Today, they are all telling stories and building ecosystems in the independent media space. The workplaces they build are better than the workplaces they were in. But the price to pay for this is doing four-five different jobs, from editing to assigning to fundraising to managing and so on.

Tough, tiring, but worth it, they told my class.

*

You could feel the tension in the room.

I know my students. They are kind, and clever, and funny, and vulnerable. They’d like to be in these newsrooms, but they’d also like to choose their own hours, their own roles, their own tasks (ideally none they dislike). They also want to be able to step away when it’s hard. And then you had the newsroom leaders in front of them who say: I need you to be there as we navigate rough waters, have patience, do your best, and show hunger to do things.

Basically, the older folks in the room were saying: there is a price to pay to do the work we do – the work you know us for, that makes an impact, that wins prizes. The younger folks in the room, at least those still interested in journalism, do want some of that, but the price?

*

The Gen Zs in my class want to work. Hell, some work too much. At the same time, they work erratically, sometimes superficially. Or they hop between projects – sometimes even jobs – not really committing to any. Or they settle on one place, make OKish money, and expect to change roles or tasks after three weeks because they get bored.

This is where the clash starts to happen. A young journalist walks into an OK newsroom, like many in the independent space, and decides the agreed upon tasks aren’t sufficiently stimulating, so they passively await instructions. Which is why their older colleagues say they don’t show “hunger”.

I empathize with the younger crowd when they say: we need newsrooms to help us learn. (We don’t do that enough for them). But I also empathize with my older colleagues who say: we need young people to be more forthcoming in asking for things, and we need to see an active desire to grow. (For every young person expecting something from a newsroom there is one that just ghosts you).

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Quick aside: one of our guests said afterwards that he panicked at how often the students would check their phones. “I felt I needed to spice things up, so I don’t lose their attention”, he said.

There’s truth to that, but that’s all of our brains. Our phones are hacking our neural circuitry and hijacking our attention. We can’t focus on people and tasks and reading (!) as previous generations could, which means we’re losing a form of engagement with the world.

We gain access, and efficiency, and trade depth. That’s what I mean when I sometimes say my students are superficial: engaging with a longer written text is hard, because it’s not a skill they’ve trained. The price they pay for being constantly connected is not being able to access the space in which deep reading takes you: other worlds, deeper thoughts, surprising connections. (It’s also why they struggle with patience and listening).

*

Here’s another thing about this business (and others): the learning you do in school and on the job in the first few years? Not enough if your personal desire is to rise to the top of the field or do something special. (Which is what most say they want).

You read and you study, and you practice on your own. I spent a decade devouring everything I could about doing narrative journalism, and then convinced editors to let me try things I was theoretically too green for. I was terrified every single time, but they let me do it. And the reason they let me do it is because they knew I’d do my best. Basically pay the price for having an idea, and owning it.

This is the difficult conversation the two side have a hard time with. One says, rightly so: You need to give me something more and better than you had 20 years ago: better pay, better working conditions, better guidance etc. The other says, rightly so: you need to deliver what’s asked of you, you need to grow and become autonomous, and you need to show up even when it’s hard.

Basically: there is a price to pay. You can’t have the attention of the editor for months on end without actually doing the work (it happens). And you can’t demand commitment from someone who feels they don’t have enough support (this also happens).

I feel these would be more interesting conversation starters. My worry is that we got stuck on a tangent: “how much we’re working, and who is work done for”.

*

It was the right kind of pandemic story: for too long, the late capitalist system we live in actively dehumanized and exploited people for the sole purpose of profit. We created a myriad of bullshit jobs. We built incentive structures to keep people in offices to deliver this value, which we told people would make the world better.

It was wonderful to see people opt out – remember the great resignation? It was equally wonderful to see people after the scare of the pandemic choose different: choose themselves, choose more balance etc.

But there were unwanted casualties to this discourse: are all jobs, just “jobs”? (And I mean that in the snarky ways we talked about “jobs” – something an asshole of a boss wants you to do against your will). Every now and then I’d get the feeling that we over-corrected, missing the nuance.

There are societal inequities we need to address, but there are also personal choices about how we define ourselves. I know my father didn’t look at his surgeries as “just a job”. That’s not what I’d like from my doctor. Nor would I like for my brother’s kids to be in school next to teachers who think this is just a job. (And yes, I also believe that serving a public as a journalist can be more than just a job. )

There is a ton of space in between “a job is a job is a job”, and “sacrificing your whole being for a hospital”. We settled for this black or white dichotomy, and many voices went unheard.

I spoke to a handful of NGO leaders who gritted their teeth through the past few years. Their orgs took huge hits because of overlapping crises, which were compounded by team members deciding to opt out. Same in many arts and culture orgs. They felt awkward trying to sell the mission of whatever they were doing, even though it still animated them personally.

I wonder if there isn’t an adulting gap here – one that showed in the room at school, as well. The older folks were scarred not just by the work, but by years of learning, of unlearning, of letting go of dreams, but finding new reasons for hope, of trying on future selves. They had, eventually, become themselves. They owned their choices and paid their prices. They accepted the ways in which they were complicit in creating both the wonderful and the terrible of their experiences.

The young ones are not there yet. Their locus of control is still external – it’s the world’s fault, little I can do. They still want it all, even though they have a sense that it’s probably not possible. Yet, for some reason, maybe because they’ve seen their parents suffer, maybe because choosing seems hard and finite, they don’t want to step in for real. If you don’t go all in, you can’t lose. But you can’t win either. So you’re stuck. And that’s another type of price to pay.

*

We are all enough, and we are all amazing. I truly believe that even when I struggle with it myself, as I have this week. I also believe that we have been living in fear for too long now, we have replaced hope with cynicism, and action with manifestation; we scroll our discomforts away instead of plunging into the depth of an issue; we have stopped taking personal and professional risks; we expect more of others than we are willing to give back.

Great of me to run at all in 2023. Also great of me to have ambition for more runs in 2024. I’m not expecting them from you, nor prescribing them as such. I want to do less hopping from project to project; it’s not enough for the meaning and impact I want to see. But this doesn’t have to be your path.

I personally want to start taking risks again – doing things without knowing how I’ll do them or how I can cover their costs. I accept I’ll pay a price for the stress of trying to bring about a little bit more of that world I say I want. But I don’t expect my students or my peers to want the same.

What I do hope is that we do more listening and less of convincing one another of what we should choose, how we should work, what we should value. If we believe in freedom, then we should also accept everyone’s freedom to choose the price they are willing to pay. I hope I can impart this to my students: you don’t have to pay the price my generation has decided to pay. But you shouldn’t waste time trying to convince them they were wrong; spend it making your own choices.

I’d like that world better: one more forgiving of itself and others, more appreciative of the struggles of everyone, more willing to expand our spaces of self-definition.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Just some thanks. I paid the price of at least half a day every week this year to write these letters. Mostly on Saturdays, which is why some runs were dropped. But it’s been such a joy, and you have been so patient and understanding with writing that is still raw and searching. Thank you to everyone who replies; I might not reply to all, or I might be short or late because of the volume, but I do read every single word and I’m thankful. (Here’s a gift: the video for The National’s Laugh Track, feat. Phoebe Bridgers).

2. Large companies often deceive us that we can have it all. “Make money first, save the world later”, they say, luring our best and brightest. Read Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All for the expanded pitch.

3. I recently listened once more to Adam Grant’s 2021 convo with Brené Brown. Vulnerability without boundaries is not vulnerability, she emphasizes, and it’s a great one to remember. Yes, modern workplaces should be a place for authenticity, but vulnerability isn’t unloading your baggage on your colleagues and having them sort through it.

4. And yes, on the idea that we’re paying a price for our addiction to our digital devices. We should embrace change, but also acknowledge loss. And the loss of deep reading hurts.