The Conspiracy Goes All The Way To The Landscaping
Hey y’all! Ever have that thing happen where you and three of your friends get food poisoning after sharing a meal at a restaurant? And it comes on so violently you have to leave work literally mid-conversation as ordered by your nervous system? And you spend Friday evening between bouts of sickness flipping through your deity rolodex figuring out which God to pray to? And have pedialyte delivered by Postmates because it’s the end times and who cares how peak San Francisco single that seems? And it takes fifty hours until you are able to finally exist in a non-horizontal state long enough to take a shower, or eat a cracker, or watch a movie, or wander into your neighborhood blinking in the sun cursing all the normies who didn’t endure the war you just dragged your sorry carcass out of? Oh, you haven’t? Might I suggest, I dunno, never ever having that happen, ever?
So forgive me if today’s Missive is anemic, because that’s how I’m feeling today tbqh LOL sigh sob ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
OMG, this piece on performative work in knowledge industries by Anne Helen Petersen (or, as she so delightfully dubs it, LARPing your job,) should be required reading for every manager out there who has ever praised an employee for “always being on.” What does LARPing your job look like, according to Petersen? Well, it’s “Evidencing that I’m doing work instead of, well, doing work,” like constant Slack/chat participation at the expense of productivity. She hints at a utopian workplace where “more flexible to the ways that (good) work actually gets done — including (gasp) working less… That’s the hardest thing, at least in our culture, to fathom, the hardest thing to change: that fewer working hours might produce more value.” (Emphasis mine)
Related: as a people pleaser, I do not take this Harvard Business Review article lightly: How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You.
And finally, friend of the Missive Zoe passed along what a Missive bot might generate as a headline (but is also a fascinating piece from Scientific American on how a lack of diversity in landscape architecture design may actually contribute to how many bottles of Flonase you've purchased this year): Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies.
Be kind to each other, and don’t forget to balance those electrolytes!
Xoxo Amy