Crisis Conversations with the Better Life Lab
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July 17, 2020
Listen to Seasons 1 and 2 of the Better Life Lab Podcast on Slate
The Better Life Lab podcast, explores how work shapes our lives, affects our health and wellbeing and impacts our relationships. We explore what isn’t working with work, and what needs to change so we can all live fuller, fairer healthier lives. On each episode, host Brigid Schulte weaves together deeply personal conversations - compelling stories of people’s struggles and triumphs with what we somewhat simplistically call work-life balance. Accessible discussions about science and research with experts help us see that we’re not alone in our struggles. That work-life balance is hard. And that it will take all of us - individuals, organizations, public policy and cultural norms shifting - to make work - and life - better. For everyone.
The podcast, a production of New America and Slate and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Slate, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Season One guests include talks with behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely on our obsession with busyness; Stanford business professor and author of Dying for a Paycheck Jeff Pfeffer on America’s overwork culture; a bank executive who took summers off as a young mother and still made it to the C-suite, and members of a Washington, DC chapter of Workaholics Anonymous struggling to overcome what they see as a life-sucking addiction to working all the time, even as they’re rewarded for it at work.
Season Two features Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried and Juliet Schor, economist and author of The Overworked American, on how America’s appetite for endless growth keeps us on the work treadmill; the stress not only of work-life conflict, but work-work conflict as jobs become more complex and demanding; Merlin Mann, productivity guru and inventor of the Inbox Zero concept on why we hate e-mail; hourly workers living impossible lives with unpredictable schedules set by an algorithm; workers in Japan who no longer want to work til they drop; and couples struggling to fairly share the load at both work and at home, and why it can be so hard.
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