Flashing Palely in the Margins
Demotion
This week, I returned to my job working in employee experience and organizational culture after six months of managing a team of talent and operations professionals. And I am relieved.
The manager role was great for a few reasons: my staff were excellent and I enjoyed working on their development and growth together, my supervisor was nurturing and helped me thrive in the role, and the pay bump was nice too.
It was, however, not great for one big reason: I spent more time managing work that didn’t interest me, and less time doing the work that inspires me. Every day I missed engaging in work that I found most fulfilling, and would often try to jump back into doing that work while also managing the team, to the detriment of my energy and mental capacity.
Turns out I’m not the only one that has been seeking more meaningful work and more work-life balance as opposed to traditional career progression markers. Aki Ito, in Business Insider, writes:
Often, people get promoted only to find themselves doing less of the meaningful work that attracted them to their profession in the first place. This is such a common problem, in fact, that management scholars have a special term for it: managerial blues. It’s the sad irony of corporate America: The higher up you go, the less fulfilling your job becomes.
For some people, climbing the corporate ladder isn’t the goal, especially when it comes at the expense of having more family time outside of work, or even feeling more fulfilled in the work we do. New paradigms of career progression need to be created to reflect the fact that many independent contributors prefer doing work and should be recognized for that without taking them away from the work itself.
And so, eventually, I asked if we could find someone to take the managerial role and I could return to what I was doing before. That person started recently, and I am excited to jump back into the culture and organizational development work where I thrive—and to have the space outside of work to keep growing.
I think I should just have a “read Mandy Brown” corner in my regular weekend reading posts because she has knocked it out of the park again in her most recent post on knowing when to quit. Especially loved this line: “You can’t keep yourself alive by sacrificing the gifts your life brings to bear.”
A poem
Said a Blade of Grass
Khalil Gibran
Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again–and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”
Some links
This is a heartbreaking piece of first-person accounts of unhoused people who had all their belongings taken from them during the forced eviction from encampments. I know something needs to be done about encampments in cities, but I can’t imagine forcibly evicting people and taking all their stuff is the answer.
Mehnaz sent me this excellent episode of This Is Love all about mangoes. I’ve written about my love of mangoes before (especially kesar and alphonso mangoes from India) so this episode brought me so much joy—especially in the middle of the winter when we are still months from mango season.
Of interest to anyone who likes music from the 90s and social commentary on race and politics: What is a Brimful of Asha anyway?
Very intrigued by the idea of bibliotherapy: prescribing books as the crux of a psychotherapy practice. And how many books do you need to read regularly in order to be a bibliotherapist?
Meal planning, grocery shopping, meal prepping, cooking, cleaning out the fridge, and then starting all over again the next week, week after week—the never-ending, exhausting cycle. Rachel Sugar has a somewhat fatalist take on why we’ll never get off the dinner treadmill.
My introduction to Leibniz was through Voltaire’s Candide in high school, so I have to admit that I didn’t really know much about him or his work other than the Leibnizian optimism that Voltaire skewered in his writing. This long piece was n Leibniz by Anthony Gottlieb in The New Yorker was a revelation of the man and his work, far from Voltaire’s satire.
Jon Klassen is writing a board book (his picture books are excellent) and in this essay in the New York Times about writing them, he expounds on the queen of the board book, and a household favorite here, Sandra Boynton:
Crucially, Boynton understands how to make her audience want to turn the page to see what’s next, maybe for the first time ever in their lives. And she is able to craft an emotional, energetic rise and fall without needing a plot or a problem to solve. Her drawings are simple and calm, her characters always look a little confused to be there, and the world it all adds up to is rich and memorable.
(Back when I was still on Twitter, Sandra Boynton responded to one of my tweets about childhood and child rearing and I considered that one of my crowning online achievements.)
MIT Press published a collection of Amazon reviews written by writer Kevin Killian and I find this kind of literature—ephemeral, utilitarian, perversely personal—absolutely fascinating. After reading this review by Tara Cheesman in the Cleveland Review of Books, I can’t wait to get my hands on this collection.
Fayaz recently shared this short rumination about nostalgia, and I thought it was poignant considering the ease with which many of slip into yearning for the past:
One other problem with looking for the past for comfort is sometimes the things that felt useful at twenty, are not useful at forty-one. You see the way people behaved, and you realize that maybe it was funny or cute then, but it doesn’t really apply to you today. This realization can create fissures between the past and the present, which can be as equally disruptive instead of comforting.
I was unsuccessful in getting the French scratch-and-sniff baguette stamps, but I will succeed in my mission to get these Goodnight Moon stamps.
From the last few days of 2024: my media diet for November and December, and a list of things I learned towards the end of the year.
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