It all started with me feeling speechless.

One sunny afternoon, a friend and I sipped coffee at a Chicagoland bookstore, catching up on her fifteen-year career journey since she’d been a student in my communication program. It felt good to hear that she’d become a stable and effective professional. She was running a company, doing good work for clients, telling stories that mattered.

And then, she met my eye and said, “I don’t think my work means anything.”

The words gut-punched me. What do you say to someone doing all the right things and haunted by occupational meaninglessness?

So I did what I always do—more research!—and my inquiry turned up more and more raw stories like hers. Stories about working hard. Stories about feeling lost. Stories about harassment and overwhelm and isolation.

What (I asked myself) do these people need? Not another productivity hack. Not a leadership tip. No, what they needed was something more fundamental, a radical shift in how they related to work and to working community.

I started calling this a mode/switch.

And now several years of writing and research, I’m happy to report that making this sort of shift—from isolation to connection, from cynicism to care, from overwhelm to hope—helps people like you recover meaning in the midst of work. That’s my mission: to help overwhelmed professionals be generous participants in their working communities.

After years of research, mentoring, and writing—including two books before my most recent book Digital Overwhelm—I launched The Mode/Switch to create a space for asking (what David Whyte calls) the beautiful questions about work and life. Along with this newsletter and our roundtable podcast, you can find my reflections in academic journals, blogs, and on other podcasts.

The Mode/Switch is for you if you feel lost at work, overwhelmed by organizational jankiness, hungry to live a good life. It’s a place to ask the gorgeous questions that make connection and purpose and hope possible.

My hunch is that this newsletter speaks easily to millennials and Gen Xers. But generational lines are arbitrary. Whoever you are, let’s figure out the mode/switches that make meaning possible at work.   

Let’s get acquainted! I'm Craig Mattson.

For over two decades, I've been researching and mentoring folks like you at the intersection of communication theory, philosophy, and psychology. I show how to make generosity, care, attentiveness, flexibility, and hope the ways you show up for your coworkers and for the work you do.

Along with this Substack newsletter—and its attendant roundtable podcast—you can find my reflections in numerous academic journals, the NetVUE Vocation Matters blog, and Duke Divinity’s Faith & Leadership site. I have appeared on numerous podcasts to talk about digital wellbeing in organizational culture, from Thrive Careers to ADHD Goals to The Talent Forge to Couple’s Therapy in Seven Words.

— Connect with me on LinkedIn here and Instagram here
— Listen to my intergenerational team cuss and discuss weekly mode/switches.

Subscribe to The Mode/Switch and join a community finding fresh ways to work and live.

Learn more at TheModeSwitch.com.