Doing Your Job the Day after the Debate
How to cope with political depression in working community
What’s the past tense of slink? Slinked? Slank? Whatever it is, that’s how I was coming to work last Friday after the Trump/Biden debate.
The research team I’m working with this summer was in their usual good form, laughing, discussing, jotting, taking stock of our project.
But not me. I slink-slank-slumped thru our work like a dehumidified clone of myself.
I left the meeting before everybody else, saying something about getting to my next thing. But then I popped my head back in the door and asked where the nearest print station was. If I’m not in my own building on campus, I can never find the printer, mostly because our university’s offices were designed like a warren in Watership Down. One of my coworkers jumped up and said, “Lemme show you”—which was, as I soon found out, something of a ruse. When we got to the printer, she took a quick look into my eyeballs and said, “You doing ok? You don’t seem—” and she made a gesture that looked cheerful and happy and radiant.
Needless to say, I wasn’t signaling any of that.
The presidential debate had me down, I told her. My hopes going into the debate had been low. But I had at least wished for more than geriatric taunts about golf scores. My friend winced. Then she grinned and said she doesn’t get depressed by politics; she gets depressed when relationships around her break down.
Oof. Point taken.
But her comment made me wonder: how should workers cope in the midst of big, failing institutions and in the shadow of leaders who can’t say simple, human things?
Is a small-picture relationality better than a big-picture depression?
My guess is, most advice for coping with political depression in working communities evokes commentary on the need for grit and resilience. But discussions of grit tend to fall into contradictions like the following.
Claim: You can build resilience.
One approach to political depression says you can cope by getting a longer perspective and a bigger picture. Take, for example, Andrea Munday’s smart, kindly piece for this newsletter, “How Can We Work As the World Is Crumbling?” Her answer to the question was, essentially, learn your own history and you’ll build resilience:
I’m not here to tell you it’s ok. Or suck it up. Not at all. It’s not all on you. We have systems and work cultures that need to change. What I want to tell you is that you have the resilience you need to find joy in this pain, just like your ancestors did. The resilience to continue to provide for yourself and possibly your family, and build a life.
You can find a lot of similar articles encouraging you to build resilience at work. Rich Fernandez writes in HBR that “because there is a concrete set of behaviors and skills associated with resilience, you can learn to be more resilient.” Cheri Rainey notes, similarly, “Resilience is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process that can be learned and developed.” But they tend to offer generic advice about learning compassion or practicing self-care. I’m taken with Andrea’s strong and simple practice of recalling what your grandparents endured. (My cousin and fellow academic Brian Mattson’s just launched a newsletter whose first issue would agree with Andrea’s point.)
On the other hand, there are some real problems with the quest for personal grit.
Counter-claim: But you shouldn’t.
Other approaches to political depression caution against telling yourself to be strong, strong, strong. Soraya Chemaly’s new book The Resilience Myth counters pop-psych encouragements to cultivate grit. Chemaly pokes at the ways that resilience-building disguises an exhausting individualism. She asks, “What does having to ‘be resilient’ do to us as individuals and a society?” Anne Helen Peterson’s always worthwhile Substack last week interviewed Chemaly, who noted:
The danger of thinking that you and you alone are responsible for adapting positively to crisis — and today that means crises after crisis after crisis — is that you will almost certainly fail to meet your own expectations. No one is resilient alone, at all times, and in all situations. Resilience is a dynamic process and it is healthier and more accurate to say that we take turns being resilient for one another.
I really like that phrase about turn-taking resilience. That’s what happened to me the other day, I think. My resilience tank was on empty, and my colleague said, in effect, I got you.
But when we’re dealing with political depression at work what’s the mode/switch we need? Do we need small-picture optimism like my colleague’s? Or is it better to face the truth and say, “The world’s cracking up”?
Is There a Counter-Counter Claim?
Late in the 2010s, I spent a year interviewing forty-five organizational leaders about the role that spirituality plays in their organizations. I’ll never forget hearing one nonprofit director say that leadership felt like being a piece of laundry in a washing machine. But the biggest turn in writing that book came with the insight that spirituality had less to do with the inner life of individual leaders and more to do with what happened among people in working communities. (I learned that from interviewing Black social entrepreneurs, but you’ll have to read my book to see why.)
My lit review of resilience-building claims and counterclaims points to a confusion about how to deal with political depression in working community.
On the one hand, you and your teammates need a certain amount of resilience, even if it’s delusional, just to keep doing the human thing together. There’s a nasty sort of privilege in despair. (In this country, it’s easier to just give up if you have pale skin and a steady income.)
On the other hand, building your own resilience can be exhausting and pointless—like running on a treadmill during an earthquake. You’re getting in shape, sure, but the house is about to fall down around you and your very fit body.
Is there a mode/switch to make here? I believe so, and I think it has to do with adopting near-to-you behavior for the sake of far-from-you problem-solving.
A Thought Experiment after Last Week’s Debate
The national mindset after the presidential debate last week has oscillated between, “Is that really the best we can do?” to “Yeah, we’re just done.” (I was going to use another word there besides “done,” but I am trying not to coarsen things farther.) How long did it take you to flick away from the split-screen on Thursday night? Ten minutes? Two? (Things got so bad for me I wanted to watch a Nicholas Cage movie.)
What would it take for that debate to have been better? Well, we’d need…
an actually functioning set of political parties,
a different campaign finance model,
stronger norms for public argument,
changes in social media algorithms,
an altered conception of charisma.
I could go on. So could you. But we get the point. To change last week’s depressing expression of American political exhaustion would require widespread change.
How do we find the wherewithal to make that kind of change? We need very, very creative thinking and very, very shareable behaviors to radiate outward from many, many centers of American life.
Try thinking of your working community as one of those centers of radiating change.
Mode/Switches for Coping with Political Depression at Work
In response to Andrea Munday and Soraya Chemaly’s very wise claims about resilience, I want to say: Take near-to-you actions for the sake of far-from-you change. You and your team do this all the time, but you might not do it with an eye to societal crises. If you’re like me, you’re just thinking about your list of projects. But this week’s mode/switch suggests adopting near-frame perspective for the sake of far-frame crises.
There are neurophysiological analogies to this. If somebody says something that triggers you, the temptation is to let your lizard brain take over. But if you take a deep breath, shake out your hands a bit, maybe shift your stance, and allow yourself to laugh or cry or yelp, you can often move your thinking from the back of your brain to the front. Small actions, in other words, enable you to take larger actions better.1
When you and your team do the next thing on the day after the presidential debate, you’re not ignoring how bad the debate was or how it’s been 126 degrees in India or where the market’s projected to go in Q3 or any other big-picture problem. But you are taking near-frame action because it’s the best way to eventually address large-frame predicaments.
Communication Strategies to Try Next Time You’ve Had It Politically
I tend to think that one good place to practice near-frame thinking-and-acting is your working community. The Mode/Switch is, in that sense, a small-bore effort to heal democracy by cultivating workplace democracy.
Let me suggest a few ideas for improving work-team communications.
Use your whole body to write email. Say what you’re writing out loud. Nod your head. Throw an elbow as you type. And, if you’re a standing desk, shift your stance and move your feet. Craft your emails the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan do in You’ve Got Mail—or, if you’re not into early 2000s rom-coms, the way Key and Peele text each other. Another way to say this is, do everything you can to be more than a large language network. Pull organizational communication into your body. Be an incarnate self interacting with other incarnate selves—even when you’re, ya know, just emailin’ and shit.
Make tech just one point on a quadrilateral of relationships. As often as you can, put your devices in the middle of three- and four-way interactions. David Wilstermann (you’ve heard him on the Mode/Switch Pod) likes to talk about a company where nobody has their own workstation. That sort of freaks out introverts like me. But the opposite approach is to suit up in our tech like Tony Stark in an self-enclosed technological space. Put your devices between and among.
Ask what the signals means. Often, the term performativity has bad connotations; it evokes something artificial or pretentious or tribal. But the truth is, we humans are always signaling our values through multiple channels. We’re using direct communication to convey technical information, sure; but we’re also using indirect communication to convey relational information. That’s a good and efficient thing: you can offer a lot of care indirectly while you’re saying difficult things directly. But as in the case of the story I started with, we often need to ask simple, frank questions about what someone’s signals mean. It can be humbling to ask what somebody’s signaling. We all want to “get it” right away. But asking about signals can not only help you understand where others are, but it can also help them to re-evaluate what they’re signaling.
Those are a few ideas for doing org-comm in a way that’s better for a world that keeps on ending. But the main point is, don’t use communication to push people out of your near-frame perspective into a big-picture problem. Don’t imply something like, You’re not here with me right now. You’re out there with Those People causing all the trouble.
I hope you’re coming away from this week’s newsletter realizing that, whether we’re talking about your team at work or our country in 2024, we have more options than building small-picture resilience or big-picture transformation. The trick is to see how the former relates to the latter.
The mode/switch comes down to this: zoom closer to pan wiser.
Grateful to Michael Gulker for pointing this out to me. I think the insight comes from Aundi Kolber’s therapeutic work in books like Strong Like Water.