Rethinking Work

who I've known for many, many years. Through her work and politics and advocacy and justice as well as her work in media and as a black woman. She has pretty much laid the path and the foundation for many of us who started out following her and her guidelines to how to navigate the media and being in media as a black woman. But in today's episode, we delve into what it means to work and to be a worker.

One of the things that I think is a positive that came out of the trauma, the beautiful mess that is COVID nineteen and our continuing dealings with a global health pandemic is that for those of us that are in privileged spaces, we were really able to assess or begin to assess our relationship to work. You see, growing up, I think that many of us were taught that, you know, you keep your head down, you do what is asked of you, and you will be rewarded with a paycheck

at the end of each week. Where you are able to take care of your family, you're able to buy a home. And maybe that was true at one point in time in our American history, but we know as we are assessing things later on in life that whose back was that on right? Who actually was given the loans in order to buy a home? Who was given, you know, the raises because their wives were pregnant. Who was the one that was able to have access to economic mobility? And these ideas of pensions and long hours

and just doing the work no longer exist. You know, when Cheryl Sandberg wrote her book Lean In, it was talking about the fact that we had moved ourselves from this place where we were trying to climb a corporate ladder, right, which means that in order for you to climb up, other people needed to come down. Right. They needed to do a dismount from their career path, they would retire and then you know, you would kiss the and be

able to move up. But she followed up with that kind of thinking that corporate ladder into the jungle gym, right where things no longer work linearly, Right, that we're swinging from one position to the next. Wherever there is

an opening is where a lot of people find themselves. Again, I say that with folks who are privileged in terms of the type of education that they have, where they actually live, their geography, what they've studied, and whether or not it's a industry that is thriving or one that's

barely surviving. But there are a lot of differences that we understand now that COVID has been a reflection in a mirror to us that a lot of the ways in which people have been working has been extraordinarily exploited. What for I will tell us is that it has been exploited for bipop people, right, But now that exploitation has begin to seep into white communities and now guess what, we're in an uproar collectively. But the reality is is that during this time we have been thinking about our

relationship to work. What does it mean to work forty hours a week and still not be able to provide for yourself or your loved ones? What does it mean to be self employed when the tax system is actually not working in your favor? Does not encourage ingenuity, innovation outside of being a part of an organization and or

a company. What does it mean that when families, when we are family planning, recognize that in a lot of ways, if both parents are going to be out of the home and working, if there are two family households, that you're going to be paying as much in childcare as you are for your mortgage or your rent. Which is why in Joe Biden's Build Back Better right in this Human Infrastructure Bill, I don't remember which is named what at this point, but in the Human Infrastructure Bill, why

we were talking about paid family leave. Why as a part of the COVID nineteen Critical Response Package that we were looking at child tax credits because you see too many people, namely women, had been forced out of the workforce, right because at the height of twenty twenty, in the height of the pandemic, they were being forced to be

both their child's teacher as well as their primary caregiver. Right, and so if we are not setting up a culture in which we are both able to work and live and not give this false construct of the work life balance. Knowing that something has to give? But should it be our sanity? Should it be our mental and emotional and physical well being? Should that be the thing that gives?

And what we have seen through out this slowdown and this emergence back into a new abnormal is that we have been participating in a system that is associated with our spiritual, emotional and physical demise. Right, that we do not have the freedom to be able to move from jobs. Right, this was the whole one of the many ideas behind Obamacare, that you shouldn't be forced to stay at your position of work, right if in fact you hate it and

you're just now doing it for the health benefits. That you should be able to get healthcare regardless of whether or not you're employed at a big company or a small nonprofit or self employed. And I think that you know, for far too long we have just gone with the flow, and the wrong sense of going with the flow. Just because things have always been done in one way doesn't mean that there is an opportunity to evaluate how we

can do things differently where it benefits all parties. This has always been a very employer centric country, which is that we are tending to the needs of the CEOs and the shareholders and the executive directors at right at

the expense of the workers. You know, even in this concept right pre COVID, when you're looking at the ways in which Silicon Valley began to change the physical sense of our work, right, they started to bring in this collegiate idea of campuses where you had everything that you needed on said campus, whether it be fully stocked cafeterias, foodsball tables, beer on tap, wine nights, the ability to get your dry cleaning sent out and picked up, and

all of these things were done. And initially we thought that those changes were great. Sure, who doesn't want to be able to readily pull down on the tap at their place of work and grab a beer and finish up the day's work once it hits five o'clock and you're not leaving. Except that all amounted to was creating a velvet cage for a lot of people, because it wasn't about how are you creating a better life for

those employees once they leave the campus. It was creating the conditions so that they would never have any reason to leave in the first fucking place. Right, So you

had that shift that was happening. But now with folks having had been home for several months during quarantine, but then many of us who are still in jobs where they have gone fully remote or they're only coming back two and three days a week, this is allowing for there to be an opportunity for us to really assess what it is that we need from our employers as opposed to what is it that we are giving them. Right.

And the fact is, you know, I left a firm, and I've said this before, I left working for others roughly three years ago. Now I've been self employed for three years. And the reason for that was a couple of things. I began to really think about what was important to me right and for I and I will get into this conversation as well, what was important where

do my values lie? And I have always, you know, worked in spaces and places where the mission of said organization or office was aligned with my personal mission, meaning that my whole work and life professionally has been around being of service. Right, making my life of service to

other people. So, whether that was working at a environmental organization, trying to give children of color access to the outdoors, right, making greener spaces, and moving us from this testing culture into a time if you remember when children were losing recess, right, because we needed to teach to the test and we needed more time. And so they don't need to run around, and they don't need to socially connect with one another. They just need to fill in fucking bubbles all day

right in multiple choice tests. And so part of my work was about stopping that because I recognized how detrimental

it was to kids. You know, from working in the women's organization and spaces to working in LGBTQ plus spaces, and you know, working for these organizations and companies and representatives all helped color the fact of what was important to me right, and what was important to me was the ability to say no. I didn't always want it to be beholden to who my employer said was going to be the next client, was going to be the

next issue. I wanted the autonomy to be able to use that beautiful sentence no, right, or as Nicolehannah Jones said, I refuse. Right. Being self employed allows me the freedom to be able to select what best aligns with my personal values and mission. I'm not saying that I would never go back into an organization or company type setting, but I'm saying it would have to be something major, right,

something major that was in true alignment. And I think that right now, as we are all changing, our relationship to work or work in general is changing. You know, first off, it was you know, this shift from agriculture to industry. Then it was the shift into the gig economy, and then you know, that became super exploitive, which we thought was going to be a democratization of work, right, work when you want, how you want, and that became exploitive.

And now we're in a next shift, right where employers are recognizing, after people working from home for a year plus the lie of the fact that you needed an office, that their productivity was going to slow down if people had the ability to what shop, you know, grocery store, shop while you were taking a call, while you were on a zoom. And so I think that there is a lot of opportunity at this moment for us collectively

to reimagine our relationship to work. And you know, frankly, for I and I start off with the utter lie that I have been talking about on wok F, which is that there is a labor shortage. No, there is not a la for shortest. There is not a shortage of workers willing to work. There is a shortage of employers willing to pay people a living wage, willing to give them health benefits, right, willing to like meet their needs and not just think that they are expendable. Right.

And so if you are being emotionally, physically and spiritually beat down forty hours a week, then you may rethink like how I show up or if I show up. There's a reason why eleven million people have left the workforce, right, There's a reason for the mass resignation. And it isn't just laziness, as as as our Republican politicians would love to tell us, Oh, the American people, we need to cut their unemployment because they're lazy. No, that's not the case.

We're just not willing to be exploited in this very extractive, top heavy capitalistic system that only rewards the few at the expense of the many. And so, in this conversation with Pharai we unpack a lot and we talk about what it means to reimagine community and community building, economic stability.

When young people nowadays are marrying later, living at home with their families longer, and not buying cars, not buying homes all because they're strapped with student debt, is there another way for them to exist and the ability to thrive. Those are's parts of the conversation that I will have with Pharai that is coming up next. But folks, tell

me what your experiences have been with work? Right? Are you a person that went into work strictly focused on their passion right or is it just a means to an end? And how are you viewing it differently now, right in the midst of this health pandemic and the advent of you know, may streaming of remote work and what does it look like in the future for you?

So coming up next is my conversation, my interview with the author of Episodic Careers for I TODAYA folks, I am so excited to welcome to woke a f daily for what I believe is the first time I think for I TODAYA on to discuss a myriad of things.

We will open up with talking about her book, The Episodic Career and how we must be psychologically self employed, as well as delving into, you know, the politics of the day, because you are no stranger to political forums, to discussions of race and inequality in media and how we talk about this, as you have been steeped in

this work for quite some time. I want to start off, though, with your book, The Episodic Career, because you know right now and I'm certain that you're you're listening in the same way that I am to all of these segments and news reports about how there is a labor shortage, about how people don't want to work. The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago had their article the mass Resignation, right over eleven million people have left the workforce.

You had Republicans saying that we needed to end support for unemployed people because that would then force them back into work. But what I have recognized and what I want to know from you, is that that is a lie, right, and that there isn't a shortage of workers. There is a shortage of employers that are paying Joe, paying for work that is of high paying quality right with benefits, where people are able to work forty hours a week and not have to play you know, three cardmonte or

Russian Roulette with their with their lives. Should I get medicine today? Can I afford to do that? And groceries and childcare and all of these different things? How do you make sense of the current narrative around work and workers in America? You know, first of all, thanks for having me on and thanks for doing everything you do.

I think what's what is happening in some ways is that the way that black people have always been treated by the labor economy has become more generalized, you know, and there are more you know that that it was before, you know, and it's always fluctuated somewhat, but never that much. It's you know, for example, the unemployment rate for Black Americans has almost always been, you know, in the modern era,

twice that for White Americans. And it's not that Black people don't want to work, but beyond a certain point, you know, given the massive amounts of labor discrimination and also just structural you know, like so many structural barriers to being a working parent. For example, black Americans are put in situations where the labor market has not rewarded us or served us, and now that's happening to white Americans. And what we're seeing is kind of a mass reckoning

with what has been an extractive labor market. And I talked about this to you know, a group of wealthy people whom you know, we're asking what can we do about America today? And I said extracted economics were one part of the pillar of destruction, you know, like that that essentially people have been giving their lives for no fixed reward at the end. Like at least in the past, my family has had a lot of government civil servants,

you know, Post Office, social secure, the administration. They got their retirement benefits. What do you get if you have been working subsistence wages at the dollar General or even a better job than that, but that you've always been just you know, paycheck to paycheck and you have saved nothing for retirement. And then you know, people who are

considered middle class are one paycheck away from disaster. And I think what some people are They're looking at the labor market and saying, I am working so hard just to be so stressed and broke. At least I can take care of my family. There were high school students who did not go to high school when they were asked to go in person during COVID because they were like, I've got a family full of essential workers that are

already risking their life. I'm not going to be that person who brings COVID back and gets everybody sick and then we get evicted. So you have, you know, And that was New York Times op ed. But you have teenagers who have been making decisions about their level of exposure. You have parents making decisions about their level of exposure. And I don't just mean exposure to COVID. I mean

exposure to what can be. And I've had the whole spectrum of experiences from work being like magical to work being like, you know, potentially life threatening on a psychological level, you know, and you know with harassment and discrimination. But when work becomes something that is humiliating and also doesn't reward you financially, it's like why why, you know, Like so many people, there have been so many great stories about people who just that they are that manager at

the dollar store. No one is showing up to work because they're all opting out, and the managers working three shifts in a row, and then the managers like I'm out, you know, like you know, like done. And then you have all of the people who thought that they were solidly middle class to income and all of a sudden they're homeschooling or their homeschooling toddlers, and it's it's I mean, you know, toddlers through elementary through whatever, and yeah, they're

down to one exactly. It's like we cannot survive, you know, Like there's so many people who are like, we cannot survive the middle class to earner parent family because we just we will we will all lose our minds. And I do see, like what we covered this on on our Body Politic my show, that there is a profound mental health crisis affecting parents, you know, um from the pandemic. Like there's seriously like a huge uptick. I mean it's

it's uptick across the board. But I think that we can recognize not just for parents, but for care givers. It can be like I just talked to someone the other day who's, you know, has her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury, and now like the caregiver situation, like there are caregivers who both have gotten COVID from their clients or given COVID to their clients, and so it's

just changing, you know, so you get the picture. There's a lot of people who have factors in their lives where what had been considered an already shaky but slightly functional way to earn a living has just gone up in smoke. And you know, you know, it's funny because I believe, you know, in so many ways and a lot of the things, a lot of the examples that

you just provided illuminate this. You know, we were fundamentally cracked as it was, right like the way in which you know, our economy has worked, the way in which that we even look and view work. Right Like we are seen, particularly by our representatives, who were supposed to be,

you know, amplifying our voices and our needs. We are just seen as cogs in a machine, right like you know, Stephanie Rule on MSNBC a couple of weeks back had said something and I'm sure you know she didn't originate it, but she said, you know, with regard to Facebook, when you're not being charged for something, recognized that you are

the product. And I see that in reality that you know, our representatives who are supposed to again be our voices, see us as the product, see us as like we are the ones that are malfunctioning because we don't want to show up in this extractive and oppressive system that leaves us depleted and emotionally scarred, right and psychologically abused in order to be able to barely provide for ourselves

and our families. And I think that COVID, you know, the pandemic illuminated so many gaps and problems that we had. But what we are seeing right now too is that as in this desire to force ourselves back into this space of quote unquote normal, that people are recognizing with this pause, those of us that had the privilege to pause, recognize that. Man, how I've been working and thinking about

work and absorbing work, Like I get the joke. Work is supposed to be a four letter you know, work is a four letter word, but it isn't supposed to feel right like this oppressive. And so do you think that we are at a moment you know when they talk about in real estate it's a buyer's marketer, it's a seller's market. Do you think that we have arrived or are we arriving at the worker's market right when we are at a place where we get to determine how work flows as opposed to just being forced to

go along for the get along. That's a complicated one. I think that we are in a worker's market for hourly wages. So I've seen, like I've driven by designs where a burger can is like seventeen dollars an hour people needed, you know, like that kind of stuff, but for and and and you now see Amazon, for example, offering um people who've who come on board and are there for a certain amount of time college tuition. That's

that's one step above. But still there is not a clear pathway in most cases for people to have the job that allows them to work hours that they can do caregiving and receive some form of you know, deferred compensation ie, retirement savings and healthcare and do it in a way that's functional. So there we're seeing I think, a wage increase first, but we're not necessarily seeing all

the system changes. And what I have said for years, and what I wrote about in the book The Episodic Career, was the way that when you compare us to other you know, what are considered developed nations, we get nothing in Germany, right right, right, in Germany, you can have a child, both parents can take parental leave for several months and it can be paid, and at least the mother or primary parent can have a guaranteed job. Three

years later. They don't get paid the whole time, but three years later they are guaranteed a job at the same level that they were working at before. So it builds in for caregiving, it builds in for for um parent child bonding. You know, there's so much emotional trauma to people putting their kids in what I call baby jail. And so I wrote a piece, um, you know, about

my journey to adopt, which was not successful. But during a series of failed adoptions with a horrible adoption agency, I spent more time than I would like in baby jail looking for that that, you know, childcare. They were charging four hundred dollars a week for baby jail in Brooklyn. Yeah, you know, yea four hundred dollars a week for baby jail.

And it's like I'm talking like really, like you walk in and you're like, I'm depressed, Like and if I was a baby, I would be really depressed, you know it Just like it's like Basically, it's kind of like the place. One of the places I saw it was kind of like the Walking Dead for toddlers. It's just all these toddlers stocks staggering around like and then you know, people on their phone while agads just wander. I'm like, I'm like, wow, okay. And so this is what people

are facing. It's not just the hourly wages or whatever. It's like, you are lucky if you can get baby jail because a lot of childcare places have shut down all of the extra work that they have to do on sanitation, etc. And Laid Limball did an incredible film called Through the Night, a documentary about overnight daycare. So think about all the essential workers who work overnight. Where do they put their kids? They put about it right,

They put their kids in overnight daycare. What happens in overnight daycare is like you have people who are just heroic, but they're burning out, you know, And so you're lucky. I mean, like, if you can find a provider, you're lucky.

And I'm also hearing from not just one or two, but multiple parents in my life that their childcare providers are having nervous breakdowns because the childcare providers, not all of them, but some of them are people who have their own kids, are making money by taking care of someone else's kids, and are living in at the expense of their own right and also living in financial precarity,

you know. And so it's all a syndrome where this country, you know, and like, I hate to be a broken record, but like this country built the middle class model on broken families, on the extracted labor practices of slavery and and even extracting from from white Americans. It wasn't just slavery.

There were many white Americans who you know, you think about that the whole line in the song about I sold my soul to the company's store, and all the people who lived, you know, in debt, and the white sharecroppers, etc. So there was there was a way in which the American dream that we were told was normal was always built on a layer of suppressing the potential of other people to live good lives. And you know, I've worked

hard my whole life. My mother, you know who's alive, worked hard for her whole life and never got what she deserved from the economy or from the job market. My grandmother raised six kids and also worked. And I've seen what black women in particular do who try to do better for themselves and their kids, and it can it can also that can be a mental health crisis

in and of itself. I mean, I remember my mother at one point just crying in front of me and my sister because we were talking about some racial something that happened. She was like, I thought it would be better by now, and you know, it's like it's crushing because also what you've seen, and the book Disintegration Um talks about this, is that in black families now, kids of the black middle class are slipping backwards economically. So you know, the whole idea of like the American dream

is that you do your kids. That's just not true for black families. I mean, it's it's and it's honestly, not only is it not true for black families, it's not true for a multitude of families, particularly particularly those who are straddle, who are strapped with excuse me, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt, student loan debt. So where are you? Where are you? So we told kids, we told young people, go out there, go you know,

go get a higher education. A higher education means that you're going to be sought after and highly employed, right, and then they get out after strapping themselves with one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, to realize that the boomers didn't leave their jobs, so there are no positions that are open. And then the gen xers right are stuck in middle management because there's nowhere to go.

There's nowhere to go, right, And so for them, they are stuck at entry if in fact they are even welcomed inside of that door, in that space. So then leaving them if they're lucky enough to have family security to them be living at home with families, which is why they're not getting married, which is why they're not buying homes. Like it's all of this trickle. Yep, it's it sure is. And what I one thing I will say that it was really interesting to talk to her.

So there was an episode of my show that I taped with Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post about Black women, aging and money and she and as part of that she talked about intergenerational wealth building and her daughter, who is a recent college graduate, is living at home saving to buy her first house. I was one of those people. It's like I wanted to have my fantasy career. And sometimes, like I said, it was fantasy. Sometimes it was nightmare.

Sometimes it was just work. But I always was spending so much money on rent. And I think that we do have to start thinking about ways. We don't have to live with our parents, but maybe we find new ways of building intentional community, like we can have family

of love and build wealth together. And maybe, for example, there is a group of you know, for you know, twenty somethings who are like, we're going to have a pact where we have a savings plan and we have somebody who monitors the savings plan, who holds the money like a you know, like a banking institution with some clear rules, and we're all going to collectively save for a mortgage. Yeah. Now we're in the West Indian culture.

I'm Jamaican. That is called partner or a susu. I participated in a su su, you know, and I did it. I did it because I wanted to see what collective economics look like. You know. My hair my hairdressers from Guyana and she was running a susu and then at the time she didn't know me that well, and I was like, oh, I want to do it, and she was like, m sidey because what I found out was, at least in Miss Susu, if you bring someone in and they default, you have to pay for their hand

as well as your hand. So it's a trust based economic system. And so I think we have to start going back to things like that and ways of building, you know, like this system was not designed for our success, so we're going to have to have workarounds and it will that won't change some of the dynamics, but it

allows you to at least control what you can. You know, is that what you mean in your book where you talk about being psychologically self employed, meaning that you should you should be the steward of what it is that you actually can control, because there is so much that

is out of our control. Oh yes. And what it also means is don't in the same way that I would tell any human being not to put room, like like I've got to be dating somebody and you take abuse, like I was in a situation where I had, you know, an abusive X and it's it's like you're like, I'll

just make it work. You know, like the reality is, in some cases things just don't work, and your fantasy about being that six figure earner or whatever your fantasy is, you put yourself through abuse of situations and then you naelt down. And I really love Minta Heart's new book right within about healing from racial trauma in the workplace, because she talks about how, you know, she achieved certain salaries and certain dream jobs that left her traumatized and

mounded and in need of healing. And I can say

that I did the same thing. So part of it is part of psychological self employment, is about financial planning, planning for your present and your future, doing what I call work style design, so that like if you know that you're someone who is a sprinter and not a marathon or maybe like for example, one of my friends, the author k Ibura, who has a ya novel coming out next year, when she was the mother of a young daughter and she and the father had split up,

she would work nine months out of the year or eight months out of the year in New York, make that money and then take her daughter to a a place of African heritage around the world, like one year it was Bohea, you know, like, and she and they would. So she would work hard for a certain amount of time so that she could live a full, culturally rich life. And then once her child started schools, she wanted to

be more rooted. But there are ways that you can, Like you don't have to be someone who earns a lot of money to work less time than most Americans do. You what you have to do is be frugal, Like first of all, like there's a lot of free stuff out there, a lot of free stuff, and it's geographic dependent. So for example, I was renting until recently in Bethesda, Maryland. If you joined the Bethesda free cycle lists, you can

get all sorts of stuff. So I would also tell people there are all sorts of lists listing free stuff. Join the list in places where people are giving away like last year's furniture, you know what I mean. Yeah, Like like go like I am all for up cycling, free cycling, like keep your keep your fixed costs low, and you can have Like there were times where I would just take a break, Like I spent a month in Honduras once and I just didn't work for a month, you know, And and of course I had to hustle

at other times. But like, I think that for those of us who are lucky enough to have options, we can do some really interesting things with those options. But no matter what our choices are, there are those people who I forget what it's called where they work, they keep their costs super low and work to retire by

the age of thirty five or forty. You know, there's and so like, everyone has a different work style and first and none of us are going to get exactly what we want, but we can make choices within those constructs. But one thing that I'm just going to say right now is that no matter what your choices are, you better save for your own retirement. Don't wait for anybody. Like if you're saving at your job, that means you are saving, but don't if you are self employed, put

some of that money away if you are. I mean, I was the kind of person who I actually work jobs that gave me retirement savings, and at one point I dipped into them and spent some of them down. And I'm in a good place because I'm in a good place overall. But things if if things in my career had gone a different way, I might never have been able to recoup those at loss. Yeah, and now that I'm over fifty, I was able to do something.

There's something called makeup payments where you can once you're over fifty, you can put more of your paycheck into your retirement savings than when you're under fifty if you feel like you need to make up lost time. So there's you know, it's it's all exhausting. It's exhausting to look at your options. But you know what's you know, what's really exhausting is to find out that you didn't look at your options and that you really wish you

had made other choices. So yeah, because I think that you know, at the end of the day, you know, being at the whim of other people, being at the mercy of other people, whether it be nonprofit you know,

organizations or in corporate America, they're all extractive. And I think that what this time presents for people is to really think about how they want to engage with work, right, Like how you know, because because you depending on your education and depending on your geographics, like, there are ways in which to design the life that you want. There are ways for you to figure out and center yourself on the fact that you know what maybe that six figure job that is going to drain my soul isn't

exactly what it is that I want to do. Maybe I realize I don't need as much money, I don't need as much house, I don't need as much as like is being dictated to me through capitalism and this keeping up, you know, grind hustle culture, that maybe maybe there's an opportunity to reorient my values and then find work that is that is in alignment. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I mean, I will say that right now. You know, I just recently left, uh, you know, like

a traditional FTE and I'm working for myself again. And I've worked for myself before, but I didn't do the things that I know to do now, which is that I better budget for retirement savings. If I'm going to work for myself, I'm also going to work for my

own retirement. And also, you know, there's the black tax, you know, at least that's what they call it in South Africa, which is that those of us who make it to a certain level, we have people to take care of, you know, whether it's you know, blood relatives, partners, whatever, like, we often end up paying for things for other people. So I've sent money back to Zimbabwe, I've sent money to Baltimore. And to also figure out what is your

relationship to the black tax? Like are you someone who really has to draw the line and say no, I can't which is acceptable, by the way, it is acceptable to say no, I cannot finance whatever thing, no matter how worthy it is. Are you someone who puts away a certain amount of money to help your friends, neighbors, relatives, whatever.

These are strategies. Like if you come from an upper middle class family where you're used to getting the house down payment from your parents, you might not have to think about this, but a lot of us have to think about how we resource other people and when we resource other people and not make it something that that really drains us. Yeah, I mean I percent agree, and there is there is so much to think about these days in terms of, you know, our relationship to each other,

how we build community. I'm still thinking about what you just said in terms of like building your own community. You don't have to live with your parents, but what does what does that look like? What does it look like to build out economic safety outside of you know, the traditional four oh one k if that's not the kind of work that you are doing. And so what are the machinations of that that allow us to have

more freedom in our day to day lives? Is actually for black and brown and you know BIPOC folks who you know from the jump, we're already behind in the freedom game, you know, and just trying to articulate that truth. The final question that I have for you for eyes, like for young people. I have young people in my family, you know, who are in their early you know, early to mid twenties and thinking that in all honesty that they have all the time in the world to figure

out their life. And I have become that older person that's just like, well, you may want to start thinking about things now right as opposed to waiting teny years. What advice do you have for those people that are either like f the system, I don't even want to participate in it, but then have no other plans, or are not recognizing how quickly things devolve and how fast

time goes. Yeah, I mean some of it is just you know, school of life and hard knocks, you know, like sometimes people will not know until they know themselves elves. But I would say that it was really liberating to me when I started developing the friendships where I could really talk about sex and what it was and wasn't with people who I loved and trusted. And money is

the same thing. You've got to find people who you can have those intimate conversations within money is an intimate conversation. Find people who you can have an intimate conversation with, Like, I'm scared. I'm scared that I won't ever. I'm scared that I will. I'm scared that this will happen. Like, find people who you trust, and sometimes the people who you think you can trust are not as trustworthy, so you know, judge it. But like so many people are

scared about money, I just bought my first house. I'm fifty two years old. Why did I buy my first house at fifty two Because I saw how much it was really challenge lenging to my mother to be a homeowner, you know, to be a single black mother who's a homeowner. It was hard and I didn't want to put myself in that position and I had to really deprogram myself. So find people who you love and trust who can help you deal with your fears. Thank you so much

for making time today for our today. The book is The Episodic Career. I just want to thank you so much for your work, for sharing so many truths right that like, we all have an opportunity to have moments of you know where I call stop, pivot and reflect right to make those changes because the world is being disruptive and disrupted in a lot of ways, which I like to think can also create opportunities out of the obstacles that they present. And I think that your book,

The Episodic Career is a guide. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, Danielle, thank you. That is it for me here, Folks on woke f daily as always. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.