Navigating the Workplace Is Harder Than Ever. Curbing Our Ambition Isn’t the Answer.

One of the best books I’ve read this year is The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, whose grandest title may be the former executive editor of Teen Vogue, but as she points out through the book, hardly tells her whole story.

Having ridden the same digital media waves of the girlboss decade as Samhita and as a major fan of her writing, I knew within just a few pages that she *gets it* in a way that the usual internet discourse about women in the workplace rarely does. Even beyond that, her thesis — that we can’t solve systemic problems with individual solutions and we should stop beating ourselves up for it — is part of a broader trend that’s pointing in one clear direction: finding collective solutions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sami Sage: I loved your book and felt so connected to how you describe the friction that comes up when we try to face systemic problems with individual solutions and why that ultimately falls short. This is a conclusion that I’ve noticed a lot of people reach as it pertains to different areas of their life, whether it’s work, politics, diet culture, or their finances. It feels like systemic realities have eclipsed the effectiveness of personal agency and it’s really hard to provide practical solutions in that context. How did you approach that challenge when you were writing your book?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I think in many ways you really just captured this moment where people have very robust criticisms of what’s happening [in the workplace], but not a lot of tools for how to navigate those environments, and I wanted to bring those two things together. I felt like there was this kind of ongoing narrative that neoliberal, Lean In-slash-girlboss feminism is failing us, but our solution to that, rather than collectively organize and demand better workplaces, has been “let’s quiet quit, let’s quit our jobs, let’s get lazy girl jobs.”

I found that troubling because I don’t think the right response to unfair working conditions is throttling or somehow diminishing women’s ambition. I felt like I had to make the case for why hard work and being ambitious is important, and to stop blaming ourselves for when we don’t reach all of our goals. In the book I call this the “margin of maneuverability,” or the space between what feels impossible to overcome, what is structurally impossible to overcome, and what is actually possible in my own life.

I think this is something that’s really threaded throughout your book. Optimism plays a really important role with this; we have to believe that things are possible in order to do them. The idea of the ‘margin of maneuverability’ definitely applies to the political space too and I think it’s actually a very useful framework for the way people think about what they can reasonably expect to do.

Sami: Right, I feel like there’s two things at play here. First is that people who are “anti-work” seem to over-index on the idea that work should not be hard at all, when work can actually be very fulfilling. People reasonably don’t want to be underpaid for the benefit of someone else’s profits, and they want to be fairly rewarded. But this idea that work being ‘hard’ is automatically a bad thing, has gotten a bit skewed.

The other issue I’ve witnessed is that it’s very hard, unless the broad consensus is that a company both wants to create a new type of workplace and that they know how to do it. When you put competitive and collaborative dispositions together, the competitive proclivities tend to win out just because that’s human nature. So I think it will require a market-wide cultural shift.

Samhita: Totally. I think your book really tackles that same dissonance around how do we actually create change within a system? Because right now it’s really easy for people to just think, “this whole political system is bullshit and I’m not participating,” which is kind of what’s happening in the workplace. I think it’s fine for a short span of time to want to “quiet quit” and normal that you can’t always be so inspired and driven by purpose. And democracy is really similar because it’s just not always going to be exciting.

Sami: Right, a tree doesn’t bloom in every season. But what I find intriguing is that there is a very clear intersection between how people feel about work and how dark money – from a few hundred billionaires – is able to hold all of us captive to those interests by flooding the political system with donations. The environment of our workplaces, including our compensation and spending power, is often driven by state and federal legislation as well as the market, so we’ve gotten all of this advice about how to advocate for yourself to get a raise when all along, the financial ceilings have been disproportionately determined by broader economic and political forces in the first place.

For example, the fact that our health care is tied to employment is supremely dysfunctional. And now, the Supreme Court overturning the Chevron deference will make it possible to gut regulations entirely if corporations pursue that, which will make workplace conditions even more precarious. So is it now going to come down to a few businesses that are both benevolent and still somehow lucrative enough to compete with every other business that’s happy to cut costs?

Samhita: That’s where I feel like worker power and raising awareness around organizing for workplaces and figuring out collective solutions, is the only solution. Why is there this discomfort around saying, “Wait this is really fucked up. My paid family leave was cut. Let’s have a conversation about why this is going to impact me and make my life untenable.” And I think the more people who refuse to put up with it, business leaders are forced to change.

I’m a Gen Xer, so I will put up with a certain amount of abuse culturally. But these Gen Zers are not doing it. They would literally rather not work than work in an environment that’s going to exploit their labor. Of course there are class considerations to all of this, but find the rise of unions exciting. There are a lot of people asking these questions because they’re looking at us and saying, “Well, you supposedly had it all. You worked your ass off; you did everything you were supposed to do, and you still haven’t paid off your student debt. You still can’t afford to buy a house.” The American dream has been gutted.

Sami: That’s why they’ve spent decades entrenching minority rule, and now they’re hoping to cross the finish line. But what you’re saying about people talking to each other at work to organize is actually quite similar to what we say in Democracy In Retrograde, and one of my favorite parts of the book. Which is that the most effective way to increase voter turnout and to change people’s minds is literally just through conversations that people have with their trusted friends. For all the advertising and consultants and punditry, ultimately it’s word-of-mouth and people relating to each others’ struggles that is the most powerful way to create a movement.

Samhita: Absolutely! Do you think that the fact that we have moved a little bit from socializing in person – and that it’s easier for an employee to pop off on twitter than to organize their own workplace – has made it worse? One of the things I felt coming out of 2016 was like, “Oh my God, we can’t even talk to each other.”

Sami: Totally. That’s a huge piece of what we discuss in the book. The algorithms — again driven by hypercapitalism — really promote the most outrage-inducing, fear-inducing content, and the most controversial points. They don’t really promote consensus.

We’re all much more siloed and isolated, and there are not as many third spaces, if any, where people can go for free and casually interact without intending to. People really start to become a little bit internet pilled and untethered from reality. In the book we talk about how friendship can be an act of resistance in an autocracy because having relationships that keep you tethered to the humanity of other people, is a threat to an autocratic state. Any autocratic regime is trying to track people’s relationships and keep anyone who presents a challenge to power away from each other. And you know what it would take to unionize a workplace? Certainly relationships and contacts, and all of us being in connection with each other.

Part of the problem is there are no longer these free third spaces for people to socialize in. Because if people want to leave their house and inevitably need to spend money to do so, we’re only going to frequent venues where we’ll be around people who are similar to us. All these things sort of dovetail, which is why we feel that civic engagement and in-person relationships, where people are working together based around their values, is a major solution not just to like people’s loneliness but to creating a multicultural democracy that is hopefully representative of our interests.

The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning by Samita Mukhopadhyay, and Democracy In Retrograde: How To Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and Our Lives by Sami Sage and Emily Amick are both available now, wherever you buy your books!

Betches may receive a portion of revenue if you click a link and purchase a product or service. The links are independently placed and do not influence editorial content.