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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Okay, so to kick this off, Marcel, to kick this off, to kick off this collection, this anthology of episodes that we have about job stress, I should first ask, what are your job stress levels right now?
I feel like job stress is actually lower because my life stress is higher. So when I have stress in one area of life, it’s almost like I’m like, oh, well, that’s not anything, you know?
Yeah, same.
I had to find empathy for my daughter’s fish dying a week ago because I was like, this doesn’t matter, it’s just a fish, I can buy another one, you know what I mean? I was just kind of like solving the problem and I didn’t realize.
You got to let kids grieve. It’s very inefficient. Yeah.
And it’s real though, when I lost my first kid, I was sad.
Yeah.
And that’s like they have very few kids at the age that your kids are, they are kind of goldfish. So of their conscious memory, that fish was a big part of it. And so it is such a, and it’s their first real big experience with loss.
And as soon as we debated on the podcast Smash Boom Best, a children’s podcast, children’s debate podcast, where two adults debate something that a child chooses, and then a child judges it. Marcel and I have each been on this show many times.
We faced off twice. I’ve lost twice to Marcel. I’ve lost three times overall.
So I’m spoiling the episode for you. It’s Hamsters versus Goldfish. And after this heated debate where I was, the floor was, bring them up, okay?
Bring them out and bring them up. Because I got destroyed. Hamsters lost to Goldfish.
Spoiler, it’s still a great episode. And then one of our hamsters died, and your Goldfish died. And that’s pretty crazy that that happened so quickly together.
That is insane.
Insane.
It’s insane.
And we both had forgotten to tell each other, Rick, wait, you too?
Oh, man. I have to go pick up the hamster’s ashes. I still haven’t done it.
I dropped him off on Thursday. We left town.
But you see what I mean? You got to pick up hamster’s ashes. And so job stress comparatively is like, ah.
Who cares?
Who cares? Honestly, who cares? When life is falling apart, I could not care less about work.
And then when work is falling apart, I’m kind of like a little bit of an absentee mother, wife, et cetera, et cetera, which is not my best quality. But what has been your most stressful job?
Well, I don’t want to go back to the biscuit factory. I don’t want to, dark times, dark times. And it was because of me.
You know the funny part about jobs and life is like, the most stressful job situation, because this episode is about job stress and loss, is the loss of my sort of full-time gig that I had that had like everything wrapped into it last year, just
Which is not this job.
It was nice.
FYI.
Yeah, it was nice.
It was not this job. Yes, I’m here. No, it’s always been, and here it’s like, I mean, with here, I think basically everyone’s under stress when it’s stressful, and when it’s not, then it’s just like, okay, we manage it.
And it’s a different kind of stress. But like, as far as the team, we don’t get into a lot of that.
I feel like we, at least me, I don’t, but you know, and so that’s the good thing is like, and because I’ve had to have like multiple hats on for like the last few years, I think that’s a part of stress is just like managing different projects and
managing different things. And most of it is pretty manageable.
I had, I think sometimes it’s like when people have expectations that are unrealistic and they have no insight into what the reality of what you do is, you know, it’s like if someone’s like, oh, yeah, just redo that whole like, just tear apart the
whole room and rebuild the entire bathroom or whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s not how building bathrooms works. And that’s kind of how it’s happened to me.
And I’ve been that person to you.
And I have gotten an education from you. And I’ve also been on your side of it with different things where people are like, yeah, you don’t mind, do you? You could just start over, do it all over again.
What do you think? Right. And you’re like, you can have that, but then we won’t be able to meet the deadline?
So you can either have the job that you want or you can hit the deadline, but you can’t have both in these cases. And yeah, at various points, this has been my most stressful job.
And then, I mean, you’ve seen me have several mental breakdowns, but one really big one. And then it’s like, but I’m the boss. Why am I like this?
Why am I my worst boss? You know, and therapy has been helpful for that. But I started my career, you know, you worked in the Biscuit Factory.
And for people who didn’t see us live, that is not a joke. Like you literally worked at the Biscuit Factory. And you, the first time that you told me that story, I was crying laughing, even though you were dead serious.
And you stone cold were sitting in a studio and you go, a human person is not meant to see that many biscuits in a day.
It was, man, I mean, just like the sheer amount of, you know how you always talk about like the garbage dumps and like the plastic containers and things like that?
That’s my anxiety, yeah. I walk into a group.
Try seeing a million biscuits, a million muffins, a million cinnabons or whatever.
You can send them in rolls all in a day and just seeing like thousands and thousands of pounds of food get thrown away, like because it just, there’s too much or deformities or, you know, a bad batch with a little bit too much baking soda or
something like that. It just, it messes with you.
And I think a big part of the stress too is like, you know, when you’re, I think there’s certain positions you can be into where you’re like super aware, like hyper aware of being a cog in the wheel of capitalism.
Just like a straight, complete, like a cog, like a person who’s only there to promote more productivity.
And like, I remember sitting on like this, sort of like a curb, like a concrete curb in the factory one time, because you would wait in waves for like more biscuits to come or whatever you were working on. And you would have to stand up.
And sometimes people would tell you, don’t sit down while you’re waiting, right? There’s literally nothing to do. You’re not allowed to go to another line and help out on pizza dough or whatever it is.
But they would say, don’t sit down. And so sometimes people would just like trade like, hey, I want to go to the bathroom. And you’d trade off and say, hey, I’ll go for 15 minutes.
Then you can go 15 minutes just so you can sit down for a little while instead of looking like you’re not doing anything.
And I think one of the biggest job stresses that I’ve had has been that too, where it’s like, you’re in environments where you have to appear busy.
And there’s a lot of things that go into that too, with race and different things like that, because during slavery, it’s like the unproductive slave.
And if you’re a black man or you’re perceived in a certain way, in certain environments, then people will be like, well, why are you just standing around? You know?
And it’s almost like you, your only value is how productive you can be, which I understand we’re working in the context of business, but it’s also like we are human and to some degree we need breaks.
Like even for capitalism to work, you need well-rested people and you need healthy people.
But I feel like here, maybe it’s just the states, maybe this is like, I’m sure there’s global aspects of it, but it just feels like we’re only allowed to be as healthy and content as we are like productive for someone else.
Yeah.
And you can’t be any healthier or happier than that, right? Like you can’t be any healthier. Like they want you to have to go get checked out because you got, you know, anxiety and this thing and that thing.
Yeah, but actually you can’t go get checked out because you can’t take the time and also they keep you under 40 hours so that they don’t have to give you benefits.
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I listened to this book. I was reading it, I forgot it, so I switched to audio this weekend, and I read this book, The Hammer. The struggle for, it’s about labor organizing unions and the history of labor in the United States.
And the writer is this guy named Hamilton Nolan. He used to, you will love this book. I’m gonna send you a copy of it.
He used to write for Gawker, which was one of the first smaller media organizations, I believe one of the first ones to unionize back in like the you know, aughts and was owned by, you know, a mega millionaire and then was bankrupted by Peter Thiel,
a billionaire who bankrolled the, you know, billionaire eats the millionaire, the billionaire eats the burp burp burp burp and down and down and down. And he, Peter Thiel had bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against they, against Gawker and that is
what folded Gawker. And this is all coming back to that live show that we did in 2022 because we talked about the Biscuits and we talked about Hulk Hogan and we did not, and we touched on capitalism and we touched on job stress because I was in the
middle of a mental breakdown, but we are, this is all connected because I was, I was reading, listening to this book and he tells the story of the labor movement through personal stories. So people who had attempted to unionize and it didn’t work or,
you know, people who are currently in unions. And in South Carolina, wish I could remember which city, a port city, where most of our, you know, our imports like come into, or a large number of our imports come into, the strongest union there and one
of the only unions there, because South Carolina is one of the least friendly union cities, it was a slavery city as well, is the Charleston. It’s Charleston and the dock workers, the longshoremen who are mostly black and, you know, keep this tight
control. Your labor is the hammer. Your labor is your power. They keep control of these docks.
They have people who have, you know, been working there since, you know, right out of high school or in their 80s, who still work. And why do they work? Because they make six figures.
And what is their job, Marcel? Water. They bring out, they keep everybody hydrated.
They have water suppliers that are actual people. So they push against any kind of industrialization that would take somebody’s job. And, you know, they are small but mighty.
And I think that if more people read this book or more people understood, it is a lot of work. It is a lot of work to organize, but that’s where you make any kind of gains. And they did talk about food production.
They talked about, you know, we’re not naming names, but in this book, they are naming names. They’re talking about Nabisco.
And, you know, without, you know, just the basics of worker rights, you have a, that squeezes out slash completely eliminates, like, a middle class. And then we’re all more exhausted. And we’re more stressed out.
And you have to work more to get less. And on and on we go. And so, yeah, work, labor, everybody has to work.
Everybody has to work. I mean, most people have to work. There’s maybe like, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have, yes, I do.
I know like three people who don’t have to work, but guess what? They still work. And you know, the work that they do, they do like volunteer work.
And they like throw themselves completely into work that is for like the greater good. And that’s very inspiring to me, because I really do think where we venerate, you know, billionaires, right?
Like there are people who are like, Elon Musk is a genius.
And I just think, you know, I think for a lot of reasons he’s a loser, but I think specifically, I cannot imagine having that much money and not waking up every day, like excited to fill buckets with physical money, you know, those big, big Home
Depot buckets and just hand them out, you know. I’d be walking into a bank and saying, who’s underwater on their mortgage right now?
Right.
Not anymore. I’d be just paying off mortgages willy-nilly, you know. Just, I don’t know.
It just, I can’t imagine having all that money and just wanting to squeeze more.
I mean, you can find things to get, man. I mean, at any income level, you can find some bullshit to buy basically. You know what I mean?
You can find something to buy, but at the end of the day, it’s like, yeah, because we’re not built the same. There’s no way I would be able to look at all the people on the street, the kids.
You can just tell when a kid just doesn’t have, you know, the setup is messed up, you know.
You know, as a parent of a child, like a parent dies, what happens if that person loses their job because now they’re a single parent trying to figure out what’s going on with this kid, trying to figure out daycare.
They don’t have a place to stay or they do, but then the child suffers in various ways because of the absence of a parent or like a parent having to work all the time or whatever it is.
It’s like, you could build, like again, I always harp on food because it’s so easy. It’s so easy to grow food. You literally take a little thing that looks like a rock, you put it in the dirt outside and you piss on it and something comes up.
So to me, it’s like, don’t piss. Everyone just know that Nora hates the word piss.
I hate it. I hate it. It’s so aggressive.
God. I hate it.
But jobs shouldn’t be stressful. You remember when people used to use the word vocation?
Yes. Yeah.
And I want, like, that’s what I… It’s like, we want a vocation.
Like, we want something that, like, makes me feel like, hey, like, there’s times where we’re, like, doing stuff, we’re on tour, we’re doing, like, a live show, or we’re, you know, even now just recording.
And, like, I haven’t even looked at the prep documents, which I probably… Me neither. I have it up.
But it’s just like… But I’m enjoying, and it feels like, hey, it’s almost like you’re flying. You’re just kind of enjoying…
That’s what it should be about. And it’s like you should… And you provide a service in some kind of way.
But instead, these dudes just want to sit here and make a bunch of money, judge everybody, fight each other. And to some degree, I guess I’m holding my popcorn to see how the show goes.
Ooh, I’m holding, like, my stomach, because I feel every time I look at the news, I’m going to shit my pants. Like, that’s how I feel. Um, I, I, the most stressed that I’ve ever been about work was when my work could not have been less consequential.
So I told this story on TikTok, and it really struck a nerve, which I, you never know what stuff will hit there and what won’t, but this did. And, you know, to, to tell the simplest version of this story, I was working in advertising at an agency.
Agency life is sort of built on stress and anxiety. You’re always, you know, you could lose a client at any time, and you could use, and then you would lose your job, right?
If there’s not enough client money coming in, then there’s not enough, you know, work for people to do, and you have to bill every hour, and you have to, you know, really be proving your value, and blah, blah, blah, and there’s no boundaries.
And this is, you know, 15 years ago, so perhaps things have changed, but I just highly doubt it, because I was at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. My soon-to-be-husband was getting a brain surgery.
They had found a brain tumor, like this big, in the right side of his head. This was a shock. We did not know that it was brain cancer yet.
I was still living in the magical thinking universe where until they tell you that it’s brain cancer, it is simply a brain tumor. Once they tell you it’s brain cancer, then it’s brain cancer.
But they’re removing this tumor, the surgery is going to be hours and hours long, and I, of course, was checking my email. Marcel, I was checking my email.
I was a good little worker still on my iPhone 2 or whatever it was, and I got an email from a VP at our company, and I believe she called me too.
But the point is the end results of these conversations were that she had a work laptop brought to the hospital for me. So I could work on a new business pitch.
Because she said something like, because you’re not doing the brain surgery, you’re just going to be sitting around. And I was like, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure.
I won’t be present with my frightened, soon-to-be mother-in-law and friends and myself and my own feelings. While the person I love the most in this world is having their skull sawed open, I will sit there and tap, tap, tap away at a PowerPoint.
And I did it. I did it. I didn’t even like push back slightly.
I did it. And when Erin was finally diagnosed, when they told us, they sent the brain tumor away, they gave us the pathology, it was definitely brain cancer. I tell everybody, right?
And same VP calls, can you still make the new business pitch tomorrow morning? And I went. I went.
I went. I went. And I was like out of my body, out of my mind.
But I went. It like did not even occur to me that I could say no. And honestly, I don’t think I could have.
I don’t think I could have. I think I would have been, you know, probably pushed out, like pretty quick, like out of that job pretty quick.
And like some, they would have found some way or another, they always did with various people who were, you know, going through whatever or not performing. There’s a lot of ways to do that.
So, and I really did not think that was bad until maybe like four years ago. I didn’t think that was, I mean, when I started this show, I was secretly pregnant.
I did not tell anybody when I started Terrible Thanks for Asking, which is not this show, but you know, everybody knows, like the first origination of this show. I was secret pregnant.
And I did not tell people that I was pregnant because I knew that unknown talent, me, unproven show, pregnancy is a liability.
Yeah.
You know, I can’t tell them, I can’t tell them. And I took Q to work like two days after he was born. Like I took him into, I took a two day old.
Like, you know, you have two children. You know exactly what a woman’s body is like after they have a baby.
That is insane. Yeah. Yeah.
Randomly, you know, like, should have been in bed, should have been in bed.
But I was like, don’t worry, it won’t affect me at all. I will have this baby and we will make a podcast. And hoo boy, hoo boy.
Yeah, but you know, when you talk about that, it really makes me think like how you’re at agency work, like how there’s a culture of, there is a culture of pressure, right?
And then how it’s impacted me is I’ve been in the situation where the culture of pressure is still strong versus like in a lean team where we’re all kind of like cool or just like, I’ve had a couple of teams like that who are like, hey, listen, I’ll
cover you, you’re good, even in a major business or a major organization. But for the most part, it’s like, we all know that we have that insidious mindset in us because then it almost is like, it becomes where you self-discipline, like you
self-orient that way. And so there are times where it’s like, you were in the hospital and someone sent you a laptop. I brought my laptop to the hospital. You see what I’m saying?
Like I brought mine. I was taking call. I remember my cousin had an aneurysm.
She was about to check out. She was in a coma. And I’m taking a call because I didn’t want to lose this contract.
And I’m taking a call and I’m trying to explain it to them, too, just so that they know, hey, why is the phone quality? Why does it sound like you’re in a car? It’s because I am in a car right now because I’m sitting in the parking lot.
When I’m done with you, I’m going to go in there, sit with my cousin for a few hours, then I’m going to go home, take care of my kids, cook dinner.
And it’s difficult because I have lived through similar stuff where it’s like they have that pressure culture, and then I’ve been in a place where it’s like technically safer, but I don’t allow myself that at all, you know what I mean?
So it’s like it’s not that these people are doing something to me, it’s that I’m self-imposing now because I’m like, no, there’s no way I’m going to put myself in a position to lose my…
Because it’s like the stress is not about the job, it’s not about the career. Like I have not been in a position for 10 years, whatever. I haven’t been in a position where if I’m not making the money, I’m not going to have a place to stay.
That’s like not hyperbolic, right? Like I may have a family member, I can, you know, whatever. I’m good with my family so I could get somewhere.
But I mean, like I’m the only income now. And I have children, like I have my sick mother here, stuff like that.
So for me, it’s a thing where it’s like the job stress is not so much the job, it’s like the thought of what is this gonna mean if I lose this opportunity.
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What I found out was even when my situation was less dire, I still was doing the same, imposing this feeling on myself constantly. And it’s difficult to get rid of.
Yeah, it’s really hard to deprogram from, and I’ve definitely gotten that same, I’ve taken that internalized version of pressure and perfectionism too, because that’s what agency, you can’t make a mistake. You can’t make a mistake.
I’ve seen people have panic attacks because a press release that nobody will read, nobody wants the press release, it’s going in people’s straight to the garbage, has like a typo in it, right? And I’ve exacted that same amount of pressure on people.
Absolutely, I have. I have perpetuated that, and I’m not proud of that. And I’m also still deprogramming all of this sort of mentality.
Somebody said something really powerful to me, which is that perfectionism is not about being perfect. It is about finding fault easily. And I was like, oh, that is it, isn’t it?
Isn’t it? And if you’re in a culture where mistakes are not okay, and these are not, by the way, I’ve never worked in a industry or at a job that was a matter of life and death, not once. Now, I’ve always worked in deeply inessential jobs.
You know, like the…
No one would miss it if it went away, that kind of job.
So we pulled together this anthology of stories of job stress, stories of job loss, stories of work and what it means to people, because it connects to everybody, everybody knows what it is like to work, to be worried about work, to have that
work-life boundary fully crossed, work-life balance is a myth. All that you can do is kind of, you know, juggle, sort of. And that’s what this whole collection of stories is about.
Yeah. So check these out. Job Stress and Loss.
One of my favorite picks is the Sarah Haggye episode.
Same. I was going to say that. So I was going to say that.
Jinks. Jinks.
Jinks. Jinkies.
Jinks. Jinks. One, two, three, four.
And now my kids are like, blackout jinx, all around jinx. Like all the, I’m like, okay. Okay, I can’t keep, I can’t keep.
Double jinx, triple jinx, blackout jinx, all around jinx.
No, I don’t do no no. There ain’t no blackout jinx. I was like, what do you mean?
What do you mean?
There’s jinx. And somebody else, yeah, that’s it.
Maybe there’s a secondary jinx. Maybe if you’re feeling really.
Maybe, there’s not a quadruple jinx. That’s not a thing. You can’t say that.
That’s not possible. What else are they gonna say? Oh, TTFA Anthologies are where we take our favorite episodes around a common theme.
We pull them together and we publish them. We pull them out of the archives. We dust them off and we give them to you here in the TTFA Anthologies feed.
We are still making episodes. We have dropped the terrible. We are now Thanks For Asking, which is at the same feed that you got TTFA in.
If you still are itching for the full archives of TTFA, those are over on my Substack, which is noraborialis.substack.com. This is also where you can get like all the full ad-free versions of the new episodes that we’re making.
But Thanks For Asking is now a call-in show. So you can call, you can text. My number is 612-568-4441.
And I am loving just chatting with people. And when Marcel’s personal life is less stressful, you’re going to hear a lot more of me chatting with my buddy Marcel.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s it.
I thought I was going to say something else. I don’t need to say anything.
And that’s it. And that’s it. But I got these ground cherry seeds.
I can’t believe you’re eating seeds. I find that. That’s fine.
And that’s fine.
You’re eating seeds. I’m not eating them. It’s planting them.
Oh, thank God.
I was like, what? Okay. Ground cherry seeds.
I thought you were going to like, okay, that’s fine. You should plant those.
Organic seeds to plant in the garden.
That’s great. We actually also have an episode over on Thanks For Asking That We Are Working On. Right now, I took calls today, Marcel, from various people.
I’m actually going to make a call right after this, where I’m asking people what they do all day, like what they do for work. I talked to the most fascinating people today, including a regenerative agricultural data analysis manager.
Her job title had seven words. Those were definitely a few of them. Yeah.
Somebody who’s a paralegal for the appeals process for the indigent in one of the Carolinas, North or South, I can’t recall. I always get them mixed up. I talk to somebody who is affected by all the doge layoffs, too.
So there’s a lot of interesting jobs out there, and I just really love to talk to people about whatever they want to talk about. So another plug for calling in about whatever you want to talk about, especially your jobs.
If you listen to this and you want to talk more about your work, text me and we’ll just, and I’ll call you back.
Yeah.
Also, I just want to say that nobody has made my work better, like just tangibly better, more fun and more interesting than Marcel Melikibu. So I’m very grateful to be able to work with you. So thank you.
And I just trust you so much. And I just really, every time I talk to you, I feel better and I feel smarter because you’re so smart.
You don’t want to say that. I need like, I need, what do you call that? I need like a disclaimer on my shirt at all times.
But you’re also very, you’re also very wise.
Like you really do have, like you have this innate wisdom where I’m like, I, if I, if I got to check something with you and like you are completely on another page, I’m like, I really do have to rethink this. I really do.
And I don’t, I really don’t take that kind of advice from anyone else, you know? Like the way that I do from you. So, so thank you.
Really, you’ve gotten me out of some pickles of, you know? And I’ve put you in some, so thank you.
Oh man, I like pickles.
I know, it’s, I mean, because I’m a fermented food guy.
I’m a pickled. Listen, we all gotta, we all gotta get some, some more vinegar.
If you can’t get into the pickles, make some pickles yourself, which I did last summer. We’ll talk about gardening another time. All right, bye Marcel.
And thanks for listening everybody.