TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: How to stop devoting yourself to your job (w/ Sarah Jaffe) | How to Be a Better Human
31 Aug 2025
Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keep Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. She and Chris discuss the emotional toll of modern work culture and the importance of community. They also dive into Sarah’s newest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, and explore the idea that between pandemics, climate change, and economic inequality, many of us are feeling a huge (and often unacknowledged sense of grief. Sarh explains the concept of “disenfranchised grief” and how collective mourning can invite meaningful social connections.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hello, TED Talks Daily listeners. I'm Elise Hu. Today, we're bringing you another Sunday Pick, where we share an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Tomorrow is Labor Day in the U.S. It's a big national holiday. And for many, this long weekend marks the end of summer and a chance to relax and spend time with friends and family.
But what if you're struggling with burnout, exhaustion, and just... don't want to go back to work. In this recent episode from How to Be a Better Human, host Chris Duffy speaks with Sarah Jaffe, author of the book, Work Won't Love You Back, how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone.
They dig into what's behind the dread some of us may be feeling at work and at home and offer some thoughts on what we can do about it. How to Be a Better Human is a show that looks in unexpected places for new ways to improve and show up for one another.
If you want to hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts and learn about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and I love my job. I feel so lucky that I get to host this show and have conversations with incredible, interesting people about their ideas.
And yet there's this weird thing for me and honestly, for almost everyone else I know, where if you have a job that you like, that's rewarding and meaningful, you feel compelled to give it all of yourself to organize your life around the work rather than the work around your life. But we're worth more than just the parts of us that can make money.
That's true whether you have a job you love or a job that you despise. Today's guest, Sarah Jaffe, is a writer who has been exploring this complicated nature of work and life and self and identity for years. She struck a real chord with people across the globe when she wrote the book Work Won't Love You Back. How devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted and alone.
Sarah is currently a writer and a journalist. Her dream job. She's doing it. But before that, she worked a whole slew of other jobs. And here is a clip where Sarah gives me a brief glance at some of the other items on her resume.
When people ask me why I wrote this book, my joke is always like punk rock and crappy jobs. My first job was picking up trash at an outdoor concert venue when I was 15 years old, which was cool because I got to see like David Bowie for free, which was great. Also dating myself a little bit. But, you know, it's fine. Yeah, I scooped ice cream.
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