Alison Pugh

Yeah, so my father was busy at work, and my mother was kind of in charge of figuring out what schools the kids would go to, and she solved the problem for my oldest brother, and he was, I think, 14, and then my sister, then my brother, then my sister, and then...

You know, I think somewhere around August, she looks down and she sees me and was like, wait a minute, I don't have a place for you to go.

So, you know, I think she, you know, made some last minute arrangement that got me into a preschool.

My familial background involves, I have, you know, some Irish in me, and a big portion of my identity is Italian.

And

my family has recipes for lasagna and red sauce and calamari and stuffed peppers.

I am an Italian raised cook.

And so when I was about 24, 25, I was in Honduras as a foreign service officer.

In Honduras, they have

The garlic they sell is unusually small.

The cloves are really tiny.

And I remember my ambassador kind of joking about how hard it was to cook with these tiny little.

And then he's looking at me.

He goes, what do you know?

Why am I talking to you about this?

You're just some wasp.

You don't know anything about garlic.

And I was just taken aback by the misread.

He had no idea.

I might look like a wasp on the outside.

That's my father's background.

But he had no idea that my great-grandmother was a contract bride from Southern Italy.

She was not literate.

And he saw this external self and not this part that is actually a big part of my identity.

So that was a misread, I would say.

Yeah, I mean, it was a kind of jarring moment, but I did still know he was a nice guy.

There was nothing pernicious about it.

But

there was, it did make us a little more distant, you know, or it did make me see, it helped me understand how little he knew who he was talking to.

So connective labor is the work of seeing the other person and having the other person feel seen.

And it's all the work that that requires, from reflective listening to kind of adjusting what you're saying, given how they're responding.

It's an interactive dance, and the interactive part is very important.

Yes, exactly.

They underlie so many occupations from therapy, you know,

teaching, primary care, but also your hairdresser, your real estate agent, your soccer coach, the lawyer, there's the manager for sure, high-end sales.

There's many, many people who use this kind of connective labor to achieve the outcomes for which they're getting paid.

Exactly.

I mean, those are really great examples.

You know,

The fact that we associate this kind of work with only very particular, very kind of feeling professions mean we're really underestimating its prevalence and its importance.

And also, may I say, it's kind of gendered.

We're misunderstanding it as only the province of women.

When men do it, we ignore it.

So how we respond to it is gendered, but I think it happens all over the economy.

Well, for sales in particular, I mean, actually, this is happening in many different occupations.

To be seen by another human being

has some profound effects.

There's a ton of research that talks about that for teaching and for therapy and for medicine.

But even in sales, salespeople know this.

When you, the salesperson, effectively identify somebody's problems or their perspective, it is much more persuasive.

it's very powerful to be seen by another human being, even when that's just for persuasion.

Yes.

The

The feeling of being understood is a powerful one.

And the feeling of being misunderstood or feeling invisible or misrecognized, that is kind of equally powerful in a negative sense.

That's a super important question.

Given that we don't know the other person, even when we think they do,

it's not a terrible approach to kind of start with humility.

So even it's perhaps easier when you know they're from a different culture or background or race or whatever.

But I think this starts with humility.

And actually, there's been great psychological research talking about how

We shouldn't think of this as perspective taking.

We should instead think of this as perspective getting.

So it starts with asking or checking on your assumptions about them.

So your posture towards reading them is not like, this is what you're feeling.

So it sounds like something like this.

It's more tentative.

And you're aware.

Your first task is to listen.

And to be humble.

And those sound simple, but actually when so much of our misreads happen under conditions of trying to do it quickly.

So many of the practitioners in these fields, let's start with primary care physicians, have no time.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the working conditions that are making it hard for them to see other people, but I would say try and hold that off because your efficiency pressures are gonna make you do this poorly.

That's interesting.

When I'm saying tentative, I'm not saying don't do it.

So don't take the risk of saying what you think they're saying to you.

But just be aware that you might be wrong and be open to that and correcting that.

There's a lot of research that shows that when you correct something that's wrong, they feel more seen.

But really, it's the task of

of listening and taking a risk.

I gave a talk in Oregon recently and someone was telling me about how they had had a horseback riding accident and they almost couldn't walk as a result, but then they managed to, now they are walking, are able to run, et cetera.

But she talked about how her feelings about her body, she's become much more cautious and wary and uncertain about what her body can do.

And listening to her, I said,

it's like a loss of innocence.

Like before she was innocent about, and just taking risks because it was fun and she could do it and whatever.

And now she no longer believes that about herself.

And her response to the, it's a loss of this innocence was like, when you do connective labor well, it's like powerful relief, a great sense of affinity, you know, like really, we were really bonded in that 30 second interaction.

And, um,

Then to me, that felt like, take a risk.

You know, like what she was saying to me, I was just saying back to her.

And so I wasn't tentative, but I was certainly open to the fact that I could be wrong.

So yeah, I guess the tension is you have to take that step.

You have to take that risk, but also be very correctable.

I agree it's a profound question.

I also agree it is an everyday one, especially for those of us who live in urban environments.

And it's not just about the unhoused, it's also about just seeing people in our midst who have deep need that you can't meet.

Just speaking directly to this questioner, I would say in my experience, they really appreciate your acknowledgement.

I think the worst is when you don't acknowledge them at all.

So just looking them in the eye and saying, I can't help you today, but I hope you have a good day or something that acknowledges them as a human being is one way forward.

in terms of like kind of the broader question of like, how do we handle interactions with those who are coming to us with much greater need than we can meet?

And I heard this again and again from people I talked to because the people who do this work are often on the front line of, you know, societal need that, you know,

Some of us might be more protected from.

So I'm talking about like bus drivers or librarians or social workers or community police.

These are people who are like right on the edge.

Again and again, they told me how desperate it felt out there.

they feel incompetent or helpless or kind of overwhelmed.

And that can be really daunting.

We have to kind of recognize that many people are feeling not just the pernicious effect of inequality and all these unhoused, but also many people are feeling really invisible.

They feel like a number.

They're being kind of processed in standardized ways.

all day, every day.

And the sense of invisibility is creating really a depersonalization crisis.

And you're not going to be able to solve that completely.

But you are going to be able to see them for a moment.

And I do think it makes a difference.

There's a lot of research that suggests these kind of

minor interactions that we might dismiss actually make a difference.

Sure.

Yeah, I am grateful to be mentored by Arlie Hochschild.

She's a sociologist of great renown who is actually a really

tremendous kind of the quintessential connective labor.

So when I was in graduate school, I came upon, I thought of an idea for a dissertation that captured my interest in the conflict between work and family.

And that was a sociology of sleep.

And so I did some interviews and my advisors, including Arlie, were

extremely excited about it.

They saw it as original, unique, no one's talking about this.

And I can see now, like in retrospect, that they are right.

It was a kind of unconventional and good idea.

But I lost interest in it and I decided not to do it.

And instead, I embarked on a study of consumer culture and how much we spend on kids and how that varies by

class and race and the meaning of stuff to kids.

And it went fine.

But there was some disappointment, I think, among my advisors for something that was probably a little more conventional, a subject.

And at the same time, Arlie was not like, no, you can't do that.

She just kind of was trying to coax my song out of me.

And that's the PhD advisor's task.

And I felt...

Not only did she give me permission or, you know, not only was I able to do this, I just felt throughout, you know, our decades long relationship now, her capacity to read and reflect what I was giving off to her.

And that really is profoundly moving and also empowering on some level.

So yeah, it's a blessing to have someone like that in your life.

That's so well put.

Parents shouldn't be saying, I want you to sing my song.

Parents should be saying, I want you to sing your song.

You know your kids so well.

It's very tempting to be like, this is what I see and I am right.

They have to make their way.

And, um,

Yeah, the restraint that that requires among those of us who have maybe studied our children all their lives is considerable.

I mean, I hear the pain in that question, and I would say it's widely shared and

One of the reasons why I wrote the book I wrote was to give people a vocabulary to be able to assert their needs as connective labor practitioners.

Because what I found is that too often we are relying on people as individual heroes.

And instead, there's a social architecture that organizations put into place that support it or impede it.

And it sounds like this writer is working in a context in which her labor is being kind of taken for granted and perhaps even impeded by her organization.

And that actually is a tragedy.

I ended up finding a set of factors that contribute to kind of a good social architecture where what kind of organizations are doing it right.

And one of the key factors is, are there other people to talk to who do this?

I ended up calling that a sounding board.

And are there sounding boards out there?

And this is, you know, something that therapists know, teachers know, you know, like they have those, that's a kind of common practice to have a group of people who are, you know, I had one teacher who was, he was like the math family, you know, the people who teach math, that's who I'm talking to about

Or therapists have a kind of very extensive, you know, supervision, but also, you know, kind of consultative practice with other therapists where they can talk about what they're experiencing or finding or processing.

Those are crucial.

I want to say one other thing about the kind of what I'm hearing underneath that email's lament, and that is about burnout.

a lot of the treatment for burnout is take a day off, take a vacation, make sure you take your lunch, practice mindfulness.

It's very individual.

And it also kind of all subscribes to the theory that it's too much relationship is causing burnout.

There's too many people kind of sucking you dry.

And I actually think that that's a misread because so many people talk to me about how sustaining they find these relationships.

So I started to think like we're running around with a metaphor of workers as like kind of these buckets of compassion that spring holes from which their compassion drains away.

And actually, I don't think that's the right metaphor.

I think we should think about like kind of the workers as soil and the relationships as rain.

And sometimes the rain is torrential or toxic.

And sometimes the soil is too dry.

But it's not that we don't need rain.

It's that we need the working conditions that enable the rain to be restorative.

Yes, for sure.

I just don't want all the onus to be on the individual people who are doing so much work.

But I agree.

I think sounding boards are a crucial component to finding relationship work sustaining.

And so, yes, you should petition your manager to set that up.

Or you can, you know, maybe end.

You can work to find them yourselves.

I mean, I completely agree.

As soon as it becomes a duty, it does start to feel onerous.

I guess I'm feeling like these two questions are related.

I think feelings of inauthenticity or feeling like it's something you have to do rather than something you want to do

is related to having to give, give, give, and it feeling like they are draining you rather than sustaining you.

Yet so many people I talked to said that this is the most meaningful work that they do.

My goal is actually to get people who write those kinds of questions over to the kind of feelings that many of my respondents were attesting to.

I think

Part of that is about thinking about where authenticity comes from.

So in my experience doing this research, authenticity in connective labor comes sometimes from whether you feel kind of affection for the other person or whether you feel like you're doing it as part of your professional practice and you get some kind of pride from doing it.

in that way.

But for the first part, the feelings of affection, I actually want to kind of push back on that a little bit.

I don't think you have to care about the other person to

deeply or much.

I mean, I talked to many therapists at the VA hospital, for example, who work with, you know, extreme cases of people with PTSD who might rant and vent and yell at them just like that other questioner was mentioning.

And so they were like...

My task is really to see the other person, but I don't have to have these great wills of affection for them.

And I think that is powerful and important to kind of say that this work doesn't rely on having to emotionally care for somebody.

You can still do it well.

You can still convey to someone that they are a human being and that they deserve to be heard and listened to.

without that.

Yeah, that sounds very difficult because whatever opinions the family members, or we could call them more generically the recipients or the students, the patients, et cetera, might have about the professionals, you have to kind of mediate that.

And that does sound difficult.

At the risk of sounding like I have a hammer and everything's a nail, my opinion is that if that person

actively sees the family members, that can actually go a long way in that mediation process.

For example, I spoke to someone who was a home healthcare aide, and she was known by her employer, her employing agency, as a hard cases specialist, because she was really good at seeing the other and just

That can really calm down the outrage if people are dissatisfied in any way.

Sometimes the family members are probably not dissatisfied, but when you're kind of handling that mediating role, it's really good.

I think actually probably both of them need seeing labor, need connective work.

I agree.

And actually, I bet, I think there are many different occupations that have this kind of mediating role, for sure.

Seeing those individual sides doesn't sound that hard to me.

What sounds hard to me is if you have to make them agree.

And I think there are professions where you have to somehow bring those parties together.

Assuming there is distance between them, that's the hard part, because especially since they aren't doing the work of seeing each other.

So yeah, I think probably professional mediators have this role, for example.

And, yeah, I think they would say, you know, given these, I think they would say something like, given these two parties that disagree, how do we get the, you know, get to a point where each of them, you know, feels like they have won or something like that.

It's my experience that

it's not painful to see people who disagree with each other.

Cause I guess in my experience of doing it, you're so kind of present with that person and you're just trying to understand their perspective.

So somebody else's perspective is only relevant if you're like trying to kind of fight with them or something, but really you're just trying to hear what their story is.

I don't think that that would be very difficult.

The difficult part is if you have to make them agree somehow.

When you talk to therapists, many of them say so many people only want to meet on Zoom now.

So COVID and the pandemic really altered the terrain, the working terrain for them.

And they say you can see the other over Zoom.

Now that's

That's actually controversial because you can't really have eye contact.

And so you're missing a lot of the bodily kind of just the vibe and the nonverbal communication that happens when you're in the same room.

And you're missing other things, of course, also.

But you can do it.

But I believe, according to what I hear from practitioners, it's completely exhausting.

So one of the things that I wrote about was how sustaining this labor is actually for people.

They get so much out of it.

People tell me, I feel honored.

I feel incredibly privileged that I get to hear this.

It's a deeply, powerfully sustaining practice for people.

And I think when it's on Zoom, it's exhausting.

I think the newer versions of ChatGPT and its inheritors can feel like being seen on some level.

I've heard people say, wow, I feel like I'm being seen right now.

And I think the kind of emotional human-like syntax that

and the not entirely predictable responses help people feel seen.

There's a couple of problems with it.

The first is that it's not an interaction.

Because it's not a human being on the other end, there's actually no risk

of judgment and on one level, that's a great thing for all the people who are afraid of the shame and judgment of others and who are walking around with dark secrets.

Many people can walk around with shame and the idea of having therapy that doesn't involve a human gaze

can be very appealing.

But because there's no risk of human judgment, people also are less attached to it.

This is also something that research has found that people like kind of are less motivated because they know it's not a human being.

So it's a kind of thing that engineers actually struggle with.

The more human they make it, the more judgment

It involves the less appealing it is to those who want to avoid judgment, the less human they make it, the more appealing it is to those who have shame, but also then the quicker the drop off because people don't consider the reflection of the other that hard won or that worth much.

You know what I'm saying?

Well, I do think that there's probably some minor uses that are important.

I think the same level like those who could get help from opening a book, I think can get help from seeking out some kind of technological assistance.

But I do think that there's something profound that happens between people and we risk losing that.

And it's so valuable, not just for the consumer or the learner or the patient.

but actually for society, for many people to be seen every day by different kinds of people produces a kind of belonging that has community effects.

And I do think that some of the kind of populist rage, et cetera, is stemming from people feeling unseen.

And so our democracy, our kind of social fragmentation

is reliant on whether or not people feel unseen or seen.

It's, I think, a vitally important kind of practice that underlies not just individual well-being, but social well-being.

So we go to technology at our peril, I think.

Yeah, people, it does feel like many early adopters are just running to embrace a technological replacement.

And I worry about that.

But while doing my research, I actually think there's other things to worry about that are equally problematic.

One is the idea that rich people will get artisanal connective labor from a human being and poor people will be the ones getting theirs from a bot.

And I think that's...

certainly implicated when people say, oh, it's better than nothing.

And I'm like, well, would you choose it for yourself?

So if the answer's no, then it's not better than nothing.

It's not something we should subscribe to as a society.

So that's one future that I see that is practically a present.

And then the other thing is this kind of triage model where the simple transactions, the simple interactions become automated.

And we already see that with like call centers and stuff like that.

When you finally get a human, it's after you've been shouting agent or whatever at your phone for some time.

Like the complex goes bumped, gets bumped to a human being.

And doctors talk to me about how they think that that's a potential.

Like they...

Some of them were open to that and some of them just saw that coming.

Yeah, I try and shut my own, like turn down the volume on my own issues or whatever and really just try and hear what they're saying.

I'm trying to think about like, what was it that let me say that's like a loss of innocence to that woman who broke her leg in horseback riding?

And for me, that was like trying to rephrase

the statement that, you know, the story that she was trying to, she was telling me a story, but under the story, there was an emotional message.

And I was trying to put that emotional message into words.

So I am deeply listening to the kind of facts of the case, but I'm also kind of trying to hear how she feels about the facts of the case.

And then I'm trying to rephrase it.

or maybe even find an image or a metaphor that captures it or something like that.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And that epiphany is,

It's like a release valve.

It has this relief that people feel and convey.

It's the power of naming what is unnamed.

And that can be unnamed to you or unnamed to other people because you don't feel like it's safe.

Like by naming it, you're saying to the other person, it's safe to say this in front of me.

So sometimes there's an epiphany like, I didn't even realize.

And sometimes there's an epiphany like, oh, I can say this out loud.

And both of those are very strong, have strong effects.

Thank you.

I really appreciate the time.