Alison Pugh

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.