(BEST OF) The Panini Generation: Caretaking Without Losing Yourself with Ai-jen Poo
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Why do caregivers feel exhausted and think they’re the problem?
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Pod Squat, if you've been feeling like you can't quite keep up lately, I want to tell you something that I wish someone had told me a long time ago. Maybe you're not failing at all. Maybe you've been trying to do a job that was never supposed to belong to one person. So many of us are caring for children while caring for parents, caring for partners, caring for friends, caring for coworkers, caring for everyone around us, while quietly wondering why we're so tired all the time. And because we're caregivers, we do what we always do. We assume the problem is us. If we were just more organized, if we were just more patient, if we were just more efficient, more grateful, more resilient.
But this conversation changed something for me because Ai Jen Poo helped me understand that what so many of us call burnout isn't just personal exhaustion. It's the inevitable result of a culture that depends on caregivers while refusing. To support them. She says something in this conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. She says, care. is the work that makes everything else Possible. Every business, every classroom, every hospital, every family. Every economy. None of it works without care. And yet the people doing that care work are so often invisible. So today's conversation is for every person invisibly holding up the sky for someone else. For everyone in the sandwich generation, or as Ai Jean calls it, the Panini effect, trying to care for aging parents while raising children.
For everyone who has ever wondered why doing the most meaningful work in the world can also feel so impossibly lonely and thankless. This conversation won't magically make your load lighter. But it might help you put down something you were never meant to carry. The belief that you're the problem. You're not. Let's go.
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things Pod Squad. Here's what today's gonna be. Today is gonna be Where we figure out that The reason we're exhausted and upset and we feel like we can't keep it all together. is not our fault. Okay. It's the fault of the system that we live in. And there are ways that we can perhaps make it better, even just by understanding. how the caretakers in our Country. Um became so undervalued and over taxed. And the person who is here is the only person who could help us put all of this into context and is a hero, truly a hero, who is on the front lines and has been forever fighting for the rights of caretakers, uh, like so many people who are listening and who are in the pod squad right now.
I, Jen Pooh, is an award winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women's movement. She's the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Woo woo! Executive Director of Caring Across Generations, Senior Advisor to Care and Action, Co-Founder of Super Majority, and a trustee of the Ford Foundation. You must be tired, I Jen. Igen is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and what's at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity, Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. You can follow her at at IGen Pooh. Hi Jinpoo, thank you for taking time out of your unbelievably important schedule to talk to us today.
You forgot the most important part of my bio, which is that I'm a proud member of the pod squad.
Oh, no way. Oh, a hundred percent. I live off of this pot. I love this pot and I love the squad. Everyone is so awesome. That makes
me so
happy.
How are you, Ijen? What's going on? We're gonna we're we we've talked back and forth about this hour and what we wanna do is really Go from the nitty-gritty. We've gotten so many voicemails from our pod squad, just people who are trying to keep it together with caring for parents, caring for kids, caring for sick people, caring for the whole world. And then being told to just put their oxygen mask on first, but nobody tells you what the oxygen mask is or where the oxygen mask is. It's a lot. And so we're we're gonna ask you to help us.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why do caregivers feel exhausted and think they’re the problem?
0:00–14:27
2
What is the “Panini effect” and how does it describe the sandwich generation?
14:27–23:19
3
How does Sarah balance caring for her children, aging parent, and her own well‑being?
23:19–31:21
4
Why is caregiving considered invisible work that sustains our economy?
31:21–41:33
5
What systemic failures make caregiving an unsustainable burden?
41:33–58:37
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from We Can Do Hard Things
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