Why we should "sleep on it" more often
Hiatuses and hot takes about dog poop and the meaning of life.
“Get a dog, walk it, clean up after its poop. Feel, in your hands, the warm turds of something that you love unconditionally and that loves you back in the same way. Reflect on this.”
A golden nugget of advice, isn’t it? It comes courtesy of a biting but enjoyable essay-slash-listicle published nearly 11 years ago. This sentence is good counsel on its own, but becomes great within its context.
The short story:
After moving away from Washington D.C., a journalist wrote an essay bashing the city. It published in Politico.
Now, everyone in DC reads Politico - and if they don’t, they at least read its daily newsletter, Playbook. Sometimes just because they want to see their promotion in print, or to see who was spotted leaving Le Diplomate last night, or any other number of idiosyncratic reasons that would take an entire newsletter to explain. It’s an interesting place.
Anyway, he may as well have stuffed a copy in everyone’s mailbox. His article went a bit viral, and people penned response essays, leading to this gem about dog poop.
I wasn’t living in DC at the time, and I didn’t read any of the articles, including this one, until many years later.
Even without a dog in the fight, as it were, this sentence landed.
The author is essentially telling a misbehaving puppy to “leave it.” Don’t burn bridges as you leave, dude - go find some meaning elsewhere, or at least some better friends. And, before you share the negativity in a permanent format, go touch some grass. Then tell us how you feel.
The good news is that Nice Work is a much nicer place to be than Washington D.C.!
You have all been so kind and welcoming of this newsletter - not just by continuing to open and read it, but by sharing it with your friends and family, telling us what you found most helpful, sending in ideas…. and that has kept us going in more ways than you know. Thank you, so much, to each and every one of you! 🥺
We also (quite obviously!) took a hiatus this summer.
Personally and professionally, it’s been a lovely time, and also a taxing time. Too few hours in the day, too few days in the week, and July seemed to disappear entirely, etc….
So, with the time remaining, given the choice to close the laptop and experience life away from work, or to write about work, we chose the former.
After that, the last thing we wanted Nice Work to become was a weekly screed about the workplace. While it is, for example, fun to read hate essays about cities you also don’t like, it doesn’t help you find the city you might love. Snarky workplace takes help us feel less alone, but they don’t necessarily make our time at work better, easier, or nicer.
TL;DR: Earlier this year, with the workload and life load quite heavy, it just felt like it was getting easier to write snarky shit than it was to write encouraging, positive, optimistic shit. So we took a break.
Now on the other side of a lot of positive thinking, good reading, and life planning, we are excited to be back!
Nice Work remains a newsletter for, about and in support of those trying to make work a nicer place to be.
And by work, we mean the things we do to earn money, so we can spend the rest of our time doing what matters.
Like getting our bestest boy a pet rock.
Back soon!
xxRachel and the Nice Work team