Dear Informational Interview, 

This weeks newsletter seeks to clarify something very important. While there are many skills—informational interviewing among them—that can be used solely for personal advancement, those same skills can also be used for nobler causes.

I don’t have much figured out, including how exactly I’d like to use my time on this planet. But I do know that I hope informational interviewing will help a great many people help a great many people. I won’t say more here. I hope you read on to understand better what I’m talking about. In the meantime…Keep the faith,

E

The Art of the Informational is free! But, one way you can support my work is by sharing it with your colleagues, friends and family!

Am I a shill for capitalism?

I have often felt a little uneasy about evangelizing the value of informational interviewing. Until recently I might have said, “It’s not a real solution,” or “It only works if you already have a certain amount of time and privilege.” But I wasn’t very good at articulating my discomfort.  And, anyways, people I really care about need better jobs and more money in order to be okay. Informational interviewing is the way to secure employment and earn more money. So I teach it in the hopes that it will help people. 

But still a sense of discomfort lingers and crystallized this week as I read “Saving Time” by Jenny Odell. 

I don’t know how to summarize what Odell is writing about, except to say she is exploring phenomenologies of time. The book does so much, so I recommend just reading it. But, there are a few sections that speak directly to the concerns of this newsletter. Early in the book, Odell critiques careerist self-help books that purport to teach readers “to play their cards right.”

Odell writes, “It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question ‘Who will do the low-wage work?’ is that it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not you. That answer doesn’t feel so good.” 

That, I think, get’s at some of the discomfort I feel with my entire approach to professional development. I have a compulsive need to help people have what they need, but is this approach too individualistic, too unconcerned with the many people who for a wide variety of reasons simply cannot follow my supposedly fool-proof protocol? 

The truth is, I hope that in ushering my coaching clients, friends and family members into a (literally) more conversational relationship with the economy, this work moves beyond the individual need or desire for more money, more status, or simply more satisfying work. 

There is no question that on some level, informational interviewing is about “playing your cards right.” But it doesn’t have to be only that. This skillset can unlock new ways of being, not just new ways of making more money. 

I’m drawing a line through Odell’s work that has to do with conversation. She doesn’t explicitly lean into a dialectic framing. She’s talking more about ways of being in time. But the conversational theme is present too, in particular where she writes of online forums where gig workers congregate to discuss the conditions of their labor. “Isolation is the harbinger of exploitation, and the forums give employees like gig workers the opportunity to compare notes and strategies,” she says.

It is in the context of organizing that the principles behind informational interviewing become more soulful and essential: reach out, share your story, find out what others know.  It is a strategy I’ve employed myself in my own efforts to organize against sexual harassment in an educational context. 

Conversations can create possibilities, especially where the subject is able to find fissures in their temporality which they can exploit.  Think union workers finding time to build solidarity on the clock. Or an Uber driver checking a reddit forum for Uber drivers while they wait for their next ride request. 

But some temporalities are almost devoid of possibility. Odell is especially concerned about the kind of temporal death that people can experience when trapped inside the socially constructed space-time of prisons. This cutting-off from social temporalities is among the cruelest things we humans do to one another.

The opposite of this kind of temporal death is an encounter with the other (an encounter that is thwarted if not impossible in many forms of incarceration). Odell writes, “People and things are alive when we become alive to one another. To regard someone is a balancing of power, an agreement not just to shift one’s center of gravity, but to admit to two centers.”

She later writes, “I feel alive when someone’s eyes light up, and mine do too.” She continues, “I’m alive to the extent that I can be moved.”

The fact of mass-incarceration is a crime against humanity and human temporality. I was tempted just now to say it’s beyond the scope of this newsletter, but it’s actually not. It’s not in the sense that nothing is beyond the scope of this newsletter. Because this newsletter, and what I teach, is about encounter, conversation and a movement “deeper and deeper into the world,” as Mary Oliver put it. Are there any readers working on the issue of mass-incarceration? I would like to know. 

Truthfully, the reader of this newsletter is less likely to be an incarcerated or formerly incarcerated person and more likely to be, what Odell would call “an overworked achievement subject.” Rather than having to contend with the temporal obliteration of incarceration, or the less total but still deadening work in temporally totalitarian space like Amazon fulfillment centers, for example, the reader of this newsletter is likely to be blessed with more choices and a more flexible relationship with time. This person might, Odell suggests, “save herself by dialing down personal ambition.”

There is a chasm that exists between people with the most painful relationships with time, and people with more flexible relationships with time. But even for the relatively temporally blessed, Odell says, there are many legitimate frustrations. She writes, “Some of those frustrations, whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, include the following: having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing in another, having to build yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, and having to ignore everything and everyone whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore. There is wanting more for yourself, and then there is simply wanting more.”

This newsletter is an expression of my “wanting more” for everyone. The conversational technology I’m advocating for can and should be used to bring about new ways of being, and new abundances of and in time for collectives of people.

I don’t yet know how this will work, I only know that it will.

What I’m reading….

Please don’t call my job a calling ~  Simone Stolzoff in The New York TimesStolzoff writes against the tendency to exploit creative and enthusiastic employees because their work is a labor love. As she rightly points out, love won’t pay the bills.

Daniel in the lion’s den ~ Erik Baker in The BafflerDaniel Ellsberg leaked the pentagon papers, an act that set in motion a turning of the tide of public sentiment against the Vietnam War. Ellsberg died this week. This thoughtful piece explores his anguish and the difficulty of the moral choice he faced.

The fake poor bride ~ Xochitl Gonzalez in The AtlanticA delightful and insightful personal exploration from a luxury wedding planner. Surprisingly, this piece is not an expert from a memoir, but if it was I would definitely read that book.

What was Nate Silver’s data revolution? ~ Jay Caspian Kang in The New YorkerDo you compulsively hit refresh on FiveThirtyEight during every major election? Are you a person with a pulse? This retrospective on the triumphs and travails of Nate Silver puts the strengths and limitations of data journalism into perspective.