Better Life Lab

Better Life Lab is back! In Season 2, join host Brigid Schulte as she explores the torture of "Inbox Zero", work schedule chaos, and the Japanese idea of "karoshi" — a sadly common phenomenon where people work so hard they die — and much more. The Better Life Lab podcast from Slate and New America will show you why work-life balance seems so unattainable for so many people—and what we as individuals, as organizations, and as policy makers can do about it. New episodes drop March 15, 2019.

It gets more intense every year — the drive to work longer and longer hours. And there’s striking new research that shows that women, who already get paid less than men, are put at a distinct disadvantage by an American job market that rewards overwork rather than performance.

In the final episode of season one of Better Life Lab, we hear from Youngjoo Cha, a sociologist at Indiana University and an expert on overwork and gender. Her research shows that, while the education gap is closing between men and women, overwork has all but cancelled out efforts to equalize the job market. In fact, the gender pay gap would have actually shrunk by 10 percent in recent decades if it wasn’t for this phenomenon.

Ciannat Howett, an associate professor at Emory University, shares her own story of job growth and overwork.

Podcast production by David Schulman.

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America.

No meeting Wednesdays and work from home Fridays are not enough.

In this episode, you'll find out how employers can really create a healthier and more productive workplace. Tara Oakman, a former Obama White House official who is currently working as a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and David Waldman, vice president human resources and administration at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, weigh in.

Email inboxes and push notifications were designed to keep us busy. But when we break it all down and how we think about busyness, we should be paying attention to the way our environment is designed — both at work and at home. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains how we can change our surroundings and our actions to fight our addiction to being busy.

Ariely is an author of The New York Times best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” a popular TED speaker, and professor and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. We also hear from David Sbarra, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Arizona, where he directs the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health. And he confesses — he is obsessed with busyness.

In Japan, workers are so used to working punishingly long hours that dying from overwork is a common phenomenon: so common, in fact, that victim families can and do routinely apply for worker compensation benefits. We hear the stories of Japanese workers caught up in a system of overwork, young activists trying to change things on the ground, and a professor trying to make sense of it all. Is it just a Japanese phenomenon? What can Americans learn from a culture of overwork?

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