One of my guest's interview subjects took a fully remote marketing job and spent her first weeks scanning her new coworkers' faces on Zoom, trying to find any signal for what actually mattered at that company. She'd read a coworker's email and think, that has to be sarcasm. Then she'd get on camera with them and realize, oh my gosh, they were dead serious. That's what adapting to the modern workplace looks like now: equal parts wave and bewilderment. Craig Mattson, an organizational researcher and communication professor, spent years interviewing rising professionals about exactly this, and the metaphors he landed on (a wave of digital overwhelm, and the life raft you build to survive it) are why we're talking today.
Craig is a professor at Calvin University and the author of "Digital Overwhelm," built from dozens of conversations with Gen Z and millennial professionals navigating the intensities of the early 2020s workplace. He and I dig into what remote work quietly steals from us (facial cues, tone, trust) and what it sometimes hands back (safety, control, fewer unwanted approaches), plus why personality and home life shape how well any of us cope when the tech breaks down, which it always does.
We also tackle the question I know a lot of you are sitting with right now: if my job doesn't feel meaningful, should I quit? Craig's answer isn't a yes or no. It's four different postures people take toward meaningless-feeling work, and by the end you'll know which one you're in, and what to do about it.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzx6rGKTfjE
Craig Mattson is an organizational researcher and professor at Calvin University in the field of communication. His research centers on the vocational experience of rising professionals, particularly Gen Z and millennials, and the intensities and pressures of the American workplace across generations. He is the author of "Digital Overwhelm," built from interviews with dozens of rising working professionals about coping with digital-era work.
Connect with him on LinkedIn, or read his writing at The Mode Switch.
"All our models are wrong and some of them are useful." —Craig Mattson
"We have to become mindful of how our tools are shaping our work experience, and sometimes distorting our work experience." —Craig Mattson
"It's possible that you can find a posture towards your work that's sustainable, even if your job does feel kind of empty." —Craig Mattson
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