RSS Amplifier

What Work Should Be · Dec 3, 2025

May your days be merry and your problems be January's

0
Sign in to vote or save

Bree Groff · What Work Should Be

The Beatles, but make it Christmas in NYC

Hi! I’m Bree, author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously), company culture consultant, speaker, and generally happy human. Here I write about how to have better days at work and in life. We all deserve more than “getting through the week.”

We are here! The time of year when it becomes ever-more reasonable to ask “Is this a December problem? Or a January problem…” The time of year when we’re toggling between “finishing strong” and “What is enough?”

Seems to me, ancestrally, that Thanksgiving was supposed to be the pinnacle of “We’ve harvested! Let’s eat, get the jammies on, and call it a year.” Somehow the modern corporate world missed that memo and like some kind of overworking groundhog has declared “Three more weeks of working winter…” Alas.

Still, the month of December can be a beautiful month. Here are a few posts that I hope will brighten these shorter days.

Come join us in the land of paid subscribers! The water’s fine <3

AP Gratitude

·

November 25, 2025

I hope this holiday season you find it easy to be grateful. But if your holidays come with challenges, then remember that’s just the universe placing you in AP Gratitude. Congrats, you are very advanced. 😉

the emperor is nAIked

·

November 20, 2025

For a lot of people, I think AI mandates feel like working as a masseuse, being handed a hammer, and then when you don't use it, told you’re not creative enough to figure out the efficiencies.

I mean, sure, crack someone’s skull and they won’t mind their lower back pain so much?

Fresh pep for your step

20 short rules for better days at work

·

April 14, 2025

Play music that came out the year you turned 18. If you work in an office it’ll be a conversation starter and might even defang ageism by normalizing BEING AN AGE, any age. Plus, there’s no music that’ll brighten your day faster than your teenage music.

Vintage habits

·

February 4, 2025

I’m feeling more empowered these days to simply like what I like and use what I want to use. I will cheer every innovation available in dementia care for my dad. For regenerative farming. For fixing the NYC public transit system. But I don’t need my books shipped to me, and I don’t need to smell my movies.

Why I value moments over milestones

·

May 19, 2025

A graduation is made up of of a million pages turned. An anniversary blooms from the compost of a million tears and winks. The peak of retirement is so tall because it’s built on a foundation of a million Mondays.

Milestones are beautiful. And yet, if they’re our only joy—if the moments that preceded them were valued as input alone—we’ve lost. Our finite days on this planet are too high a price to pay for the hope of cake one day.

What if schools taught a “Tools for Happiness” course. We talk so much about preparing kids for their futures, and yet we never explicitly teach the one thing most people say they aspire to above all else, the one thing parents say they want for their kids above all else: happiness.

What good is it to be successful if you’re not actually enjoying your life? Ooh I have all sorts of ideas for curriculum, for guest lecturers, for projects. Given most schools don’t even teach basic personal budgeting, we’re not exactly killing it on the life skills currently so this is a stretch. But given the wild popularity of programs like Stanford’s Life Design courses and NYU’s Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing, not to mention THE ENTIRE SELF-HELP INDUSTRY, seems like knowing how to enjoy your days should be up there with knowing the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

What’s on your mind this week? Tell me in the comments!

Read the original on breegroff.substack.com

Comments

Nothing yet. Say the first thing.

    Sign in to join the conversation.