Podcast Roundup Week #6

This week I listened to 33 episodes, but that count doesn't include the few episodes I listened to of a podcast called Gone at 21 that I immediately unsubscribed from as soon as it became clear that polygraphs were being taken seriously. Psuedo-science gets no respect from me.

The most compelling episodes I listened to this week were part of the genius podcast Death, Sex, and Money. The podcast is doing a miniseries called "Opportunity Costs" that is examining class.  Anna Sale, the host, is a genius. She gets people to open up about very hard topics and asks very probing questions, but she does it all while seeming sympathetic and kind. I honestly don't know how she does it. She's both hard-hitting and caring. It's a fine line and she walks it so carefully that as soon as I see an episode of DSM on my playlist, I feel like I'm in good hands.

This miniseries is really interesting. In the United States, we often don't talk about money, but class is a big deal.  The interview with the guy in grad school who was working two jobs just to make rent and couldn't really spend the necessary time on schoolwork is powerful. He talks about how he grew up working class and feels really stagnated right now. He also talks about having to face other grad students who don't have problems with money and how alienating his life is. He is seen as sort of "uppity" by the people at his part-time jobs, but his classmates just don't understand how the constant low-level stress of how to pay rent impacts his life.  It resonated with me in so many ways. You don't want to compare yourself to others, but it's hard when you are doing all you can and just can't get out.

There was another interview, one I wasn't sure I would care about, that dealt with two friends, Cat and Christine, who are very different classes. Cat is upper middle-class and Christine straddles the line between working class and lower middle-class. They both had trouble conceiving and Cat was able to afford fertility treatments and eventually the adoption process (that she admitted cost about $30,000 all told) and Christine just kept her struggles to herself as she was happy for her best friend, but was isolated because of money. Cat now has two kids and Christine doesn't have any.

These two sound like GREAT friends, but this difference in access to money is the giant, unspoken obstacle to complete understanding. 

It made me ponder the whole "I'm friends with lots of different types of people" cliche that people throw out to show how tolerant they are. Most of my friends are pretty much like me. They do similar types of jobs, they make similar types of money, they live in similar types of places, and have similar educations. But I do have some friends who didn't go to college and it's HARD to find places of overlap in our lives. We work, vacation, vote, and hobby quite differently, so when we get together there are a lot of awkward pauses as we try to figure out how to gloss over uncomfortable aspects of our differences. I also have friends who, while they have the same level of education I do, don't make as much money as I do.  Sometimes that can get awkward as we try to figure out equitable ways to distribute costs.  This awkwardness is usually fine for me, but I wonder about them. Is a brief discussion about cost something they go over and over in their heads. Is it more than "brief" for them?

I'd recommend you listen to this miniseries. Even the annoying woman who used to be married to a rich man who STILL receives alimony and lives a perfectly respectful middle-class life, but blames her ex-husband a lot of for her downturn in life, raises some interesting questions that I think we all could use some time to think about.  Plus, Anna Sale is my hero.