[3:21] Episode 49 of Issue 5: Exploring the Meaning of Work and Life Balance

Learning English is not only about mastering grammar and vocabulary but more importantly about being able to use it naturally in real-life situations. However, textbook sentences are often too formal and quite different from expressions used in everyday life. To speak authentic and natural English, exposure to dialogues in real contexts is necessary. Here, we select frequently used daily English expressions covering social, work, and travel scenarios, helping you break free from "textbook English" and learn how native speakers really talk. Below is the content of this episode "Episode 49 of Issue 5: Why Do You Work?". Keep accumulating, and make your English closer to real life!

I had a talk with Carrie, mother of Will's friend Jack and wife of Dan, a wealthy Democrat and party contributor who's just been given a big job in the Clinton administration. She is a woman whose life is changing. She's been at home for six years with two kids, which has been no burden. She's been having fun and her rolling apartment, one room rolls into another, which rolls into another, has just been sold to a show business couple. She's smart and thoughtful and the only regular problem in her life, she's told me, is embarrassment at the dinner party. When somebody says, what do you do? And she says, I'm being a mother. It is one of the strangest things about modern life that women feel defensive about doing something that was until roughly a quarter century ago in the whole course of human history natural. I talked to Carrie in a neighborhood lunch place. She told me she's been offered a White House job. She told me she's actually a little ambivalent about the job and she asked what I think. I said that on the one hand, it's nice not to have to get up at 5.30 a.m. to do yourself before you do the kids and it's nice not to go to an office. On the other hand, I said, it's something really something to be immersed in history and part of something like a new administration. She nodded and fussed with the menu. You're kind of tired of on the one hand on the other, aren't you? Yes, she said. Well, do you want to know what I really think? Oh, yes, she said. So I said, look, I think that of all the ways you can spend your time between now and 時, work is just overrated. There are only two reasons to work. One is to support yourself or your family, which is the reason most people work and it is not to be argued with. The other is if you have a need to share something with other people who are alive. Artists and painters and great arguers and thinkers and makers of beautiful cabinets. People who make the best shoes ever. People who have a divine compulsion. They all have to work. To me these are the only two reasons that make sense. If you don't need money and you don't have a compulsion, you're lucky. You can stay home and be a good mother who's actually there. You can be part of the kid's school. You can have time for friends when they call and need you because one's waiting for the biopsy and the other just had this terrible affair. You'll be the only calm woman in Washington. She asked me why I work. I told her to support myself and my son and also because of a compulsion. I want to be immersed in life and name what I see. A week later she sent me a note. She said she's thinking of putting off work for a while to see how it goes.

Above is the content from Qicaiwang about Episode 49 of Issue 5, "Why Do You Work?". Hope it helps you!