Reviews and Comments

You can see the way the DNA of this book shows up in other, later texts, particularly Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Reading this in 2025 is interesting because so little has changed—except that things have perhaps gotten even more dire, with 25 additional years of increased costs and the minimum wage only having risen minimally since then. However, I just wasn’t particularly compelled by Ehrenreich’s time “slumming it” as a low-wage worker. I’ve been a low-wage worker, and in my opinion having an “outsider” tell this story and find ways to make it palatable and legible to the class of people who read the NYT makes it less incisive. The best parts of this book are the additional research and footnotes, and there’s not enough of that for me to recommend this book over something like Maid (which offers a better, more visceral personal narrative) or Evicted (which avoids the trap Ehrenreich fell into by building the book’s narrative off of interviews rather than centering Desmond’s experience, and offers more background research).

I don’t regret reading it and it wasn’t a bad book, but it does surprise me how often this still gets recommended even now when it really doesn’t feel like it has much to say.

Also, the random fatphobic diatribe at the end of the book was so fucking annoying lmfao. Absolutely took me out of the book and made me roll my eyes, especially since I’m 99% sure we already had research indicating that poverty and fatness are deeply correlated in the US when this was written. Ehrenreich really shows her whole ass by denigrating the (likely similarly poor and overworked!) “wide-body” Wal-Mart customers in comparison to herself and her thin coworkers who are apparently more worthy of empathy. I didn’t put the book down after reading this bit because honestly it’s kind of to be expected from a middle-class white woman writing in 1999/2000, and also because it’s from a section where she emphasizes that the work seems to be making her more cruel and less empathetic. But that bit honestly just feels like punching down and also a missed opportunity to bring in some interesting research about how pursuing health, including a socially acceptable thin body, is not available to the working poor, and how being fat opens one up to additional discrimination and further poverty.

Basically: there are better books on this topic out there, by people with more complex lived experience. This book might be enlightening if you have never worked for minimum wage or cleaned toilets for a living, but if you have—skip it, you know more based on your own experience than Ehrenreich could have possibly put into this book.

This is really just okay. I got excited at first at the beginning when she mentioned being from the Bay Area and growing up in a similar environment to what I did (parents working in tech, growing up in strip mall suburbia in the South Bay), but overall I just wasn't impressed with the arguments made or the examples of how one should "resist the attention economy." It felt deeply individualistic--very "well just use your willpower to put your phone down and touch grass sometimes!" Reading this in 2025, with knowledge about things like dark patterns, the degree to which our behavior is constantly tracked (and, arguably, in some ways even predetermined by tech algorithms), the ways this information is being utilized to cause real harm and violence on a mass scale... it just didn't hit.

I did appreciate the degree of historical grounding re: things like the hippie communes of the 60s and 70s and how "dropping out" isn't really the option we might fantasize about. Still, the suggestions made throughout the book didn't smack of "resistance" to me. It just came off as a middle-class white woman from one of the most privileged places on earth (speaking as a middle-class white woman from just down the road) universalizing advice and experiences that are not particularly useful or applicable to anyone else. I'd skip this one.

This was a 3.75 for me. I did overall really like this book--it has Nagoski's signature voice (and literally, too, since I listed to the audiobook!) that feels both knowledgeable and playful, and sympathetic without being entirely cloying. I gleaned a lot of useful information from this about how to actually manage stress in ways that are lasting... and also had to acknowledge that a lot of the stuff that I choose to carry isn't really mine to worry about. It's wild hearing a phrase like "human giver syndrome" and hearing it described and going "oh, so, like, my whole personality? coooool cool cool cool." Would recommend this to anyone who constantly feels like they're drowning. It's a self-help book for sure, but backed by research and with many actionable solutions and useful examples.

I think the only part I didn't like was the bit re: body positivity, not because it was wrong or bad, but just because I'm a fat liberationist and have Done The Reading. So that section felt like being taken back to preschool and honestly felt like it stretched on way too long. I'm sure it's helpful and useful for others! All of that was just stuff I knew already and left me bored and ready to get to the rest of it. That and having to hear "patriarchy (ugh)" with the "ugh" said aloud every time the word came up kind of made me cringe. We can use the big girl words! It's okay!!! (But also this book was published in 2019, truly A Different Time.)

One other downside: the audiobook has music clearly designed to elicit emotional reactions at points, which I did not love.

But these are very minor gripes. The centering of the human need for community and connection is, in many ways, what makes this book stand out. Absolutely worth a read, especially if you are a perpetually exhausted woman.

Parts of this were interesting and worthwhile. I appreciated the focus on specific studies and examples of positive changes that have been made (and are still being made!) toward the beginning of the book, and the historical and cultural context discussing why some cultures and locations have robust third places and why others don't in the middle of the book.

I was really put off at various points by the lack of depth in the author's analysis, however. Particularly at the end when he discussed the "Polis Stations," I found myself yelling "PLEASE read Angela Davis or ANYTHING about prison abolition!!" at the audiobook as it played. I feel like the book suffers from having been published in 2019, and in many ways it feels quite dated just six years later. The bits about "reaching across the aisle" feel trite and a little nauseating in April 2025. And, as someone who is from and still lives in the Bay Area, much of the authors' final chapters made me roll my eyes. His criticisms of various tech corps and the billionaires who built their wealth from them are incredibly mild, and frankly read like reputation laundering (and I would've said the same had I read the book in 2019, because all the same people still sucked pondwater then and we'd all had years to recognize it by that point) and also tainted by a misguided belief that tech barons and megacorps are telling the truth when they say they want to do any kind of good in the world and not just extract every ounce of value they can. Capitalism and capitalists might be bad and destroying social cohesion actually!!

Basically: there are some nuggets in this that made it feel worthwhile for me to read, if only to give me a jumping off point to dive into the work of the researchers the author cites, but altogether the analysis felt shallow and at many stages like it missed the forest for the trees.