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Former Condé Nast and Yahoo editor’s new memoir explores media-industry workaholism — and recovery from it.
In the 2010s, Jennifer Romolini had reached the top of the corporate media ladder. With high-profile positions at Condé Nast and Yahoo — and as chief content officer for Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland.com — Romolini appeared wildly accomplished and personally fulfilled. Except that she was falling apart, mentally and physically, from all the stress, caffeine, and never logging off.
In Romolini’s acclaimed new memoir Ambition Monster, she looks back at her personal burnout journey — she even needed vocal cord surgery due to overuse — and how it reflects a wider broken workplace culture.
Romolini: Change feels impossible until you do it. I don’t think that I could have conceived of another way to live and support my family. You start getting more and more stuck as you keep going. [You say], “Well, I absolutely have to make this much money, and I have to have health insurance through this company. I have to, and I have to, and I have to.” All of these things start boxing you in.
The truth is, climbing the career ladder is very narrow. The world is actually much more expansive. But climbing a career ladder is so conventional, one size fits all, and prescriptive.
To answer your question more specifically, I’d been feeling an inner rot for years. I just had not conceived of the idea that I could do something else.
It’s all part of this idea of being “good.” This idea that seeking validation and all the marks that come with external success are actually meaningless — but maybe [they] feel good in the moment.
Romolini: When you put a career before everything else, you neglect everything else. It’s an obvious calculation. I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t care about taking care of myself. I thought of myself as a machine built for work. … But for sure, the fact that I kept running on [my] voice, even after a doctor had told me not to, even after I knew the stakes — that I could potentially have stopped being able to talk if I kept talking in the way I was…
I kept going because [I thought], “How can I let this project down?” You start to see your own sickness, that this is not sustainable. … What am I achieving for? Just abusing myself this much? Am I willing to sacrifice my health and happiness for a job.
Romolini: It’s crushing to realize how little is in your control. Because we have this false sense of control: “If I input this, I will output this.” … And possibly we can, but it’s going to cost most of us a lot more than some of us.
I started seeing it with my white male peers, who had pedigrees and could move through the world with ease. It seemed like they just fell into promotions and assignments. I mean, even my husband, who’s also a writer. He just fell into things. And everything I got was so hard won.
I especially saw this as a class issue at Condé Nast, which really kind of broke me in some ways, because I worked really, really hard. I worked harder than almost anyone in that office. And my working hard was kind of looked down on. It was like, that was not the thing to do. The thing was to breeze through the thing — to be known and important and wealthy enough that the job didn’t matter that much.
Those were the people I was seeing get rewarded: the people who were connected. [They projected] an idea that they were something, and so everybody treated them like they were something. This was all grandfathered in, nepotism, and, you know, money. It was very much separated by the “Chanel haves” and “Chanel have-nots.” And I was the middle-class kid … I was broke. The playing field was not level.
Romolini: Workaholism is not as studied as it probably should in the rise-and-grind culture of the United States. But the little research that is available makes a very clear connection between childhood trauma and workaholism, specifically around something called “parentification.” Psychotherapist Bryan E. Robinson has done a lot of work around this. He’s the one who devised the work addiction risk test.
Parentification is when a child is exposed to things that they are not developmentally ready for. That could be a child caretaking a parent, or it could even be having too many things explained to them that they were not ready to hear. Too much access and few boundaries. Being a confidant to a parent, hearing about adult themes that were just too big.
So what happens is, the kid becomes a perfectionist after that. It’s like, they’ve taken on too many things. They become a mini-adult way too young. That sort of drives them throughout their lives.
The other psychological concept that I thought about a lot was when kids are abused or in chaos. Children need to believe that their parents are good. So when their parents are not good, having a hard time, the child internalizes that. The child takes on that they’re bad. This, for me, was so important. Because I had my whole life been searching for goodness. I certainly sought it out through achievement.
Romolini: I think we need to interrogate our behavior and our decisions. Why are you going above and beyond for a job? Why do we always bring an “A” game to everything when a “B” game will probably suffice? And what are you giving your energy to? I no longer go full force in anything that doesn’t light me up, that I’m not getting energy back from.
For me, the only things I get that kind of charge from are creative projects: books, I wrote a podcast last year that required my whole brain for a couple of months. It was worth it, I loved it; I didn’t feel depleted by the work.
So, I think that’s how we start to change. Because I think that we can get into a trance of just moving through the career and not ever being thoughtful or present for the decisions we’re making. It’s just like, “Well, of course, I’m going to do this next.” But why? Is it what you want? How does it serve you? What do you want at this point in your life? … If an opportunity came once and you didn’t really like that opportunity, an opportunity similar to it that you will like better is likely to come along.
Romolini: “Slow down” is my No. 1. Slow down, it’s not going anywhere. … What matters is how you feel and your relationships. Those are the significant things that you’re going to remember when you die. You might remember some work you were really proud of, but most of it, you won’t. Try to have some fun along the way. Try to give it some levity.
When I was a manager, I was getting all these pressures from everybody. But to my staff, I would always be like, “Look, it’s just a website.” Most of us are not out here saving lives with our little typing. Everybody tries to make things an emergency, and there’s so few things that are emergencies.
The last thing is, take so many beats if you’re triggered. I think work is really triggering, and I think we don’t talk about it enough. I think we shame spiral all the time. We can really catastrophize.
Take space. Don’t knee-jerk react. Just give yourself the pause. All of these are all in the same piece: Nothing’s an emergency. Don’t rush. Take a pause. Try to be lighthearted. Try to have fun. Like, we need to earn money to live, but it doesn’t have to be this hard.
Romolini: Well, I have a full-time job that I really love a lot. I climbed back down the ladder — or sort of raced down it. I am basically doing the job that I did 20 years ago. I’m a beauty blogger, and I love it. I test and review beauty products, and I try to get some writing in every day. I have a couple of standing meetings a week. But my bosses are really respectful of work-life balance, and they really respect me a lot, which just feels like a miracle.
Romolini: I wish that we rewarded people more for achievements like self-regulation. I was messed up last week, I got a tough edit. I was writing an essay, and I had not been given a lot of direction. I also was rushing. I’m at capacity right now in a way that I’m not usually. I got an edit back, and the editor didn’t like the story. And man, did I spiral. Man, did I feel shamed.
I started doing the forensics — I looked at everybody who had been shared on the document. I felt the humiliation. A wave of shame just went all over me, and I started spinning out. It was a couple of hours. It’s terrifying to be in that place. It’s shocking that you can regress back into it.
So what I did was, I took the rest of the day off. I went for a walk and I re-centered myself. I talked to some friends. I didn’t do the thing I used to do, which was throw my entire body at the problem. Instead, I just paused until I could handle the situation and until I could see it accurately.
Because so much of workaholism has to do with this projection of what’s happening, this distortion of reality that’s not true. I’m a completely competent writer. This was just a miscommunication. But in that moment, I couldn’t see it. And I had to pause everything until I could.
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