When we ‘adult’, we’re thrust into an array of decisions that all seem equally weighted. Pressure from the economy, family expectations, peer to peer comparison, retirement? How do we make sense of it all before our time’s up?

That's the blurb we used to recruit the cast of the first season of work:ed - our pilot podcast project under Hatch Media. work:ed started out with the big questions around work and livelihood that preoccupied our own team of millenials and gen zs.

We wondered how others would answer the same questions that we held. work:ed, because it reads as "worked", past tense, the thing we all want to be able to say about our choices one day. The colon leaves room for whatever comes after work: an education, an edit, an ending.

To our cast - Moon, Darwin, Michelle, Peng Kai, Lakshmi, Nat, Sze Min, Justin, Priscilla, JP, Faye, Rukhsar, Praise and Daniel - thank you for lending your stories to our narrative experiment.

work:ed isn't perfect, and it doesn't really land like most content you see nowadays. It's a little bit slower, with nuances in the gaps, and we hope it sits with you longer too. Perhaps you will see yourself in some of these characters, and perhaps the stories that'll resonate with you will surprise you.

If you're curious about a generation's answers to these questions of work, we invite you to follow along. work:ed launches on Youtube and Spotify on 16th October, and snippets are out on Telegram, Instagram and Tiktok. 

What happens now? We see work:ed as bigger than this first season. Most of what we currently hear about work comes from the same few voices: the founders, the high-flyers, the ones with a neat story to tell. We want to balance that out, with more narratives from the people who keep things running every day, and find out how work sits alongside everything else in their lives: family, money, health, rest, and who they're becoming.

If Hatch exists to put people first in how we find, train and place them, work:ed is how we put their stories first too.

To our cast - Moon, Darwin, Michelle, Peng Kai, Lakshmi, Nat, Sze Min, Justin, Priscilla, JP, Faye, Rukhsar, Praise and Daniel - thank you for lending your stories to our narrative experiment.