at the risk of sounding incredibly lazy, a bit entitled, and maybe even a tad bit pretentious: I hate working. i generally oppose the use of stereotypes, but it’s almost too on the nose that I feel like this and I am ‘gen z’. some stereotypes are true I guess. but I mean, it’s not like burnout is new to the world. and hating the job you spend the majority of your time at isn’t some rare, unique experience. most people you meet didn’t, don’t, and won’t follow their dreams. maybe they couldn’t. for whatever reason, we’ve all kind of just normalized finding joy in the parts of life outside of the mundane day to day jobs we carry. as the official woke friend, i’m gonna go ahead and immediately call out that capitalism is the obvious culprit. there’s more to it than that though.
the key function to any operating system is essentially cooperation– things have to work well together. basically, you need multiple players if you wanna participate in a team game. capitalism works, not just because of the exploitation of greed– but also largely in part because of our complacency. you can’t participate in a team game if the players refuse to play. obviously, this is over-simplification of a deeply intricate concept, but i’m hoping the point sticks. i think maybe at some point in history, hard work did actually equate to success. (this is regarding actual material wealth, so like, the idea that me working my 9-5 religiously coupled with great spending habits will somehow result in the accumulation of wealth over time. not about working hard in school & getting good grades or whatever.) but i don’t think that’s a realistic view of the world anymore.
things are set up to where it’s damn near impossible to get ahead. if your rent is ⅓ of your income, your transportation costs are ¼, and you give yourself an allowance of even ⅕ of your income,over ¾ of all of the money you make is already gone. i didn’t even include groceries, personal expenses, utilities, etc. (funny how i made sure to budget in a personal allowance, right?) to my point, that’s just not feasible considering the way life goes. if your car stops and it’s gonna cost half of your biweekly check, your landlords don’t care and still want their money on the first. if you lose your job, the power in your home is still in danger of being disconnected if you can’t manage to pay when it’s due. so if you’re living check to check, it’s going to take a whole lot more than hard work and good spending habits to get you where you wanna go.
it seems like there are increasingly more and more ways to manifest the american dream– all of which require things attained by those who have already seen the materialization of said dream. in layman’s terms, you need money to make money. and to get back to point of this all, working is less and less meaningful for that reason. people are becoming aware of the fact that they are far more likely to be homeless than to ever be a millionaire & experiencing a growing disillusionment with the ideals that they’ve been taught to blindly glamourize. most people don’t even want a gigantic home or a bunch of money. (this is an actual fact and there’s data that backs it up). but because we’re constantly force fed this narrative that bigger is better and more is never enough, we’re constantly running the hamster wheel as a result.
i don’t know what the future holds for us, but if the current climate is any indication, it damn sure isn’t gonna be the good ol’ american dream. at least not in the ways so many of us have imagined. change is scary, but inevitable? (insert politically incorrect video response to the pandemic by vanessa hudgens here please) i mean, old regimes must fall to make way for new kingdoms, right? things change, people change, life changes. for me, and maybe for a lot of other people, the acquisition of success and/or happiness– and what that looks like– is also always changing. with all these changes though, it’s important to always keep in mind that the things closely tied to your pursuit of happiness can not be entirely tangible. if you promise yourself that you will be happy when you buy a home, what will happen if you never get the chance to buy a home? or if you buy it and lose it? if you assure yourself you will find peace once you’ve settled in your job, if they hire someone else? what happens if you’re fired?
the point i’m making is that we’ve all been conned. our schools taught us that this was normal. our government convinced us that this was the only way. and our parents trained us up to believe in the dream. but they all failed us. there are simply things that we should all have access to without any prerequisites. and to be honest, i don’t even really think the work itself is the problem. i mean, it’s a fact of life that you have to work. the problem is the severely unhealthy relationship we’ve all come to have with it. that, along with the obsession over the promotion of the disease that is consumerism.
i warned that i may sound entitled and lazy, but only because i’m acutely aware of how people perceive the idea of work, not at all because i actually believe that i am. i, without a doubt, understand the value of work. i just don’t at all agree with or understand what working costs us. i feel like this generation actually has a real chance of revolutionizing what it means to be employed– to make a living for yourself. i mean, how can anyone daring to challenge a regime be labeled anything but tireless and dedicated? it takes courage to acknowledge that change needs to happen, but it takes strength to actually usher it in. and honestly, i think that’s the real work that needs to be done.
-frankie hendrix
