"You're exhausted and burned out..."

[minoanmiss]

"... because work is terrible", at Ask a Manager.

I was pretty surprised to see this on AAM. I would have figured she'd be more purely capitalist than to admit these realities.

Comments

[bikergeek]

I think she advocates for employees more often than you might think, or at least encourages them to advocate for themselves.

[acelightning]

Many cultures don't have a concept of "working at a job" - you get up and leave your home in the morning, go somewhere else and do something you hate doing for 8 hours, and then you're allowed to go home and relax. In many cultures, you just do something steadily through the day - it's more like farming or child care; tasks become necessary, and you do them, and then you go back to doing something else. You're grinding corn meal, or weaving, and then the baby cries, so you stop and feed her. Then you go back to hoeing the crops, or making pottery, until some other task demands your attention. But it's not like the American concept of "going to work".

[kore]

Yeah, having a job that you leave home to go to and spend a fixed amount of time at and then leave again is really pretty modern -- I think it pretty much dates to the Industrial Revolution altho even long past the railroad age there were still people taking in work in their homes. It also depended on the WWII labour boom and the post-WWII standardization of mass production, where workers themselves were basically turned into cogs in a giant machine and also encouraged to think of the company as "family" rather than depending on each other in solidarity for political power i.e. unions.

(yes I once read an economics history textbook! go me!) (also I totally vaguely remember Marx's early writings about the products of a labourer no longer being for them but instead becoming some kind of portable unit almost like a calorie ((stored energy)) that could be built up for other people but I REALLY do not remember it that well and I am not going to try to look up A Critique of Political Economy or whatever it was past 10 PM)

[acelightning]

Yes, it's probably part of the Industrial Revolution. And the concept carried over into education - children go to school for six hours or so a day, just as if they're going to a job (and of course the modern educational system was invented to teach children that this is the way they are supposed to structure their day, just like working in a factory.)
But it's not the only way to organize your time.

[kore]

Yeah definitely -- what sabotabby wrote below about that really resonated with me. And of course that attitude gets called "spoiled," and there's this minor breaking of the will that's supposed to happen under capitalism: everyone hates their job, everyone goes to their job, everyone counts down to their retirement, nobody is ever free of money/job title being the very most important thing about them. When I worked briefly at a state department job ((as a temp of course, did I get hired permanently even tho I revamped their database? NOPE)) I knew people there who had countdown timers on their desktops which were counting off the years, months, hours and seconds until they could claim a full pension. It's like retirement is supposed to be the "prize" for working your life away (and the reality that most elderly people are poor and often sick of course doesn't mean a damn thing).

[kore]

....oh, that book, based on that piece which really annoyed me, because all that stuff was happening to Generation Ex in the nineties and even the late eighties. It's SO NOT a Millennial thing.

"But as boomers were cultivating and optimizing their children for work" -- WTF. Millennials were born starting in like 1981, no? https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/

I just seriously do hate this, because for one thing it really shortens the period of time and the real origins of "temp work" and how out of the ordinary the Boomer ideal of working for the same company all your life and being taken care of by it, essentially, was. And yet how it's been held up as an ideal for decades and decades after it wasn't possible to start at a low level job in a company and work your way up and retire with a big cushion. What she's totally missing is that with "contract workers" (temps) you often don't get benefits, and with the inevitable shift to "gig workers" we are going allll the way back to pre-manufacturing individual workers piecing together not enough to live on through multiple jobs, often done at home (and with the ACTUAL 20th century piecework business, Etsy, this is literally sold to people as an awesome entrepreneurial opportunity!). So it's not just that Millennials got sold a bill of goods (ha, ha) about being able to follow their bliss AND pay the mortgage, it's that everyone got brainwashed by Fordism into thinking giant corporations actually gave a shit about their employees.

//rant rant rant

[minoanmiss]

So this is the work equivalent of "sex was invented in 1968", where the historically aberrant Boomers are being presented as historical type specimens. *listens and takes notes*

[kore]

SERIOUSLY yes. In the pop media, it's like "everything happened to the Boomers" has turned into "everything is happening to the Millennials," probably because articles are now click-driven and the Boomers and Millennials are the two biggest generations, IIRC. In fact I think the Millennials are bigger, altho I'm not sure. But it's just beyond dumb to me for her to suggest that the big shock of realizing you have an expensive degree and can't get a job you're overqualified for and you now have giant student loan bills to pay is a post-00s thing. I also think part of it is the pop media idea of the 1990s is as a happy prosperous fun time under Clinton whee! and nooo, not everyone was sharing in the dot-com bubble (which for one thing didn't start until about 1995). I mean "jobless recovery" was coined in about 1991, I think.

[gingicat]

Yes, it was in fact coined the year I graduated from college.

[kore]

I graduated December 1992! //gloomy fistbump AND then got to Seattle in 1999 right as the dot-com bubble popped. Ahahaha.

[gloss]

But it's just beyond dumb to me for her to suggest that the big shock of realizing you have an expensive degree and can't get a job you're overqualified for and you now have giant student loan bills to pay is a post-00s thing.
That drives me BATSHIT! Considering I, uh, dropped out of my super-expensive private college in 1992 because the student loans were going to be too onerous? Yeah.

[kore]

I honestly think it's the population size, because I remember ALL this "lazy, spoiled, demanding, privileged" stuff from Boomers about GenExers -- "you just want to walk out of college and get handed a job!" Well yeah that's how you told us it works.... But because Gen Ex is right after the Boomers and was so much smaller, nobody really gave a shit when we started defaulting on student loans and moving back in with our parents. But the Boomers are no longer the loudest voice in the room (most of the time) and the Millennials are a much bigger generation, so all of a sudden, whoha it's a crisis! And it IS a crisis, but it's the final manifestation of a crisis that's been going on for a long time. I mean people like me have been getting "useless" degrees in the humanities that don't translate to secure academic jobs or outside-academia jobs since what, the end of the 80s? And now it's 2020. If kids aren't realizing that there's no market for what they're paying a shitload of money for, I don't think it's all their fault. (And I'm cutting a rant here about how Obama encouraged people to go to trade colleges because OMG getting a degree is the most important thing ever, and how many people (most of them minorities) were utterly swindled and left with student loan debt they paid for nothing at all. People getting access to real education is great but "OMG get a degree to earn money" is not.)

[musesfool]

Yes, this. Gen X represent! *wry*

I graduated in May 1992 into a recession and kept the part-time (full-time in summer) admin job I had, and when that got cut to part-time (it was partly grant-funded and the grant ended), I got another admin job in another nonprofit. None of which had anything to do with my degree in Literature. *g*

I did try out a "career" type job in my late 20s, but it ended in ill health both physically and mentally, so I quit, took some time off, and then went back to being an admin, which I am really good at! And I've done it long enough to make a livable wage at it, and in the current economy, losing my job would be devastating, but it's not my "passion."

My parents only ever wanted us to be happy, and over the years, many a teacher and guidance counselor lamented my lack of ambition given my alleged potential. *hands*

[kore]

I graduated in May 1992 into a recession and kept the part-time (full-time in summer) admin job I had, and when that got cut to part-time (it was partly grant-funded and the grant ended), I got another admin job in another nonprofit. None of which had anything to do with my degree in Literature

LOL yes, I had so many temp admin jobs. So. Many. I actually got really really good at Access because it was just coming in (remember Access??) and I had to constantly enter stuff into it and fiddle around with it, so I thought I could get into database management for a while. That ALMOST happened, but the person who was supposed to train me during my probationary period moved several states away and checked in every week by phone. The results were not good. Nearly everyone I knew who had a humanities degree wound up in admin related jobs, or managed to change over into IT somehow, often without pro IT training. But IT is really discriminatory re age and then companies started requiring everyone to have CS degrees and that got closed off too.

I think I knew one person from my grad school program who managed to snag an assistant professorship back in the nineties, and that was because they could do feminist history, Victorian novels, something else AND computer support. Everyone was complaining you needed four or even five different fields to get a job. And then there were no academic jobs at all. And that was over 20 years ago. If people do get employed in the humanities now, they're doing it as adjuncts, which is temp labour for universities, and just about as exploitative and unreliable. It's a rotten self-perpetuating system which just gets more and more young people, students and adjuncts both, into terrible debt that they'll never get out of, and for what?

[jadelennox]

Yeah, I like Peterson as a journalist, but she's part of that whole millenial thing where they think they invented a lot of tribulations and ways of thinking. I suppose it's just part of ignoring Gen Xers -- you notice your parents generation, I suppose, and not the inbetweeners. Though my parents weren't boomers, and we certainly noticed boomers, as they're pretty much unavoidable.

[kore]

Yeah, I think it's generational -- younger people often just don't know that much about what is to them ancient history (not discounting myself there) plus the framework of the world is still changing so fast it makes different decades look really different than they are. I mean in the 90s I actually called in to an availability line and waited to be called by a temp agency for a work assignment, and now people get set up on their phones with apps for gigs. But the principle behind keeping workers that alienated and atomized is the same, just with new shiny tech.

The boomers DOMINATED media in the 80s and even some of the 90s in a way I just don't think people, especially younger people, can get today. I still remember when I was 18 it was the 20th anniversary of 1968 and that was what every magazine and paper was completely devoted to. And it wasn't just that "retro is cool," it was that as the boomers aged in the 70s and 80s they were nostalgic for the 50s and 60s culture they remembered. Then suddenly in 1991 Neilsen Soundscan started tracking records sales and surprise, the highest-selling records were hip-hop and R&B and rock turning to grunge. Not surprisingly that was when the earlier members of Gen Ex were in college or just finishing it. It was a bizarre forced nostalgia and extreme wossname, reactionary? -- no that's not quite the word I want, but the concept that the past was always better and everything should be rolled back to it. Gen Ex kind of got the media spotlight as lazy apolitical slackers, and then surprise, we actually had jobs and voted! and then, IDK, the idea of people turning 18 in 2000 got paid a lot more attention, from what I remember, and then post-2001 media was very different from everything.

[cjsmith]

I’m so glad I’m not the only one who notices this pattern. IT IS NOT A MILLENNIAL THING. Sigh.

(One problem contributing to this “it’s all Millennials” trope is not present in this piece, but I see it a lot: anyone the speaker/writer perceives as young is labeled Millennial. Millennials aren’t graduating college right now. Millennials aren’t 28 right now.)

Anyway, kudos to Ask A Manager for seeing that the work situation sucks. I think she’s been doing more and more of that lately.

[kore]

Yes! It's an ongoing thing! With capitalism! It's been going on for SO LONG now, the consequences are catastrophic so now people are paying attention! and then I flail like a Muppet.

Yeah, from what I see in the media, Millennials are either people who turned 18 in 2000 (born 1982) because the pop media needed thinkpieces for "the high school graduating class of 2000," OR the generation after Gen Ex (Gen Ex is 1965-1980, Gen Y is 1981-1996, according to Pew), OR EVEN people born in 2000 (who are now about to turn 21 and thus freelancers can churn out more clickbait thinkpieces), often called the post-9/11 generation. A lot of the demographics the online journalists are talking about as "Millennials" are the kids of Millennials! arrrrgh. Someone born in 1982 is almost forty now!

I have also detested Anne Helen Peterson ever since she wrote that article saying that Clara Bow, Carole Lombard Jane Fonda AND Jennifer Lawrence were all fake Cool Girls, but I didn't realize that was her when I read the "I'm just like this 27-year-old who got mocked for not being able to vote by mail" article. Someone who's 27 in 2019 is about ten years YOUNGER than she is. I think divvying up generations by decade is stupid (20-25 years seems like a much better time frame) but it sounds to me like she was in the last wave of Gen Exers who did the traditional college-grad school thing but then didn't go into academia, and instead she started work for Buzzfeed and wrote articles that went viral and got book contracts. I don't mean to say she has NO problems, but she definitely seems different than the younger people who are graduating and so unable to find work that they move back in with their parents, and have to defer student loan payments so often they wind up owing much more than they actually borrowed. But she's claiming that experience for the article (and for the book she based on it and got offered a contract for, which is probably going to sell a lot because the article's so buzzy).

[cjsmith]

I am with you on the Kermit flail. I do that a lot - generally when people start noticing a thing is bad (or, worse, having known but now taking action) only when it affects THEM.

And wow, I didn’t realize but A.H.P. does indeed seem like a real piece of work.

[kore]

I am with you on the Kermit flail. I do that a lot - generally when people start noticing a thing is bad (or, worse, having known but now taking action) only when it affects THEM.

Yeah, like all those panicky articles about SHOCK OHNOES THE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR WHITE MEN IS GOING DOWN!....by writers who never said anything about the life expectancies of Black women, because why would they.

[cjsmith]

RIGHT??? Yeah. That.

I am reminded of the fact that RBG got the equal protection clause to include sex when she defended several MEN who had been treated unfairly.

[sabotabby]

Not a Millennial, but when I was a kid, I realized that I was going to have to go to school on a school schedule for a foreseeable number of years, and then after that I was going to have to go to work every day until I retired, and the thought filled me with such existential horror that I almost couldn't continue.

I have never had a job I loved so much that I would rather do it than not.

[kore]

OMG, I remember sitting there in school as a kid having the exact same realization -- that people were going to be able to boss me around for greater and greater parts of the day and my autonomy basically counted for nothing -- and really freaking out. (So I coped by dropping out of everything pretty much! UH WRONG STRATEGY)

[sabotabby]

I'm not so sure it's the wrong strategy. Having been poor but relatively free and rich but abused and traumatized at work, it's a toss-up. Granted, I was poor in an age with a better social safety net...

[kore]

Yeah, when you actually hit rock bottom poor and have to do shit like go to the human services department and declare you have no income to get emergency food stamps, then there's SO MUCH paperwork and you have to wait around a lot of places and it's almost more like a job. Like, when we went to the food banks a while ago, that would take ALL FUCKING DAY, because the food banks would have long, long lines before they even opened, and then the pace was glacial, and most of the food banks were a long walk plus a long bus ride away. It's grinding.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, that is a lot worse. Like I had to go in and do interviews every week, which was shit, but I was still paying rent and getting food.

Now it's much more like the US here and rent isn't even possible on minimum wage.

[watersword]

She's been developing more of a sense of ....hmm, I'm not sure what to call it. But she has advocated unionizing more and more lately (she's always suggested raising concerns as a group, so maybe she finally made the connection to organized labor).

[kore]

Anyway something from me that isn't ranting HEY LOOK LIZZO ON THE COVER OF VOGUE

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EirplnKWAAAzqPj?format=jpg

[minoanmiss]

I was just writing about rounded black women and beauty and I remembered that you gave me this awesome link! Eee THANK YOU!

[kore]

AND they actually quoted her on Breonna Taylor and "No justice no peace" on the Vogue TWITTER ACCOUNT. Damn. Some things really are changing.

[kore]

ALSO, check out Olympic athletes costumed as Marvel superheroes: https://www.marvel.com/articles/games/olympic-athletes-marvel-avengers-makeover Including Simone Biles and Alysson Felix.