The Joys of Work

There have been a spate of TikTok videos from Gen Zers bemoaning their fate as work-a-day plebes, now that they’ve graduated from college. This one from Brielle went viral a few months ago.

“. . .this is my first 9-5 job after college and I am in person and I’m commuting into the city and it takes me fucking forever to get there. There is no way I’m gonna be able to afford living in the city now so that’s off the table. I get on the train at 7:30 and I don’t get home til 6:15 earliest, and I don’t have time to do anything! I want to shower, eat my dinner and go to sleep. I don’t have time or energy to cook my dinner, I don’t have time or energy to workout so that’s out the window. . .”

You get the idea. She goes on for another 45 seconds or so like that, weeping and just coming to the realization that being an adult is hard.

Never mind that Brielle has about 250k TikTok followers and in her bio she has an “inquire” email address suggesting that she is taking press and promotional opportunities as an “influencer.” So maybe that job she talks about is for show and the real job is crying on TikTok for her quarter million followers which doesn’t sound that hard.

If we set all that aside (that she is likely an “influencer” making money that way), she’s not wrong. Once you have a “9-5” job you don’t have much time for anything else. First of all, it’s not usually 9-5. It’s usually more like 8-6+. Second, there’s usually a commute of some sort. So then you’re talking 7am-7pm that is taken up with commuting and working. And that can be kind of tiring so then you don’t maybe want to go work out at 7:30pm. And then go out at night with friends (if you’re young this is a consideration). Or maybe you do and you’re just exhausted all the time. At any rate, there isn’t a lot of time lying about wondering how to fill your time. It is mostly filled for you and if you try to squeeze in some “me time” it is at the expense of sleep.

When I got my first “real job” the hours were crazy and the pay was garbage. I worked from about 8am until whenever. Sometimes super late . . . 9pm, 10pm and beyond. But if we worked late, then we got free pizza which was helpful since my salary was 17k a year in San Francisco, which in 1994 you could still live on if you had a bunch of roommates. The 17k a year sounded great when I got the job but I did quickly learn that meant my checks were about $500 each, twice a month, which covered rent and cheap food (a lot of rice and beans and Top Ramen) and the occasional night out IF I scoped out $1 happy hours with free hot dogs. It definitely did not cover car repairs and $50 brunches with mimosas. Maybe a greasy diner breakfast after a night out at the club, raving until the wee hours.

I’m not complaining. I loved it. Every second of it. That is, when I wasn’t crying about my car being broken into (a common occurrence in San Francisco, even back then) and not being able to afford to get the window replaced; or about getting ghosted (that wasn’t a term back then but it was a thing) by some guy I liked; or thinking I was in love with someone who simply wasn’t in a position to love me back (either he was gay, or an addict, or a garden variety loser, or taken by someone else or some combination of all of those).

Still, I loved every exquisite moment of it. I was young, and on my own in a city I loved. San Francisco was the place for me. If you’d ever felt like a weirdo — ever in your life — this was it. The city wasn’t yet brimming with douchey Google stock option millionaires or start up bros or Tesla driving assholes who think they are saving the world but are really just the same as every other rich consumption and status obsessed jerk who ever walked the earth. San Francisco in the 90s was filled with artists and punks and hippies and dancers and free spirited young people. I. Loved. It.

At any rate, I chose to work hard play hard, as they say, and went out quite a bit after working long days. I chose to be exhausted most of the time because hey, I was young and I could handle it. I also chose not to exercise at all and to eat a ton of fast food, because my job was working on the Taco Bell account at an advertising agency and I needed to know the “competitive set” or so I told myself. So I had no money, very little time to myself, and I gained 20 pounds and I still look back on it as one of the most magical times of my life.

I was used to working hard and not having time “for myself.” I actually viewed working as “time for myself,” in a sense. Growing up as a gymnast, I trained 6 sometimes 7 sometimes 10 (in the summers) hours a day. My day generally looked like this:

6:30 wake up

8:00 arrive at school

1:00 leave school

1:30 get to the gym

1:30-7:30 train

8:00 get home

8:00-10:30 try not to eat and do my homework

10:30 shower and bed

Repeat

The training was for me. That was in service of something I wanted. It wasn’t an imposition. It was a joy (until it got super awful and abusive but this isn’t about that. I write plenty on that separately). Training was doing something I loved (until I didn’t). I wasn’t waiting to get through it so that I could watch TV and gab with my friends on the phone (when people still talked on the phone).

Maybe kids just have too much time to lie about and they expect that going into adulthood? Who knows . . . I’m not for over-scheduling kids but I am fully for them having something they love doing — whether it’s a sport or art or debate club or the school newspaper — that they work very hard at and learn that if they do, they get better at it and derive a sense of satisfaction from that.

I don’t know if I love work and that’s why I spent my childhood this way — working many hours a day — or if I learned to love work and what you can achieve if you put your mind to it because I spent my childhood this way. It’s probably a chicken and egg type of thing. At any rate, to me, work is life. If that makes me a work-a-holic (as my husband might argue), so be it.

But think back to a 100 years ago. Or a bit more. Or even a bit less. If your family owned and worked on a farm, it was all work all the time just to live. Wake up at sunrise, tend to the animals, kids go to school (which they probably had to walk a few miles to) and parents keep working — hard physical labor on the farm, mom washing clothes by hand and making every item of food from scratch. Then kids come home and continue to help with tasks, then dinner which mom has probably been making for hours, clean up, then bed with the sun going down. No gym! No hanging out with friends! Just work.

The idea of a weekend with a defined work week didn’t even exist until the 1800s. It wasn’t until 1926 that Henry Ford standardized the 5-day work week, instead of the normal-at-the-time 6-day work week, without reducing pay. And it wasn’t until 1938 that Franklin Roosevelt standardized the 5-day, 40-hour work week with the Fair Labor Standards Act, a result of labor union efforts. The Fair Labor Standards Act also prohibited child labor and established the concept of a legally required minimum wage. All good things.

Back to Brielle the TikTok-er. There were many people who came to her defense, saying she’s not wrong, work is hard and we work too hard and require too much of workers these days.

In Junkee (whatever that is), Ky Stewart wrote:

“There’s absolutely no possible way to get a healthy work/life balance when you work 9-5, five days a week. I feel like I’m living to work, not working to live.”

But here’s my point: the whole “work/life balance” and “working to live” concept is what is new. Not long work days that leave little time for recreational activities. For centuries people worked just to get enough food to eat to live. The idea that we should have endless amounts of free time to scroll on TikTok, brunch with friends, and lie about watching Netflix then head to the gym for hours at a time is what is distinctly new.

Look, I like brunch and going to the gym. I’m not saying I don’t. But I also like work and derive a distinct satisfaction out of a job well done. And yes, the idea that work can be fulfilling rather just something necessary to survive (which is fulfilling in its own way, right? Surviving, that is?) is also a new concept and one that I am quite grateful for. And I know some jobs (many) are distinctly awful and soul sucking but I have a feeling Brielle isn’t doing hard manual labor and is probably in an office somewhere in some city and probably has to prostrate herself to some annoying and demanding boss but I’m guessing it isn’t physically demanding, just kind of boring and maybe a bit ego-wounding (because she went to college thinking she’d get some cool marketing job and maybe she did but mostly she’s cleaning up conference rooms after the more senior marketing staff has met to “brainstorm”. Or something like that.)

At any rate, my point is, while yes I’m grateful for things like a 5-day work week (thank you labor movement), and minimum wage and the illegality of child labor, perhaps we need to adjust our perspective around the idea of what work is. Yes, you will spend much of your life working. Hopefully in a job that provides you with a satisfactory income to afford not only necessities but some nice extra things as well. Hopefully the work won’t be soul crushing and hopefully you’ll like some of the people you work with so that you are getting in some human contact with friends even if they are “work friends” not real friends.

Sometimes work will suck. Sometimes it will not be fun or fulfilling at all. It will be hard and boring and maybe even your boss will be a real jerk. But you’ll be able to support yourself and maybe even your family and you’ll endure and hopefully one day the work won’t totally suck and it will never be as hard as life on the plains was back in the 1800s.

As with almost every subject these days, we forget that things are better now than they were 100 or 200 or 400 years ago. We do not live in a uniquely awful time, especially not here in the United States. We live in a uniquely privileged time where we get 2-day weekends, and 5-day work weeks and there is such a thing as a yoga class to go to when we have time and we don’t have to wash our clothes by hand and our dishes by hand and we can order food rather than baking bread from scratch every day.

I have always been grateful that I have work that pays me (quite well now but certainly not in my 20s) and I can take care of my family and I can enjoy a gym workout when I can muster the energy.

So, Brielle — if you were my kid — I’d say: be grateful you have a job, and some extra TikTok influencer money. Go out with your friends on the weekend. Stop whining. You’ve got it pretty darned good.