Why You’re Not Going to Quit
FOOD SERVICE JOB
The tips. The sweet, sweet tips.
OFFICE JOB
Once you get sucked into an office job—and by that, I mean you’ve invested enough of your soul to make it seem like a part of your life, the way another human being might be—there is a sense of obligation about it. You’ve already climbed, say, six rungs up the corporate ladder (and had to step on the faces of some decent people along the way), so why would you bail out now? Office jobs often have a tendency to define you, as they have the unfortunate reputation of being “your real job.” People in the service industries will often talk about how they’re just making money while they wait to find the real thing, and once you get a lock on said actual job, it’s hard to let it go. You are no longer just “Sarah, blond girl and skilled maker of pancakes,” you are, “Sarah, blond marketing director for That Company Over There.” Even if we end up hating it, it has often crept into too much of who we are as a person to just drop it.
RETAIL JOB
The discount, though not enough to keep you locked behind a cash register on its own, is part of an overall comfort zone you can easily slip into when working retail. The money is just enough not to be bad, usually, and the job is often so easy that leaving it seems like more trouble than it’s worth. The tired complacency that leads us to stay in shitty retail positions for extended periods of time is something that should have its own pharmaceutical to combat.
So, as you see, every job you can possibly hope to have in life is going to have its ups and downs. Sometimes you might feel as though the entire professional world is conspiring against you. The important part is finding a life outside of work that fulfills, excites, and challenges you, because there are few things worse than having an identity entirely wrapped up in and defined by something that you can one day get fired from. We’ve all had brunch with those people who are incapable of talking about anything except their workweeks and various interesting things that happened to them with colleagues you’ve never heard of and/or don’t care about, and we know how tedious it is for everyone else, so it goes without saying that this should be avoided.
But having a job is essential to life, and no matter how we choose to spend our working hours, we’re going to need to do something. Maybe, in order to maximize the amount of enjoyment we get out of working versus how many nights we go home and bang our heads repeatedly against the wall, we should come up with some kind of checklist for jobs we should be looking for. What is important, though? What are the deciding factors for what is going to make a job both attainable and fulfilling? Assuming that the world is just a sparkly merry-go-round of perfect jobs to pick from, what are the qualities that you could ultimately forgo in order to be happy overall?
There are those among us who put top priority on our social lives. For those folks, it is essential to go out and stay out late, to try new things, to make friends, to be “on the scene” —whatever “scene” that may be. Regardless of who is going to condescendingly talk to you about how you’re “getting a little old for this nonsense,” your goal in life is to have a rich social calendar filled with activities and fabulous people and the errant bottle of champagne opened with a sword. Guess what, though? A huge number of jobs kind of cut that lifestyle off at the knees.
We all think, on some level, that we can beat the system when it comes to balancing work life and play life. And, yes, a couple coke-fueled, completely fucking insane traders working at some huge investment bank in Manhattan manage to pull off eighty-hour workweeks and six-hour benders at clubs—but you are not one of them. And, plus, have you met them? Or, God forbid, worked with them? Because I have. (Met one, not worked with one. I’m happy to say that I’ve never held a job sucking the blood out of little children’s dreams at some Patrick Bateman–filled investment bank.) And you know what they’re like in person? Horrifying. At least the ones I’ve met. I was once lucky (?) enough to have an in-depth conversation with one of those fabled workaholic financiers about the circus-esque logistics of his life and the realities of having such immense professional pressure at the age of twenty-five. This was essentially our exchange:
Me: So you must work really long hours, don’t you?
Him: Yeah, we usually get into work at around 8:00 a.m. and don’t leave until at least nine-ish. Sometimes we’re there until midnight or whatever, it really depends.
Me: Damn! How do you have time to do other things?
Him: We go out and party all the time. I would say at least a few nights a week we go out to a club and stay there until 5:00 a.m. or so.
Me: And you’re not tired?
Him: I’m tired all the time! Are you kidding? But that’s just part of the lifestyle, kind of.
Me: Do you even have time for a girlfriend?
Him: Kind of. Most of the guys who work at the bank date girls who work in the fashion industry because they also work crazy hours, and they get paid shit, and they’re usually gorgeous—it goes pretty well with the lifestyle. Plus, they don’t really have a chance of moving up in their field, so they usually quit around thirty to become housewives. Pretty much all the guys do it.
Me: So why do you do this job?
Him: Are you kidding? You don’t want to know how much money I make, but it’s a lot. A lot.
Obviously, this is just one guy telling his rather extreme story (though I should mention that I later interviewed a pretty prominent fashion blogger who confirmed for me that she and many friends in the industry date almost exclusively within the financial industry), but it illustrates some of the problems we all face. There is a balance to be struck somewhere between enjoying your work, making a good living, and having time to do other things. And unless you’re doing a shit ton of coke (which this guy didn’t mention but which seems like a crucial element to the story, if you ask me), it’s not really possible to have all three at the same time. So being the “social life” guy may mean choosing a job that is either in an industry that permits it (such as the food industry), or one that has relatively light workloads, which allow you a comfortable ten-to-five workday and no projects to take home and obsess over at the end of the day.
If you’re the kind of person who wants to make a lot of money, that would seem more straightforward, wouldn’t it? I mean, hey, I’m not here to judge you for your Monopoly Man-esque ambitions. I can respect the desire to live comfortably and buy a new Apple product every two weeks without thinking twice about it. So why don’t you just find a job that is really lucrative, work really hard at it, climb some invisible corporate ladder, and reap the benefits? Apparently, it doesn’t work like that. We know that the idea of “working really hard” being directly proportional to exactly how much you will succeed is incredibly untrue in practice (no matter what you say, old white Republican males, no one will ever believe your success was 100 percent self-made). But it’s also important to note that well-paying jobs are kind of hard to locate in the first place.
I think the job market is now officially aware that we’re all desperate. As I mentioned before, for every ad that shows up on Craigslist for some underpaid secretarial post, there are going to be about five hundred motivated twentysomethings with master’s degrees ready to get into the octagon and kill each other with their bare hands to get it. And this is only a slight exaggeration; people are desperate. What does a company stand to gain from paying someone a really good wage when they could get away with paying half of it and still have someone who basically bursts into happy tears every lunch break over his profound luck to have found this job? People are accepting lower and lower salaries for jobs that, if the economy weren’t such a clusterfuck, they never would have accepted in the first place.
But what could be improved, pretty easily, is the lifestyle that goes with your job. Unless you happen to stumble upon one of the few industries left that is still throwing an expense account at every intern with good hair, you are going to have to manage your day-to-day life
around it. First and foremost, don’t live in an expensive city. I hate to say it, because the whole world is basically screaming, “If you don’t live in New York City, you aren’t worthy of life on this planet, you peasant,” but that shit is a privilege. I mean, really, we all know people who moved to The City with not a whole lot in the way of plans or connections but a vague idea of “making it.” You know what they end up doing? Waiting tables, bartending, or working in a store—or possibly several of those at the same time. You know what kind of life that affords you in a city as ball-crushingly expensive as New York? A terrible one. I mean, yeah, technically you can scrape by and talk about how you’re “high on the energy of the city,” but you’re certainly not going to afford being high on anything else.
There are so many other places you could be, both around America and around the world at large that would enable you to balance out your financial life a little more. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I did live in Paris myself when I didn’t have a fancy grown-up job, but I was a student, working as an au pair (a glorified nanny), and lived in one hundred square feet. Do you know what one hundred square feet looks like? It is unfortunate and in no way allows you to fully enjoy The City for all the majesty it has to offer you. You don’t want to be toiling away in that lifestyle when you’re nearing thirty.
And as to a job you enjoy, there is a good chance that landing one will severely damage your social life potential, as well as any chance of highly lucrative compensation. We often see people who are “married to their work,” and that means exactly what it sounds like. They are always spending excessive time with it, sacrificing everything else for it, and generally being defined by it. A lot of people who work in the more “glamorous” professions, such as the arts or PR or TV production, tend to be of this persuasion. They would essentially give at least two of their appendages to have more professional success, and everything about them tends to center on how well their job has been going lately. It’s pretty clear with a lot of this group—from the DJ/web designer in a rotating carousel of Snapbacks, to the writer who has an impressive résumé of prestigious bylines that don’t actually pay—that the money is not always overflowing to compensate them for the effort. Speaking personally, as a writer, every time you ever announce that you work in such a profession, you are immediately met with an open look of smug disbelief and a demand for further clarification.
Or, if you are being fairly paid, it often comes at the expense of any time out and about. There comes a moment in many of these “passion” jobs when, at two in the morning on a Friday night, when you’re still hard at work on a project that you are putting extra time in without having been asked to (and with no prospect of compensation), where you sort of take a long, hard look at your life and wonder how exactly you came to be “that guy.” None of us wants to feel like we have sacrificed a balanced, fun life for being the MVP at work several months in a row. Regardless of how much money we might make, or how admired we may be by our coworkers, it certainly seems as if we must live a pretty pointless life. So if you are in hot pursuit of a job that makes your heart go all aflutter, it may behoove you to resign yourself to at least a few years of being Career Guy, even if you hate to admit it.
No matter what you are looking for in your job, or what you end up doing, it’s only important that it makes you happy. It could be bringing in ample money, giving you a super-flexible schedule, or simply making you feel as if you accomplished something at the end of the day. It could be the job of your dreams or just something that provides you with money to travel to all your various fetish conventions around the country. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to sit on your bed, take off your shoes, and think about what you accomplished (as well as what lies ahead of you). And if it makes you hate your life and everything about it, or makes you question your worth even a little bit, you should probably pull up your résumé and start fluffing it up, because you’ve got some applications to fill out.
Chapter 3
HOBBIES
Or, How to Find Things to Do That Don’t Depend Entirely on Drinking
First and foremost, what is a hobby? So many of us go from the ages of birth to twenty-two-ish without ever having taken that into consideration. It’s a word that has general meaning (something you do for enjoyment in your spare time), but throughout much of our early lives, the concepts of both enjoyment and spare time were rather vague. We knew that there were fun things we could be doing, and we might have had an idea of which things interested us more than others, but we didn’t have a whole lot of control over things like transportation, finances, and extracurricular education. For everything from breakdance lessons to showing everyone up at the middle school Spring Fling to the errant trip to Chuck E. Cheese, we were at the whim of our guardians.
Think about it: You’re a kid, and you’re hardly capable of making a decision as important and influential on the trajectory of the rest of your life as “What am I going to do with all this spare time that I, as a six-year-old, am faced with?” So your parents will usually fill in those blanks for you: Enjoy your five-ish years of ballet, soccer, karate, or gymnastics. Maybe Little League, if your family is more old-school. The point is, the activity is going to be pretty straightforward, it will be planned with the precision of a Swiss timepiece, and you aren’t going to have a whole lot of say in the matter. (If you happen to have often-written-about-when-analyzing-the-downfall-of-our-generation Helicopter Parents, enjoy doing all these activities at once, on an incredibly strict schedule, while your twitchy, forceful elders live vicariously through your tiny successes in hopes that you will prove to be “gifted.”)
And then, as if by magic, you’re in high school, where your extracurricular activities start flying fast and free. (Or maybe even middle school, if you’ve actually started caring about college applications at age twelve, but chances are that period of your life doesn’t get into full swing until around sophomore year.) Now is the time to pick activities that, in addition to potentially being enjoyable on their own merits, are guaranteed to make you look like a “well-rounded teenager” whose activities include things outside of scowling at people at the mall and drinking Red Bulls, like the majority of your teenage peers. And while well-rounded is certainly a term that sounds positive in theory, in practice, it can end up even more insufferable than the aforementioned scowling mall-hangers. It’s a tough balance to strike, being productive and still having a normal childhood, and not everyone manages it.
If you were an admissions officer at a prestigious university with a good balance between party life and rigorous academics, imagine what you would want to see on an application. Things like student government, sports, drama—and anything in which you can exaggerate a position of take-charge leadership. Nothing says, “I made the most out of my three-week stint in debate club” like treasurer. Engaging in hobbies in high school (without becoming an insane, Tracy Flick-esque, type A personality whom everyone avoids like the plague) is a direct step toward a better future, with a relatively high return on investment. You’re not just participating in these tedious student association meetings for yourself, you’re participating in them for your grandchildren, and for the future they deserve from your getting into a highly ranked state school.
In college, hobbies are so very many things. Never in your life do you have such a potent combination of free time, youth, access to social events, and tingling loins that long to meet other, similar-minded sexy young people in various activities. This is the time to get involved politically for about ten minutes, to try out for a play (even though you’ve never been in the same room as a stage) simply because the person you’re trying to bang is a huge drama nerd. There is nothing you can’t do when faced with such a lascivious Roman orgy of potential social groups and time-consuming activities. And, better still, nothing really counts in terms of social repercussions. You don’t have to be labeled so swiftly and cruelly by your choice of activity, the way you are in high school.
You can dabble in a little of everything—including recreational drug use—without being defined by it. Everything is a hobby.
But when you graduate, when you are spit out into the world in which 90 percent of people with whom you come in contact are your coworkers or crappy neighbors, what are you supposed to do? How do you continue to dedicate time to things that do not provide you with money and, at least directly, do not contribute to your future? How do you just sign up for something for “fun,” and do it—especially when it isn’t centered around the consumption of alcohol? It seems intimidating to say the least, especially given how limited our free time is at this age. You come home at the end of a ten-hour workday, and the last thing you want to do is go to a pottery class at which you are going to struggle to make something even vaguely blob-shaped as fellow grown-ass adults snicker under their breath at your incompetence.
It does seem exhausting, and the chances are high that you could end up making a fool of yourself more than anything else when it finally comes time to show up and participate, but the benefits certainly outweigh the risks. Think about it: You will be meeting new people who don’t work two cubicles down from you; you will potentially have a different pond in which to insert (tee-hee) your fishing rod and scavenge for romantic partners; and you may even learn something in the process (cue inspirational music). If you are feeling the ever-tighter grip of limited social options as a young adult in the working world, few things are more liberating than giving yourself a new outlet for hanging out.
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