I don’t want to work
Before I go into all this I am going to mention the following :
- I like my job. I get to do some really cool work with some pretty great people (yes the bureaucracy gets annoying sometimes, but I generally like my job). Come to think of it, most of my jobs have been pretty decent, if not life-changing (in the good way – like doing meaningful work – not in the way that it was so terrible it changed my life).
- I enjoy curating space for Millennials (and anyone else) to figure sh*t out via thegrownupmillennial.com.
- As I typed the title of the post I heard my parents’ voices in the back of my head in Jamaican Creole : “Den a lazy yuh a get lazy? Yuh a tun wutless”. This essentially translates to the fact that I’m lazy and I want to be a bum.
You might be thinking I’m lazy too, why would I write a headline like this? Or you might feel it in your bones that you also don’t want to work. Either way – I’m gonna break it down.
The value of a dollar
I understood pretty early on that you had to work to make money and I didn’t shy away from work (except emptying the trash – thankfully my sister took that chore). I “worked” (it’s in quotation marks here because I’m not sure how helpful I was) at my parent’s workplace every summer and some evenings until I was about 17.
My parents taught me the value of working hard and also saving “for a rainy day”.
Hard work pays off?
We were all sold the idea that “hard work pays off” and it generally does. I guess. I assume that my commitment to hard work has allowed me to level up in my career (and in salary) consistently.
But we’ve also been sold fake news. After reading Daniel Pink’s book “When”, it is more apparent that the world our parents grew up in is not the world we inherited. “When” something happens also affects the outcome. So, even though we might be more educated than our parents (not just formal education but information is more accessible) and are working as hard as if not harder than our parents (contrary to popular belief) – we have generally not seen a better quality of life.
So, is it just about “hard work”? I graduated from University a few years after the recession between 2007 and 2009, which would’ve given me a bit of a different experience than folks who graduated during the recession. So, WHEN certain events happen is also important. There are so many variables that determine your success.
Get a master’s degree they said
You go to University to increase your chances of being successful – of getting a job (that will cover any student loans and maybe some accomodation). Really that’s it. That’s the draw. You pay money – and sometimes even go into debt – to go to school, to then leave school hoping that you’ll be paid enough to get out of debt and somehow make a life.
When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so glad to be over with school. I enjoyed meeting new friends in University and I liked my program but so many years of back-to-back schooling (prep school to high school to University) had me exhausted – and then I had to look for a job 😩?
My parents kept hinting at “not waiting too long before you do your master’s” and after chatting with my instructors I figured it was the way to go. After many sleepless nights and so many tears (including a full on breakdown when upon submitting my thesis I was told I was missing a component) I got the master’s. It was also pretty damn expensive. AND did not guarantee that I would secure a higher paying job.
This article outlines that most master’s degree holders will be paid more, based on a salary survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. For majors like Biology there could be an increase of pay up to 87 percent (although it must be noted that this major also had the second lowest starting salary) but for majors like Accounting and Finance the increase could be just about 4 and 15 percent respectively.
But aside from what might be a nominal pay increase, there is also the overall cost of the degree – not only the massive cost of tuition but what it will cost you (emotionally and psychologically) to actually complete. Then, stepping into a work environment where you may only use 10 percent of what you paid to learn 🤷🏾♀️.
I promise I’m not lazy
After all those years of working hard; of going to school (again and again) to get relevant qualifications, certifications, degrees; the countless hours of resumé and cover letter writing; and all those years of being a “team player” – I think I’m over it.
It also doesn’t help that we’ve been in this pandemic for two years now and the “future” we’ve been working towards seems less real.
All things considered it feels like I’m clocking in “the work” now so I can earn something later on. But, I don’t want to wait to earn that something else, I want to enjoy it today. I don’t want to spend my todays working on tomorrows that I might not even get to see. Delaying my joy until I’ve clocked in enough hours. That doesn’t seem like a decent trade-off.
Redefining retirement (aka “life after work”)
I applaud my generation for redefining what retiring looks like. We don’t share the concept that we’ll put in umpteen years of work (perhaps upwards of 40/50 years) and then we retire to just…do nothing.
Our definition of retirement is more like using our time in the most fulfilling ways. Maybe we’ll still want to work (on our own terms); maybe that means travelling; maybe that means finding new hobbies; and maybe that means…doing nothing. Retirement for us is living life on our own terms – not those prescribed by society or by our department heads.
The biggest difference is that we don’t want to be plugging away at a job for 40/50 years to be able to do this. We want to reclaim our time now.
The workplace is the fifth leading cause of death in America
We’ve seen what playing the long game has gotten our parents and relatives – a barely decent pension and possibly years of workplace injuries that everyone now considers normal.
When I saw this article in 2019, I immediately sat up straight, and the image isn’t even the worse part :
“She has thick varicose veins from spending so much of the day sat down, as well as a protruding stomach caused by her sedentary lifestyle. Emma also has a permanently hunched back and red and sore eyes from leaning forward and staring at a screen” (Sky News, 2019).
Fifty percent of the office workers they interviewed during the study to create this life-size model – Emma – reported that they had eye problems because of work and 49 percent said they had bad backs.
In a similar study done in the United States, they founf that the workplace was the fifth leading cause of death – higher than Alzheimer’s and even kidney disease. Some of the top stressors were : job insecurity; long work hours /overtime; low organizational justice; no health insurance and low job control.
Researchers argue that wellness programs won’t be enough to reverse some of the effects of the work environment. It has to be a revamp of management practices and work culture that will not only fix what’s happening at work but will also result in a change in employee coping mechanisms. So ultimately changing unhealthy coping habits like drinking (excessive alcohol consumption), smoking and over-eating.
I’ve heard from friends that their managers ordered in fast food for them as an incentive to stay later to complete a project. At first glance it seems helpful and considerate; but if folks were going home they might get in a bit more exercise (at least to walk around the house instead of sitting at their screens); probably wouldn’t have had fast food for dinner; might have had time to decompress and come back the next day with fresh energy and perspective to finish the project.
90% of office workers who suffer from health issues because of their jobs are therefore performing more poorly at work.
(Sky News, 2019)
It's a catch 22 isn’t it? You want to work harder to achieve more. But by pushing yourself beyond your limit, you are not able to perform well on the job.
It feels a bit like a hamster wheel –but not in the fun way where you can hop on and off at any time – it just keeps going.
I do not dream of labour
So, no I don’t want to work; and this is not just something I say every few days as I drag myself to my laptop. It’s part of a realization that I want more.
I want to be able to work on my own terms. To do and to not do. To enjoy the simple pleasures of taking a walk in the middle of the day. Of choosing when to respond to emails. Of not constantly looking down the barrel of a deadline. My parents gave up so much to give me the life I have now. I want to honour their sacrifice by rewriting this manuscript.
I don’t want my work to suck the life out of me before I even get to live it. But until then I’ll take advantage of the health insurance.
