The End of the Millennial Hustle
It was somewhere in the fourth week of pandemic-induced isolation that I realized how indistinguishable Monday started to feel from Friday. As the pace of the weekend began to bleed more copiously into the week, the work week had taken on a numbness which blurred into the evening hours. My to-do list had largely reached its end, dissolved by the inability to do much beyond the borders of my home. There was plenty I could choose to do, of course, at varying price points — virtual classes, virtual seminars, virtual workouts — I just simply didn’t care anymore. I realized, for the moment, that I no longer cared for the endless development of the self, the ritualistic desire for growth and improvement buried in my gym schedule, errand list, various side hustles. All I had scheduled for the foreseeable future was to give my cat her flea medicine.
We have entered a strange time in which we are structurally prevented from planning too much ahead. Professional networking is largely out the window. We squirrel away our rapidly dwindling savings, if they exist at all in this tenuous economy, and we find that all long term goals are tempered by present needs. Job boards are muted. The days in quarantine, which began in earnest scheduling, efforts to maintain normalcy and routine, have melted the minutes and hours into a fluid stretch of morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The line between checking email and checking in on the book I’m reading are utterly entangled. At 3:00 I have a Zoom call. At 3:21, I water the houseplants.
The millennial generation has been variably dubbed the Burnout Generation or, more recently, the new Lost Generation. We are the generation so utterly screwed by bad economic policies to graduate into a recession, take on astronomical student debt, and have the lowest rates of home ownership. Birth rates have fallen as we struggle longer to get on our feet — we see stories of CEO pay cuts and corresponding surges in births as inspiring, rather than an indication that we have officially entered the Upside Down. Those of us unlucky enough to find our strengths lied in the liberal and fine arts were especially worthless in a society increasingly bent toward tech and STEM fields. We adapted, taking administrative, service, operations jobs, diminishing our intellectual value in the process.
Could the Great Pause become a Great Rebellion against the profit-driven values which push us to hustle harder yet fail harder than any generation before us? Have we all realized that it’s just too damn much? That all the networking meetings, side careers, evening classes, won’t get us any closer to the happiness we crave in community and professional fulfillment? Will we be able, finally, to separate our chosen professions from the lives we lead? Maybe we will finally collectively decide that this sucks. What would happen if we, as a generation, simply gave up trying to compete in a game we can never win — what if we decided to take back our lives?
And what would the end of the hustle actually look like? To many of us who pursue creative careers, it’s an unimaginable luxury. We constantly try to tweet, post, meme our way to public attention, raking in views and retweets like IOUs for a secure future. If we pursue enough career-enhancing ventures, make enough contacts, maybe we can afford to buy a home someday, afford day care, a shorter commute, more time with our families. Yet we have entered a reality where we find ourselves exhausted from years of overwork, but currently unable to hustle our way to economic security.
We are pressured to find clever ways to continue the grind. I don’t think I’m alone, though, in finding the many online quarantine career building tips tone-deaf to the present we find ourselves living. The inherent selfishness of networking is magnified when we consider that a loose contact may be dealing with a sick family member, sickness themselves, or the current stress of working in a medical or service profession. Maybe we continue our tweets and memes, secretly hoping to go viral, but we find our efforts at originality drowned in the heightened white noise of the internet.
We do what we can to make time go by faster, yet to what end? Why are we in such a rush to live out our lives? Always hurrying from one deadline to the next — just get to Christmas break then I will relax, just make it to Memorial Day weekend then I can have a break. We’re all heading to the same finish line. For the first time since childhood, time has slowed down for many of us, and the days seem to drag. Suddenly, we have more hours than we know what to do with.
I got an actual phone call from a neighbor this week. She had no idea what I do for a living, and she didn’t care. She had gotten my number from a community forum and, volunteering her time with the group, was calling just to check in and see if there was anything I needed. I’m sad to admit that this has become an alien practice with all but my immediate family members. As a kid I would frequently walk down the street, and brazenly knock on the door of a friends house: “Is Amanda home to play?” I would leaf through the yellow pages to find the names of my friends’ parents, and call their homes: “Can Katie talk?” This wasn’t some ideal of 1960s suburbia. This was 2002.
When did knocking on neighbors’ doors, calling them and our friends, start to seem like either a professional necessity or an outrageous violation? Even in the professional world, calling someone without advance notice is often seen as taboo. Millennials are especially vilified as the generation too busy, or maybe just too terrified, to talk to their neighbors. But in the time of coronavirus, instead of spending our free hours on hesitant emails to professional contacts, many of us are simply calling our family, friends, and neighbors. Many of us are stepping outside, talking at a distance to neighbors, clapping with them every evening, enjoying the sounds of their kids playing on the sidewalk. We’re baking. We’re dusting off our musical instruments. Our long neglected pets are thrilled to meet us.
After we emerge from this period, maybe too many of us will continue the desire to lead unhurried lives. We will renew our efforts to build a sustainable career. But maybe too many of us will realize that we enjoy the 10 hours back per week we had spent, if we’re very lucky, on a commute to homes we can afford. Missing our children’s bedtimes. Too many of us will have enjoyed getting to know our neighbors from front porches and stoops, preferring to spend time and create community with people who hold utterly no value to our professional advancement — maybe we’ll just like our neighbors for themselves, even if they don’t speak our language, even if they’re decades older than us.
Some have suggested that this Great Pause will allow us to rethink our societal priorities. We are seeing what it looks like to address climate change in a dramatic way, to address our culture of consumerism. The time we have regained from our commutes, the pointless meetings, running errands, may very well allow us to be more creative, more loving, and ultimately more fulfilled as a society. Our productivity and our bank accounts have decreased, and we find we have value anyway. When we have resumed our lives and rebuilt our economies, when we dust off our LinkedIns and put aside the baking, will we have the tenacity to remember that we are more than what we produce, what we market ourselves to be? Our memories were short when the world moved fast. Now that it has slowed, maybe we will remember who we were during this time, and know that we are more than our hustle would purport us to be.
