Why Nineteen
For a while now I’ve been thinking about how the pace of life feels so intense, even if you like what you do. As Roxane Gay recently put it, “We are incredibly busy in that modern way where we overschedule ourselves and say yes to everything asked of us until we reach a breaking point, recalibrate, and repeat the madness all over again.”
When the pandemic lockdowns began to disrupt the fitness industry, I found myself working 12-hour days seven days a week on digital projects for my employer. The irony: My colleagues and I were working tirelessly to help clients stay physically active and manage stress, all the while sparing little time to stay well ourselves.
Grinding in the midst of a pandemic is on brand for America’s hustle culture — that nonstop, exhausting way of life many of us know. Hustle culture is the balancing act. The slog. The cluttered inbox weighed down by emails promising to help you organize and optimize every second of your life.
“There has always been something a little obscene about the cult of the hustle, the treadmill of alienated insecurity that tells you that if you stop running for even an instant, you’ll be flung flat on your face,” Laurie Penny wrote earlier this year in Wired.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hard work. I grew up in Buffalo. I am the son of Linda, who worked at the cider mill and at the marina with my dad, Chuck, who is fond of saying Buffalo has two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. And he sold boats. My late grandfather, the OG of hustle, worked forty years at Bethlehem Steel after returning from the war.
By middle school I was selling boats alongside my dad and slinging pizzas out of a pizza trailer. I’ve also waited tables and umpired little league games and worked data entry for the Y2K glitch. After college, I worked in magazine publishing and then digital media, for sports and tech companies, environments that demand you give everything. But just because I proved I can grind as hard as my parents and their parents doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Over the years I’ve struggled to balance my career with everything else, and my health has taken a toll. I’ve experienced burnout, insomnia, digestive issues, life-threatening food allergies, and seemingly unsolvable skin issues. Too many people experience similar struggles, some more than others. Work demands are particularly unfair to Black women, who enter the job market younger, work longer, earn less, and are poorly represented in high-wage jobs, according to the Department of Labor.
Despite the insane hours I was putting into my job during the start of the coronavirus outbreak, on May 20, 2020, I was laid off, joining more than 38 million Americans out of work. The team I had built and led for more than a decade was dissolved. At that moment, my achievements didn’t add up. They didn’t keep me employed, and I wondered what was the point.
Without a job, I had to be nowhere. It was a good hurt. Now, for the first time since my childhood, I’m having a summer break. And yet hustle culture still rains down pressure to self-optimize while caring for our families and communities and doing a little extra at work or looking for work and feeling the stress of isolation.
But at this transformational moment we need space…
…to think about our humanity, grieve losses and suffering; to set boundaries for ourselves and create a path for better; and to feel it all and face it all instead of just powering through our days.
We need time to grapple with important questions…
If you’re lucky enough to work from home and enjoy more meals with your family, then how might we rework our way of life to make that the norm for more people instead of the exception? With our eyes wide opened to America’s racial inequities, how can we hold ourselves and others accountable to anti-racist policies? In short, how can we set aside time to reflect and take action for necessary change? It seems like that’s what Mother nature is not-so-subtly demanding of us.
“We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations — and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found,” Jenny Odell writes in “How to Do Nothing.”
I don’t know how to fix this unsustainable way of life. It’s a mess that even Marie Kondo couldn’t tidy up. But maybe that’s the point right now — to sit in the mess and let that process spark joy.
No doubt, I’ve got it easy compared to people who are battling COVID-19, caring for children or an elderly parent, risking their lives as essential workers, living in areas where the virus is surging, or experiencing systemic racism or other forms of bigotry and oppression.
I’m also fortunate to be able to apply some things I’ve learned about self-care during my years working in fitness and wellness as an editor at Men’s Health and a brand strategist in human performance. And I still struggle with my well-being like everyone else. That’s why we need to start a conversation about human sustainability, because we all deserve to live and move in a rhythm that feels good and at a pace we can sustain.
I’m not just talking about wellness. If we’re going to shift from the burnout lifestyle toward a culture that values our quality of life and sustainability as people, then we need to go beyond the elusive concept of work-life balance, beyond a dysfunctional health care system that doesn’t work for everyone, beyond a $4.2 trillion wellness market full of quick fixes. What we need now are real conversations about change on personal, social, environmental, organizational, and policy levels — not just apps and life hacks.
This is the point of Nineteen: to talk about what it’s like to live in your rhythm, and what gets in the way. Personally, I’m seeking wholeness — family, leisure, nature, rest, adventure, meaningful work — rather than juggling a job and everything else. I want to live in a way that feels good instead of just trying to keep up with it all, and I want to know what living in your rhythm would mean to you.
Nineteen is a place for conversation and inspiration. We won’t shy away from the issues, but we’ll try to keep things upbeat. We’ll obsess with better, not with what’s broken. In the weeks ahead, we’ll share inspiring stories about the creativity and resolve of people who are redesigning the way they live now. I say “we” because I’m launching Nineteen with talented writers and designers, and we’ll only be as successful as those of you reading and commenting. If you would like to write for Nineteen, let us know.
Cheryl Strayed once wrote, “The making of literature is always an experiment.” This publication is an experiment that I hope you’ll test and evolve with us. Because one way or another we’re going to emerge from this moment changed. Let’s create that change together.
