Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I Hate Work
112 Plays1 year ago
Work kinda sucks, huh? Many people hate or merely tolerate their jobs, yet the average person has to spend 90,000 hours working during their lifetime! What's up with that? In this week's episode, J.R. shares his thoughts on the culture of work, while telling the story of his own winding career path.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Life's Challenges
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome, friends, to life's effing nuts. I am JR, one man's stories and ruminations on being human in an upside down world. Basically, I just tell these punchy little stories from my lived experiences that aim to capture relatable truths about life.
Early Lessons on Work
00:00:32
Speaker
I have a very sort of acrimonious relationship with work. From an early age, I was sort of taught that work is inherently meant to suck. But if it doesn't suck, it's not work.
00:00:48
Speaker
My father's a businessman. He, or he was a businessman. He's retired now, retired-ish. He had his own women's clothing company. And from a pretty young age, I think the earliest I remember, maybe 10 years old or something like that, I did some work in his warehouse. And it's not like I was working 40 hours a week or even that regularly. Occasionally, if it was a holiday break, I would work the week and make minimum wage or whatever.
00:01:17
Speaker
often just doing pretty menial tasks, like bagging garments, moving clothes from one section to another, or going garment to garment and checking the seams to make sure there's no holes or things like quality control, things like that. Really boring, mind-numbing stuff.
00:01:34
Speaker
And my parents were trying to sort of instill a work ethic in me. And I appreciate that. I do think hard work is a good skill, a good trait to have, to know how to work hard, to know how to push beyond discomfort. I think it's really important I'm into that. But also, I feel like there could have been a better job
00:01:59
Speaker
showing me also how it feels good to work hard and that you work hard and then you go have a nice time. But that part was left out. It was presented to me like all life is work, all life is struggle, all life is grind.
00:02:16
Speaker
Like you better be miserable. Otherwise you're not doing life right. That's sort of how, that's how I received it. At least in my little brain. I, I, I'm sure that's not the message my parents were trying to send to me. Work was just drudgery. It was just drudgery with no
Art vs. Conventional Success
00:02:30
Speaker
payoff. When I was young, I mean, to this day, I am an artist. All I really cared about when I was young was, you know, following in the footsteps of the artists who inspired me, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac.
00:02:46
Speaker
Uh, what do you got three people like that? I tried to like be a good student and to make my parents proud and things like that. It wasn't for lack of effort. I just, for me, I couldn't make myself care about something, um, that I just didn't care about. Um,
00:03:06
Speaker
I will say that there was an element of privilege in there because I did not have to, when I was younger, I did not have to pay my own bills into my early 20s. And so I was afforded the freedom to not care. If it was a matter of eating or not eating or paying the rent or not paying the rent, there wouldn't have been a lot of choice.
00:03:33
Speaker
And I'm sure I would have like survival mode would have kicked in because it has as an adult of like, okay, it doesn't matter how uninterested you are in this job. Like you need to eat, you need to fucking pay the bills. And so there was an element of privilege in there. Nevertheless, independent of privilege, I just, I mean, I cared very deeply about, about creativity, about art, about
00:04:02
Speaker
contemplative philosophical thought, et cetera. I just didn't, I couldn't make myself care about school. For me, like the idea of like having a five year plan, a 10 year plan, a 15 year plan, like designing and mapping out a life. If, when I was younger, it felt so, so, so farcical. Like what? Like.
00:04:24
Speaker
No, I don't want to live in the moment. I want to, I want to explore and travel and learn and grow and be in community and create beautiful things. And like, that's all I really cared about. People who had a five year plan that I thought were freaking losers or, or just squares.
00:04:45
Speaker
Um, now I'm almost 40 and I see things differently. I think they kind of wish that I took those things more seriously and that I did have more of a path and a plan for the future beyond just like create art like Bob Dylan.
Nonprofit Work and Stability
00:05:04
Speaker
But my point being, because I didn't, I didn't have a college degree and because I didn't.
00:05:11
Speaker
I think the idea of a career or buying a house or having a family like that was just, it didn't feel like me.
00:05:30
Speaker
I didn't, I like none of it. I didn't care. I was like, I was like a fucking rat, like a beatnik or neo beatnik. Like I, you know, shopped at thrift stores and had like a shoestring budget and lived in a tiny little studio with like a mattress on the floor. Like I, like I, I guess I was like a pseudo bohemian. I mean, I wasn't a full on bohemian, but I had like bohemian tendencies, I would say. And so I had these sort of,
00:05:58
Speaker
odd jobs and I was just sort of like on the fringes of society in some ways. And like living paycheck to paycheck, needing to borrow money sometimes, it's like not in a good solid situation. And all that time, like the idea of having a regular nine to five, being sort of wedded to a job,
00:06:24
Speaker
Um, having to go through, jump through all the hoops and all the bureaucracy of job boards and resumes and cover letters and skill building and, and like career path, like it, like that all just felt fucking dreadful to me. Like I just, I had a.
00:06:46
Speaker
A very healthy fear that it would just destroy my soul. Like that as an artist, as a creative person, as an adventurer, as a seeker, that it would just fucking wreck my soul. So I found, I like cobbled a life together and worked my way around that.
00:07:03
Speaker
But I wasn't happy because I also am neurotic and anxious and felt a lot of shame for not being successful, quote unquote, successful, like in the sort of mainstream sense of success, like good job.
Creative Job Searching
00:07:21
Speaker
make money, family, house. I felt a lot of shame, especially because I came from a family of business people where the mark of success was those things I just mentioned. So I wasn't happy. In some ways, I was caught between two worlds.
00:07:42
Speaker
In 2016, I took a part-time job working at a nonprofit called Youth Spirit Artworks for Homeless Youth. It was a jobs training arts program for homeless youth in Berkeley, where I live. I took it sort of slightly on a whim.
00:08:04
Speaker
Once I started working there, I found myself really enjoying the stability and the normalcy and the regularity of having regular work hours and not having to hustle and grind and reinvent the wheel every second of every day, which is sort of what I've been doing up to that point.
00:08:23
Speaker
I was like, man, this is nice. Like, I don't have to think I can just like show and it was meaningful work. I was like working with young people who were sort of in need of going through stuff. And so I was like, oh, this is actually kind of cool. Like, like, that's just like my whole sort of nervous system came down. There was just a sense of normalcy and regularity that that I thought I would have hated. But there was like, oh, this is kind of good.
00:08:43
Speaker
And eventually I became in not too long of a period of time because there was like a leadership void in that organization. And naturally just being in the community, I guess like I have a natural tendency toward
00:08:59
Speaker
bringing people together and also organizing and naming what's happening. And so I did that naturally. And then within a few months, I was the program director, having had no previous experience or schooling to do that kind of role. And I did that for a year and a half, and it was very intense. Some of it was amazing and great.
00:09:24
Speaker
It was a non-sustainable environment because we were always strapped for resources and there was a lot of internal politics and it just was not a fully sustainable, stable organization. And so I left after a year and a half.
00:09:41
Speaker
And then I went back to sort of cobbling things together for a bit. And I had sort of an epiphanous moment where I just said to myself, like, I, I'm tired of grinding. I'm tired of going upstream. I'm tired of reinventing the wheel. I'm so tired at that point. I was what, uh, I don't know, probably what 34 or something like that.
00:10:04
Speaker
I'm tired of this shit, man. And so I just decided within myself, like, I don't care how uncomfortable it is. I don't care how frustrated or angry I get. Like, I'm going to find a way to get a quote unquote normal job.
00:10:21
Speaker
And so I just started going on job boards every single day, two hours, I'd time it. In one window of my computer, I had the job board. In another window, I had a Word document. And I decided that whatever feelings came up, which were many, there were many, I would just write about it. And so being on those fucking job boards,
00:10:51
Speaker
I would get so angry at just what I thought was the bullshit of it all. Like all these fucking requirements for every, for all these jobs and all this officious language. And just, just the, it's just in the overwhelming nature of it and all how competitive it was. And I was like, Oh shit. Like no wonder I've avoided this shit. Like I fucking hate this. This is terrible. Like I'm just like going through these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of job listings.
00:11:23
Speaker
and putting all this time and energy and effort towards like submitting resumes and polishing the resume and writing cover letters. And these people don't give a fuck about me, like more likely, you know, it's very likely that I'm gonna put all this effort and energy and not hear anything back. And like this system is fucked.
Pandemic and Remote Work Struggles
00:11:40
Speaker
But I just kept showing up day after day. I didn't care how angry and I just wrote about it. And often I would write a lot more than I actually applied. I was like writing a book basically about how, and it wasn't just the same thing over and over. Like this fucking system sucks. This fucking system sucks. I would go into detail in this writing.
00:11:57
Speaker
And through that process, I got so fed up and angry and frustrated that subconsciously, it wasn't a conscious thing. I said, fuck these people, man. I'll show them. I'm going to write my cover letters as if they're like creative writing assignments. Like I'm not playing by their rules. Fuck this. And I just started writing these wild cover letters. Um, and to my surprise.
00:12:24
Speaker
Someone wrote back, someone was like, this is a great cover letter. Are you free for an interview? And it was for a copywriter position. I didn't even know what copywriting was at that time. And I was just applying for a whole bunch of different shit. I was applying for anything that looked remotely possible. And so I was pretty shocked and amazed that I got an interview. And so I did the phone interview and I was awkward and anxious. And again, I didn't even know what copywriting was.
00:12:52
Speaker
But the hiring manager, I guess, liked me and asked for me to submit writing samples. And I didn't have any formal writing samples. I'm a fucking poet and have journals and journals and journals and notebooks filled with poetry and prose and all sorts of avant-garde writing. And so there was a stint in my life where I was a sports poet.
00:13:21
Speaker
perform original work on a major San Francisco radio station, but I had those recordings still. So I just submitted the recordings and thinking like, okay, I guess I didn't get that job. And then the guy writes back and he's like, is this you on the radio? He's like, did you write this? And he's like, you just moved to the front of my line. Are you free to come in for an in-person interview?
00:13:47
Speaker
And so I went into this like fancy San Francisco, downtown San Francisco, hip tech office and interviewed with all these like high executives. And it was for a company called Spin, which is micromobility, shared scooters.
00:14:05
Speaker
Anyway, I got the fucking job and they paid me more money than I ever thought I could ever, ever, ever, ever make. And at first I kind of loved it. I like I, it, I felt like I was part of society. Um, I feel like I'd done it my way and it did alleviate a lot of like my shame about like where I fit or belong in the world. Um,
00:14:30
Speaker
a lot like I like it a lot almost the shame almost went away entirely like I felt self respecting my felt a sense of pride in like
00:14:38
Speaker
Like, when I met someone at a party, like, oh, what do you do? I'm a fucking copywriter, man. I make blank amount of money. No, I didn't say the money part, but in my head, that's what I'm thinking. Like, I am a part of society.
Critique of Capitalist Work System
00:14:50
Speaker
So like, you know, at the office, I'm making friends from all the different departments. And like, I formed a relationship with the CEO. And like, I did it my way. I'd started doing these presentations at our all hands meetings, where I would do like these creative poems about the company. I created this whole like internal brand.
00:15:07
Speaker
Um, and so it was kind of fun. I, like, I kind of did like it, but then the fucking pandemic hit and then we were all remote. And then I really started hating it and really struggling. I just felt like I was so disconnected and everything became transactional and I really, my writing really suffered as a result.
00:15:41
Speaker
Anyway, eventually they downsized and I got laid off after two, almost three years. And I busted my ass really hard and got another job and made even more money at the same copywriting again. And then I struggled again though. This fucking work from home shit is not, it's for the birds, man. It's not good for me at all. I just, I really, I really do better in person. Anyway, struggled again, got laid off after a year and a half at that company. And now I'm in this sort of,
00:16:10
Speaker
new phase of my life where I have a little bit of a financial cushion and I'm trying to go back to the things that made my soul spirit and spirit happy and like my spirit awakened and gave me a sense of purpose and meaning.
00:16:26
Speaker
Obviously, I have bills to play. I'm trying to do what I was not able to do when I was young, which is take that sort of more pure purpose-based artistic side and see if some way, somehow, I can leverage that into making money in a way that feels good to me, that doesn't compromise the integrity of the work. In general, it just has me thinking about just the system of work. And I guess in some ways, I know this is
00:16:52
Speaker
I don't mean to get like complicated or political, but like, I do think there's an element of like the capitalist system where things are so competitive and so much energy is geared towards work and like, quote unquote progress and advancement that it, to me, my, my view is that it dominates our culture. Um, most people, you know, spend 40 plus hours of their week fucking grinding and a lot, and to me,
00:17:21
Speaker
Most people I know don't love, love, love their jobs. Like there's an element of drudgery to it of like, this is what I have to do. And for some people, I think like they can sort of tolerate it, deal with it, do good enough, and then enjoy your holidays, enjoy your long weekends, enjoy your evenings, enjoy your whatevers. For me, I struggled with it, man. I just, I really did. Like it was, it was so,
00:17:48
Speaker
I got chemically depressed, like in that, in that grind. I like the last company I worked for the CEO worked, you know, seven days a week, often 10, 12 hour days was like not, I worked, you know, I was part of a team that worked directly with her. And like, that was setting the tone and she loved it. She, she, it was a labor of love for her. She fucking loved it. But for me, that was fucking miserable.
00:18:16
Speaker
I didn't have to work those same hours, but that was the culture. That was the leader. That was the example, see what she was setting. She respected that kind of grind, that kind of hustle. Those are the people who advanced through the organization. For me, it was just fucking miserable, man. It was fucking stressful. Also, there was always this
00:18:41
Speaker
the scepter over my head. Like if I didn't perform and deliver, like they were gonna fucking cut my ass loose, which they did and turn my life upside down. Like the whole thing just felt totally fucked to me.
00:18:53
Speaker
And I was getting paid good money, but like not great money. And I mean, it was more money. If you had told me I was going to make that much money 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you. But then I come to find that like, it's actually not that much money living in the Bay area. Like anyway, so the point being to me, I think the system of work based on my experience and based on what I see in the people that I interact with, it's, it's kind of a fucked system that.
00:19:22
Speaker
A lot of us, from what I can tell, from what I've heard, from stories that I hear, are just sort of getting by.
Exploring Alternative Work Paths
00:19:30
Speaker
And that if money wasn't an issue, if money wasn't a thing, we would do very different things and the quality of our life would be a lot better. And so I think that's just fucked up. I think it's a shitty system and I want to name it. I want to name it. And I mean, I'm grateful that I have a little bit of a financial cushion that I created that I can take a little bit of time. And I know majority of people don't have that and they have to just grind no matter what.
00:19:59
Speaker
Um, and I guess, I guess, I don't know if I have an answer for this shit. I mean, there's a lot of invested interest in advancing big businesses and, and sort of keeping the system as it is. I think maybe there's some hope in, you know, the, like the creator economy, the fact that people can make a living as YouTube. Um.
00:20:22
Speaker
content creators or influencers, building online communities where they can turn them into businesses, or you can be an Uber driver or DoorDash. Not that those are great, but at least you can create your own schedule.
00:20:36
Speaker
Um, so I think there's like maybe some hope, um, that there's like more, a little more power that people have a tiny bit, maybe a smidge, but I don't know, man. It just, it seems like a fucked up broken system. I'm trying to hack the system currently to see, is there some way I can do it my way and not be exploited and not, um, grovel at people's feet and not fucking stress myself out.
00:21:03
Speaker
50, 60, 70 hours a week. Just to keep people in a hierarchical structure happy on top of me. I'm trying to hack the system. I don't know if I have it in me. We'll see. I'm curious if y'all resonate, but I'll catch you again soon for another episode. Life's effing nuts. One man's stories and ruminations on being human in an upside down world.