Gen X was obsessed with anti-sellout culture, but maybe capitalism won after all
Life is really expensive, so does selling out even mean anything these days? On career pivots, career meltdowns, and content monetization.
I’m convinced that in the second half of life, you often find yourself having to relearn things all over again. It’s a bit of a rude awakening because life is a beautiful, if puzzling, story when the unexpected comes in waves. It’s not fully yours to control, so you learn how to surf in order to temper the disruptions. Or, you can just see where it takes you.
After a series of consecutive sucker punches the last seven or so months, something good has finally happened in our household. Not exactly life-changing, but a huge lifestyle shift in which I am now living with a spouse who works from home 2-3 days a week. If you’re a long-time blog reader or a former bakery customer, then you know how big a change this is.
After thirty years of waking up before sunrise to start work in the early morning hours at restaurants, commercial kitchens, and urban greenhouses, Mark now logs into an office job (same company, different role) at 9 A.M. He’s so unaccustomed to starting his day this late that he sometimes bakes bread or preps dinner because he doesn’t know what else to do with his time. Having worked blue collar careers his entire adult life, he’s now joined those of us who sit at desks and stare into computer screens eight hours a day, some days from the corporate office and other days in one of the kid’s unoccupied bedrooms that is now co-opted as his WFH workspace.
“It’s kind of like I’m not working at all,” he confesses sheepishly after closing the laptop at 5 P.M.
How else would someone who’s worked on his feet, lifting 50 pound bags of flour or produce in manual labor jobs for nine hours a day react?
“Office jobs are like 65% actual work and 35% bullshitting with your coworkers and making coffee runs,” I tell him. He nods because he understands. He’s on the other side now.
It’s only been six weeks and the novelty has yet to wear off, but it’s thrown everything in our household off kilter. Even the cat is confused by this change in schedule and thinks that every day is a weekend now.
And here is where I make my own confession because I don’t know how I feel yet about having to share the apartment during the weekdays with another human. It’s not like I don’t know how to make that work. We made it work for a year and a half when the kids were doing high school remotely (also, it’s bonkers that this actually happened), but when your lives are intimately intertwined inside a city apartment, it’s an adjustment for everyone.
The Gen X career meltdown
You may have read this article published last week in the NYT by now: “The Gen X Career Meltdown” is about aging workers in creative fields who find themselves pushed out of their careers and made irrelevant. I touched on this a few months ago in this post, “Can we talk about this horrendous job market?” Reader comments are chiming in to add that it’s not just creative fields that are feeling the downward spiral, but other industries too. The article is a little too on the nose and I personally know too many people who are in the same underemployed situation as I am. Others are hanging on for dear life till the robots come for their jobs. Most of us are just trying to survive as we slowly crawl towards retirement.