Jobs is hard, man.

While I can’t speak for you personally, something along the lines of this exact scenario has occurred to me and so many of the other working people I know, that it can’t just be a one off weird thing. 

You see a job description. It’s entry level. They want two or more years of experience and a list of degrees and skills that reads like a James Joyce novel. The description is also full of avocado culture conscious capitalism bullshit about how you will “grow with them” and “spiritually evolve” by making less than a dime off every dollar you rake in for them. It’s kind of terrifying. You figure there’s no way in hell you’ll get it, but you figure, “what’s another resume and cover letter thrown into the void?”

You hear back from them. At the interview they tell you a weird version of what they are looking for, so convoluted that you aren’t even sure what they hypothetically want you to do. You just know that it sounds very businessy. They say a lot of official sounding words, but none of it really means anything. You thought you knew what they did going into the interview, but now you’re kind of unsure. It’s like an absurd play— one that you went tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a sliver of a shot at being cast in. 

“…millennials are particularly infamous for being unsatisfied at work, and tired of this shit, when no one has ever liked it”

Then you get hired and what they really wanted you to do the whole time was make powerpoints, answer phone calls, and spend most of your day pretending to do stuff. What was packaged as some kind of team-building-minimalist-productivity-enhanced-workflow-module, that you needed a reference from the fucking pope to land, mostly involves you watching badly done powerpoints on how to use Microsoft Office, presented by a guy that leaves the cursor in the middle of the fucking screen the whole time. 

So, you might be wondering what the fuck my point is. It’s that millennials are particularly infamous for being unsatisfied at work, and tired of this shit, when no one has ever liked it. We are always criticized for wanting more than we deserve, expecting more than we should, and then being upset when we can’t get it. We are discussed by older people like we live in the land of milk and honey, and are just throwing totally random tantrums and don’t want to drink in any of that abundant goodness.

None of our problems are inherently new problems, but they are definitely being compounded by some unique situational stuff. People have been talking about how bureaucracy is nonsense for decades. Our complaints are old complaints, but some of what’s surrounding us is a completely new kind of bullshit.

I think anyone who went to school for four or more years, who is in debt nearly $40K, got an internship, and goes through multiple interviews to land some kind of job advertised as a consciousness raising experience, only to end up making a non-living wage making copies all day, would be pissed off. 

I understand that employers think that “Experiential Office Enhancement Assistant” will attract more people as a job title than “Company Punching Bag,” but why can’t we just be real for a second?  

Not everyone is gonna be a CEO, Rockstar, or some kind of Rockstar CEO. Most office work is ultimately pointless and kind of soul crushing. The eight hour workday itself is so inefficient that some Swedish companies have already started ditching it altogether, because it inspires drained employees to bitterly spend every second they can watching cat videos on company time. Most people totally hate their jobs, don’t want to be there, and don’t expect that much from them —not even a living wage. A friend of mine works in a call center where it sucks so bad, a grown ass man was faking epileptic seizures in order to get out of shifts.

Yeah, they figured that one out real quick and he doesn’t work there anymore.

I think that most of Millennial frustration isn’t coming from entitlement. Older people want to buy into this fantasy of the world where the work they do means something, even if what they are doing isn’t saving lives, genuinely bettering the world, or culturally significant in any way. They want to wrap marketing junk food to unhealthy kids in some kind of cloak of business professional lingo, and to make it seem like an urgent life or death calling. Every place wants to pretend they are fucking Google, and what they do is on that innovative world-changing grind, when they really just aren’t.

I understand that it would be really hard to incorporate acknowledging the absurdity of exchanging most of your life for slips of paper so you can just keep on doing that until you drop over into company culture, but I’m not really asking anyone to do that.   

In the midst of the thousands of articles out there telling me that my entire generation is pretentious, entitled, and delusional, I just want to throw it right back. A bunch of people who call secretaries “Executive Administrative Assistant Professionals” and think they need somebody with 10 years of international diplomatic experience and an ivy league degree to answer phones part time wants to tell me I’m pretentious?

That’s probably the only thing they aren’t wrong about.

 

 

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

So, let’s get a few things thing out of the way before we start this up. I’m bisexual. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish. I was born with a vagina. I come from a pretty financially unstable background, and I’m mentally ill as fuck. While I look white enough that a cop isn’t gonna shoot me in the face in broad daylight and claim that I deserve it because I have an attitude problem, white Christians have been doing their best to oppress and exterminate people like me for thousands of years.

While the risk I face is not as dire as the millions of people Trump wants to deport, or the middle eastern children Trump and his friends will bomb to supposedly protect, but are not willing to allow into our country, which is largely descended of immigrants and refugees, I cannot help but look the fuck around and notice that shit is so fucked up right now. I also can’t help but notice that the people who only wish their ancestors had done a better job of killing my predecessors, so I would never have been born and couldn’t mouth off, are in power.

Fear is in my DNA. Being able to properly assess threats and sheer luck are the only things that separates me and my family members from the millions of our dead kin. My great grandmother escaped the pogroms in Russia on a fucking boat with a baby and (probably) a potato strapped to her. I’m only alive because she went “fuck this” and came to America. In her honor, I have looked around, said “fuck this,” and am now working on hopefully leaving America.

These are four forces I view as huge potential threats to my life, and honestly the lives of others in this country. Because even if you aren’t a sniveling wreck with thousands of years of trauma stored in your shitty cells, you probably breathe air, drink water, and will die if someone shoots you.

I mean, not to rely on stereotypes or anything. Sorry. I don’t mean to assume. Maybe you’re an armored plant that runs on sunlight, and your mother dipped you in a magic river as a child and nothing can harm you. My bad.

America’s 4 Biggest Public Enemies

Anyway, let’s get the obvious piece of shit I feel personally threatened by, and think you should too, out of the way.

1. Donald Trump.  

I’m not gonna go too deep into this, because this isn’t revolutionary or interesting at this point. Every other day something terrible Trump has done comes out, and despite his slide into the White House spiking me on a six week depressive episode, I could wake up to him surprise fisting my asshole tomorrow and I wouldn’t even blink. I would just be like “Yeah, sounds about right.”

I would then then read all of the think pieces from Breitbart about how I’m a whore and I deserved it, with the detached glazed look of someone who has dissociated past the point of ever coming back.

If Trump wasn’t going to get us blown the fuck up, he would be the most hilarious senile grandpa ever, except for those few times he tried to rape you as a child. Aside from him making me, someone who has been a victim of sexual violence, confront just how cool Americans are with people getting raped, his policies spell out misery for the majority of Americans and apocalypse for earth. Suppressing scientists and intellectuals is the gateway drug to fascism, kids. And I know what fascism leads to. It’s people like me in a fucking gas chamber by the millions. I’m out of here.

About that planet tho:

As the prophet Nelly once said “It’s getting hot in here.”

As the prophet Nelly didn’t say, “It’s getting hot in here because of man-made stupidity and arrogance, which is also poisoning our air and water. We are all gonna fucking die.”

Also, there’s this really good vegan diner in Brooklyn called Champ’s Diner where I got a vegan crunch wrap one time. If most of the world is underwater, this diner would also be underwater, and I wouldn’t be able to go back. Tortillas don’t really hold onto their crunch under water, and it kind of ruins the overall mouth feel. Which is the real tragedy.

2. Mike Pence

This is also fairly obvious. No shit the Fuhrer and Vice-Fuhrer have everyone who likes not living in a fascist dictatorship quaking in their thrifted boots. But, like, I want to get a little serious here for a second. I see a lot of people begging for Trump to be impeached, so Pence can take over directly.

I DON’T THINK YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE ASKING FOR.

Look, symbolically, Trump is triggering for a lot of people. I 100% understand. Seeing his face and hearing his voice makes me feel physical panic. A big part of my job is writing about him, and it’s probably part of why I drink so much. He’s also a complete embarrassment on multiple levels. He tweets like a freshly divorced bitter alcoholic that is new to the English language, has spent half of his presidency on vacation, and a lot of people think he might have dementia.

Honestly, I thought he was just a prick. But after seeing him take a kid’s hat to sign it, forget what he’s doing halfway through, and throw it into a crowd of people while the kid wails in despair, I think all the people claiming the old fuck might have dementia are onto something.

Vice President Mike Pence’s legacy as Governor of Indiana is creating a massive HIV outbreak through budget cuts. He had Indiana looking like what all those racist white savior complex commercials want to tell you all of Africa is. 20 people a week were being diagnosed with HIV in Indiana in 2015. Then Pence turned to Obamacare to save the people in his state who he had literally tried to kill by defunding Planned Parenthood in the name of Jesus, only to run on the platform of dismantling Obamacare two years later.

By having no government experience at all, Trump has a record that leads me to believe in him more than Mike Pence’s.

Do you really want the guy that pulled a Reagan move like that in the year of our lord 2015 as your president?

Don’t get me wrong, both of these fucks should be put in a box and lowered into the center of the earth, but having Trump impeached and replaced with Pence will most likely solve none of our problems.

3. The American Democratic Party  

Yeah. I’m queer. I’m Jewish. I don’t eat meat. I read books recommended by David Bowie called things like “The Age of American Unreason” and “The Brutality of Fact.” I should probably be with a bunch of other full of shit liberals jerking off. I should be watching my friend, who is a composer, and my other friend, who is an opera singer, 69 each other in the back of a Prius right now.

The liberal establishment is just as dangerous as the conservative one, possibly even worse in certain aspects. In fact, both sides act more or less the same.

Both liberals and conservatives rally around figureheads, and defend them ruthlessly regardless of the reality of their actions. While Obama was a cool guy, a brilliant public speaker, and a deft politician who broke new ground by soaring to incredible heights while dealing with a system that still seeks to enslave people that look like him in for profit prisons, and also I 10/10 would bang him, he did a lot of fucked up shit in the name of furthering American imperialism. His administration was low key deporting people left and right, and responsible for 10 times more drone strikes than Bush’s. Not one liberal gave a peep about how fucked up any of that was until Trump got on that deportation grind.

If you so much as mention any of that to an Obama fanatic, you can physically see the look on their face change as their butthole tightens up. I would love to go more into the fucked up shit Obama did with a twinkle in his eye and a sensual spring in his step, but I’m already pushing my word count because I receive sexual gratification from complaining. And I have one more threat to get to.

I told you I was Jewish. You should have expected this.

The American Democratic party is the exact same warmongering imperialist threat to humanity that the Republican party is. While wearing a mask of gentility and intellectualism and moral righteousness, they ultimately play the same game. Hell, the dems may have rigged their own fucking primary to bow to corporate interests. They have been bought and sold 1000 times, and can barely pretend to be actual people and not just lizards in human suits. They don’t stand for shit. Even Bernie Sanders went from “Trump is Hitler and we must stop him!” to “We will work with Hitler because I’m sure he means well.”

Look at Hillary Clinton. There is a person who is actually a lizard if I have ever seen one.

4. White Christian Terrorists

Yo, so I want to lay down a scenario for you.

A dude shows up in a public place with an assault rifle, mumbles warped religious dogma, and opens fire on unarmed people. Multiple people die and are wounded.

I’m pretty sure that’s the textbook definition of a terrorist attack.

But for some reason, when that dude is white, his religion is Christian, and the place he’s opened fire on is a Planned Parenthood clinic, he’s just a mentally ill loner or something. And no news outlet describes it as a terrorist attack.

You know that if Robert Lewis Dear, who shot up a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs in 2015 was even a little dark, or a little foreign, he would have instantly been branded a terrorist. But for some reason, when you’re a white guy shooting up a medical care facility (that mostly provides STD testing), because you want to stop them from harvesting fetus parts, you are just kinda sad. It’s a weird freak isolated incident. It’s nbd.

Only it’s not actually nbd. While Trump and middle aged white people wail about refugees infecting our soil or whatever, and how Islam is a public safety threat, it turns out that’s actually wrong. According to FBI stats, Non-Muslims have been behind over 90% of all the terrorist attacks in America between 1980 and 2005.

That’s right. While we have spent decades destroying The Middle East on flimsy pretexts, in what has been called the War on Terror, American citizens are over here terrorizing the absolute shit out of their own country. In fact, over 300 people have died in numerous mass shootings and in the midst of political violence since 9/11. Only 33 of these incidences were caused by Muslims.

I didn’t even know there were radical political Jews out there killing people, and that honestly sounds more like a punk band to me than a real threat to public safety, but statistically you are more likely to be shot in the face by a radical extremist Jew than a Muslim, in America.

However, if you are gonna die in a terrorist attack, it’s most likely gonna be a white supremacist throwing that bomb, on the other end of that gun, or holding that knife. They have killed twice as many people as Muslim extremists, and their whiteness protects them from any kind of scrutiny, or meaningful societal pushback. These people are allowed to, totally unchecked and protected by our culture’s desire to uphold whiteness as the standard of excellence, kill whoever they want without anyone going too deep into it.

Donald Trump has emboldened these people. He has validated them. He and his friends also want to make sure that anyone can get a fucking gun, no questions asked. And as white men with an axe to grind become increasingly armed, belligerent, and validated in their views, with those in the highest positions of power behind them, I can only imagine an America ahead of us more terrifying than anyone could ever imagine.

So I’m going to leave.

Periodically humanity flexes its deepest desires for death and horror, and cannibalizes itself in massive numbers. These touch society from root to tip, even fucking with the elites who casually benefit off the suffering of most of the population without thinking about it most of the time. We may be on the cusp of another era of that.

Or we might not.

Everything might be fine.

But I’m still leaving.

 

Support Isadora’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!

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Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

 

If you truly believe that all young people hate older people as viciously as they seem to hate us, I guess the popularity of Bernie Sanders with young people would be confusing to you.

If you are really that set on ignoring everything Bernie Sanders has ever said and stood for, and the complaints of the majority of Americans, because you deeply believe that people of different age groups are destined to fight each other like some kind of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon bullshit, I honestly don’t even know what to tell you.

I’ve encountered this mindset a lot. Older people who have done shitty things to me have tried to dismiss my anger by telling me that “I’m just too sensitive” or “I just hate old people.” When I was a college student, a middle aged woman I was at dinner with bragged about her wealth and famous connections for hours, and then tried to nickel and dime me into paying for her dinner and wine. I don’t think I was old enough to even legally drink at the time.

Obviously, I hated her. And I’m not subtle. If I hate a bitch, the bitch knows about it. You know what this woman said to me?

“You don’t like me because I’m old. I can tell.”

Let’s get this shit out of the way. Most normal people do not inherently dislike or like somebody because of their age. You know what most people like? Feeling validated. You know what most people don’t fucking like? Feeling ripped off.

“When we say “What the fuck, America?” most older people straight up ignore us or tell us to shut up.

Bernie Sanders has been asking “What the fuck, America?” and actively trying to fix it for decades.”