Image by Phil Kates (License CC BY-SA 2.0)
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”
“…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.
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