Surprise — This Gen Z-er DOES dream of labor.
For some, it’s our only way out.
Recently, there’s been a wave of videos to pop up on YouTube of various people stating that they don’t have dream jobs because they don’t “dream of labor”. I resisted watching them because the concept as a whole kinda rubbed me the wrong way — to me, it seems this whole movement seems to be hustle culture with a new coat of paint.
If you ask me, the people making these videos come from a place of immense privilege. They have the option to not work, and the freedom to make YouTube videos about it. Out of curiosity, I watched the one such video that my homepage was inundated with: “I no longer aspire to have a career” by Katherout.
Katherine is from the San Francisco Bay area, which told me really all I need to know about this movement. She majored in business at USC and fell into the corporate hustle culture that is prevalent in Silicon Valley. It’s no surprise that she came to this conclusion, just based on her upbringing.
Growing up there and falling into the field that she did, it’s probably really easy to fall into this anti-work mindset, because the concept work is INSANE there. There are huge, multi-million, maybe billion dollar companies whose sole goal is to maximize profits. Of course working at these places is gonna suck real hard.
So, here’s the thing: I get where she’s coming from. I do. But, I can’t relate, like, at all. The Bay area is an economically rich area. Anything you can dream, it’s there. I’ve been to the Oakland/Lake Merrit area before, twice, and hope to return there since it’s officially Vaxxed Girl Summer. I love it there. I wanted to live there previously, but now that I have grown up and realized it’s next to impossible, I’ve set my sights elsewhere. It’s just so, so vastly different from where I grew up, which is why I’m saying that this mindset, the “I do not wish to work” mindset, just does not translate to everyone.
So, I’m gonna say it. Miss Katherine is a bit privileged, based on geography alone. I have no idea if she grew up poor or anything, since she doesn’t go into it in her video, but being that she is from the immensely wealthy Bay Area, it’s probably real easy for her to look at her situation, years after acquiring at least some wealth in her business career, and be able to choose to do something else. I’m making a lot of assumptions here, but bear with me.
“Work” for Katherine is a wholly different concept than “work” for me. For her, it’s not a means to an end, a way to improve and enrich her life — her life, it seems, was already quite enriched and there was very little to improve upon living in one of the most economically rich areas in the United States. Of course, I’m only talking economics here; who knows how her home or social life was. Work for Katherine seemed to just be the next logical step in her life, something that was expected of her but that she maybe didn’t want for herself.
For me, work is essential. It’s my way out — but what does that mean? Well, I grew up and am still unfortunately living in a small central Alabama town with less than 20,000 residents. The median household income is just $26,000. The average is $15,000, but I kinda forgot which one is more applicable in this situation. Still, it’s hovering around the poverty line.
I didn’t grow up poor. My dad was a journalist at our local newspaper and my mom was a schoolteacher. Both of them viewed their work as meaningful — my dad interviewed a lot of civil rights figures and wrote passionately on the subject quite often, and my mom wanted to have an impact on children and educate the youth, just like her parents did. They have since moved on to slightly different careers, but I would hazard a guess that they still feel their work is meaningful, for different reasons.
My mom retired from her education job a couple years ago, but has since returned to a career that helps children and families in need. For her, work was something that was personally fulfilling — she wanted to have an impact on people, and if her former students are anything to go off of, she did.
My dad is no longer a journalist. When I was in the fourth grade, around 8 years old, he got a high-paying job that required him to travel all across the United States for months at a time. Currently, he works and lives in California and, to some people, makes oodles of money. He doesn’t like it, though. He hated the fact that he’s been more or less separated from his family, but he figured it was a worthwhile sacrifice to make. You see, my dad did grow up poor. So, as most parents are wont to do, he wanted to give me and my sibling a better life than he had. Being away from his family for extended periods of time was just a means to that end. His work is not personally fulfilling, but a necessary duty to his family.
Even though my parents worked and are still working as hard as they can to provide me and my sibling with a life better than they had, they didn’t quite foresee that the city they decided to put their roots in would go into such economic decline like it did.
My elementary school experience was fine. It was fine because I went to the school in the white neighborhood with the high property taxes and adequate funding. My middle and high school experience was quite different, though. They were both criminally underfunded and my high school was eventually deemed “failing” and taken over by the state.
By 10th grade, I had become incredibly disillusioned with my station in life. Yes, we were comfortably middle class, but I quickly realized that this city had nothing to offer me — I had lofty aspirations as a teen, and yearned desperately for big city life — the life Katherine has. I frequently describe my city as a black hole of opportunity. Unless I chose to work as an underpaid, overworked schoolteacher or in a factory making locks for Honda vehicles, there would be little I could do here. College was really my only way out, my only way to achieve my dream of leaving this depressed little town in the dust.
So, to college I went, initially with the goal to become a novelist. However, I grew up and realized that would be next to impossible, so I moved to film. Fun fact: unless you’re immediately looking to be a big-time movie director, the film and video-making industry is quite feasible. I was actually able to find a few jobs in this field during college, and many of my classmates have found jobs within that field, which, aside from an exceptional few, I was not able to say that about creative writing.
Things were really looking up for me my last two semesters of school. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to take on this industry I had adopted for myself and finally prepare to start my life elsewhere. I was even on my way to directing my very own short film...and then, long story short, the pandemic hit and, apologies for the Français, it fucked my shit right up.
It’s been almost 7 months since I graduated. The job market has become booboo-garbage in the last year. Finding jobs has been hard for everyone. Sure, I could’ve just worked pushing brooms or flipping burgers somewhere, but considering I was (and still am) living with my parents and have next to no expenses to pay, I chose to focus my efforts on finding a job that I spent 3 ½ years and put myself in over $60,000 of debt learning to do.
So yeah, I yearn to work. Why is that? Well, once more, I have become deeply dissatisfied with my station in life. Here I am again, stuck in my hometown, this black hole of opportunity. It has destroyed my mental health because I am exactly in the one place I do not wish to be: unemployed and living at home. Not only that, but being that I am unemployed and am not interacting with anyone other than my mom and my dog in-person on a daily basis, I have become incredibly isolated. (Surprise! Introverts do like social interaction and aren’t agoraphobic and chronically socially anxious! Who could’ve thought?)
I HAVE to escape this place. There’s nothing for me here. The only way to do that is by finding a job elsewhere. Constantly I ask myself, am I being hamstrung by my location? During one job interview that I can only describe as a tremendous flop, upon learning that I wanted to work in the film industry, the interviewer asked me, “Have you thought about moving to Atlanta?” I wanted to scream. Of COURSE I thought about it! I think about it all the time! Why do you think I’m applying for this job? So that I can save money to move there and accomplish my actual goals. I didn’t say that, of course. I simply said that I can’t move there unless I find a job there. Because, y’know, money. The interviewer said, “Yeah, I get it. Chicken-or-the-egg situation.”
Let me just say that if I lived in the Bay Area, number one: I would probably be working by now. And number 2: I certainly wouldn’t be complaining about it. This may just be my idealistic view of the place, but the Bay Area really seems like the opposite of my hometown: a vast ocean of opportunity.
So, Miss Katherine, I get where you’re coming from. I’m just having a real hard time sympathizing with you, and all the other LA YouTubers who have the privilege, opportunity, and more importantly, money, to just up and stop working and begin to live their lives of Instagram vacations and diarrhea tea sponsorships. A lot of these types fail to realize that not everyone is an influencer, and, more importantly, not everyone wants to be an influencer. Plus, the value of being an influencer doesn’t really seem to be that high with everyone and their mom starting boring lifestyle channels and flooding the market with videos about what they eat in a day and fast fashion clothing hauls. Personally, being terminally online to financially support myself sounds like a miserable existence. But, I guess they make it work.
As it happens, this has affected my favorite hobby — making YouTube videos — in a quite detrimental way. I haven’t been making as many videos, especially research-heavy videos as I might have in previous months. Well, this is why. Not weirdos not wanting to work, but the fact that I’ve become so despondent, deeply upset and dissatisfied with my station in life, despite my best efforts. Thankfully, I’m over it now, but I just couldn’t seem to muster up the energy to make another high-effort video like my Sims Iceberg or any other deep dive until recently. Maybe there’s a whole conversation to be made that I put too much emotional stock in my ability to find a job and move away from home and start my life and finally become an independent well-adjusted person in the society that we live in but quite frankly, unless you’re my therapist, I don’t wanna get into it.
Am I being too inflammatory here? The answer is no. To me, it seems many of these anti-work and anti-capitalism social media movements are started by people who come from a position of privilege and have, ironically enough, benefitted a whole lot form the capitalism they claim to be against. That being said, I am proud of those people who left their jobs en-masse to demand higher wages and better working conditions. THOSE are the people making actual change in our work culture, not YouTubers with over 100k views per video and NordVPN sponsorships.
I’d like to ask you all who may be compelled to watch a video of an influencer expressing their desire to no longer work to consider a few things: where is this person located? Where did they grow up? Did they attend college? What are their income streams, and how lucrative are they? The answers to these questions may reveal how these individuals are even able to cast the concept of labor aside in the first place.
I do not want this article to be taken as a hit-piece on Katherine or any of the people who have made similar videos; they’re perfectly valid feeling the way they feel and are free to express that. Perhaps I’m lucky that I chose a career path exponentially less boring than Business to be in — if I didn’t, I’d probably want to quit, too.
To conclude, I think we as a generation need to focus on why the current state of 9–5 work culture is so detrimental and work towards fixing it as well as realizing that not all forms of employment involve boring offices and meetings that could’ve been emails. We should not be writing off all forms of work to become #VanLife vagabonds hawking vitamin gummies on Instagram because sitting under fluorescent lights for 8 hours a day is ruining their vibes.
Work can be fulfilling for a myriad of reasons, and work takes on many forms for different people. For my mom, it was educating future generations. For my dad, it was preserving the plights of past generations. For me, it’s storytelling and making my voice be heard, even if it’s in some abstract, indirect way.
And hey, it isn’t all doom and gloom for your old pal Arin. Since I began writing this article, I found a job. It’s not in the most ideal city, but it’s exactly what I want to be doing, what I spent 3 ½ years and put myself in over $60,000 of debt to learn how to do, so it’s a start. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I finally get to start my life, and that I didn’t have to perpetuate a grift to do that.
