On Burnout
I think it’s safe to say we’ve all been through a lot in the past year.
In January of 2020, I went to New Hampshire with Rookie and Jazmin to work on a short film. It was fun! We made some good friends (hey, Connor and Kennedy!) and made a good movie.
And Jazmin brought her banana
In February, we set out again, this time to Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. And that was incredible.
At the end of February, I landed a last-minute producer gig on a short film. More new friends, more good movies.
Then the world ended.
We got in a car together! And went into buildings together!
It’s impossible to say the toll this pandemic has taken on us as a collective, beyond the more than 500,000 lives already lost to COVID-19. So much of that has been preventable, and I hope we never forget the people responsible. Donald Trump made the COVID crisis so much worse than it ever had to be, enabled by a corrupt GOP and emboldened by the extremely vocal minority of blind morons who voted for him and continue to say he speaks for the people when he’s a many-times rapist who lives in a literal golden tower.
But I don’t want to talk about that right now. I want to talk about burnout. Because burnout has been prevalent in our society for a long time, before Trump, before COVID. And, while this may be an unpopular take among some older or younger folks, the truth of it is that nobody does burnout like millennials do.
I adopted a new best friend on that short film! It was great!
Our generation grew up before we realized the world was bullshit. We were told all our lives to get into a good college, get a degree, get a job, get a house, live your life, retire. Just like it always was, right? Except college tuition rates have risen more than 213% since the late 80s and early 90s. CNBC says “In 1940, the median home value in the U.S. was $2,938. By 2000, it had risen to $119,600 and today it’s just over $200,000. Even adjusted for inflation, the median home price in 1940 would only have been $30,600 in 2000 dollars.” In Los Angeles, where I live for some reason, you can’t find a studio apartment for less than $1300 a month.
Look at how cute these dogs are!
So it’s a lot more expensive to go to school and it’s a lot more expensive to be alive. Wouldn’t wages expand to meet that rise in cost of living?
Nah.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. I remember when that was set, because it was 2009 and I worked at Subway, where I made twenty-five cents more than my friend who was a manager because I’d been hired just after the adjustment. Some states have higher minimum wages, and some companies actually pay more than they need to. But still…$7.25? I mentioned in my last blog post how the current Fight for $15 has been going on so long that even $15 an hour is no longer enough. Never mind the fact that Joe Biden is already telling people in private that the $15/hour raise will never happen. He’s not a president for the people, he’s a president for the status quo. And the status quo is broken. If minimum wage was adjusted at the same rate of cost of living, it would be somewhere around $24 an hour.
I’ve never once had a job that paid me $24 an hour. Very few people I know have had that pleasure.
Instead, we improvise. We have side hustles. Uber, Postmates, Lyft, Wag. They call it a gig economy. Then those companies write their own legislation that screws over workers, and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a marketing campaign so people think it’s a good idea. It’s not. In California we’ll be feeling the negative ripples of Prop 22 for generations, and already similar statutes are starting to poke their ugly little heads up in other parts of the country.
But what choice do we have? We have to pay rent, even in a pandemic. We have to pay street cleaning tickets, because the mayor of LA is a little bitch who quietly brought that policy back while COVID case numbers were rising. Those of us fortunate enough to have jobs have to cling to them, because no one is going to help us. Socialism is reserved for banks, corporations, and billionaires. They get handouts, and convince us to fight amongst ourselves so that we don’t realize who the real enemy is.
These two don’t pay a dime in rent!
And so we burn out. Even before the pandemic, millennials were told that we have to grind, to work and work and work until we drop, and then keep working. Our worth was tied to our productivity; if we’re not working, we’re not worth anything. It’s why I can’t spend a day laying in bed watching movies. I have to do something, otherwise I feel anxious. And I know I’m not the only one. My entire generation suffers from this. Many of my coworkers have second or even third jobs. Many of them go straight from Target to those jobs. Then they go home and sleep, just to do it all again the next day.
Dolly Parton recently released a remixed track called 5-9, about the “joy” of having a side hustle. I haven’t listened to it. Dolly is probably the closest thing we have to a living American saint, but she missed the mark on that one. Side hustles shouldn’t be something to celebrate. They shouldn’t be a thing at all. We are the generation that can’t have a hobby without monetizing it in some way. We can’t just paint, or draw, or build miniatures, we have to also sell them on Etsy to survive.
I don’t have any hobbies. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. When I’m not at Target, I’m working on Tequila Mockingbird projects. But what do I do when I’ve finished all my emails? What do I do with my spare time when I don’t have any paperwork to draw up?
I tend to cycle through the same six or seven websites on a loop, endlessly refreshing even though I’ve read every article already. I tend to have a sitcom on in the background. If I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll watch a show I haven’t seen already, or even a movie. But at the back of my mind there’s a little countdown clock, ticking away until it’s time to get ready for my next shift. I hardly remember what day it is anymore. My brain has rewired itself to think in terms of shift start times rather than days. It’s not Tuesday, it’s just the day I’m at Target from 2pm to close.
I’m not a scientist, but I feel like that’s not healthy.
People like to say we’re doing okay because the economy has never been better, but the truth of it is there are two economies in America. One of them is housing, wages, taxes, social benefits programs, cost of living, and the like. The other is the stock market. And when people clutch their pearls and shout, “The economy!” usually they’re referring to the second one. The stock market is okay, the 1% are happy, so America is fine.
Sven is famous on the Internet because he hangs out with protestors and shits on the mayor’s lawn!
Right?
We’re not fine. We’re struggling. The pandemic rages on completely unchecked because so many people in this country just decided not to deal with it anymore, but we were struggling before, and we’ll be struggling afterward. We have to work to live and live to work. Our entire lives, our entire identities, are consumed by our jobs. But what about people who don’t have jobs? What about people who don’t want jobs?
That should be fine. We as a society need to work to get past the weird stigma that if you work hard enough, you’ll get the American Dream. I talked in my last blog post about how that American Dream is bullshit, and I’ll say it again here: it’s bullshit. 60% of wealth in this country is inherited. There are no bootstraps to pull yourself up by other than having rich parents.
Change is coming. There are people working at every level (other than perhaps the presidency and the Senate) to change our lives for the better. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, private citizens like Beto O’Rourke, progressive candidates like David Kim, activist organizations like KTown for All are working hard every single day to make life livable for everyone in this country, rather than the privileged few.
It’s something we all have to do together. We all have to decide that enough is enough. We have to make our voices heard. It’s increasingly likely that those in power aren’t going to help us. The two-party system is broken. We need people who stand for progress to run for office, to work with activists, to help people. Even a simple act of kindness that, to the person doing it, can seem like nothing, can radically change another person’s life. Treat the unhoused like human beings. Talk to people, ask them what they need and if you can help. Donate to grassroots activism if you can. They spend their time and money delivering sleeping bags and food to those in need. If you can’t donate, why not volunteer? Why not help with their letter writing campaigns, Twitter blasts, or phone banks? Research candidates at every level of government before voting. It’s easy to just skim over things like judges or who’s running for City Controller, but these positions have untold amounts of power and influence.
Why does she never Venmo me when it’s time to pay the electric bill?
Life doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve just been conditioned for so long that this is how things are that we’re used to it. But we have the power to change our futures. We just have to act on it. And we can’t let those in power bring us down, because they will do anything in their power to do just that.
I am always tired, and that’s something else I think a lot about. I can’t imagine I’m the only one. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s sick of it. So let’s do what we can do make this country a better place, where everyone has what they need, where life is actually worth living.
But while we’re doing that, remember to take some time to yourself. Go for a walk. Watch a movie you haven’t seen before. Have a game night with your roommates. Build a puzzle, sew a blanket, paint a picture. Get wine drunk and blast the new T-Swift album until you collapse. The world wants us to be burned out, because if we’re burned out we can’t change what needs changing.
Screw that.
