Burning up
Like every knowledge (or maybe just media) worker, I’ve been thinking about this article on the so-called YOLO economy for the past couple weeks. It’s about people like me quitting their supposedly “good” jobs in droves, now that the end of the pandemic is in sight. (Well, in the U.S. It still looks pretty far away to me!) The past year—specifically working through the past year—has left us exhausted and unfulfilled in a way that has permanently given lie to the toxic ideology about work that millennials, in particular, have been swimming in since birth. Our work is not our life. Our job is not our identity. Our employers, no matter how much we’ve been forced to sacrifice for them, will push us out of the lifeboat at the first sign of trouble. Many of them did. We can’t unsee what the past year showed us about our lives and the societies that determine how we live them. We’re done.
The article sums up many people’s feelings as, “The pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t have to live like this.” It’s not that I think this is wrong. It happened to me! It’s that the article is missing a dose of rage. We’re not saying fuck it because we’re tired of Zoom calls and have some extra savings after a year trapped in our homes. We’re saying fuck it because we’ve been personally betrayed by every single structure and ideology governing our lives, up to and including capitalism itself. Everything. Was. A. Lie. Careers: a lie. White-collar jobs: a lie. The global economy: a lie. Meritocracy: a lie. Borders: a lie. Work-life balance: a lie. A social safety net: a lie. Having it all: a lie. America: a lie. Millions of lives were quite literally sacrificed on the altar of these lies, while the luckiest among us were stuck working harder than ever at jobs that, at best, didn’t matter at all.
I know that as we passed the various anniversaries, a lot of people found remembering the beginning of the pandemic triggering. I’ve found it bracing, in a good way, to revisit some of the writing from last March and April. Like this article in Slate, published on March 14, 2020, which seems both laughably small and unbearably huge, about the TSA lifting in the carry-on liquid size limit for hand sanitizer:
All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.
What could we see then, when the sense of betrayal and free fall was searingly visceral and still so surprising, and not just the (potentially infectious) air we’ve been breathing for a year? What have we stopped looking at, because it was just too exhausting and frightening to keep our eyes trained on it for months on end? Those are the feelings that are coming to the surface now, a year later, when many of us find ourselves expected to go back to acting like we did before. To go back to the lies, to the bullshit. As if we can’t see them for what they are. As if they hadn’t collapsed right in front of us. As if they had ever been real.
So YOLO I guess! Because lol nothing matters. Or rather, everything matters, and we won’t be tricked into pretending otherwise, not again. As Mandy Brown wrote in her newsletter recently, “Maybe we’re not burned out but burned up. The former assumes we’re empty vessels simply in need of refueling while the latter asks what might rise from this heap of ash at our feet.” I can’t stop thinking about that. We’re burned up.We’re burned up. We’re burned up.