Where did the time go?

Listen to the young woman discovering work sucks... she's right.

It’s the classic formula. Young woman makes video on TikTok. Someone grabs the video and posts it on Twitter (still not calling it X), solely for the purpose of dunking on her and thus getting a load of engagement. Many people join in. They hold her up as an example of young people being woke, privileged idiots. They declare that we are ‘doomed’ and this is the end of humanity.

This week this cycle has come for a woman who was saddened by the discovery that having a full-time job that requires a commute takes up such a significant portion of your time that there seems to be little space left for anything else. She pled with her followers for answers: how do you do this? How do you have relationships and hobbies and downtime? Is this really what life is supposed to be like?

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1717193628194680895

And it all played out as you would expect, with multiple people (not even just older white men! Lots of types of people!) responding along the same theme: how dare this woman complain, yes, this is what life is like, we’ve all had to do it, and you need to shup and stop whinging.

It’s an odd position, because few of the critics are actually disagreeing with the facts of what this woman complained about. They don’t dispute that a full work day with a long commute either side of it is exhausting. What they disagree with is that she’s questioning it - not complaining, because complaining is allowed and encouraged as a bonding tool (look at how long the Dilbert comics have been going for, and the eternal relatability of Garfield hating Mondays), but questioning, as though there could be another option.

This is a strange cultural thing that persists. Older people say ‘this is how it’s always been, and yes it sucked, but I had to do it, and so you do as well’. In this mindset, questioning how things are is deeply rude, because it’s like saying to older people ‘you lot are silly and you could have chosen to just not suffer’. Even complaining is allowed among older people, because they were doing the same thing the other older people were, and thus they can complain without any judgment baked in, but frowned upon for the younger generation, whose complaints are outrageous because they didn’t even have it as hard as the older people did. People are so desperate to not question their past suffering that they do a bizarre thing of nostalgia-fying it (those were the good old days!) while simultaneously saying it was so much worse than these young people could even know about (these gen Zs don’t even know how good they have it!).

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A post shared by @newyorkermag

It all comes down to this idea that work has to be rubbish, it’s supposed to be hard, and suggesting otherwise is a flight of fancy. Work also has to be done just as we’ve always done it, otherwise society will collapse because we’ll start questioning lots of other things that aren’t working. It doesn’t matter if another way of doing things might actually be better, what matters is by even attempting to do things a new, different way, we’re insulting all the people who chose to do things the old way. Just look at the government telling councils to immediately stop four-day working week trials, despite all the evidence suggesting these are a good thing.

All this is to say that the woman complaining about her job was entirely right. Most people in full-time employment have lost the one thing they can’t buy more of: time. And it’s not just the hours we’re paid for. Think of your evenings. These are, in theory, non-work time, but so rarely are they filled with anything of worth. We work late, then get home so weary from a day of work that we only have the energy to decompress from the day, sitting on the sofa and scrolling because that seems like it might be relaxing (it is not), then we have to do the life admin of eating and cleaning, then ooh, we’d better get ready for work tomorrow, and ooh, we need to get an early night because of work tomorrow, and we do this on repeat until the promise of the weekend arrives and we tell ourselves that actually this is when we’ll learn to play the guitar or make meaningful connections or write a great novel, only to find that Saturday needs to be spent recovering from the week, then Sunday disappears in a swirl of worries about the week ahead. Our time is spent either working or dealing with the after-effects of work or thinking about the work to come. And sleep. Where is the space for anything else, really, genuinely? The space that isn’t little scraps we’ve had to scrounge for and pay for with tiredness or the sacrifice of something else?

If you are lucky and strategic, the work that takes up so much of your time is work you enjoy (that’s the case for me) and feels meaningful in and of itself (also the case for me). But even in that instance, we should still be questioning if this is how our lives are supposed to be spent; with such a large amount given over to jobs and everything else lower down on the priority list. This is how it is, they say, and how it always has been, but why? Why does it have to be? Why can’t we acknowledge that maybe we got it wrong before, but now’s the time to make things better?

Better doesn’t need to mean a total overthrow of everything we know. Young people saying ‘I don’t want to do work like this’ does not mean young people don’t want to work anymore. We can take baby steps, like perhaps allowing more working from home than before, or changing up our hours to better suit people’s natural rhythms, or acknowledging that not every work task is more important than workers’ wellbeing.

What if, rather than viewing this woman and other young people like her as ungrateful whingers, we saw them as canaries in the coal mine, chirping through the nostalgia and the stubbornness to tell us that we don’t have to toil for hours and years and delay happiness until the weekend, until annual leave, until retirement, we can try something else. Change is difficult and scary, but if we push through it together, generations backing each other up along the way, it could work out so much better for all of us.

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

This week’s episode is a WorkChat edition (meaning it’s us chatting about work, rather than interviewing someone), discussing topics including the emotional toll of being a journalist, declaring friendships at work, and orgasms. Have a listen:

Work-related reading recs:

• How an effort-reward imabalance can make work miserable

• Great piece on the rise of the ‘accidental manager’ and why there are so many bad bosses now

• As always, loving Amelia Tait’s writing on absolutely anything, but this piece on AI newsreaders is fascinating me this week

• Interesting report on companies offering ‘wellbeing days’