Everyone Wants to Work

In my house, we have a standing once-a-week Facetime call so that grandparents who live six states away, can virtually see their granddaughter who they see in the flesh, once a year if they’re lucky.

Halfway through the latest call, after we’d covered the granddaughter’s health, happiness, school, dance class and general wackiness, the conversation inevitably turned to my job. I was trying to impress upon my stepfather the general insanity that I deal with on a daily basis, but when I made the comment that our office regularly hemorrhages staff, my step-father countered with a phrase that quite frankly ticked me off. He said, ‘Yeah, nobody wants to work!’

To give some background, my step-father, much like my mother, is a retired boomer and republican, who is very much a by-the-bootstraps type of person. He believes in putting your head down and doing your job.

But rather than get angry at him, I took my time to explain that the people leaving my office, aren’t just going home to live off the dole. They’re not even leaving the government. They’re heading to other agencies, or departments. Some are simply moving to different offices within the same city. It’s not that they don’t want to work. It’s that they don’t want to work here.

But as I hung up the phone that night, I couldn’t help but wonder…did he really think millions of Americans quit just so they could live on the dole? I suppose he did, because every single person from the previous generation that I’ve spoken to about this, all had the exact same reaction. They all seem to think that collecting unemployment, or any sort of social services, is a weakness or failure of character rather than a last ditch effort to remain afloat.

But the truth is that the pandemic has taught us that life is too damn short to continue killing ourselves at a job we hate. For millions of Americans (myself included) we were all burnt out before the pandemic even began. It’s only been with COVID that so many of us finally figured this out.

I shouldn’t be surprised by my stepfather’s response, but it does speak volumes as to the generational gap in understanding. When you have a bad situation, you don’t waste time elaborating about how bad it is. It’s like trying to describe a really terrible sound that only you can hear. You might try to mimic the pitch, or talk about how loud it is, but inevitably no one will really understand without hearing it themselves. So at the end of the day, you simply throw up your hands and say ‘I can’t sleep at night,’ and leave it at that.

But in talking with my step-father and those from the previous generation, it feels like I have to explain the sound, because without it they won’t be able to understand what the problem is. To them, you work a job until you retire, so doing anything less requires an in-depth explanation. But millions of people didn’t quit last year so they could sit at home, or open eleven million Etsy shops.

For me specifically, I am doing this so that I might spend more time with my family and preserve my sanity. This right here, the very act of writing, is my dream job, or at least part of it. I want to be a writer full-time. I want to be paid for the words and stories and songs that I care to write, not simply fire up the old resume so I can move onto another government job that I know I will end up hating.

I want to get out of this insanity, while I still have some of my own to give. But for as anxious as I am to get out, I’m not rushing off and quitting. I’m taking this year to build momentum for my writing. I’m writing articles much like this one, I’m self-publishing stories on Amazon, and querying agents about my literary horror novel that I’ve been championing for the last six years. And while this process is slow, and inherently frustrating, it is also one of the bright spots of my day. It is what I think back on at the end of the day, what I look forward to at night and what I consistently measure myself against. I constantly push myself to be better, to come up with something more because what fifteen years of government have taught me is that working a job you hate isn’t safe, no matter what anyone, not even matter your paycheck, says.

It is nothing more than a thirty year way of slowly tearing yourself apart. And life is too short and too beautiful to go out that painfully.