Lately I’ve been rewatching Mad Men (sort of for fun, but also for a Mad Men rewatch podcast I started), and while almost all of the characters in it are slightly different flavors of philandering scumbag, it’s hard not to notice, and be jealous of, how often they just sort of drink and goof off and go on introspective walks and generally ponder while smoking.
Why can’t we live more like that, I find myself asking.
The obvious answer is “because we’re not white guys in the 1960s” (and also don’t want to destroy our families and die of heart attacks at 51). Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether doing away with the concept of the “smoke break” was really only about getting people to stop smoking or if it was also partly about getting workers to stop taking breaks. There’s an additional irony to me vicariously savoring these fictional characters’ frequent “me” time in a show that I’m essentially watching as part of a job.
And that’s the rub: many of us have so thoroughly blurred the boundaries between living and working that we’re barely capable of spontaneity anymore. I get an itchy, anxious feeling any time I’m doing something that can’t be monetized.
Certainly it’s worse out here in the media industry. Everyone I know, most of us with 10 or 15 or 20 years in the business, is now either holding down one of the last few staff jobs–which usually involves doing work that used to be done with four or five people and trying to please an MBA somewhere who doesn’t really understand what you do—or trying to substitute the staff job you lost a few years ago with five or six semi-regular part-time and/or freelance gigs. In either case, it tends to put the pressure on to fill all of your time slots with some type of bag-securing activity.
But I would argue that the phenomenon goes further than the decrepit, dying old bitch that is the media industry. For Gen Xers and Gen Yers like me (Wikipedia would tell you that I’m a millennial based on year of birth, but I contend that if you learned to masturbate using analog media, you’re too old to be a millennial. I owned ska records god dammit, I will not be erased), we were mostly raised to pursue our passions. Study hard and go to a good college, they all screamed at us. You don’t want to end up digging ditches and working fast food!
Now that I’m over 40, I feel like I’ve been relatively successful—and yet, managers at In n Out are earning significantly more than I am. And theirs seems like the better gig, too—with a tangible product, happy customers, and relevant metrics for success. A friend of mine recently abandoned tech sales to start a pool-cleaning business. He seems happier than ever and there isn’t a single person in our group chat who isn’t jealous of him.
