At some alternate time in my life, I was told about my approachability. “You are very approachable,” I was encouraged, “very easy to talk to.” I questioned this candidly as if it were true – or biased – as it was coming from a friend who, from the start, had made it clear that his heart was residing permanently on his sleeve. This pattern was common at other places in my life as it so came to be: the ability for people, even mere strangers, to open up in my presence. This was astounding, often unwarranted, but was made clear just how easy it was to do. My questioning of this only came when it happened. Working closely with the public I was introduced to the notice of active grieving, navigating life’s curveballs, often an unwelcome comment about my hair, shoes, or fingernail polish, and most of all: what it is that keeps people going. My ability to listen was never intended for personal gain, but certainly fell no shorter than one of my favorite quotes: “writers are always selling someone out.”
My innate hyper-observatory tactics led me to realize, among most other things and specifically pertaining to this narrative, the constant motion and need for timely fulfillment we all seem to live in. If not for social media and tentative distractions otherwise, what are we to do than make a project? As Millennials and generations thereafter come swiftly into adulthood, the pattern of monetary fulfillment not only seems necessary for some semblance of comfortable living, but necessary for us to feel like we are paying our own dues – physical taxes that were implemented by those before us, signaling our own rite of passage into what we have been told will lead to a satisfactory value of life. What we, as both a generation and society, are coming to realize is that these “dues” are becoming less attainable and are another piece of the pie added to our plate of food we have not yet been able to touch. As the expectation grows for us to accomplish X, Y, and Z and our efforts continuously fall short, victimization increases. If not from our peers, from our elders, and from our bosses, there is often an internalized voice ready to remind us that we are not fulfilling our “duties as citizens,” as if we had not known that already.
There became a quiet understanding among those willing to put in the work necessary that, given the dedication, what you so desperately wanted would come to you. To some degree that proved to be true, as anything you work for will reap an apparent benefit. What inevitably bred among kids raised under the provocation that you can “be anything you want to be” was consequently what has been since coined as “Hustle Culture.” Definitively speaking the understanding is that overworking yourself is the only way to earn the respect we are supposed to equally treat our elders with. In this ideal, if you are not filling every single minute of every single day with something that pushes you to your final goal, you are not trying hard enough. You do not deserve what you are working towards. I vividly recall laying on the concrete floor in the back office of my store thinking “I am navigating myself towards a dead end.” The nylon separating my tensed back and the chill of the concrete only went as far as the imagination. I constantly felt as if someone had turned on the air conditioner in my chest. I knew I had taken on too much already and continued to agree to more until I snapped. Subsequently, my career prospects diminished as quickly as my drive had, my ambition to create was a mere whisper in the wind that hardly graced the summer days, and I felt the pressure of vision on every move I thought about making. At the pass of my previously mentioned dead end, I began pleading with any higher power to grace me with insight but eventually realized what I needed was to establish what it was I thought I needed to be told and tell it to myself.
By far the hardest pill to swallow was my inability to give in to the typical “hustle culture” lifestyle. Contrary to the idea that no bad days exist, I found that eventually, the bad days are what gave me something to create from. Not as if I were actively seeking bad days, per se, but to acknowledge them for what they were is what made this specific pill a little easier to swallow. The idea that you should be working with no days off is not only damaging and borderline inhumane for any working individual but especially (and in my specific case) in a creative field. It is not impossible to produce results working tireless days in a row, but the moment you prove you can do such a thing is the moment the expectation of that natural routine to continue comes barreling in at a fault. Retrospectively I noticed that on my particularly bad days in retail, my ability to “develop a connection” and “make a sale” happened to the millionth degree, merely because I was so focused on distracting myself from feeling that way. Inevitably I gave myself no time to recuperate, no time to de-stress, no time to analyze why and how I was feeling the way I was. But our sales still happened, I still made sparkling connections, and the expectation to keep those results building is what made me realize specifically that I was not built for a constant influx of result expectations, producing better product suggestions and ideas, and my own personal expectation of myself to do exceedingly well in all areas of my life. I had to literally and figuratively take the seat I made for myself.
On the occasion I felt I had something to say, I would take out the phone I had used prior only to doom scroll and avoid my own downfall and scribble in my notes whatever piece of something came to mind. I had begun to notice that my days were decided often the night before: based firmly on how I was feeling mentally would be the factor in how much – or how little – I managed to make myself do in the day. Between scrolling through job boards and taking walks that often turned into runs, I could not tell you what I did otherwise. I was focused on so little compared to my misery I would imagine I was simply just doing things to do them. Every so often I would hum the melody to a song I had not heard in quite some time and wonder where it came from. Eventually, the words began to join in moments that caught me off guard. As if I had regressed to some astral plane of lyricism from my high school years, I kept repeating “I’m a bit overwhelmed, some may call it uninspired.” I paid no mind otherwise and continued with my days as if I had all of them to waste.
This is the part of the story I wish I could tell you in detail.
It is seldom the first listen of a song that you realize the severity of its context. Often it takes the second or third listens, perhaps in different settings, to understand the negative or positive inclination you have towards what it is you are listening to. I so desperately want to remember my first listen of Society by Valley but became so glazed over in trying to understand what I was feeling, it was not the first, second, third, nor fourth listen by any stretch of the imagination. When I “came to” and realized the gravity of the track I was driving home from a dinner I went to against my better judgment. I had my windows down while a chill began to settle in the air and my sunglasses stayed on despite the sun having almost fully set. I had a predilection that the song was “too pop” or “too stick-it-to-the-man” to feel like I could like it without inner dilemma. That was the point. As if it were some moral conflict, I could feel the pushing and pulling of the lyrics as they related to my own current struggles. The constant expectation for results, the competition with other people doing the same things, misunderstanding where your place in society is based on where you were put by someone else, the prospect that you are emotionally available to give all that you have and it still not being enough…. And as I continue to process this, I am debating my own continuation. Nonetheless, Valley delivered an item of genuine matter in a time we are all looking to find what it means to really enjoy what we are doing.
“Society” was created in similarity to Archers by With Confidence (a song I had, just weeks prior, gotten a tattoo to represent) and Uninspired by Cartel (the song I mentioned before, the one I did not know where in my brain it had hidden itself). In a creative field, there is always something you are not doing right or not doing as well as the other guy or something you are expected to do for a profit. As a creative myself, I had found it routinely difficult to enjoy something as a hobby without feeling the need to monetize it and add a higher value, as if bringing me joy was not enough value. What integrity are we surrendering by measuring up to what the expectation of us is? And is the collective moral jury feeling the same loss of integrity? Are we as individuals supposed to be expecting more from ourselves even if we know there is nothing left to give? Enlightened are those who accept what they have to offer and do not feel the pressure to give or make more. As far as my understanding goes, the ability for my generation to live a sustained life on what we have made and have not spent on “frivolous” items like a loaf of Pepperidge Farm for good toast is further from our reach than we can estimate. The economy has changed just enough without the general living wage doing the same that we are essentially pigeon-holed. The encouragement for us to “know our worth” has turned into freelance work very few people wish to pay for because somewhere along the line we decided art was not a worthy enough field to support in a traditional setting. Despite the daunting task of earning a livelihood, enjoying it, and being able to separate the two, there still poses the issue of the general unrest my peers in their 20’s and 30’s are now experiencing. According to a survey done by Lending Tree in 2020, 50% of Millennials have an alternate source of income in addition to their classic consumer-driven job. In addition, 53% of those polled admitted to needing that income to help make ends meet, especially during the Coronavirus Pandemic we are seemingly still having to navigate. So where does the plead for a middle ground begin and end? The argument can be (and is) made that the wages at which we are being paid do not reason the treatment by executives that come with said wage. In my experience, I myself have done the work of a retail assistant manager for less than $10 an hour. A job that, on average, pays $15 to $16 in America. “Be thankful you have a job,” I would be assured. In the same breath, the next question, “have you considered finding something else?” This could easily turn into a think-piece on how our willingness to help is often preyed on and taken advantage of, and though we know it, it beats the alternative. What this all came down to was understanding my own lines that could and could not be crossed. For so long I watched people around me achieve the things I learned I too wanted to achieve, but only at the expense of personal losses. Eventually, I came to think “it isn’t worth it” and accepted my fate in whatever way it came to me because I knew I would never mentally be able to grind out the work and results as much as others did. Retrospectively, I do not necessarily think this makes me, or anyone in a similar situation, any less deserving of the same desires. For a long time, my inability to “hustle” sat in the form of a gray cloud over my head. The metaphorical rain that fell was merely my own despair, exacerbating the drowning feeling of fear I would not accomplish anything worth a damn. It was not until I physically wrote down on a piece of paper in front of me “you do not have to subscribe to hustle culture” that I submerged myself in such a cleansing thought.
Being able to enjoy the release of a song so poignant and blunt in its message feels like unearthing a treasure. Fully understanding and accepting a personal dissection of it feels like something in that treasure had my name engraved on it. For weeks I have questioned what I am doing and who I am doing it for; why I feel like I am here and why I feel like I am only here to be a catalyst, in whatever form, for others more than for myself; how I am supposed to make the most of this, whatever it is. It feels serendipitous that I got a tattoo highlighting the suspense of going against what is expected of you just a week after quitting a job that had taken so much out of me for so long. Only to then be followed by the remembrance of another song about the way society treats the idea of creativity, then have another hit so close to home when I found its artist on a whim. I struggled to write this because I did not know where to take it nor where it would come from. All I knew is that I felt compelled to write based on the mundane experiences of healing past traumas and chauffeuring oneself into adulthood. I felt somewhat cooler and more worthy of taking up space in the world of writing when I was around the age of twenty. At the same time, I had routinely watched a movie about a writer raising two writers (Greg Kinnear, Nat Wolff, and Lily Collins, respectively, and incredibly) because I found so much rich content in it. As I finished the latter paragraph, a quote from the movie “a writer is the sum of their experiences” came to mind, almost like a subconscious pat on the back from the twenty-year-old who is still in there somewhere, even if in pieces. We are all worthy of claiming our own time, especially having just experienced a yearlong (and continuing) pandemic that left us all in a state of disarray. There is quite literally no better time than the other side of an unprecedented, once in a century, completely unexpected health event that rattled the world as it once was to reconsider what makes you feel like you can take control of the parts of your life that make it feel worth living. As new generations enter adulthood it is not difficult to see that working ourselves to the bone for comfortable retirement years is an unforgivable promise. While the routine of instant gratification is damaging to our patience to some degree, when it comes to enjoying the life we have while we have it, at this moment, we should be expecting an immediate turnaround. Despite the demands of the general society as it continues to crumble under its own oxymoronic growth, there should be no reason to diminish the demands of what we know will fulfill us at this moment. If working your fingers until they bleed is not what is going to fulfill you, put some gloves on and move to the next project. In the end, you are the only one that will be directly affected by the decisions you make in the moment you have to make them. While you, the decision-maker, will inevitably be the one to face the pending consequences, you will be the only one allowed to reap the benefit of an independent choice while everyone else stood there and told you about why it was a bad decision to make. Personally, that sounds like a them problem, not a you problem. Stop working yourself to the bone to achieve a societal construct.
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