This post isn’t a basket of financial advice, it’s about working crappy jobs. You know the ones, where you’re a faceless and nameless creature taking up a space that could be occupied by anyone. You’re not employed so much as someone needed to be. I’ve worked a lot of them. In customer service, retail, food service, telemarketing, warehouses, you name it. Very few people want to, but you’ve got to bring home the bacon.
Those kinds of jobs are like the airports of employment. No one wants to stay, everyone just wants to move on to somewhere else. Very few people get up in the morning and dream about managing a fast food restaurant where they’re essentially a non-person to most customers. Almost everyone has something else they’d rather be doing or somewhere else they’d rather be that work is interfering with. Whether they want to be out making art or out at the bar, the job itself is regarded as a kind of necessary evil. I’ve noticed it breeds a kind of aggressive apathy in a lot of people, myself included. Not caring about the job is often the only defense of your sanity. It’s not your career, you’re moving on to something else. You don’t care about it, you just need it to get by for now. Caring beyond the minimum amount needed is almost a betrayal, it feels like a commitment to staying in that place, a commitment that becomes resignation. The only reason you’d care is because you know that deep down, you’ll never get away. There’s something about working in faceless jobs that creates a deep existential angst in adults.
In those jobs the people who don’t have the apathy are at best strange and at worst hostile. After all, we all know what it’s like to work with someone who doesn’t care as much as we do. It’s frustrating. I’ve known people who throw themselves into those kinds of jobs and on one hand I respect their ability to commit, but on the other I watched those jobs burn them out and finally chew them up, leaving room for nothing else in their lives. The message to me was clear, apathy will keep you whole. It keeps back the best parts of yourself and saves them for that something special you hope to move on to.
I spent a few years treading water in those gigs, sunk in depression and trying to find a way out. It was university that did it for me, and the things I’d learn there, the people I’d meet. It’s important to understand that I had good jobs for the most part. My managers were usually civil and well-organized, my workplaces were kind, and my co-workers were routinely easy to get along with. Sometimes I even had fun at my job. But it was always a burden. You’d spend most of your time thinking about what you were going to do when the shift was over. Sometimes there’s even a sense of feeling bad about feeling good about the job because it feels like institutionalization. You’re buying into something instead of struggling to get out. I know all of those feelings pretty well.
What I didn’t know is that they stick.
Recently I’ve had some great jobs. Graduate school, being a teaching assistant, and finally my current gig, doing communications for a faculty association. And those feelings never faded. Now I have to fight with them. I remember days during my MA when I was determined not to care about my work. Not because I needed a break or a bit of distraction, but out of the same sense of aggressive apathy I’d had years before. I’d write lines reminding myself why I cared about my research and why I was actually doing things I really loved doing. I still struggle with it today. I look forward to going to work, I have all kinds of things to do that I’m interested in, and I’m a person to the people I work with, not a pair of hands.
I wish everyone could follow their dreams, and I have a keen awareness that my own good fortune is due more to good fortune than my mad skills. I spent a lot of time becoming qualified for my job but ultimately it came down to the right conversation in the right moment. Making the transition to something that could conceivably last for decades rather than a year or two is tricky when the notion of really committing to my work is so alien, but I’m working through it.
When I’m in places where people work the kinds of gigs I used to, I try to give them the concern I’d want, but I also find myself respecting their apathy. They’re not passionate greeters, fry cooks, and cashiers. They’re just bringing home the bacon.
