I no longer aspire to have a career.

welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is katherine and today i wanted to have a little heart to heart on something that i think has been causing a lot of grief for many people which is what exactly are you supposed to do with your career and to jump right in with a piping hot take i'm here to tell you that maybe you'd be better off with that one i have my trusty girl bossy journal here in which i've scratched down a few notes but really i just want to speak to the transformative power of reclaiming what a career means if you're watching this first of all hit the thumbs up that would help me out a lot and subscribe if you'd like um but if you're watching this your youtube homepage may look a little bit like mine in that every so often a video trickles in there invalidating the idea of a dream job and i've really enjoyed listening to their very personal reflections on that and i want to add to that discourse in support of all these other great folks trying to liberate us from a life of servitude to companies um i will have a few of those linked because i love to share other youtubers and i also love to watch fresh up-and-coming content that has not been misguided by the pressure of immense youtube success if you know what i mean so i'll link a bunch of those channels um down below i don't think i've talked about my upbringing too much on this channel but i was born and raised in the bay area which is a very work-centric culture i think it gets characterized that way a lot i never consciously saw that as an unhealthy thing growing up but what it does do is imbue the youth of silicon valley with the intense desire to go to like an elite four-year college and then get a very prestigious brand-name job which greatly impacts the mental health of literal 13 year olds that are already stressed about their future and their potential and how successful they'll be instead of just exploring and having fun with friends like doing creative [ __ ] like instead the orientation is very much on like not even just the immediate future of middle school or high school but like five to ten years out where you're gonna be and personally i just don't think that kids should be concerned with that and i think we would have much more well-adjusted adults in the world if we allowed kids to be kids so then i went to college at usc and i was a business major which is basically majoring in jobs like it's like the least academic major you could take because it's completely disoriented on commercial output and like it's basically just instead of spending four years learning about philosophy and critical thinking and just reading super important theory you're spending all of your time in excel and doing consulting projects and like there's certainly merit to that and i'm also generalizing here on what a business degree is like obviously there are more strategic classes in the business school but like a lot of it is very like entrepreneurial minded um which maybe this is radical but i almost feel like taking four years or three years to just expand your mind and open your mind up to the world not just to business would be more helpful when it comes to being like a well-rounded person starting a business and understanding like the ethics and all the considerations of a community and just you know like these are some things i've been thinking about like i have always been very oriented to work throughout the day i just i'm always trying to be more productive like if i ever have any free time i whip my laptop and i'm working ahead on a group project like information or slides or i'm um already editing part of this vlog and getting ahead of myself and that's just like the kind of person i am and as soon as i graduated i plopped right into the corporate track and was a happy little lemming just charting my course and i remember very distinctly like six months into it being like i don't know if this is for me i don't think i'm qualified i don't think i'm competent here like i don't know what i'm doing i just don't think this is for me like i felt a core misalignment with what i was doing and i kind of just chalked it up to like okay this is how everyone feels like you just have to keep going at a certain point it'll settle out and you'll start to realize that nobody knows what they're doing and you just have to figure it out as you go but i think that we should honor those feelings of like cognitive dissonance and really like question and challenge those because otherwise you just suppress and deflect those thoughts and just only accept that work is everything and that you should be fully plugged into it and just quiet any thoughts that maybe you're not this is all personal to what i experienced i know a lot of people that are wonderful skeptical thinkers that never wanted to go into the corporate world and were always questioning it and i wish i were more like that but i very much was just climbing my little ladder sat out in front of me spelling out what an impressive career would be and i remember like maybe a year or two into the corporate world i got really into the dichotomy of work to live versus live to work and i started to take in my surroundings and start to pick out examples of you know people in my life that live to work versus work to live you know who's happy who's not who's fulfilled who's not and now it's kind of laughable that i even questioned which two of those options is right or wrong i think i very quickly was like well whatever one suits you best is fine but genuinely have a hard time accepting that living to work is benefiting you more than it is a company you know like you have to wonder what's at stake and i'm just saying when they index like the happiest countries in the world and i don't know exactly what the index is based on so maybe it's flawed and corrupt too but they tend to be countries like denmark where work is just downplayed in your identity so much more like i remember going to the netherlands and it's like if you ask someone you know what they do they'll answer oh well i'm a cyclist i'm a father i'm a writer and then maybe the second to last thing would be like and i'm an accountant but in no way is their labor and their job the formative part of their identity like they don't center that in who they are like we do in the u.s and call me looney but like i think it's very plausible that their happiness index and their distance from their jobs is their identity is linked that does not sound unbelievable to me so i've spent a lot of time over this past year taking in a lot of different perspectives about work and different point of views about success and career orientation and all of that and i really enjoyed like learning how other people define these things for themselves and in that sort of informal self-study if you will there are a lot of dangers that people speak to of tying your job directly to yourself your worth your purpose because here's the thing like amongst the dangers are the potentiality that you'll lose your job and if your entire self-awareness is centered around a job and then you lose that thing at the core suddenly you feel unmoored you feel untethered like it's it's not just the uncertainty and fear of lack of income and having to do a job search and like all of that change but you're also dealing with a shift in identity and this feeling of losing who you are and complete dissonance with your entire world view so that's one danger that you don't know when you're going to lose a job whether you're laid off or you're fired or any myriad of things and also quite frankly like your employer does not care about you holistically they care about your labor and i'm very plain about that fact like i think it's helpful to view it in those terms instead of sugarcoating that your job is going to support your entire lifestyle no your job is just going to support you to the extent that you will work harder it's all profit centered right like they're not going to do something just cause it'll make you happier on the weekends they only care about making you a better worker and i know that sounds cynical but i actually just think that's the plain non-ornamental view of it and it's really hard to see someone starting to experience the dangers of consolidating your identity and your work in real time there's been no better example of that and no more unsettling example of that than goodbye again by johnny sun this book just came out and it is so profoundly sentimental and ridiculously reflective about what it's like to be someone who prioritizes productivity over all else like literally all else and also to see the progression from that to what true care looks like so i just wanted to read a couple passages from this i found it really scary whenever i resonated with something johnny said um because these are very bleak realizations they're not cool and sexy and fun this passage is called on yearning it's one of the first three or four essays in the book and the first line opens the most productive years of my life so far have also been my loneliest i don't know if the loneliness was a requisite for this but i also don't have any productive years where i haven't been lonely to compare this to even knowing that most productive should not be the goal of my years to begin with i've still learned to be more comfortable with being isolated than with being unproductive when i am not able to work when i'm out with friends or having a conversation with someone or traveling or buying groceries or doing the laundry or eating i get this itchy hollow longing that doesn't go away until i'm in front of my work again if i were talking about a person i suppose that might be called love it doesn't feel right to call this feeling by the same name i'm very quickly realizing that almost every passage from this book is applicable to this topic so i'm just going to read one more passage and then we'll move on but this one's called making rest the only way i feel able to take a break is if i stay up all night working or if i stay up for multiple nights working until i finally exhaust myself physically and mentally to the point where i am forced to stop working because i am incapable of producing any more usable work at least for a day i fear that i have learned to look forward to burning myself out like this to love this numbed exhaustion because it is the closest thing i can get to some form of rest and i'm sad that this is the only way i allow myself to actually take the rest because it is the only circumstance in which i can see rest as productive in that resting at this point is the only way i can get myself back into working shape once again this is just so illustrative of our toxic outlook on our careers and what is going to provide us with the most fulfillment and the book is not this bleak the entire time there are some really wonderful passages about his family and cooking and this is his journey to liberating himself from some sort of divine attachment to his career and it's probably some of the most honest writing i've seen on this topic maybe ever so that's goodbye again by johnny sun i think the hard part with these dangers is that you don't realize they're creeping up on you until it's too late a lot of people will defend how hard they work and they say that that gives it the most happiness that gives the most joy they feel best about themselves they feel most fulfilled when they achieve and i'm never going to challenge someone if they genuinely feel that way but it worries me because i know like the dangers lurking of being in that mindset so there's a few questions i invite anyone in that mindset to ask themselves anybody that's already challenging their their definition of a career to ask number one is maybe the most beautiful twitter thread i've ever seen twitter is not usually a pretty place i'll try to find it it's way back in my likes or my retweets but it asked what would you spend time doing and what would your life look like if you had all of your basic necessities covered if you had access to health care if you had food shelter like your maslow's hierarchy of needs are covered that's all good and said away what would you spend your time doing and i think this is a really really important question because a lot of people say i see this a lot in like ubi discourse is that if you just pay people to exist they won't do anything and that humans are lazy and if we don't have a job and have work we will not do anything and this thread was such a powerful example of all of the things that people are yearning to do but that they aren't able to fully devote themselves to because they have to spend countless hours every week selling their labor to be able to afford human necessities a lot of people want to start a garden a lot of people want to devote their life to art i know a lot of people that would love to become therapists or social workers or devote themselves to some very giving field but they can't because the debt that school would put them in in order to get that degree and be able to work those fields is inescapable and so they just can't do what they want to do like there's so much we're limited by so i would ask yourself like if you didn't have to work 40 hours a week what would you fill that time with and that's a really wonderful way to reset on what your internal passions are alternatively you could also ask yourself what would you spend your retirement doing that's really really sad and bleak that we feel like we have to wait 40 years just to be able to do what we want with our lives like as if your 40 50-year career is in exchange for like i don't know 10 years of retirement where you get to be free and do whatever you want it's really sad to me and so a lot of people answer you know travel i personally would love to become like a docent at a museum i would love to continue to do youtube i would love to run a blog i would love to hike all the time i would love to go to yoga retreats i would love to come out with a poetry collection i would love to do ceramics i would love to learn 15 instruments i would love to be like these questions are so imaginative for me and that's the help is that they allow you to break out of like just the trap of thinking that your job is the only thing that you're quote-unquote good at or is worth doing um i know that there are other parts of your life that fulfill you and make you whole even though a lot of people will tell you that like they pour themselves into their job because that's really like the only thing in their life and the answers to those questions give you some direction as to where you should redistribute your worth your fulfillment another helpful way to frame this is like almost in the shape of a thesis i saw where i live talk about this in a video but when i speak about my life's work my life's work isn't selling software like that's not my life's work that's not my contribution to the world like my life's work when i think about it and i really journal about it and get into my meditative bag and be on my pisces [ __ ] my life's work is showing up for my friends it's showing up for my community online in person it's indulging in creativity it's exploring outside of myself like that's how i want to define my life's work because those things all sound more fulfilling to me and more rewarding to me than outlook emails and slack notifications and zoom calls i actually would love to see what you come up with for your life's work and how different that might be from mine down below so if you want to comment that i would love to see a comment section just full of reorientations of the way that you look at success and fulfillment so plop them down below there's also a lot of media out there that can really help you almost see these issues from a distance you know like a bird's eye view i watched industry on hbo last year and it definitely rides the very thin line between satire and genuine writing but it is a very delicate sophisticated satire of my generation entering the workforce and the perils that go along with a highly demanding job it's not even cartoonish as a satire that's why it's really hard to pick up on the fact that it's a satire because it's not blown out of scale it's hauntingly like relatable like i know people in that lifestyle and i was very close to being in that lifestyle so i recommend that show is a nice way to kind of like allow you to take a step back i also love the cottage fairies youtube channel she completely broke away from civilization period and she's living out a lot of our dreams of just moving to a cabin in the woods and rebuilding and being in your own self-sustaining ecosystem where nobody else is like placing demands on you like she's living out that dream and she is so mindful about her thought process and shares that all out so i recommend her as well and i would love to see more media like that you know normalizing taking a gap year in the middle of your career normalizing gaps in a resume normalizing pivoting super often i mean we've seen van life crop up this year as a response to the increasing demands of capitalism is the way i see it not everyone matter-of-factly states their intentions for living in a van that way but i don't know dog like people would rather be unhoused than be forced to respond to a system they really don't connect with like i want to see professionalism die out i want to see linkedin abolished like so many people exist out there in the world without work being the center of their universe and that shouldn't be radical like we need to be centering those stories more in our lives as well to remind us like of what is important in this life so that we're not on our deathbed wondering what it would have been like if you actually took the pto like and for that reason boundaries are sexy limits are sexy creating the fences around what space work will take up in your life and what space it won't is hugely liberating and i actually recommend typing out your boundaries printing them out and plopping them on your computer i did that last year and we're so used to just bending to the wills of our employers and capitalism that if someone asks you to cross over your boundary it's easier to say yeah sure and just succumb out of almost like coercion than to stand up for yourself and cause a little bit of good trouble and say like no i need to prioritize myself here and my boundaries this this and this also when you think about people that you admire you adore in your life or parasocially what do you think of like think to yourself for a moment like what about them do you admire like what is aspirational about them to you and then i want to know like did you think of what they do for work first or even in any of those things you admire about them also if you want to put that in the comment section i would love to read them i'm very i'm a very curious nosey person i love being in the comment section so please don't hesitate especially if you're typically a ghost viewer and you don't engage i love feedback and i would love to hear from you also if this is resonating with you go ahead and subscribe the button is down below these are very central themes to my channel's quasi-rebrand in 2021 so these types of conversations will only continue on my channel the last anecdote i want to touch upon before we close out this video is anne helen peterson's writing she wrote a book called can't even how millennials became the burnout generation i haven't read the book so i cannot personally recommend it but i do follow her and i read her sub stack every week that she sends out of like shorter form writing and she recently shared this is like a little turducken situation where i have an article within an article within an article but she shared an article called welcome to the yolo economy it's on new york times site so if you haven't hit your limit for articles you can read i'll have it linked down below um or if you're actually paying them and you're subscribed to them you can read it but it's essentially about people that started their career were happily chugging along and then hit a wall and were like can't do this anymore gotta go and so they actually did they were just like [ __ ] it i'm out of here people that were so drained and depleted that they didn't feel like they even knew how to do their job anymore which is such a failure of capitalism like capitalism was one job is to get us to keep selling our labor and it's literally sending us so far to the extreme that a lot of people are saying yolo i'm gonna go start a farm the term he coined is the yolo economy um and it was kind of crazy to even see an article about that because i'm like damn there are enough people operating this way and challenging the notion of a career that we have a term now for it like this is getting real like this is happening people are fed up with professionalism and the idea of just plugging yourself into a 40-year career because they're realizing like that doesn't really suit their needs um and what they need to feel whole my closing argument if you will take it is that the idea of a 40-year career was invented by corporations to provide consistent labor they know that if you're concerned about your successful career and a sequence of well-flowing jobs that just get more and more impressive over time you're gonna keep your ass in your seat you're not gonna ask questions you're just going to do whatever they need to get hired higher you're going to go above and beyond your call of duty above your job description you're just going to keep chasing chasing chasing when in reality 40 years is a long ass time to pick something at 22 and then just stick with it it actually concerns me to do one thing for 40 years that does not interest me that does not provide me with safety and comfort a lot of people would probably say that's just because you haven't found something you love and something that really fulfills you and i'm like jobs aren't designed for you to love them that's not the point the point is just to give you income so you can participate in society like and most people just don't want to accept that and that's totally fine like i know i'm gonna get some flack in the comments and some dislikes from people that don't want to accept that and they want to love their job and i'm not saying you can't if you if you are one of the magical few that genuinely feels like your work is in 100 alignment with your life's purpose and your vision for your existence freaking kudos i just personally don't even want to accept that expectation because i think it's a losing game for me i think if i'm just searching for anything that's going to give me everything whether that's a person or a job it's unrealistic and that's where i'll leave you i will invite you to follow me on instagram where i will be getting a tattoo of my preppy style somewhere on my body if we get to 10 000 followers by the end of 2021 thank you so much for watching i will see you all next time and cather out

Channel: Katherout

Views: 629,952

Keywords: katherout, 9-5 job, san francisco, silicon valley, work week in my life, college, college vlog, day in my life

Id: nKFypHcnGu4

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

In a society where everyone pitches in 20 hours a week to do the necessary labor for everyone to have a decent standard of living and where resources are equitably distributed, I'd relish the work. It'd have meaning.

But we're forced* to work in the service of something entirely different. When I know that my, and most peoples', work isn't moving society towards something better, that it's merely enabling our subsistence while contributing to the astronomical, and growing, wealth of people who use the very wealth we create for them to ensure nothing changes... When I know that, whether what I'm doing is fun or drudgery, it makes me resent it, because I know what it's in service of, whether I want it to be or not.

*Don't even.

Edit: Fixed a bit of wonky grammar.

[u/Rocabelle]

This reminds me of the book "Work Won't Love You Back" by Sarah Jaffe. It's an excellent deconstruction of work culture in America including the idea of "dream jobs" and has some fascinating interviews with many different sectors of working class people about creating unions and how to advocate for yourself and your fellow workers.

[u/funkycinema]

Ok, I enjoyed the video but there is something unspoken here and I really feel the need to point this out.

You really have to be in a position of remarkable privilege to consider taking a gap year in your resume. I’m happy for her that she can consider this, but I didn’t feel she at all addressed the fact that abstaining from the labor force is not at all a viable option for like, almost anyone. It makes me feel like she must be living in a high paying tech bubble.

[u/Sean_A_D]

I haven't watched the video yet but I defiantly went through this a couple of years ago.

[u/HurtyEggface]

Rich kid take. 'Guys, getting a good degree and settling into a well paid job, just like wasn't for me.' There is a point to be made about alienation from labour, but this turned me right off I'm afraid.

[u/IronDBZ]

r/antiwork

[u/thornzar]

I lived for my job. i was an independent promotor, putting on shows for small acts a lil bit everywhere around my city. It took me 10+ years to get where I was before the pandemic. I almost didnt have weekends, most of the time I’d have 1 weekend off per month. but i fucking loved. it was work, it was not super fun all the time. Now its all gone and I have no idea what to do. people tell me I have to reinvent the ideas yadayadayada but thats what i was doing the whole time I was working “how can this be better? What went wrong” etc. now IDK... I’m doing therapy, most of the days I do nothing. i totally lost my will to live /:

[u/JoePortagee]

This makes me think about this fantastic documentary that I saw a while back. It was about two identical twin sisters from I think South Korea, who sadly enough were separated and adopted to different families. One to a family living in rural Norway. The other to your typical American family.

The documentary focused around them meeting at the age of 10. The American kid was so hyper, went to so many extra activities after school, I even think the parents mentioned it was good for her future career. Hyper is really the only way I can describe her.

The Norwegian twin seemed calm, healthy, so playful and happy - like kids are supposed to be. They were nothing at all alike apart from their appearances.

That's just my take on it but the documentary really upset me. I don't remember the name of it but you can probably find it on Google.

Capitalism is cancer. It doesn't give a shit about your happiness. I'm happy to be living in Sweden and I feel sorry for anyine living in a extremely money oriented society. If I were you... Get out. Really. Get out.

[u/9Point]

It's weird to think about in grade school when teachers would ask what you want to be when you grow up and then lament how everyone wants to be a streamer or youtuber.