51: "Which explains our current "best practices" for achieving middle-class success: Build your resume, get into college, build your resume, get an internship, build your resume, make connections on LinkedIn, build your resume, pay your dues in a soul-sucking low-level position you're told to be grateful for, build your resume, keep pushing, and eventually you'll end up finding the perfect, stable, fulfilling, well-playing job that'll guarantee a place in the middle class. Of course, any millennial will tell you that this path is arduous, difficult to find without connections and cultural knowledge, and the stable job at the end isn't guaranteed"
"Late capitalism" economy predicated on the buying and selling and leveraging of things that aren't tangible in addition to connections[class status] and credentials
More grit makes you more valuable
Rise in economic inequality and fear of class instability is what shifted parent's attitudes and educational achievement perspectives
Obsession with building value intersected with concerted cultivation according to Harris in "Kids These Days"
You don't go to school to learn, you go to school to prepare to work!
67: "If a child is reared as capital, with the implicit goal of creating a "valuable" asset that will make enough money to obtain or sustain the parents' middle class status, it would make sense that they have internalized that a high salary is the only things that actually matters about a job"
We look down on people who hope for a well-paying job even though our ancestors were utilitarian. Ancestors did it because it was what the family did, the most viable option, or because they were trained
Job that reflects well on parents' "good job" and impressive to peers "cool job"
81: "When people follow a "calling," money and compensation are positioned as secondary. The very idea of a "calling" stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God. American Calvinists interpreted dedication to one's calling - and the wealth and success that followed - as evidence of one's status as elect. This interpretation was conducive to capitalism, the cultural theorist Max Wever argues, as it encouraged every worker to see their labor not just as broadly meaningful, but worthwhile, even sacred"
Millennials don't want their dream job anymore, just want something that doesn't underpay or overwork
Lofty, romantic, bourgeois ideas of work
Millennials told that passion leads to profit
Told that we're special and that we just work hard enough but generations before destroyed societal, economic workplace protections that made a life free from economic worry possible
If opportunities didn't arrive, millennials saw it as a personal problem
Increasingly unclear why we were researching for a nebulous goal
127: "As theorist Jonathan Crary points out, even our "sleep" is increasingly a version of machines in "sleep mode" that's not rest so much as a "Deferred or diminished condition of operation and access." In sleep mode, you're never actually off; you're just waiting to be turned back on again"
153: "What these technologies do best is remind us of what we're not doing: who's hanging out without us, who's working more than us, what news we're not reading. It refuses to allow our consciousness off the hook, in order to do the essential, protective, regenerative work of sublimating and repressing. Instead, it provides the opposite: a nonstop barrage of notifications and reminders and interactions. It brings every detail of our lies and others' to the forefront in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. Of course we do more"
Digital detoxes don't fix the problem, instead, call out how tech expanded burnout
155:"Which is why it's so difficult to moderate our relationship with our phones, let alone disengage with them entirely. For so many of us, disengaging from our phone means disengaging from life. There's a fair amount of shame affixed to this new reality: that those more connected to their phones are lesser people or at least people with lesser wills. But the phone (or, more specially, the apps on the phone) was engineered to first create a need, then fill that need in a way that would be impossible to re-create - all under the guise of productivity and efficiency. To succumb to its promises doesn't mean you're weak; it simply means you're a human, frantically trying to complete everything required of you"
Money comes from manipulating, sustaining our attention, selling it to advertisers and making the apps money
Buying and selling of our time
Like button: "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure"
Like and refresh button changed the game
Push notifications weren't present in the early iPhone days, introduced gamification
Net loss for humans: loss of attention and autonomy
158: "Why is the allure so strong" The dopamine explanation is part of it, for sure. But for me, I think the larger draw is a shared delusion: that with my phone, I can multitask like a motherfucker, and be all things to everyone, including myself. It's not the shiny black rectangle that's beguiling; it's the idea that your life could be so ruthlessly, beautifully efficient, seamless, under control, that makes it appealing"
158: "We'll concentrate at work; we'll master that errand paralysis through apps; we'll keep our household in order through other apps; we'll figure out a social media strategy that at once develops and refines our personal brand while also demanding very little of our attention we'll make everyone in our lives feel recognized and special because of texting! When all that fails to occur, we stress out, which makes us want to multitask even more to try to get a handle on the situation, which makes us even more inefficient"
THE POSSIBILITY OF GETTING THINGS DONE THAT WILL FIX YOUR ENTIRE LIST FAST!!
Errand paralysis
Instagram is the app most responsible for burnout
Social media turns us into multitaskers
176: less with lack of Net and more to do with other things vying for attention [cleaning, cooking, small tasks, doing laundry, commuting]
Doesn't feel cathartic when rest of lives spread into work thanks to tech
Millennials blame themselves, not the tools
Leisure was 8 hours not spent working, hobbies done for pleasure, not for societal status or making extra money on the side
182: "Our leisure rarely feel restorative, or self-guided, or even fun. Hanging out with friends? Exhausting to coordinate. Dating? An online slog. A dinner party? Way too much work. I'm unclear whether I spend my Saturday mornings on long runs because I like it, or because it's a "productive" way to discipline my body. Do I read fiction because I love to read fiction, or to say that I have read fiction? These aren't entirely new phenomena, but they help explain the prevalence of millennial burnout: It's hard to recover from days spent laboring when your "time off" feels like work"
182: "Two hundred years ago, formal leisure was the provenance of the aristocracy. You went to university not because you needed a good degree on your CV, but because you wanted to join the clergy, or liked books, and what else would you do with your days? Maybe go on a walk, call on a friend, or learn an instrument, or play cards, or embroider. But none of those things was done to make money - you had well enough of it, and everyone knew as much, because you spent your days wholly engaged in leisure"
Starting with Industrial Revolution, first labor reformers called for 5-day week
Leisure "democratized"
1926 - increased mechanization & automation & productivity so Henry Ford called for a 5-day workweek
1930: John Maynard Keynes - he wanted his grandchildren to only work 15 hours a week!
Experiment in new skills for pleasure!
"Free time" by Benjamin Hunnicutt
Productivity increased, unions advocated for decreased work hours, public and private resorts camps, clubs, parks
Parks not originally set up for more work
1920's: it began to rise again, work hours, rise of "knowledge work"
Economy faltered, work hours increased downsizing and layoffs, workers had to prove themselves
Hourly job pay, stagnated because of inflation and clamored for overtime pay
Hired fewer peeps because of inflation and had fewer benefits and expected them to do more
Productivity rose, companies reduced paid time off and workers had to agree because of the tight job market
Time magazine - "America has run out of time" article in 1980. Parent's were brought up in this
186: "That ceaseless drive for productivity isn't a natural human force - and, at least in its current form, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy, the Intel engineer Melissa Gregg examines the history of the "productivity" craze, which she dates to the 1970s, with subsequent spikes in the 1990s and the present. Gregg connects each wave of productivity management guides, self-help books, and, today, apps to periods of anxiety over downsizing and the perceived need to prove oneself as more productive - and, as such, more theoretically valuable - than one's peers. Amidst our current climate of economic precocity, the only way to create and maintain a semblance of order is to adhere to the gospel of productivity, whether blasting through your email to get to Inbox Zero or ignoring it altogether"
1970s "the productivity craze"
Self-help and apps - periods of anxiety over downsizing and proving yourself as more productive
Order - adhere to gospel of productivity
187: "One result of this drive for productivity is a new hierarchy of labor: On the top end, there are salaried, hyper productive knowledge workers. Below, there are the people who perform the "mundane" tasks that make that productivity possible: nannies, TaskRabbits, UberEats drivers, house cleaners, personal organizers, Trunk Club stylists, Blue Apron packagers, Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, FreshDirect shoppers. Rich people have always had servants. The difference, then, is that those servants made it so that they didn't have to work - not so that they could work more. The people who facilitate these productivity-facilitating tasks, however, are almost always independent contractors, underpaid, with little jo security or recourse for mistreatment. Many are driven by their own set of unrealistic productivity standards, but instead of getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to find themselves into the ground to meet them, they're barely making minimum wage.
Salaried knowledge workers, then mundane workers
192: "In this way, many time spent not working - that, is, leisure time - is money that's effectively lost. In order to reconcile ourselves to that idea, we cram in as many activities and as much consumption as possible into our leisure time, so as to make it valuable in some way. To evoke this style of manic consumption, Linder describes the man who, after dinner, fills his leisure by "drinking Brazilian coffee, sipping a French cognac, reading the New York Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and his Swedish wife - all at the same time, with varying degrees of success." Today's version might be the woman who drinks her seven-dollar cold brew, with a four=dollar coconut water in her purse, on her way to yoga, while listening to The Daily on her headphones, while sending appropriate reaction GIFs to her group text about their upcoming girl's weekend"
Maximizing leisure goes back to class anxiety
"The Sabbath World" by Judith Shulevitaz: process of businesses open on Sunday began with the commercialization of leisure in the 20th century
Podcasts feel like checklists, tv shows feel like checklists
Amount of consumption to keep up in convo keeps growing
Constant demand to make best use of time
A drive to make anything you dedicate yourself to as perfect as possible
Pressure to monetize it
Relaxing can feel exhausting and frustratingly unrestorative
Cramming leisure with "aspirational" class value to feel more secure in class. The other way is to make money by monetizing hobby
Every activity as means to an end
If you don't monetize or have a hobby as a means to an end, there's a permission to be imperfect
205: "That's why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It's an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don't like when there's no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?
247: "Between 2017 and 2018 births hit a thirty-two-year low. These people not having kids- and enduring a "sex drought"? They're millennials. And while increase time on the internet, and dating apps, and career ambitions may be the direct cause for less sex and fewer children, the real cause is burnout"
Americans resign themselves to burnout. Our parents did it for us so that we could live more secure lives and yet we still give each other burnout
Leisure shouldn't be scarce, domestic labor shouldn't be unequal