Lately Iâve 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, itâs 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 canât we live more like that, I find myself asking.
The obvious answer is âbecause weâre not white guys in the 1960sâ (and also donât want to destroy our families and die of heart attacks at 51). Still, itâs hard not to wonder whether doing away with the concept of the âsmoke breakâ was really only about getting people to stop smoking or if it was also partly about getting workers to stop taking breaks. Thereâs an additional irony to me vicariously savoring these fictional charactersâ frequent âmeâ time in a show that Iâm essentially watching as part of a job.
And thatâs the rub: many of us have so thoroughly blurred the boundaries between living and working that weâre barely capable of spontaneity anymore. I get an itchy, anxious feeling any time Iâm doing something that canât be monetized.
Certainly itâs 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 jobsâwhich usually involves doing work that used to be done with four or five people and trying to please an MBA somewhere who doesnât really understand what you doâor 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 Iâm a millennial based on year of birth, but I contend that if you learned to masturbate using analog media, youâre 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 donât want to end up digging ditches and working fast food!
Now that Iâm over 40, I feel like Iâve been relatively successfulâand yet, managers at In n Out are earning significantly more than I am. And theirs seems like the better gig, tooâwith 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 isnât a single person in our group chat who isnât jealous of him.
