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Last week, a Substack post by a guy named “Alex” started haunting my feed. His bio: “I collected careers like stamps in my 20s: architecture, music, entrepreneurship—nothing stuck. Turns out I wasn't alone.” The title of the piece: “The Death of the Corporate Job.”
Some illustrative sections:
Walk through the City or Canary Wharf at 8am and you'll see thousands of people who look purposeful. Sharp suits, coffee in hand, calls already starting. The whole thing looks impressively important.
But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They're in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They're creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.
A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn't point to a single tangible thing. "I enable decision-making," he said, then caught himself. "Whatever that means."
Also:
The corporate role isn't dying in some dramatic collapse. It's dying like religion died for many people—slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.
The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it's building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes—that faith is evaporating.
And finally:
I know developers who do their "official" job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who've automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.
They're not quitting. They're using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn't died; it's become a funding mechanism for actual work.
One person I spoke to called it "corporate entrepreneurship"—not in the LinkedIn way where you're an "intrapreneur" innovating within your company, but in the sense that you're using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.
This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.
It’s all very Fight Club and Office Space meets Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, isn’t it? Maybe a little Graduate, a dash of Say Anything Lloyd Dobbler-ism, and certainly some David Graeber, who first published his essay on “Bullshit Jobs” in 2013 (and who Alex, to his credit, references directly).
I don’t mean to be paternalistic so much as highlight how every generation arrives at a similar point of disillusionment: most jobs involve bullshit. What you do with that information, once gleaned, is usually a pretty good barometer of character. But the realization that the corporate career can feel meaningless — that’s nothing new.
What strikes me is how discordant Alex’s post is from the vast majority of writing I’m seeing on jobs, most of which focuses on the fact that it feels incredibly hard to find one — for people of all ages, but especially Alex’s.
Take this post from Femcel, which also haunted my feed when it was published back in January. The title: WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS:
Don’t tell me to go on LinkedIn, Indeed, or my university’s alumni network. Fuck your “job finding resources” links and master docs. Do not tell me to email a million people for “coffee chats” and “informational interviews” where I make a thinly veiled attempt at letting some Gen X person know that I am totally unemployed via bullshit questions about what they like about their industry, what advice they have for breaking in, what is required to succeed. Do not tell me to put all the key phrases of the job description in some invisible-colored text on my resume so the AI bot reading my resume will boost it to the top of my pile. Do not tell me to reach out to former employers, family friends, blah blah blah.
I have done all of this and more. There is nothing you can tell me that I do not know. I’m 24.
OK maybe some of you laughed at that.
What I mean is — I am young enough to know all the AI and tech tricks, all the websites (yes, I know about ZipRecruiter), the temp agencies, the recruiting agencies, the stuff about reaching out to everyone for a job. I know about all the industries — advertorial, assistant work, sales, yadda yadda yadda.
I am also sick of getting some of the most condescending advice ever:
hAvE yOU tHouGHt oF a jOB iN bUsInESS? WhAT aBouT nOn-ProFit? Or bE An OffICe maNAgER at a LaW fiRM?
WOW! I never thought of that — a job in business or as an office manager? What genius!
I recommend the piece in full for its portrait of a particular sort of exasperation, one that will be familiar for many of us: I did everything “right,” I worked so fucking hard, I did all those fucking internships, I even have a bunch of situational privilege, and now I’m somehow both undertrained and overeducated for everything. She’s not picky; she doesn’t even want a job she’s “passionate about.” She just wants a job.
I felt something similar when I was 24, working a nanny job because it was the only gig that matched my “hard” skillset (aka lots of babysitting and camp counseling). Even in 2005, it was impossible to communicate to a potential employer yes I have no experience, but you should hire me because I’m smart and work my ass off. I’d have killed for an office manager job. A solid 60% (maybe higher, let’s be real) of why I went to grad school was because I couldn’t find an entry point on any other career. (A lot more on all that here)
The first author, Alex, has already had jobs and quit them — and is preaching the gospel of disillusionment. That’s why his writing has the ease and uncanny polish of a self-help book: his career is talking about leaving his career. He chose this route, and wants others to feel better about choosing it, too. Femcel’s disillusionment is borne of desperation — she’s not rejecting careerism; careerism is rejecting her.
●
Fast-forward eight months. It will surprise no one that Femcel is starting a PhD in English this Fall.
Her first newsletter about it: “I am excited for my PhD and you can’t stop me.”
And you know what, she makes some points! To start:
Maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on because I have not started my PhD. But as far as my English PhD goes, I will be: fully funded, in a union which guarantees a salary increase every year for 5 years among other benefits which should be federally legally mandatory without a union but alas, receiving guaranteed subsidized housing, as well as affordable health insurance.
Also:
My first ever job was working the hostess stand at a bougie restaurant in LA with a bunch of aspiring models and actresses, where I was once brutally screamed at by a coked-up chef for not putting a note about a celebrity who had arrived in the right area of the kitchen. I KNOW A TOXIC WORK ENVIRONMENT!
AND TRUST ME, BEING UNDER PRESSURE TO WRITE MY THOUGHTS ON EVE SEDGWICK BY THURSDAY AT 11:59 PM IS A LOT BETTER THAN BEING ON MY FEET FOR NINE HOURS WHILE TRYING TO KEEP MY MANAGER FROM REALIZING THE 6”1 BLONDE NEXT TO ME DID COKE WITH THE LINE COOKS AND THEN A GROUP OF FINANCE BROS WHO GOT A PATIO TABLE FROM HER WITHOUT A RESERVATION, IN JULY!
And finally:
My biggest fear is becoming one of these condescending, belittling, holier-than-thou graduate students who talk about GETTING PAID, HEALTH INSURANCE, AND SUBSIDIZED HOUSING for five years to GO TO CLASS AND DISCUSS AND READ AND WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT as if it is SURVIVING DISPLACEMENT or FIGHTING ON THE FRONTLINES WITHOUT ARMOR.
To be fair, I did not have a union, subsidized housing, five years of guaranteed funding, or a paycheck that covered my bare bones living expenses during my PhD. As far as PhD options go, Femcel has found a good one. I also remember making very similar arguments about the privileges of thinking what I wanted to think about all day, every day, for pay.
What I didn’t understand is that finishing a humanities PhD, both when I did and especially now, requires re-entering the corporate sphere, with even fewer legible qualifications on her resume. It sucks but it’s true, and all of you who have attempted to transition from humanities academia into the non-academic world know it: of course you can find a job. But it’s probably not different from the job you could’ve found at 24, only now you’re over 30 and figuring out how to use LinkedIn is even more humiliating than it was six years ago.
You’re also just as disillusioned about the machinations of corporate America as, say, Alex — it’s just that your corporate experience was the ostensibly un-corporate interworkings of academia. So many of us flee to grad school because the corporate world can’t accommodate us, only to find ourselves immersed in its poorly cloaked tenets (and making far less money). The English PhD might be “safe” for now, but universities are eyeing every program that’s not a profit center, that doesn’t bring in grants, that doesn’t make them competitive for the sort of students who have optimized themselves not to be “the best” or “learn things” but to “get jobs.”
And that’s what makes so many contemporary PhDs miserable: it’s not reading high theory, or slightly insufferable people in class, or writing seminar papers. It’s doing all those things against the backdrop of the contemporary university: the constant threat of program and service reductions, the union fights for cost-of-living increases, the overburdened senior professors, the anxiety-ridden students, the addiction to (and negotiation of) AI, and the looming after.
I don’t regret getting a PhD. But I basically got all the shitty parts of the corporate experience and none of the resume lines. I got yanked around the country chasing jobs but none of the pay bumps. I was expected to attend conferences to keep up with the field but was also expected to take on credit card debt to pay for them. I learned how to teach but, hilariously, only at a level where I would continue to be paid less than a (unionized) kindergarten teacher. I accumulated so much knowledge and so much debt and so little readibly translatable experience.
This makes it sound like I’m arguing for people to take the so-called “email jobs” that both Alex and Femcel rail against. And part of me is like, yes, get an email job and take some grad classes on the side; that’s actually much smarter. Realize that all jobs are sorta bullshit and start cultivating the lush garden of your non-work self.
But also? I believe parts of jobs feel like bullshit. But I think the actual “bullshit jobs” — the ones where you truly do nothing — are vanishingly rare. Most people do work that needs to be done. It’s just that the work itself is structural, invisible, painstaking, or just…collaborative.
For example: a friend of mine works the sort of job that Alex hates. They spend most of the day in Zoom meetings, and then an hour or two doing “their actual work.” One time I was working beside them, eavesdropping on call after call, amazed by how little seemed to get done. I asked: Why can’t you just decide what to do, and then send them an email about it? But that just wasn’t how they did things. They came to consensus, and then delegated tasks, and completed a project, and then started the process all over again. Yes, consensus-building takes a lot more time than direct decision-making; it might even appear, from Alex’s vantage point, to be bullshit. But it might also just be a different — and less authoritarian — way of running a business.
I wouldn’t know that, because I’ve never experienced it. I’ve never experienced anything approximating a stable career environment: I was employed by individual families, then employed by a quasi-corporate entity (various educational institutions), then a VC-funded digital journalism start-up whose corporate culture was “fro-yo machine,” and now I’m a freelance journalist. I have been equal parts rejected, scared off of, and terrified by corporate culture. I convinced myself my only option, the only thing I was fit for, the only thing where I could feel even a modicum of security and be free from others’ bullshit, was to go it alone.
Alex evokes people his age in fancy work outfits figuring out how to create secondary jobs within jobs, pulling a salary while launching their own product on the side, but I think most people — his age and mine — are in a similar place to me. For whatever reason, there’s no place for them in the corporate world: they don’t have the experience or the connections; they’ve been laid off; they’re over-qualified; they’re too old; they’re right at that age where every hiring manager thinks they’re immediately going to have a baby; their bodies can’t handle an in-office 8 to 6; their caregiving schedule demands the sort of flexibility a corporate job in their field cannot provide; their primary skill set is now largely performed by AI; the industry where they worked has been decimated by the current administration; they simply cannot get the key words in their resume to match up with the resume-scraping algorithm, WHATEVER.
The why matters somewhat less than the suffocating feeling: there’s no job for you. So you create one for yourself.
●
I used to think of small business owners as, like, Greg from high school who started a bagel shop. Creating jobs, living out their dreams, calling the shots. But you know who’s a small business owner? Me. Every other freelancer you know. We’re creating jobs, too — we’re just creating them for ourselves. We’re taking the broken vestiges of a career, even if that career was only six months long, and building it into sustainable infrastructure. It’s incredibly empowering — and incredibly precarious.
Health insurance? Your responsibility. Retirement matching? Nope. No vacation time, no sick time, no paid family leave. Sure, you can take it whenever you want — and make no money during that time. And yes, I know people figure out rates that allow them to take time off (Wudan Yan is particularly skilled at this). But the reality is that we have transferred the risk of the job market to the risks of self-employment — and agreed to shoulder the corresponding costs in the name of “control.”
We email all the time, but we email when we want. We can work anywhere, which means we often work everywhere! Sure, we have to be constantly looking for more work, and avoid ever saying no, and serve as a one-person provider of customer service, social media management, content creation, graphic design, billing, and accounting — but we call the shots. All of them, all the time. We don’t need shitty managers; we (shittily) manage ourselves! We don’t need HR, or payroll, or tech support, because that’s us, too! And we’ve convinced ourselves it’s better than the alternative: mouldering away in a bullshit job or constantly searching for the next one.
Alex and Femcel’s posts differ in tone, style, vibe, seemingly everything — save the overwhelming message that the working world is broken. They’ve reacted differently to that brokenness — Alex advises stealing spare hours at your consultancy job to spin up a product launch deck; Femcel applied to grad school — but they’re both so palpably hungry for a different way. Both have or will wind their way to creating their own job, and taking on their own extensive financial risks, simply to arrive at a semblance of life satisfaction and security.
That’s certainly one way for a society to be: thrilled to trade security for control, so thoroughly unacquainted with consistency that you develop an allergy to it, well-armored against demands on your time that you haven’t chosen yourself, ruthless in the pursuit of personal success, because what alternative do you have? There’s no safety net to catch you. It’s the individualistic ethic honed to its most bare and bold self.
You see it most vividly in books, podcasts, and newsletters marketed at entrepreneurs, but I also see it all over LinkedIn, where every non self-employed influencer is so clearly building their social media life raft for the moment when they join our ranks. It’s all over the rhetoric of MLMs and “gig work,” which convince people rejected by the corporate world — usually for very different reasons than Femcel — that there is a way to feel like you have a control, that there is a place for someone like you in the workforce, that moms can make money working from home. And I see it in posts right here on Substack, trying to convince people to subscribe to their newsletter in order to unlock growth hacks that will allow them to make writing their full-time job.
All of it — the people peddling this advice, and the people consuming it, and even the people who scoff at it from their increasingly precarious perch of salaried employment — are operating within the same rapidly degrading system. We trade security for control, which we understand as happiness, and direct our focus inward. But what happens as we age? What happens when, for whatever reason, we can no longer run our business of one?
For a short period of time in the 20th century, we voted and governed in a way that provided firm answers to those questions, particularly if you worked for someone else. When you get old, the company you worked for — along with taxes taken from your paycheck — will care for you. It wasn’t that the companies or even the state was more benevolent; it was that labor was protected, unionized, and strong. They forced that understanding to become reality. But as I’ve written about before, white collar workers rejected unionization: as a whole, they were unwilling to sacrifice the promise of advancement, of individual control, for the protection of the whole.
And so the hard-won protections of the post-war period began to erode. Pensions were replaced by “individual contribution” plans (aka 401ks); at first companies matched their employee’s contributing, then those matches decreased and now, in so many cases, there’s no matching at all — and that’s if a 401k plan is even available. Labor protections have been gradually — and in some cases, thoroughly — eroded. Disability is arduous if not impossible to obtain and arduous if not impossible to live off. Social security will not die, at least not unless our current government pointedly kills it. But what it provides is not enough to age with any semblance of dignity.
Self-employment has remained somewhat steady for the last decade at just over 10% of the working population. There was an uptick after Covid, and current numbers suggest that the demographics with the greatest job loss — see: Black women — are also the demographics with the biggest increases in self-employment. We have woven a rhetoric around the current job market to convince us that the problem isn’t the way we’ve organized the economy, or the ongoing erosion of the safety net, or the erosion of worker’s rights, but the jobs themselves. In that paradigm, the solution isn’t to vote to create a different economy, with different incentives and different allocation of profits, but to create your own job.
It’s rich, I know, that I’m writing all of this from the perch of a seemingly secure freelance job. But it’s also telling that even though this enterprise has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, I worry constantly: about my partner losing his full-time employment and, by extension, our access to good healthcare; about developing brain fog or a disability; about Substack’s viability as a platform; about my relevance as I age; about how much I need to set aside each month to ensure that when I can no longer write the way I do, I will be able to survive.
So here’s my contribution to this genre of job market writing. After years of navigating failing industries and labor exploitation, I finally have total control. I know exactly what I do, and who I do it for, and why I do it. I have almost entirely rid my workday of bullshit. But because nothing about the larger system itself has changed, I can have all that control — a seemingly perfect job! — and operate, every day, in total fear. ●
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