No Goals, Just Vibes

The Pandemic Has Changed My Relationship to Work

I can’t tell you the exact moment it happened, like most things these days it was probably a slow, gradual shift rather than an abrupt, a-ha moment. But in any case, over the past year something has changed - some days it feels like even permanently - that has eroded my sense of what my life should be, and what its relationship to work looks like. It’s now simply no goals, just vibes for me.

In many ways 2020 was defined by a remembrance of things past, of holding on to the hope that our newfound situation was temporary and eventually we’d make our way back to something resembling a familiar sense of “normal.”

Even as we were thrust into an entirely new way of living last year, we recalibrated how we work in a dramatically fast way. Our ability to make such an effective leap into remote working, to manage full-time jobs from home while facing such unprecedented fear, is really remarkable. 

Yet there is something absurdly cruel about having to mentally manage both the possibility that you or your loved ones would catch a potentially deadly virus and a passive-aggressive note from your boss about the timing of a project, that in the face of everything happening in the world, feels pretty meaningless in scope. 

The pandemic gave us a huge opportunity to take a step back from many processes and structures that we took for granted and find a better, more humane way forward and it was squandered by institutions that refused to place people over capital. But once it became unavoidably clear that not only was this generation-defining, world-altering, global catastrophe not going to pause our output at work, it wasn’t even going to slow it down, it became hard to ignore the unspoken cruelty in that contract. 

For me that disillusionment has been a long time coming. It’s almost comical at this point to list the staggering amount of economic hardships facing millennials and gen z, from several “once-in-a-generation” financial collapses, to colossal student debt and astronomical housing costs that have crippled our earning power and ability to save. We are the first generations to earn less than our parents and yet have been told our entire lives that these setbacks are a result of expensive avocado toast, rather than systemic inequity. 

We’ve also been raised to think of our employers as family, with summer Fridays and pizza-based rewards serving as substitutes for things like job security, health care and living wages. As the Girlboss-era is finally having its own reckoning, the pandemic is hastening the knowledge that our jobs are never going to put our needs above the bottom line. It’s no surprise then that so many headlines over the past year have been defined by labour strikes, mass resignations and pleas for a reset with the role work plays in our lives. 

Of course the ability to resign from a job or step away from the toxicity of office culture is a huge privilege, one primarily afforded to white, middle class professionals, but all of us should levy the shifting sands of power to demand better conditions on the job. And look, you don’t even have to quit your job to stake your claim to your own time, or clarify what success means to you.

As Twitter sage Meetka recently tweeted “It’s so fun to have no ambitions and no goals. My only goal is to get through each and every day without dying in a freak accident.” Or as Internet Hippo put it even more succinctly, “Not interested in a “career” just looking for the least annoying way to afford food and shelter.”

I don’t want to ruin myself to compete for rewards that don’t even exist anymore. Crippling debt, an ever-worsening housing crisis and of course the almighty looming destruction of climate change mean that the promised land of retirement or even a comfortable, middle-class life are simply out of reach. Sure some people will achieve the kind of unspeakable wealth that didn’t used to exist, but most of us will probably just scrape by until a junior manager lets us know our position is being made redundant and we’ve got five days of health insurance left before we have to clean out our desks forever. 

The great resignation is not just about a group of frustrated employees, it’s an opportunity to open up the conversation about what work can look like and to redefine ambition for a generation raised to believe in the benevolent power of success. 

While 2022 has started as bleakly as the past year, there is a lot of promise in the months ahead for true, structural change that reshapes the work landscape. No industry has been untouched by pandemic upheaval, which gives all of us an opportunity to organize for something better, to realise that crippling burnout is not an inevitable side effect of working.

These past two years have helped me crystalize this understanding, to try and seek out a different relationship to work and my life, punctuated by the desire to just be, man.