Like a lot of people raised in the midwest, I started working when I was 14. People couldn’t wait to praise me for working at 14, swearing this made me some kind of go-getter destined to enter the workforce as an adult with the sort of delusion required to cosign the existence of the American dream. I honestly didn’t mind, since i figured work was something you did for about 40 years, and if you lived that long your later years were spent tooling around the country in an RV, taking photos in front of national monuments. I had a lot of energy, and it didn’t bother me in the slightest, because I was never tired, and high school was easy to me to the point where sleeping through my classes didn’t derail my GPA. This says more about my high school than it does about my intelligence.
In high school and college I worked as an entertainment reporter and columnist for newspapers, and my ambition was Big Time Journalist. For me, this meant a staff writer gig at a newspaper read by more than a few thousand people, and the occasional book published of my collected columns. Folks like Dave Eggers seemed to have the right gig. I spiced up the journalism resume with crime reporting, and felt like I was sufficiently armed for career stage 2. Sure enough, I scored a staff writer gig at a small town newspaper, and after two years I got restless and opted to move to a larger city while pursuing an MFA in writing, and decided my next career move would be writing books (closing the deal on that columns collection).
I got my first grant writing gig while I was working on a nonfiction book, and right away it was a surreal experience. The pay was absurdly low, but I was desperate for a job and took whatever I could get. The person hired to supervise my department had no experience in fundraising, management, or nonprofits, and somehow got the gig anyway. In one year, I went through three managers, because everyone who had to report to her directly quit within three months. Yes — she was that bad. The morale of the entire nonprofit went from meh to into the dirt in the two years I worked there, and virtually every staff meeting included announcements for reduced benefits or layoffs, but somehow they always had funds for fancy fundraising events that never raised enough money to justify the cost — and somehow that heinous supervisor stayed there until she chose to leave on her own terms.
At this point newspapers were folding like crazy and there were more unemployed journalists than working ones. I had my MFA, but seemingly so did everyone working as a barista within 200 miles, so I moved on to nonprofit #2, which was an amazing art college with a crop of students that produced some of the finest art I’ve seen outside of museums. My task was annual fundraising, and closing out a $17M capital campaign, which I did in a year. The first sign that the gig had turned sour was when they hired a consultant we didn’t need to weigh in on what we’d already accomplished. Then I suddenly had a new supervisor who, once again, had never even worked at a nonprofit, let alone in fundraising. I made it three years before I quit, and five years after that the college permanently closed, thanks to a combination of astonishingly bad financial decisions, poor hiring practices, inexperienced leadership, and social climbers and corporate overlords infecting the board. It felt that all the work we’d done to level-up the place was a giant waste of time.
The amount of time I’d spent fundraising now felt like the thing trapping me there, so after a year of freelance work and tutoring I was happy to see some stability with a full-time gig at nonprofit #3. It seemed like a sweet gig, mostly because they let me work from home in a time when the practice was rare for everyone other than programmers. There were many odd things about it, like everyone getting paid basically the same thing no matter what their titles were, having to use my own equipment, no opportunity for advancement, non-existent benefits, and the strange decision to essentially pick someone to slowly groom for the top spot over a period of ten years. No competitive hiring practice, just feeding a recent college grad everyone’s experience and calling him king. A handful of dinosaurs were in charge of every decision, and couldn‘t puzzle out the most basic components of management…like direct deposit. Still, I hung in there for 10 solid years, because my previous experience taught me this is as good as it gets. The flexibility let me finish my first book, a handful of people read it (not unusual for a first book), and I didn’t have the funds to function as my own marketing machine. I was also kinda winded. 22 year-old me probably would have kept pulling rabbits from hats, but I was tired. During COVID the nonprofit emerged under a warm blanket of cash, no one was laid off, and as the only person doing fundraising completed all the government paperwork required for PPP loans…and the minute those loans were forgiven, I was laid off. Logically, I suppose it made sense, in that we raised so much money to support the organization during covid that they didn’t really need a fundraiser. Emotionally, it felt like another betrayal, and an overdue lesson I should have already learned: Your employer is not your friend, and they have no loyalty to you.
That was over 18 months ago, and still (still!) every time I look at job postings I just want to leave earth. I can see the coming doom in half of them, and in the other half see the time two years from now when I’ll have to do this all over again. Every hustle is a scam, and fueling every hustle-scam are a dozen people making one video and article after the other urging more suckers to sign on. You’re urged to sell everything you own, create bottomless content for faceless corporations on the off-chance that you collect a few coins for your efforts, or apply to yet another job that doesn’t pay enough to live (which is probably good, since you won’t live very long without benefits). And there’s no end in sight, because there’s no retirement in sight, and an entire government presenting legislation that suggests the solution for AI replacing workers is time travel. Why invest in the future when we can send children into coal mines?
And this brings me back to my original point, and what snapped a gasket in my engine during the latest quest for something that will keep me sheltered and fed: Some alien-bot humanoid on social media, praising a parent for encouraging their child to work at 14. GTFO. How long do you have to live before concluding that prosperity doesn’t arrive courtesy of hard work for almost anyone? How many generations does work have to be a religion before a family births its first capitalist-atheist? How hopeless does it have to get before we admit this doesn’t work? During the Houghton-Mifflin writers’ and editors’ strike, I learned the average salary of an editor was $45K. In New York City. For a publishing behemoth. Every single person I knew who worked as a journalist was laid off during the pandemic; none of them returned to journalism, and most are doing SEO, cooking up shopping lists for readers who want marching orders for their bank accounts, on behalf of corporate clients. Every single person I know who used their MFA to transition to teaching can barely feed themselves, and hangs out in cramped university offices, waiting for a tenured professor to retire or die, so they can dive on the floor for whatever crumbs might have fallen from their cadaver’s pockets.
In another month, I’ll likely resign myself to working in a grocery store, if I can convince a manager to take a chance on someone with no retail experience. For now, I’m just choking on my own rage and testing the quality of Big Pharma’s latest antidepressants, and taking photos of plants and birds. If some hovering alien is listening, I have stories if you have room for one more on the next outbound ship.