The really cool thing about being a Millennial is how we’ve all had to endure the absolute sickness of the dominant culture when it comes to work. We’ve been completely immersed in it: “You’ve gotta GRIND to find your dreams, work hard and everything will work out for you!” Stay at the office late, adopt the vision and culture of your workplace without question, have a positive attitude, and most of all BELIEVE in yourself! And by the time you’re 35, when you’re on your 11th or 12th job, when you’ve been laid off and fired, when you’ve quit in disgust, when you’ve moved up and moved down, and when you’ve had about 50 bosses – most of whom have been terrible – and when you’re enduring the third major recession of your adult life, how can it all not start to blend together?
After a while you’d have to be pretty delusional to think that the GRIND has anything to do with your career success! After a while it seems like maybe even a positive attitude won’t help you! After a while it seems like the GRIND is really just a sociopathic need to self-promote and slather all over the shoes of every one of the rotating cast of managers that are over your head, and an ability to literally adopt an entirely new belief system at the drop of a hat, the moment someone tells you to. It seems like maybe the grind wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
After long enough, the only thing getting ground down is your dignity, and the closest thing to your dreams that you’re achieving is a dreamlike state where starting a new job begins to feel exactly like starting the last job. The best part is that you really, REALLY have to start asking yourself – what lengths will I go to to keep health insurance for my family, to keep this roof over my head, to not go into crushing levels of debt? What am I willing to do, to say, to believe even? And if I’m not willing to do that, what then?
Hairway to Stephen 