Do People Hate the Economy? Or Do They Just Hate Their Jobs?

As I sit down every evening to write these essays, I’m trying to balance them out: Should I write another missive about failure and doom, or should I write about, like, emoji? The last couple have been fairly lightweight, so I guess today is full negative. If you like the balance, or wish it were going another way, please email me!

Look, guys, I’m not going to make sense of this shit for you. The election is over, the results are painful, and there’s nothing we—or at least I—can do about it. The past week has been wall-to-wall explications of what happened, and how and why, with blame flying in all directions, from the short campaign season to Gaza/Israel to wokeness to misinformation to cyclical variations to whatever. I read all that crap, too, and some of it satisfies me and some of it infuriates me, and the more I think I understand, the less I understand in the end.

Often, I wonder if understanding at all will in any way help. It’s not like comprehension will help me avoid what’s coming, or help the forces of good do better next time. Not to be too cynical, but figuring out how to live with the consequences is my priority, not figuring out what happened.

Still, one thing sticks in my head, driving me ever more crazy as I ponder it: Just about every measure of the U.S. economy is good. Inflation is low, so is unemployment, wages are growing quickly, the stock market is hitting new heights. Rents are apparently even coming down, thanks to new housing supply coming online between now and 2026. Gas prices are… fine, on a downward trend right now, but more or less near a 20-year average. The inflation from 2021 to 2023 was wretched, but by the numbers, shit ain’t bad right now.

But people fucking hate it. Some of them don’t know or understand the objective measures of the economy, so we’ll just ignore those people. But lots of people do know about the good numbers, and they still fucking hate the economy. And that, probably more than anything else, decided the election.

So, what gives? How is it that we’re enjoying another period of economic growth (presided over, as usual, by a Democratic president), and yet it feels hollow and rotten?

My theory is that when people say they’re thinking about The Economy, they’re actually thinking about Their Jobs, and jobs, in general, are just awful. The worst they’ve ever been in my lifetime. Work, my friends, sucks.

Now, I need to make clear to any reader who happens to be associated with my own employer that I am not talking about my own job or company. Things there are 100% hunky-dory, more fulfilling and functional than ever before, and the market trends that plunged literally every other American workplace into the shitter have so far magically bypassed my own 9-to-5. Things there are… pretty good! In this essay, I’m obviously only talking about elsewhere.

And elsewhere, work sucks. Let us count the ways!

1. Getting a job sucks: AI screens your resume and rules you out of jobs you’re qualified for because you didn’t rehash the job-ad keywords in your summary. And even if you did get an interview, there’s actually five interviews, over a span of nine weeks, and at the end of it they don’t tell you anything, because they’re not even sure if they want to hire anyone anymore, or if they can even afford to do so, so you’re left hanging, but even if you do get the job they rescind the offer because you tried to negotiate for more money.

2. Getting to the job sucks: The pandemic proved we can all be quite productive working from home, but your company’s owner wants everyone to go back to the office, either because he (always a he) believes it’s somehow better for morale and productivity, despite all evidence to the contrary, or he can’t get out of the commercial office-space lease and so needs to justify the ongoing expense. Also, traffic is terrible if you have to drive, and the subways and buses are less consistent than ever because they’re starved of funds by politicians who either hate mass transit or are afraid of appearing too environmentally woke. And then even when you don’t go in to the office, you still have to meet with your colleagues online all the time, even when it does no one any good, and worst of all you have to use Microsoft Teams.

3. Holding onto a job sucks: Is your company going to stay in business through next year? Will it shut down, or get bought out? Will it realize everything it’s been doing so far was a mistake and pivot to an entirely different objective? Where does that leave you? Has anyone been here more than five years? What are the growth opportunities for you? Is there a promotion path here, or in the industry at large? There used to be norms, right, a sense that over the decades you’d ascend the ranks little by little and find your way to some kind of “senior” position before retirement, but they’ve long since been eroded by a few decades of “creative destruction,” so what are you actually expecting from the future? I mean, you could be laid off, or even fired, at any time and for any reason—and maybe the industry will treat that as a “no harm, no foul” issue and you’ll be back in the workforce in weeks, or maybe it’ll be a black mark on your resume for all time, and you’ll be taking lesser and lesser roles just to make ends meet, until it seems like there’s no possibility of getting back where it once seemed like you were going. And there’s no one to protect you, either, not the union, which if it exists is probably dependent on a bigger, older, more traditional union that doesn’t recognize the unique needs and challenges of a worker like you. But more likely there is no union, only an HR department that, if it’s not criminally understaffed, is utterly beholden to upper management, or the founders, and is solely interested in protecting their interests—and employment, and employability—over yours, because who even are you, anyway? Do you even work here?

4. Leaving a job sucks: It’s all a big goddamn bet, isn’t it? To leave these days is to leap into the unknown, because the new place might be more dysfunctional than the last. What, are you going to scour Glassdoor, or talk to recently former employees, and really get a true picture of the place? Maybe it’s a paradise, maybe it’s a mouthful of sand. And omg, if you’re going freelance or into contracting? Let’s bid a sweet “go fuck yourself” to your health insurance, to anything that might keep the lives of you and your family halfway stable. Let’s hope you never trip on a crumbling sidewalk, or develop a mole your doctor finds “interesting,” or experience anything other than an unbroken series of blissfully uneventful trips round the sun until one day, in your late 80s, you step off the curb, misjudge your own weight, land hard on your heel, fall and crack your hip, and die in the hospital two weeks later.

5. The work itself sucks: Your coworkers are idiots, your customers morons, your partners incompetent. The only thing you have in common is you all hate one another. No one knows what they’re supposed to be doing, why they’re supposed to be doing it, or how whatever it is should get done anyway. The software is outdated, the coffee maker’s broken, and even when it worked it was 1990s dark roast, not a decent fourth-wave single-origin. (Also, people keep stealing the Nespresso pods, so there are never any when you need one.) Everyone’s racist, the men hate the women and the women hate the men, and they're all too sensitive anyway, especially the boss. No one laughs because no one makes jokes, and the jokes that they did make weren’t funny, and even when they were funny, everyone on Zoom was on mute with their cameras off, so no one heard or saw them laugh. What are we doing? Why did we get into this business? How is it that we’re technically making more money now and yet we hate our lives and we can’t afford anything and there’s no light at the end of this tunnel, which is especially maddening because we work, say, for a tunnel-making company? And even if all that were okay, which it isn’t, our kids will have objectively worse lives than ours—that is, if they avoid getting gun-murdered at school and don’t develop panic disorders while getting into college, and if we can afford to pay for their college, which they likely won’t need anyway because this country is in full-on Hate Mode over education and expertise. And even if work were boring but stable—undemanding, unrewarding, unsurprising—there’s no functional after-work counterculture remaining as a relief valve. You can’t go to punk shows or underground sex parties or Off–Off Broadway theater or some affordable hole-in-the-wall restaurant or just way out into the wilderness in search of a new, refreshing, alternative crowd because the people you’ll see out there are all the same as you, snared in the trap of careerism, unable to find a way out, and considering chewing off their own legs to escape but worried that the company dental plan might not cover the damage.

Work, as Matt Groening memorably put it, is hell. There’s no getting around that, and there’s no avoiding the sense that it’s getting hellisher, whether you’re a schoolteacher or a truck driver or a software engineer. In fact, the bright economic data we’ve seen come out of the Biden administration only makes it worse: If things overall are so good, then my situation must be particularly terrible! In that light, I could see voting for a change. When the system is broken, any fix looks better, even if it’s just a crumpled ball of packing tape with bits of hair and sand stuck to the edges. Our savior!

Thing is, of course, things aren’t about to get better. They’re about to get worser, because the folks about to take charge have no interest in making the system function better for the rest of us. Their interests are solely for the owners, the billionaires and multimillionaires who could get ever richer and more powerful if only those experts and unions and regulations would just shut up and go away.

Other thing is, we want to work. Whatever we’re doing, most of us got into it because we liked it, had a talent for it, and thought, Eh, I guess I could do this for the next several decades until I’m close to death? All we want is a stable environment to work in, run by ambitious but non-greedy bosses, with predictable routes to ascend the rungs of seniority, and some basic, ironclad protections in place: Don’t fire us randomly, don’t abuse us, don’t chucklingly underpay us, don’t disrupt us into the gutter, and if or when we find ourselves unemployed, don’t make it a death sentence by taking away our health care. Give us these basic things, and we’ll be happy. No, we’ll thank you and stick by you for treating us like human beings. We’ll praise you and vote for you and give you credit, long after you’re gone, for doing the absolute bare fucking minimum. Treat us well—treat us merely okay, even—and we’ll be that thing you love the very most of all: We’ll be loyal.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt