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Millennials Are Obsessed With Side Hustles Because 'They're All' They've Got (qz.com)
Quartz ran an article over the weekend which captures a growing trend among millennials: to have a side job -- or as many of them call it, the "side-hustle." One of the reasons that people need this other gig is obviously money, but there are other factors at play as well. From the article: The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. This psychological benefit is the real reason for the Millennial obsession, I'd argue, and why you might want to consider finding your own side hustle, no matter how old you are. Now one might say that this "side-hustle" is not a new phenomenon at all. People have since forever have had multiple jobs to make the ends meet. But the author argues that in the post 2008-crisis, we have witnessed a whole generation where one gig would simply not cut it all for many. The article adds: Previous generations have also coped with such semi-tragedy; probably every human ever has been a sort of actor-waiter at some point. In any case, those of us who are employed generally understand ourselves to be lucky. Working as a benefits administrator, an ad-sales rep or even a Facebook engineer might not be the dream job. But your side hustle can keep you from feeling pigeonholed. It's the distraction from your disappointment, a bridge between crass realities and your compelling inner life. In the best-case scenario, your side hustle can be like a lottery ticket, offering the possibility -- however remote -- that you just might hit the jackpot and discover that holy grail of gigs. The one that perfectly blends money and love. The one that's coming along any day now.
And most of us have them. We leave work and work on something we're passionate about, but might not pay enough. Or might not pay at all. Or we volunteer at a charity. Or at our kid's school. This is nothing new, the number of people looking to make money from them is just increasing. Maybe. Its not like doing side jobs was ever that rare.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
After I was out of work for two years (2009-10), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy, I spent the next two years working a daily job (Monday-Friday) and a weekend job (Friday-Sunday) to recover financially. When I got my government IT job, the two-hour background investigative interview lasted four hours as I had to provide the names and phone numbers of the 20+ contract assignments I've done during that time. The government finds it suspicious if you deviate from what they considered is an average person. An average person would only have one job for two to three years.
Of course they are! Even servants have servants these days!
People keep telling me folks should all just get better jobs instead of being burger flippers. This comes up a *lot* because I talk a lot about alternatives to minimum wage, because minimum wage increases concentrate wealth at the expense of jobs (no, your hamburger won't be $15; your $8 value meal will cost 13 cents more, multiplied by 31 billion sales per year, which takes enough of the *same* *total* *income* to make wage for 281,000 minimum-wage jobs--that's the maximum number of jobs that go away). One of the common answers is just "they should get better jobs instead." The other is some magical handwaving about money falling out of the sky (some people don't realize that the wages come out of the consumer's spending, and think that raising wage means more money magically appears in the paycheck, and so it can be spent and create even more jobs--a concept that would indicate infinite money and infinite jobs at all wage levels).
My more recent response has been pointing out that these people can bother feeding themselves, since those wage workers are your grocery baggers and burger flippers. People expect a register operator, stocked store shelves, bagged groceries, and a hot meal ready for them for two dollars; then they complain that somebody actually did all the work involved, and demand that guy stop mooching and go get a real job. It's ludicrous.
Really, I shouldn't talk about this on Slashdot. Bashing concepts like Basic Income is front-page material, but supporting positions are spam.
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I have a friend who worked for a company in Washington state where HR told him that he COULD NOT fire 2 employees for exactly these reasons.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Everybody needs a hobby, is what this article boils down to. For the people in question, part time job is hobby.
Actually, it's about more than "hobbies." Basically, TFA is about conflating a bunch of things that used to have different terms and corralling them under a new fancy appellation, i.e., "side hustle," which sounds like a really stupid dance people do at weddings.
A few things that are conflated here and had perfectly good terms before:
(1) "Hobbies" -- these are things that basically make you no money. Nominally, they might bring in a little income, but it's so small you don't really pay attention to it at all. You're more interested in the activity than the income. You might only sell some of your work to try to make the expenses "balance out" a little, not really to make a profit.
(2) "Dream jobs" -- these are things that people would like to do with their lives, but they can't "make a living" at it. So they have what used to be called a "day job," and then they work as a musician some evenings or on the weekends. It's more than a "hobby," because they actually would prefer a job as a musician, but the income isn't enough to make it work.
(3) "Second jobs" -- these are what poor people do to survive (i.e., put food on the table and make rent), and what middle-class people do to afford some desirable luxury or send their kids to a nicer private school. (The latter sometimes use the word "side job" too, avoiding the "electric slide" and the "side hustle.") Often they are menial part-time gigs, but they are distinct from the above categories because people generally would prefer NOT to do them.
The author of TFA seems to confuse all of these categories, which used to be straightforward in previous generations. Moreover, he adds his extra "first world problems" twist to his examples:
Maybe that's because many people assume the side hustle is just financially oriented, simply another adaptive response to recession-era economics. Google "side hustle" and you will find thousands of stories, but they are all focused on the how. As in, Dear internet, how can I make another $200 a month to cover my Verizon bill?
If you are struggling financially because of your Verizon bill, maybe your financial priorities are a little screwed up.
Last year, writing for the internet earned me a grand total of $415 before taxes, or about the price of two hotel nights on the outskirts of Manhattan or San Francisco. To say I'm not in it for the money would be understatement. Not because I'm above such earthly considerations. There's just very little money in it to be for.
The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. In fact, given all the hours I've devoted to it, there's no question in my mind that I've lost more than I've made, if only in terms of my Starbucks spend.
If your metric for your side job is that you're spending more money than you're making at Starbucks, you don't have a "side job" or even a "side hustle." You have a hobby. And you have enough disposable income to not give a crap that you're spending that much money on coffee. Good job! Now stop meditating on your first-world problems and trying to conflate them with things real people do to survive or to get things that will really make their lives better.
If your writing hobby gives your life meaning, by all means, keep doing it. But please stop acting like most other people who have to work a second job on the side might also just throw away all their proceeds at Starbucks. Or... well, is that really what a "millennial" budget looks like these days? $200/month Verizon bill, $100/month coffee bill... but can't make rent or afford a car so you still live with your parents?
I really don't want to give into Millennial stereotypes (which I think are often inaccurate), but TFA is just BEGGING for it.
Fuck you.
For decades they have been telling kids to work hard and achieve all they can. To get a good job you need a degree, they said. And she enough, all the good jobs list a degree as a requirement.
Degrees used to be free of course, or at least quite cheap. And there were good jobs that paid the debt off.
Millennials made the decision to get an education based on the advice they had at the time. They were 18, younger even. And it worked out well for their parents.
But oh, sorry, we broke the economy and well, someone's gotta pay... And it won't be us, we've got ours.
I pity the H/S graduating classes of 2007 and 2008, who didn't really know any better but weren't in a position to change course. Anyone afterwards knew damn well that they had to think carefully about their major, about getting a job, and about vocational schooling as an option.
Anyone before then should have remembered the echo from the dot-com implosion and recession, and/or was old enough to know that their degree in Religious Studies and Art History was not going to pay the bills. I remember telling people that, but they continued anyway. That was a *conscious* choice for them that they had plenty of time to reconsider their huge incoming student loan debt -- and with a decent job market, they had options.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
This sums things up perfectly. I keep seeing "news stories" about things that have been going on since mankind first drug itself out of whatever cave it was living in being rebranded as something that these newfangled kids are doing.
I don't get it.
The current generally has virtually no historical awareness for anything pre-2005. This is beyond the "normal" cyclic view of history and re-inventions, many of them have only the barest knowledge of life before YouTube. I grew up well after the '70s, but somehow I had cultural awareness of the Vietnam War and its influence on the then-present-day as I was a teen and into my twenties.
The current generation (I don't like the term "Millennial" since I find it to be too broad ... let's say the "Digital Natives" (vs. Generation Y, which was roughly born 1980-1992)) is living in the eternal present, unable to re-contextualize current events. Gen Y and Gen X are doing this too, but at least we're doing it ironically. We still remember the critical thinking thought processes we were raised on, whereas they never really got that to begin with.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
We have a Trump voter here.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm an old millenial (we used to be called gen Y), but technically still a millenial.
The biggest flaw I see in my cohorts is that they try to take on the entire world's problems and blame their personal issues on the rest of the world. The internet makes us so connected that people instantly try to relate themselves into movements and jump to conclusions about a complex problems that really have no bearing on them whatsoever. I think Han Solo said it best... Delusions of grandeur. And when it comes to reflection on where they are today, where they want to be in the future, and the inevitable disappointment; the blame game starts, It might be with their parents, or the school/teachers. or the banks, or the government, etc. There is always some institution to blame for their shitty low income life. It's never their own fault.
Student loan debt is a problem. Maybe you should have chosen a different degree or a less expensive university, as the number of jobs for people with liberal arts degrees doesn't match up the the number of people graduating each year. Similarly, banks charge high fees. But you can always put your money in a credit union.
These are the kind of things I deal with too, but I have found that I deal a lot better with them (i.e. they get resolved sooner) once I take the onus upon myself, instead of blaming everyone from my grandparents to Obama for my lot in life. There was a graduation speech a couple years back where the speaker talked about one subject... "You are not special." I think more people aged 18-34 should listen to that speech and take the lesson to heart before trying to blame their problems on institutions.
It's always been this way ... and when I first got into the "work world" after college, the whole thing depressed me too. I spent a lot of time asking, "Why? What's the point of all of this, and how did my parents stand it?!"
But the elephant in the corner of the room that everyone likes to ignore is this: People with these "side jobs" are often working smarter, not harder. For example, say you want to start a side business selling something online? You may have to burn a few of those precious weekends working on the setup -- but once the e-commerce site is running, it sells to visitors 24 hours/7 days without you having to do much with it. Your role is probably only going to be in the packing/shipping of products ordered, and handling returns as needed. Granted, that can take some time, but you get to choose when you do it and for how long. You could box up a few items right before bed, perhaps? Or knock some of it out while you're watching some show on TV at night, relaxing. If it does well enough? Now you can afford to pay some teenager to do the hands-on stuff for you, making the operation completely hands-off.
And same kind of thing with people who really do find a way to make their second job a sub-set of their hobby. I know a guy in town, for example, who is really into history. Since he was interested in digging up everything he could find about local history in our city anyway, he decided to start compiling it into books. He's got 3 of them out now that he sells via Facebook and occasionally at a local flea market table, or in other people's shops. He was going to hang onto all of those notes and photos and copies of historical documents anyway ... so putting them into book format didn't take a whole lot of extra effort, really.
To a lot of employers a degree was proof that you would be able to get up in the morning, turn up for work and be able to figure out what to do with simple paperwork. The actual content didn't matter a lot for non-technical jobs until there were so many unemployed around that recent graduates had a lot of competition.
Some people who did those degrees you are contemptuous of some years ago see those of us who completed degrees based on science and technology as "the little people" who were "not taught people skills" and are working as management. So while it may seem a stupid idea to do such courses now it was not in the past, may not be in the future and possibly isn't really that much of a stupid idea now. What was stupid in hindsight was what I did - an engineering degree with a tight focus on manufacturing inspired by an approaching obvious manufacturing boom. It was stupid because the boom happened in China while engineers were laid off elsewhere.