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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.
Sorry, my free time is worth more to me than a second job.
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They used to call this your "day job." Artists, writers, and musicians all have day jobs, all except the very lucky few that hit it big.
These have been around for awhile. Usually it's a change to
a) Get a little extra cash
b) Do something you enjoy a bit more than your day-job
c) Build skill/experience/clientele
It's not a bad thing to have, especially in your "day job" goes south. I know some people whose side-jobs became a fledgling business and grew from there.
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?
I'll add to my comment that I've *NEVER* heard this called a hustle, and it seems like a terrible term to use because classically "hustle" has been a term for a scam, con, or some other way of shady way of making cash.
"moonlighting"
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I've been playing in bands longer than I've been working in tech.
I do it for the love of music, but the extra cash doesn't hurt either.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
These aren't hobbies. These are folks working second and third jobs because their day job doesn't pay enough for rent + food + car. I don't see a lot of actor-waiters, I see a lot of folks doing Uber on the weekend to make rent.
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Few people - including those of us too old to be millenials - have truly stable employment any more. Long ago we signed away our rights to contest being fired or laid off. If one job pulls in enough money to keep you afloat, you need the second in order to put money away for when the first one is no longer there.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Old people are annoyed by what young people do.
On the contrary, I'm definitely "old" by most definitions and I feel for young people. They have it harder than I did in so many ways. You are only young once, and not for long; you deserve to enjoy it.
So let's see, 8 hours to sleep at night, 8 hours for your main job, travel time to and from job, less than 8 hours left in the day for living, and you want to fill that with more work beyond the stuff you need to do like cook and feed yourself/family, taking care of your home/apartment, etc?
Fuck that, where's that extinction-event asteroid when we need it?
I though all these computers and automation was supposed to make us need to work less...
"...probably every human ever has been a sort of actor-waiter at some point."
Could the people who write about millenials' employment habits please go to a state other than California for just one fucking day?
But if you give it a different, cool-sounding name, you can write a magazine article.
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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Quartz ran an article over the weekend which captures a growing trend among millennials: to have a side job--
Oh, boy, sounds like somebody's written another article that describes twentysomethings doing normal, everyday things as if they were members of a completely alien species having incomprehensible interactions with the fabric of the fifth dimension.
I wonder how out-of-touch and annoying this particular article is going to be? All right, I'm taking a deep breath. How bad could it possibly be? Here we go, let's do this.
--or as many of them call it, the "side-hustle."
Oh, God, my eyes! I wasn't ready!
Millennials are obsessed with side hustles solely so they can use the phrase "side hustle".
As opposed to the older generations, up front they actually know what they are getting into and need to prepare for a life where you can't take anything for granted and you need to fight tooth and nail to keep what you have. So I'm not surprised by the whole multiple job thing increasing.
Feel bad for us old fucks, we bought into the American Dream because that's what our parents told us to do. Go to college, get a job somewhere for 30 years, buy a house, have some kids etc. But then we found out the hard way that even when you do the right thing your job loyalty means nothing. Your house can be taken away in a minute flat and you can lose a huge amount your retirement savings over the whims of greedy idiots on Wall St. Oh and don't have a serious medical issue or you will lose job/house/saving all in one.
So why I can't promise an easy life for the younger generations, at least you know up front the American Dream is a total lie and to change your thinking accordingly. Newsflash right?
Mind you I'm talking about the Middle class here. The "Lower" class has always been fucked and always will be. Working 2-3 jobs has always been the norm.
Again as always a BIG fuck you to all the scumbag companies who pushed our jobs overseas because they had to "stay competitive" and manufacturing in the USA was too expensive. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
recognize the source of the increased payroll must be reduced dividends, since all other business operating expenses remain either constant or increase slightly
That may have been true in a different era, but increasingly (and specifically in the fast food industry GP was discussing), the source of an increase in wages would be:
Cost savings realized in automation + paying fewer employees more to work with/manage the robots.
Dividends don't have to go down, in fact they'll probably go up. And wages will go up too, but not enough to offset the lost jobs. This evolution might be hastened by minimum wage hikes, but MW is not fundamentally the cause. The cost of the machines keeps going down and down; for many fast food tasks, there will come a point at which it simply doesn't make financial sense to employ a human to do them at any meaningful wage, even if we slashed MW. This point isn't in some far off "Isaac Asimov" future, it's in the "before 2030" future.
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Dunno... I think I have to cut the author of the original article a little more slack than the parent poster is doing.
I'm not here to argue for the term "side hustle" as the best choice of words. But traditionally, you had a lot of people who worked one full-time or "career job". And then when situations arose where that wasn't cutting it for them to maintain whatever lifestyle they were used to, they'd take on a second job. Sometimes we called this "moonlighting".
The thing is, this "side hustle" seems to me like it's a little bit different. The traditional taking on a second job tended to involve selecting something relatively non-demanding. You might work the night shift at a local gas station, for example, or deliver pizzas. It wasn't usually anything you actually enjoyed doing, but rather, something you could *stand* to do after already putting in an 8 hour day at your primary job. I think what the Millennials are talking about is figuring out something you already kind of like doing, and turning it into a small side business opportunity. It's not about applying for entry level jobs in retail businesses. It's about making the effort to print up business cards or flyers and building a promotional web site, and convincing people they should buy some product or service from you that you can provide in your spare time. BUT, it's a "hustle" because you're probably trying to "fake it until you make it". You want your customers to THINK they're dealing with an entrepreneur who is working on getting that big business loan or venture capital money before long, to really grow the business into something big. But in reality, you're going to make up excuses why you're out of something or can't be there at 3PM next Thursday when your customer would really like the service. Because this is about some extra money on the side; not a hyper-focused effort on going full-time with what's offered.
If there's anything that's a sad commentary on today's society, I think it's not so much that you've got a generation willing to do some of this for the sake of regular trips to Starbucks. But rather, it's sad that the traditional "moonlighting" job positions are often not even available for that purpose today -- because you've got so many applicants who need those as their MAIN job to survive.
Where the hell were you? The housing market crashed, but so much more went with it. Lots of folks got laid off. The lucky ones who got a new job often found that they were deep underwater in their house, even if they put 20% down.
Being part of an interlinked economy means that nobody is an island. Crappy loan products peddled to suckers can blow up a bank and take down everyone else with it. Young folks hitting the job market at that time were SOL. Colleges are not subsidized nearly like they used to be, so the same degree you have costs a lot more (usually necessitating student loans). Companies shipped all the lower end jobs overseas, taking away entry level jobs to gain experience. So the few open positions of any consequence for a few years after 2008 all required 5-10 years experience and super specific job skills.
We littered the country with a whole heap of well educated debtors that really struggled to get a decent job. Many of them did get crap jobs, and many had to go live with their parents due to the crushing debt they got that could not be serviced on a service job.
Yes... Unfortunately, not increasing the minimum wage only delays the automation by a year or so, as the cost of automation keeps falling.
Defending the status quo in minimum wages is a losing game, because the other side isn't standing still no matter what you do. Even if you cut the minimum wage automation will continue increasing, because there are some jobs that can already be done for considerably less than a person can live on that haven't yet been automated.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.