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.

Comments

Free time

[StikyPad]

Sorry, my free time is worth more to me than a second job.

Re:Free time

[magarity]

Everybody needs a hobby, is what this article boils down to. For the people in question, part time job is hobby.

Re:Free time

[sinij]

Sorry, my free time is worth more to me than a second job.

When you are unable to afford food, housing, and defaulting on your student loans you quite likely will reconsider this stance.

Re:Free time

[ShanghaiBill]

Sounds like one of those entitled Baby Boomers.

As a BBer, I have had a "second job" for most of my life. I have stacked hay, renovated houses, and done lots and lots of contract programming. TFA offers no actual evidence that 2nd jobs are more common today. It is all just conjecture and opinion.

Re:Free time

[Captain Scurvy]

Everybody needs a hobby, is what this article boils down to. For the people in question, part time job is hobby.

I would agree with this, but phrase it as: "Millennials try to turn their hobbies into part-time jobs." I think part of this trend has to do with the desire to eventually turn a "side-gig" into a job that can offer full financial support, and the Internet has made it possible for a lot of people to at least make a fair shot at doing that.

Re:Free time

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re:Free time

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Free time

[AthanasiusKircher]

I think part of this trend has to do with the desire to eventually turn a "side-gig" into a job that can offer full financial support, and the Internet has made it possible for a lot of people to at least make a fair shot at doing that.

I really don't think "the Internet" has a lot to do with this, nor do I think it's a "trend." Everybody acts like entrepreneurship was invented in the past couple decades. But how do you think people "got ahead" in previous centuries? How do you think we had a "rise of the middle class" that moved us out of the dark ages of feudalism, then led the charge for the Industrial Revolution, etc.?

A lot of those people were folks with ideas about what they'd prefer to do, and they kept working at a day job to make money to fund what might start as a "hobby" but then lead to a new business or a new invention or whatever. By the 20th century, big business had grown to the point that more people were employed in large corporations, so this idea of "hobbies" or "side jobs" leading to lead to bettering your life shifted instead to "night school" and credentialing/formal study on the side to convince an employer that you're qualified for something better.

The only thing the internet has done is "disrupt" some large corporations and their control in certain sectors, which perhaps makes it a little more likely for an individual to take the "hobby" route instead of the "night school" route again. But let's not kid ourselves -- the number of such people who eventually convert some online hobby to dayjob may be larger than similar entrepreneurs of the past couple generations, but as a percentage of people who dream of doing so... it's vanishingly small.

Re:Free time

[Etcetera]

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.

Re:Free time

[phantomfive]

I really don't want to give into Millennial stereotypes (which I think are often inaccurate), but TFA is just BEGGING for it.

Don't. Create a new category like "self-entitled" or "dumb as a brick" (which fits most people with a $200 a month phone bill). These are traits that cut across generations.

Re:Free time

[sdguero]

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.

Re: Free time

[Anonymous Coward]

Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and it was free. Contrary to popular belief the founders were not in fact opposed to the notion of there being benefits for living in a society.

The California public university system was free until Ronald Reagan got elected governor and ended that. His rationale: college students were opposed to his policies. Reaganomics brought exactly that much thought on a national scale and over 30 years of it has ruined this country.

I went to college in the late 80s/early 90s. Paid for it with savings from working through high school, working summers, and the occasional job during school though I tried not to work when school was in. Graduated with zero debt, and near zero fun too but such is life. Got married in 2000 and my wife had to finish school that she'd interrupted when she was younger. We paid for that in cash too. It was hard but we did it.

College inflation brought on by Republican education cuts and privatizing student loans while letting the loan companies have essentially zero risk (thanks, 'free market' conservatives) have made either of those feats mathematically impossible today.

I literally couldn't do what I did were I to try now. I don't blame the millenials for what was done to them, unlike so many dipshits out there. The conservative fallacy that everything that happens to you is your own fault it's just excuse making for the utter failure of their entire philosophy.

We need something better.

Re:Free time

[dbIII]

was old enough to know that their degree in Religious Studies and Art History was not going to pay the bills

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.

Day job

[XXongo]

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.

Re:Day job

[Etcetera]

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.

Re:Day job

[93 Escort Wagon]

The current generally has virtually no historical awareness for anything pre-2005.

Don't use such a broad brush. It's not "the millennials" who are doing this - it's just a tiny subset of millennials who are trying to turn their blogs and/or their unknown websites (e.g. qz.com) into a paying gig.

I'm in my 50s, and while I tend to view "millennials" as rather self absorbed and lacking in perspective... I don't think they're any more so than my generation was, back when we were in our early 20s.

aka a "side job"

[phorm]

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.

THey're called hobbies

[AuMatar]

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.

Also, hustle?

[phorm]

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.

Music

[Sir_Eptishous]

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.

Re:Music

[angel'o'sphere]

I think the term "making money" refers to the amount of money in relation to the hours put into "making music" versus you would make if you worked at McDonalds.

If you practice twice a week and on top of that once with the band per week, lets say 2 hours ever time, that is 6 hours practicing per week. Assuming normal vacations and other causes, you do that only 45 weeks per year we come to 270 hours per year practicing. Now lets assume you play in a small band, just 3 people (Bass, Drums and Piano) and have a gig every month, lasting lets say 3 hours? And you let a hat go around, you make $150 per evening, divided by 3 that is $50 per gig or $600 per person per year.

Total hours worked is 270h practicing and 36h gigging, so you "make money" of $2 per hour.

That is by no definition "making money", it is a "waste of time". No lets factor in your gasoline and guitar strings and we are very quickly in the negative.

Actually, that was a no brainer, sorry that it took so much writing to point it out to you.

I'm not buying it

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:I'm not buying it

[PRMan]

rent + food + car + STUDENT LOANS

It's also instability

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:It's also instability

[PRMan]

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.

It's the Great Recession...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re:"Millennials"

[chipschap]

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.

Depressing...

[MitchDev]

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...

Re:Depressing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I though all these computers and automation was supposed to make us need to work less...

Yeah, but the people who own shares in the corporations realized that instead of letting the people creating all that productivity benefit from it, they could funnel that value to themselves and make even *more* money for doing nothing. Then, it occurred to them that people's productivity had become *so* high that even if they made employees work just a few hours a week more, in any reasonably large corporation that would result in significantly *more* money in their pockets, for which, again, they'd have to do absolutely nothing! What could be better?

Of course too much is never enough, so that became an upward spiral. Then add in minor upgrades like stagnating wages vs. inflation and several rounds of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you arrive where we are now: trying to convince people that having multiple jobs to have the standard of living society tells us is "normal" is also normal.

It will all cave in at some point; you can only take such activity so far before it all collapses. Of course, as with most of human history, the people who cause the collapse will find a way to benefit from it while the rest get screwed, but things should be better for a little while after that until the cycle ramps up again.

Re:Depressing...

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:Servants

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Are Millienials Karflegening Too Many Vizbogs?

[Pseudonymous Powers]

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!

You can't blame them.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:2008 crisis?

[Moof123]

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.