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Millennials Are Obsessed With Side Hustles Because 'They're All' They've Got (qz.com)

Posted by msmash on from the desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures dept.

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.

15 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Free time by StikyPad · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
    1. Re:Free time by magarity · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Free time by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Free time by Captain+Scurvy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Free time by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Free time by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:Free time by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re: Free time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. aka a "side job" by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Also, hustle? by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. I'm not buying it by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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  5. It's the Great Recession... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:"Millennials" by chipschap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Are Millienials Karflegening Too Many Vizbogs? by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  8. You can't blame them. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.