Millennials have a fraught relationship with work. At this point it feels like we could do a compilation of people telling us about the jobs they wish they had been able to have but couldn't for various reasons, whether it be because the lifestyle was too demanding, they didn't want to move to LA, or they had been sold this dream of fulfillment that was ultimately an illusion. In this episode, we talk with Cody Crabbe, an independent podcast producer based in Salt Lake City, who had a moment of reckoning after working a string of retail jobs and ultimately decided that he had to quit and work for himself. 

There were so many elements that went into that disillusionment, from the perverse incentive structures of hourly work that penalize you for being efficient, to the facade of having to pretend that your job is the only thing that's important to you in job interviews, to the absolute absurdity of working 40 hours a week. He even told us about a time when one of his former employers got acquired by Walmart, who cut their paid parental leave from 16 weeks to 2 weeks in an act of almost tragicomic cruelty. 

We talk about how we got here from the companies of our parents' and grandparents' generations, where it DID seem like once upon a time you could work at a job for 30 years, expect to get promoted, and retire with a healthy pension and the sense that your workplace was a community where people really did care about you that you could feel a sense of loyalty for, and why that gradually eroded away.

And then we talk about the future: the rise of automation and gig work wiping out a lot of the "stable" jobs of yesterday and what will happen if and when we start implementing a universal basic income (UBI). What would you do and what would the world look like if you had $5K a month, and could do whatever you wanted with your time? Cody thinks we could have a much more vibrant society, where people volunteered their time more to causes they cared about, we could share more knowledge with each other by taking the time to teach younger generations, and we could simply have more time for leisure. Which begs the question: what would you do with your time if you could work as much as you wanted to?

Links:

Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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