Working 9 to 5
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it.
Dolly tried to warn us: working 9 to 5 really is all taking and no giving. “I don’t have time to do anything,” said a plaintive young woman in a video that went viral this week: “I don’t have time or energy to cook my dinner…I don’t have energy to work out.” She’s dismayed to discover how much urban working life takes from her, how little it leaves her in the way of money and leisure. The margins of her world are constricting, and she’s, “like…so upset!”
Breakdowns like this, when they voyage across the generational ocean that separates TikTok from Twitter/X, have become for Gen Z what avocado toast was for us Millennials: a symbol of the offending generation’s moral laxity and mental fragility. Older adults pass these clips around like found objects from a remote civilization. They are totems that apparently serve as our only mode of contact with a benighted tribe called “the kids,” whose barbarous customs evoke an intoxicatingly paradoxical mixture of contempt and pity.
If the past is another country, then so is the future, and it’s true that the territory ahead looks wild and uncultivated. The Whatever podcast, another window for the olds into juvenile mores, has found a rapt audience for its young guests among their incredulous elders. We watch with horror as women describe what it’s like trying to hammer something like a plausible romantic commitment out of the ruins of what used to be called the dating scene.
What’s heart-wrenching about these glimpses into young single life is not just the social wasteland that the girls describe, but also the poverty of the language they have at their disposal to make sense of their situation. Despite the scorn they get, they’re not actually oblivious or unthinking: they know something is deeply wrong. But they have been deprived of the moral concepts, and tacitly forbidden from making the moral judgments, that would allow them to articulate who they are and what they want.
So they are left stuttering through their pain, groping feebly for words that can express how they have been emptied out and betrayed. “Like the whole, like, and just like the inconsistency in them,” said one girl: “like I literally like hate that like so much.” She was trying to talk abut how vulnerable and exploited she felt in the vast gray areas of modern dating, how agonizing it is to be strung along through an ambiguous situationship by a man that can see no reason to limit his options. But she was failing, and she knew it: “I don’t know how to word this.”
Of course not. Because she was raised in a culture that has been determined for decades to deny basic facts about human nature. Like all her peers, she is wandering through the wreckage of the sexual revolution. The era of free love took all the guardrails off of romance, letting loose an explosion of indulgence and pleasure that lasted for about half a generation. But now the party’s over, and these kids got all the hangover with none of the fun. They were never there to experience the Age of Aquarius: they just inherited a ruined culture and a ransacked language, and now they wander like ghosts through the gray dawn.
Which is why I just can’t see my way to laughing at the lonely girl in her rented walk-up, panicking as her 9-to-5 city job swallows her waking hours like some engorged beast. Sure, she’s a bit of a delicate princess. She knows that, and she says so right at the outset: “I know I’m probably just being so dramatic and annoying.” But she’s not just pouting over something so inconsequential as “what a real job is like,” as her detractors suggest.
She’s waking up to a sickening reality: what was once portrayed as a shoestring adventure, the upwardly-mobile life of a twenty-something girlboss, is actually a threadbare and loss-ridden half-existence. Some fashionable magazine writer she’s never heard of, decades before she was born, made a living out of exalting corporate drudgery at the expense of homemaking. And now she’s the one paying the price.
Because if housebound motherhood really was “a comfortable concentration camp,” as Betty Friedan claimed it was, then it should have been liberating to flee suburbia and enter the workforce. Instead, the granddaughters of second-wave feminism are trapped and isolated in shoebox apartments. Many of them are bitterly unhappy and can barely find the words to say why. “How do you have friends, like how do you have time to like, meet a guy?” This is not just a spoiled rant. It’s a cry from the heart.
The movie 9 to 5, which featured Dolly Parton’s song of the same name, came out in 1980. It was still flush with the go-girl confidence of the newborn decade. Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly played frustrated employees fantasizing about murdering their sexist boss, Franklin Hart. But though Hart is the immediate hate object, there’s another story playing out quietly in the background of the script. Fonda’s husband has run off with his secretary when the movie starts; that’s why she has to go to the office in the first place. It’s a movie that pretends to be about equal pay and in-office day care. What it’s actually about is an abandoned woman, forced into an environment that makes her miserable.
Men don’t love office life either, for that matter: they used to suffer through it to support their families. But corporate feminists, egged on by free-market fundamentalists, took away the family and left the suffering. Why would a man, or a woman, slog through hours of mindless typewriting if there’s no one to come home to? Young people are starting dimly to realize that they’ve been played, turned into widgets in the name of liberation.
“They just use your mind / and they never give you credit”: the driving question behind Dolly’s beat is who you’re ultimately working for. Despite the associated glamor, “Amazon” and “Oracle” are actually bad answers to that question. If young people are realizing that, it’s not our job to mock them. It’s our job to help them come up with a better one.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
I feel this on such a personal level. I became a young adult during the rise of Tinder and Bumble. Like most women my age, I was sold the bill of goods that men are trash and to never let them pay for dinner, lest they expect things in return (not always bad advice, mind you.)
I always fancied myself the salmon swimming up the proverbial cultural stream (because where I'm from in the South, it's very normal to get married at 18.) I wanted more; to experience more.
After 8ish years of "experiencing more" (read: living the hedonistic nightmare packaged as female liberation) I changed course. I met my husband and fell in love. Currently, I'm drinking my coffee in my house while my baby naps and my cat sleeps on my lap. I am more fulfilled now than I ever was chasing situationships and instant gratification. I feel for this current generation, and I hope they find their way out.
I saw that video a couple of days ago, and it just made me sad. But your writing has helped me to see exactly what it is that she lacks, and how desperately we have been failing. Thank you!