“How’s post-employment?” a friend asked me over coffee two weekends ago.
“Honestly? Great,” I replied and sipped my matcha.
In short: I got laid off from my first full-time, post-grad job. Hold your applause until the end, please.
If you’re here for a cultural analysis of the latest in social media and tech, I’m sorry to disappoint (though I promise there will be tidbits sprinkled in). Today’s edition is all about my musings on unemployment in this layoff-laden economy, temporarily escaping the endless game of capitalism and trend keep-up, and re-finding my footing without given structure. Welcome to the third installment of pure delusion.
First, some recent life happenings:
I know Halloween is very old news, but I will not stop talking about my costume this year as Taylor Swift from the 2019 AMAs (see here for the reference photo, see below for my execution). At the sacrifice of many sharpies, I drew each of her album names on a fresh white button-down, which took much longer than I anticipated. Her original shirt only went up to Reputation, so I brought my shirt up to speed with her following releases. And no, I did not snag Eras tour tickets (this is a sore subject).
Speaking of my favorite musical artists, I traveled to Washington DC earlier in November to see The 1975 perform at The Anthem. The stage was a house cut in half horizontally and was one of the most captivating constructions I’d ever seen. The set was divided into two parts, their most recent album and a selection of their older music, totaling a 2-hour show interluded by Matty Healy crawling through a TV. Healy made a nod to Maxwell Frost, the first Gen-Z member of Congress, who had won his election that week in Florida (shout-out to my home state) and was in the crowd enjoying the concert with the rest of us. An absolutely unforgettable night in honor of my former high school Tumblr self.
I’ve eaten a vegan Thanksgiving for the past eight years, and this year’s turkey-less locale was Bushwick. I haven’t gone home to Florida for Thanksgiving since my freshman year of college, so Thanksgiving is always a fun gamble of a holiday for me with what friends I can round up. What I thought would be a wholesome night topped off with my mother’s vegan pumpkin pie accidentally turned into a festive two-day Brooklyn bender where I, at some point, withdrew a $20 bill and immediately misplaced it. I’ll leave it there.
I started this essay a few times in my head after receiving the news of my layoff. As you can imagine, being laid off has taken me through quite the rollercoaster of emotions, oscillating somewhere between an intense “fuck” and a numbed “being chained to a desk sucks anyway,” usually landing me at the cliched “it’s a blessing in disguise.”
To begin, here are the facts: For the past year and a half, I was working at Paramount as an Integrated Marketing Coordinator with a specialty in paid social for the CBS News and Entertainment business units. A lot of words, I know, but in short I was working with advertising placements that went alongside social content. Very corporate. I started at that job one month after graduating from the University of Southern California with a journalism degree. Initially, I was based in LA, where I stayed for a year before transferring to the NYC office in August. Two weeks ago to the date, I was informed that my position was cut due to a reorg within the company. I am one of many who have been affected by the recent mass layoffs in the tech and media spaces. (And, to top it off, this happened the same week I tried, and failed, to secure Taylor Swift’s Eras tour tickets — life does hit you all at once).
But you’re not here for a LinkedIn summary, nor am I seeking to write a cringe LinkedInfluencer-style post. Instead, I’m here to reflect on the role work and, interconnectedly, social media have played in my life, which lends itself to a more personal entry than I would normally aim for. If you’re currently struggling in your career, I hope this entry brings you some comfort and perspective. (Yes, this essay is dramatic, but it’s my first layoff, so I’m allowed this moment of self-indulgence).
Let’s return to my friend’s “post-employment” phrase that opened this entry. I thought it was a funny euphemism to use instead of outright saying, “So you lost your job, huh?” On the subway ride home that evening, I was sitting with this term, when the prefix “post” suddenly made my brain jump to “post-modernism” (genuinely was a word association, not an attempt at pretentiousness, I promise). I had a vague understanding of what post-modernism stood for, but I wanted an exact definition to chew on, which a quick google search provided me:
noun: post-modernism
a late-20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”
Then, of course, I needed the definition of “modernism” as a point of comparison:
noun: modernism
a movement in the arts in the first half of the twentieth century that rejected traditional values and techniques, and emphasized the importance of individual experience (Collins Dictionary)
Not to equate the average experience of losing my job to a grand-scale art movement (nor am I an art scholar, aside from the one class I took in college), but I find the two yin-and-yang philosophies an interesting means to frame my situation through — or, as I may call it, employment and post-employment. On one hand, “employment” connotes: Transitioning from student to employee, navigating what I want from the career world, and finding personal meaning in my allotted unstructured time. On the other hand, “post-employment” is just that: Dissolving the line between structured and unstructured time to favor the self over capital production.
Obviously, my two definitions aren’t perfect parallels to the two art movements (“employment” in a corporate sense is probably better literally equated to the institutions modernism was rejecting), but the core comparison here is how one movement spawns by rejecting its predecessor. That is the true outcome of a layoff, or any big life change, really.
“So what are you going to do next?” some have pressed me, to which I wave them away in a dismissive gesture, to which they’re confused. Most don’t know how to react when you openly express diverting from the norm, which, in this case, is corporate job hopping. As long as I’ve had a concept of professionalism, all of my work has concentrated in the social media space, including content production, audience development, influencer partnerships, and paid social. The social space, for all its constant change and innovation, is as much fun as it is exhausting.
To be completely honest? This is the first time in my life I’m allowing myself to deeply question my career path, which, per my above yin-and-yang definitions, is exactly what I should be doing, especially so early in my 20s. I’m going to have my infomationals. I’m going to read my silly books. You know what else I’m going to do? Vibe.
You’ve heard of the great resignation. You’ve heard of quiet quitting. But have you heard of post-mass layoff vibing? (This phrase probably takes a more formal shape on LinkedIn, Re: “I’m taking some time off to…”). I want to acknowledge here that having time off to “vibe,” in a trite sense, is a financial privilege I’m temporarily afforded in my severance period and isn’t always the case in unemployment. I, like many of my peers, have done life the “right” way up until this point: Do well in high school, go to a reputable college, get a good job, live in a fancy city, and so forth along the straight and narrow. My sense of self has always been largely wrapped up in this conventional idea of success, and, frankly, this is the first time in my life I’m without a structure that guarantees such formulaic triumph. A layoff, then, is a unique, forced chance in life to pivot from the set path and ask, “Is this what I really wanted?”
Other than this layoff, the only other life event that’s given me this kind of pause was Covid, when society battled between doing nothing and infamously throwing out how Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine. Again, I’m not equating losing my job to a devastating global pandemic, but the two do share a certain isolation-induced ponderance. I suppose Covid was when I learned to simply vibe when life affords you a rare break, as Mary Retta wrote in her pandemic-era essay “on vibing,” which I return to often:
To vibe is to shape time into pleasure, to mold it into something that feels soft and tastes sweet. It is to take a pause that bleeds into another… I am not sure that time is a thing we can take or waste or save or give away. I have been so young for so long now I’m afraid it has grown tiresome. I was once scared that time might leave me behind but today I welcome it’s escape. I don’t want to take my time anymore. I want to set it free.
Earlier this year while I was still living in LA, I was listening to a podcast episode from The Ezra Klein Show titled “The Case Against Loving Your Job.” The episode discusses the pandemic’s role in uprooting our relationship to labor, as many reckoned with how work, despite its central place in our identities, cannot love us back. The physical office became less relevant, meetings felt more unnecessary, and, most importantly, did it all even matter?
One guest recalls his first post-grad job as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he, bright-eyed from school, took this well-paying position that promised the world. However, he was instead met with a soul-crushing moral conflict involving a project where he would help a company lay off thousands of employees not for need, but for pure profit:
I found myself like falling apart physically, you know, gripped by this anxiety and anguish, wanting to just like break down for no reason. And at the time, I attributed to burnout, but it wasn’t burnout. I had been burned out before. It was something totally different… And as millennials and Gen Zers continuously view their work as something that is a calling, a meaning, a purpose, something to make the world a better place, and then they go into workplaces, where they’re being, I think, increasingly sold a bag of goods of social impact, and then at the end of the day, it’s about making a profit, this is the kind of thing that’s going to keep popping up. And it’s going to keep popping up far beyond the professions we’d even expect it to.
I’m not the first to admit I was not in love with my first job, maybe not to the above extreme, but I get where he’s coming from on some level. In lieu of being able to converse with people about what I do for work, I’ve noticed the varying levels at which people present work as self, ranging from beat-it-over-your-head proclamations to silent acknowledgments. One approach is not more appropriate than the other, just different. This label is a fact of life, after all, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon to witness. Most people want their work to be meaningful and worth talking about, and I share that ambition. Our relationship to work is, after all, a relationship — it’s a living entity that requires commitment, consultation, and compromise. This relationship, like any, should leave us with a refined perspective on ourselves in relation to the surrounding world.
Regardless, my first stab at full-time employment was a learning experience in what to do and what not to do in the professional world, and I made some friends along the way. To those struggling in their career, whether you’re dealing with a layoff, job search, or clocking in at a dead-end job: It’s okay. Nature will balance itself out eventually. If you’re a graduate of the past few years, remember the work world we’ve entered is entirely different from that of decades past. We are quite literally in the midst of shaping the future of work, which is messy at times, so continue to demand from yourself and your environment to do what you love and nothing less (with boundaries, of course).
“What are you in the city for?” new acquaintances have asked me at social gatherings.
“Actually, I just got laid off from my job,” I state, to which I receive pitiful looks. I then quickly offer reassurance, cushioning the blow with “it’s a blessing in disguise” or “really, I’m looking forward to the time off.” I wish I could just shout, “I’m post-employment vibing!” but that might just be reserved for you readers and close friends.
Being in the weeds of my Paramount job, coupled with my journalism background, inspired this newsletter, which I thoroughly enjoy and intend to continue with a focus on the digital/social landscape, as originally promised. However, the mass layoffs in media and tech are affecting real people (hello) and are not just another trend to dissect on TikTok, so I want to focus on other subjects where I can. Further, for sake of my sanity and creativity, I hope to take somewhat of a break from completely immersing myself in the online space and its endless scroll. Instead, you can catch me post-employment vibing in museums, workout classes, movie theaters, or in my room with a book (with some professional stuff sandwiched in, too).
At the very least, writing is my one true passion, and I finally have more time for it. Now you may applaud.
Listening:
I’ve been listening to so much Taylor Swift and The 1975 I fear I may have dug myself into a music hole too deep to get out of. Please send me other music to listen to, please.
This daylight savings playlist I made last year still hits
Spotify wrapped is today! If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I’m basic
Yes, my #1 artist is Taylor Swift (top 1% of listeners baby)
My #1 song is “leave my mind” by Ben Platt
Watching:
The White Lotus (HBO)
With only two episodes remaining in the second season, I think this may be my favorite show of all time, simply because it’s a poignant dissection of the modern human condition. I find people either love or hate this show due to its slow pace, but know I will argue in its favor with everyone and anyone.
Do Revenge (2022)
Young adult dramas are a guilty pleasure of mine, but this one was not the cringe, over-saturated woke Netflix recipe I was expecting. Honestly, this is an instant teen classic stacked with a great cast (and I usually hate stacked casts). I give it a 7.5/10.
Atonement (2007)
This one gets a 9/10 from me. Beautifully shot with an insane twist at the end. Now I’m on a period piece and Kiera Knightly kick (not mutually exclusive).
Bones and All (2022)
This is one I do not recommend, despite great reviews from critics. My roommate and I went to see this in theaters solely for the Timothée Chalamet factor, and we left 20 minutes in because of the gore factor. To quote my roommate as we bought tickets: “I think it’s about cannibalism, loosely.” Wrong. “Loosely” was a grave understatement. I know it’s supposed to be a stunning allegory about love and acceptance (it has an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes), but this film is not for the weak of stomach.
Bones and All has the same director as Call Me By Your Name, where Chalamet co-stars with Armie Hammer. Do with that information what you will.
Reading:
Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Thanks to my dear friend Natalie Bettendorf for this book rec! Check out her Substack The Poppy Field
Looking for:
Your feedback! If you love pure delusion, let me know what you love about it or what you’d like to see. If there are typos, though, that’s none of my business.
Thanks for indulging my delusions!
<3 Rowan
Really like this one. Keep vibing!
This was an absolute pleasure to read, it's inspiring me to have a sunnier outlook on pending economic uncertainty. Thank you for your work <3!