Tag: work

This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.

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Schedule Changeups & Five Recommended Essays

Posted on by Sonya Mann
Sleepy vs. Bedtime Bear (265/365)
Photo by JD Hancock.

Geez, I’m tired. Working is hard! Every time my schedule gets more rigorous, I’m newly astounded that people manage to work full-time—or longer. There are industries where sixty-hour workweeks are common. Ugh, no thanks. (Not that anyone is begging me to join their tech startup, lol.)

Anyway, getting a gig with Bustle has put me in the weird position of having a weekend. Well, it’s weird for me. I haven’t had periodic two-day breaks since… high school. I am accustomed to working roughly three hours daily, instead of concentrating my efforts during a certain chunk of the week. Now my days off are Friday and Saturday. Accordingly, today I am lazing instead of furiously typing. Gotta take a break, right? I still feel absurdly guilty, like I always do when I don’t measure up to my own arbitrary standards of PRODUCTIVITY.

Even when creating is too energy-intensive, curating is pretty easy. Inspired by a combination of my love affair with Instapaper and Meshed Society’s recurring link lists, here are five essays to serve as food for reflection (pun intended):

* “The outsider” by caustic British novelist Rachel Cusk, on joining a book club and finding it beneath her. Notable quote: “we learn to surrender the sense of our own importance, but the writer does not. He continues to pit his private world against everything, to fend it off.”

* “Scorched Earth, 2200AD” by Linda Marsa, a dystopic take on what will happen during the next couple of centuries as climate change continues unchecked.

* “I Made $570K Last Year, But I Don’t Feel Rich”, interview by Logan Sachon with a wealthy man who doesn’t appreciate his luck because of lifestyle creep. Attitudes to guard against!

* “J-School Confidential” by Michael Lewis, about how Columbia’s much-touted journalism program is an overblown mess. Good schadenfreude read, especially if you’re in media but lack the credentials.

* “The incredible story of the Dirty Dozen Rowing Club” by Erik Malinowski: ten amateur athletes from the Bay Area decide to become Olympic rowers; they are more successful than you’d expect.

Aggressive Inspiration Provided By A “Growth Hacking” Master

Posted on by Sonya Mann

I just read a bunch of Ryan Holiday articles. For those who don’t know, this guy was the marketing director for American Apparel and the reason Tucker Max’s book sold. Holiday is not a good person — he employs the shock tactics that he claims to abhor — but he is very talented and industrious. Any writer who gets me to open a bunch of browser tabs is talented, because I hate keeping more than three tabs open. I endured the visual mess in order to keep track of all the different things this guy has written that I want to read, notably a lot of posts for the Observer.

Here’s my conclusion from Holiday’s various you-suck-here’s-why advice pieces: the only way to get ahead in life is to work. Okay, that’s obvious. And yet it’s not. As Holiday writes, almost with incredulity, “The energy [that people] waste on fad diets and gear and figuring out how various unnecessary technologies work. The resources and creativity that seeps out telling people (or themselves) stories about themselves or projecting an image to the world.” The only successful strategy is to work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working. You can still fail if you work hard, but you can’t succeed without doing it.

Last night, devouring all this stuff, I had kind of an internal crisis about the publishing industry and my place in it. I asked myself, is it actually a good idea to start writing for Bustle? Is that how I should spend my energy? The answer is probably a combination of “no” and “yes”. The answer is that it can be the right decision if I work hard enough and smart enough. I can use Bustle’s higher traffic to increase my personal audience. That is the only worthwhile way to approach this gig.

Work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working.

Too Much Caffeine LOL (Once Again)

Posted on by Sonya Mann

I used to worry about seizing the zeitgeist. Okay, I still worry about it: I need to write relevant things that people want to read. But it’s not hard. A couple of quotes from Heaping Torso got a bunch of reblogs on Tumblr so I’m probably pretty good, right? I don’t need to check for trending hashtags or survey the tastemakers, those nebulous powerful nobodies, in order to make art. I just have to work on things that interest me, and hope I’m naturally cool enough for other people to be interested too. I’m anxious to push to the front of the pack but it’s better to be on the side investigating something that most people haven’t touched. God, I’m gonna have a fucking panic attack. I can’t do that. I can’t be original.

Sometimes I consider moving to some irrelevant small town in Central Valley and being the beginning of an art scene, paying cheap rent and living through the glory days that my heroes talk about. San Francisco before the AIDS crisis and the tech boom. (Hopefully the cultural shortcut conveys what I mean.) I want to create a ground floor for myself to get in on. My dream is that twenty years from now I’ll be mentoring new versions of myself in a town whose name we don’t know yet.

I mentioned this fantasy to my cousin and he warned me not to dismiss what’s already in these small towns. They’re not San Francisco or Oakland, places with exciting histories and mainstream recognition, but they’re not nothing. Fair criticism; he was right to contradict me. You can’t go into a place expecting to be better than everyone else and have them embrace you; pride goeth before a fall.

But I don’t think I’m entirely wrong. Have you been to these rural towns? There’s nothing there. Fucking nothing. No bookstores, no cafes, not even churches. It’s full of Americana to romanticize, grazing horses and old rusty cars in every yard, but there’s a reason why everyone moves to cities instead of the other way around.

The Woeful (Aspiring) Writer: Industry Education

Posted on by Sonya Mann

Note: I shouldn’t be blogging because technically I’m on vacation, which is to say that I’m parked in Portland, OR, the fourth stop on a meandering road-trip through the Pacific Northwest. I pointedly left my laptop at home because I wanted to unplug for a month, but whatever. The house where I’m staying has a free-use computer. Plus, I haven’t been writing in my notebook much.

Today I can’t stop pondering my “career”, present and future. Well, mostly future. Such spells of self-reflection usually occur after I’ve glutted on essays from The Awl and its ilk (e.g. “The Plath Resolution”). Last night I found several issues of The Sun in the bathroom and squirreled them off to bed with me. Pompous-but-poignant lit mags are my jam!

The Sun always makes me melancholy, but it was nice to get some reading done. I’ve been attempting to dive into Tarot Revelations, by Joseph Campbell and some other guy, but honestly, who am I kidding? Since I said “honestly”, I must admit that I was kidding myself a week ago when I stacked this book on my “to read” pile, but actually reading it has dispelled my hopeful urge to “study”. Give me fun books or give me the mobile game that I’ve quickly become addicted to, Best Fiends. I can’t be relied on to slog through anything! Drudgery is for chumps.

Um, I was talking about careers, right? I just read Emily Gould’s essay from MFA vs NYC, retitled “How much my novel cost me”. It could be considered a primer in privilege. I have my own heaping privilege, so I didn’t look at Gould’s situation that way. My basic reaction was, “Thank goodness I live with my parents because otherwise I could never afford to stay in the Bay Area.”

The sensible choice would be to move somewhere cool-but-not-that-cool, a midsize city in one of the states that I always forget about, like Kentucky. I live in California’s equivalent of the unnamed city, but because I’m close to the internationally lauded metropolis of San Francisco, prices are still high. Plus, I’m only moderately employable.

disregard females, acquire currency
Image via Know Your Meme.

The Bay Area is not a practical place for me to build my life, not when the only prospect that I can relish is self-publishing with my dad’s laser printer. The closer I get to my self-imposed “find a real job” deadline, the less appealing it seems. What I want to do is keep making and distributing zines. The tough part is acquiring currency.

Especially since I want to acquire currency without disregarding females! But actually, one of my Tumblr friends signed up to sponsor me on Patreon, which was the sweetest thing. This post will end on that cheery note!

Millennial Problems: No One Wants to Pay You

Posted on by Sonya Mann

I haven’t written at all during the past two days. I’ve been working on Christmas presents; I’ve been doing social things; I’ve been depressed. Whatever — there are always excuses. I don’t need to beat myself up about it, but I do feel disappointed. For the most part I’m not doing paid work right now, making my own projects even more of a priority. Still, it’s hard to maintain the go-go-go pace, you know?

Last night and this morning I comforted my crushed career hopes — being able to support myself as a writer — by reading a bunch of articles about unpaid internships. Basically, unpaid interns are free labor for the companies that “employ” them. Such programs are invariably exploitative. Usually, they are also illegal. And yet the Craigslist ads keep popping up. To see a couple of recent examples, click here and here.

Journalist Sarah Kendzior was interviewed on this topic in 2013. She said, “The American Dream dies hard, because it was not a dream. We saw it work for previous generations. And now we witness its erosion.” Yup. I feel like I’ve been duped! (Hat tip to Miri Mogilevsky, another eloquent critic of unpaid internships.)

First on Twitter and then on her blog, Kendzior outlined the steps of building a “prestige economy”, her term for the system that only rewards people who have the privilege to accrue credentials without being paid. Here are the first points:

“1) Make higher education worthless by redefining ‘skill’ as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.

2) With ‘skill’ irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.”

I’m one of the lucky few who can afford to work for free, because my parents support me. It’s still exasperating. I don’t want to be supported by my parents forever. Neither do I want to work a drudgerous full-time job. The world isn’t organized how I wish it was. Ugh. End rant.

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