Almost Adulthood: Work

I updated my LinkedIn headline three times this week. "Marketing Coordinator" felt too entry-level. "Content creator" felt too cringe. "Digital Storyteller" felt like I was trying too hard. Finally, I wound up settling on "Social Media Specialist" because it kind of sounds like I know what I'm doing, even though half of my job is just romanticizing and writing about leather bags.

My parents think I "work in tech," which sounds cooler than "I schedule Instagram posts and respond to DMs from people who want to know if we ship to Alaska." When I tell them that I spend my day on social media, they're like, "So you get paid to scroll?" And you know, they're not wrong.

But here's what's troubling: at social gatherings, I reflexively introduce myself by my job title instead of the qualities that actually make me interesting like my encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, my eye for vintage finds, the hobbies I've cultivated outside the office.

When did our jobs become our entire personality? When did "What do you do?" become more important than "What's your favorite conspiracy theory?"

Gen-Z was told we could be anything we wanted, but somehow that evolved into believing we had to become our jobs. There's this unspoken pressure that, if you're not passionate about your 9-to-5, you're doing life wrong. But what if your job is just... fine? What if it pays the bills and doesn't make you miserable, but it's not your "calling"?

All of this "follow your passion" rhetoric suggests that everyone has one, single passion that pays the rent. But most of us are multifaceted humans with interests that don't directly translate to concrete career paths. We enjoy true crime podcasts, fresh-baked sourdough, and enraged Twitter threads dissecting the Disney Marvel movies. None of that suggests to potential hiring managers, "Hire me for the marketing team," but it's probably more interesting than our ability to "synergize cross-platform content strategies."

Sometime between the 2008 recession and TikTok going mainstream, having more than one job became not so uncommon. Now, almost everyone has multiple streams of income. The gig economy was created with promises of flexibility and income freedom, but instead, we got more anxiety and the pressure to monetize everything we are good at. 

There are now endless apps on our phones: Shopify, DoorDash, Poshmark, Depop, Fiverr, and Upwork. All of them offer to pay us money quickly, and yet require way more work than they lead us to believe. We’ve now turned our cars into taxis, our closets into storefronts, and our hobbies into secondary jobs. 

We're not just working anymore. We're extracting value from every corner of our lives. That spare bedroom? Airbnb it. Good at graphic design? That's a side hustle. Can you take decent photos? Sell them as stock images. The space between "this is something I own," or "this is something I enjoy," and "this is something I can monetize" has completely collapsed.

But the hustle is what we don’t talk about: it's exhausting. When everything is a revenue stream, nothing feels like fun. All of your vintage thrift store finds are now “deadstock.” Your baking hobby is now a business plan. Your social media is now personal branding.

And then, somehow, in the middle of all this side-hustling and monetizing, you land an actual job. Not a gig, not a freelance project, but a real, salaried position with benefits you don't fully understand. Suddenly, you're supposed to perform a different kind of adulthood.

There comes a moment when you realize you are performing adulthood. You use terms like "bandwidth" and "synergies" when you're really just an adult who still gets excited about Hot Wheels and Lego builds.

But then things change. Ray, a junior studying Finance at Clark University, experienced this when presenting research to department stakeholders: "The most adult I've ever felt in my job was when I presented my work to department stakeholders at Clark University after an entire semester of research that led to growth and a bigger budget for the department."

All of a sudden, the performance is not a performance anymore. You're actually making real decisions and impacting real budgets. Impostor syndrome doesn't vanish, but it becomes entangled with the idea that maybe you do know what you're doing, even if you're figuring it out as you go. It's the most bizarre sense of cognitive dissonance: feeling like you’re not doing enough while slowly becoming the thing you were pretending to be.

You'd think that would be enough. That finally feeling competent at your job would quiet the voice telling you you're falling behind. But then you make the mistake of opening Instagram during your lunch break. Or scrolling LinkedIn before bed. And suddenly, that fragile sense of "maybe I'm doing okay" completely evaporates.

Because while you're celebrating the fact that you successfully navigated a budget meeting without completely embarrassing yourself, everyone else online seems to be changing the world. The impostor syndrome that was just starting to fade comes roaring back, except now it's turbocharged by the carefully curated success of everyone you've ever known.

Instagram and LinkedIn turned everyone else's career into a highlight reel, while ours felt like outtakes. The college friend who's now at Google, posting all about meditation rooms and free kombucha. The high school acquaintance who launched an Etsy shop that magically turned into a six-figure business. The person from your internship who is suddenly doing TED talks on industries you'd never even heard of.

What the algorithm doesn't show: the 80-hour workweeks, the credit card debt paying for an "entrepreneurial lifestyle," or the panic attacks in the office bathroom. Those pretty posts about being "grateful for the journey" don't tell you about the times they cried over job applications.

The comparison game is totally rigged, where we're comparing our behind-the-scenes struggles to everyone's curated success. We're all just trying to figure it out, and the ones who seem like they have it all together are doing the same thing, too.

You might have business cards for a job that you are still not entirely certain you understand. You may explain your work to relatives who nod politely but clearly have no idea what "digital marketing" means. Being "grown up" mostly means having slightly better impulse control and a basic understanding of health insurance.

We are figuring out careers in job markets unlike any other generation, as well as problems they never had. While at the same time, our generation is the one being labelled as entitled for wanting work-life balance, on top of full compensation. We are embarking on careers in industries that didn't exist five years ago, while we are asked about our five-year plans.

But perhaps that's also a kind of freedom: not having a prescribed way forward means we get to define our own parameters of success. Perhaps being an "almost" adult is just another way of saying we are still trying to figure it out, and that is exactly where we are supposed to be.