Let’s start off by saying I kind of did the thing that I hate and made this a ~dramatic~ headline. “Versus” isn’t really the right terminology for the comparison or dichotomy I’m looking for here, I love the AntiWork Girl Boss and as y’all know, I am here for figuring out how to disentangle your identity from your job and prioritize yourself and self care. Ever since starting a different job in July 2023, I have been struggling with my penchant for minimizing the impact of work on your life with how the concept of lazy jobs is completely incompatible with helping and service professions. Soon after moving and starting the job – in the midst of piles of furniture that didn’t fit in my downsized home and half unpacked boxes – my partner and I watched The Bear, and when we watched Forks, I thought I’d cracked the code, watching Richie come to terms with how much he loves and is really good at serving and making people happy. “I guess this is what I’m realizing,” or some version of that, is what I said out loud to my partner, “some of us are just kind of destined to be in jobs that exhaust us, because they’re the ones we’re good at.”
I don’t know if I believe that and I don’t want that to be our destiny – but I do know, much like how my mom deemed me a Leslie Knope, I am more of a Carmy than I am a Stanley Hudson. When Richie gets his “microbasil! fuck yes!” moment for a table that had been eager to try deep dish Chicago pizza, if you work in a profession for which you put in grueling hours and mental gymnastics to see your constituents smile, you felt that. During his week in a high-end restaurant, Richie “[sees] just how possible it is to carve out moments of surprise and delight in a rigid format.” I can’t relate to that more. As an educator, especially a museum educator, surprise and delight is the dream. Even in small museums, space restrictions, collections and curatorial priorities, museum policy, endlessly expanding to-do lists and Outlook notifications, volunteers and colleagues that work against your vision…there are so many obstacles to delivering surprise and delight. On top of those institutional obstacles, restaurants and museum education work share weekend work, masking to give “customer service” face, hours on your feet and physical labor. The surprise and delight is “worth it,” probably, but the costs are real.
I’m sorry not sorry for spiraling into my 300th post about how impossible it is to feel comfort and joy working in the arts under a capitalist society but I…don’t know what to tell you at this point. What I realized when I yet again found myself yearning to quit my job in search of that great white buffalo “work-life balance,” I couldn’t stop thinking about this reel. Everyone can’t be businessmen. The appeal of the lazy girl job is that it updates, and makes more inclusive, the Don Draper version of businessmen – having a kiki with your coworkers, long lunches, making plenty of money to have a comfortable life by having a few great ideas a year. It’s a version for today’s emerging workforce: the goal that you don’t work too hard is the same, but the reasons are different. Instead of keeping a wife at home with 2.5 children and a picket fence, today’s workforce is trying to do it to stay at home with their dog and take Instagram-worthy vacations.
I’m firmly on the side of the fence that if a job can be done remotely, there is no reason to force people into an office. But if Don Draper was the picture of privilege in 1957 (I’ve never watched Mad Men don’t @ me), the girls filming an inspired “5-9 after the 9-5” because they didn’t need to spend an hour commuting or need to get up to be in an in-person meeting at 9 a.m. feels like the 2024 version. I watched a video recently where a mom was like “this is my LIFE it’s so REAL my house is MESSY I do my BEST” and she did a yoga video in the middle of the workday. You’re not fooling me! You’re a businessman.
Because I am passionate about my job that requires me to frequently work with people and the public face-to-face, ever since work from home became a thing, I have done a little exercise for myself in which I think about other jobs that also could never really work from home. “People who work in restaurants can’t work from home. What are they gonna do. Let robots cook us food? People love restaurants. Restaurants are important!” – my internal monologue, dragging my ass to my workplace five+ days in a row. Most of the people in my life have jobs that they could not do from home. My circle of friends includes people in health care, education, and manual labor; my mom was a teacher and now she’s a florist, and my dad was a landscaper and now works in a factory. But it’s more than just being in-person that is totally antithetical to the Lazy Girl Job practice. That’s where the comparison to the The Bear struck me.
In the season three trailer, Carmy’s voiceover begins, “What if I wanted to open a restaurant? They’re hard, and they’re brutal and they’re specific, but I know how to do it,” and he concludes the trailer by asking his partner, Sydney, “this is what you wanted, right?” There’s an argument to be made here that I’m getting the wrong takeaway from The Bear and that Carmy’s unhealthy obsession with perfection and work isn’t something in which I should be finding validity. I counter that argument by saying he’s trying to create some good in this world, which, if you read many many many of the blogs here on Museum Drip, is how I think about working in the arts. It’s why I argued not to Throw the Van Gogh Babies out with the Bathwater in the first place.
Raise your hand if you’ve asked yourself “this is hard, but it’s what I wanted, right?” about your museum career. The pressure-cooker unpredictably of environments where you have to pivot and problem solve in the moment is exciting and exhausting. If you do it well, it looks effortless. If something goes wrong, it’s usually glaringly obvious. You can’t predict what problems will come up so you have to be ready for them all and you have to solve them all. Other people will think you have lost your marbles, but the people that come to experience the thing you created will be happy you put that effort into it. You will have to work at time when other people don’t so that they get to spend their leisure time enjoying the thing that you created for them. It will be a small part of their big life, and so it is thankless, but it also might make the world a better place.
It occurs to me that I want to make a list of jobs that fall into this made up category that I’m now calling The Bear jobs – my dad’s passion for perfection in landscaping in his former career comes to mind, for example – to demonstrate that this doesn’t have to be tied to a white collar coded world where people have culinary school or art history degrees. There is a larger narrative here about labor but I do think passion plays a significant role in burnout and exhaustion by raising the personal stakes. There’s a larger narrative here that digs deeper into our friend’s reel featured above where an EMT gets paid $14.50 an hour to respond to emergencies and people think the answer is to just “go get another job” but I don’t have an economics degree to explain why, as a support of work from home, my discomfort with the popularity of the Lazy Girl Job movement is growing daily. (Besides, I’ve already written about raising wages and focusing on income equality.) The only solution can’t always be to just get another job.
The payoff of a passion-driven job is twofold; to spend your days around the thing that you’re passionate about, and to create something or learn how to share something with other people, and witness them experience surprise, delight, understanding, joy, connectedness to something larger than themselves. Thus far, I have not been able to figure out a lazy girl job that offers that payoff, despite all the other benefits offered by a job that affords better flexibility and less blood sweat and tears (all of which I probably shed at work this week). Carmy talks with Richie in Forks about purpose. Ultimately, we should strive to create a world in which “succeeding” (whatever that means, more on that later) in a creative, service oriented role doesn’t sacrifice your mental and physical health. Let’s all get the real “not everyone can be a businessman” ringing in our ears.
