The United States of Precarity

On getting laid off

All summer my dreams have been an eerie mishmash of impossible events. In one, my dead brother visits for breakfast. In another, my very divorced and very estranged parents reunite. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to untangle the web my subconscious is making. The messages, acute and lucid, speak for themselves. Naturally, daybreak meets me frazzled and mildly disturbed, caught between waking up and trying to decode the images I’ve just seen, images that mimic a world I know intimately save a few details which render it absurd. One morning a few weeks ago, I couldn’t remember my dreams. They weren’t of much concern. I’d overslept a little and didn’t have the temporal luxury to tend to my antenna. Ready or not, the material world awaited me. I flipped open the computer for my silly computer job and braced myself for yet another monotonous day full of Slack sounds, but the ringtones never came. The application was disabled. After some tinkering, I came to understand the fate that had been decided for me. As if waking from some uncanny dream, I laughed nervously and shook my head. 

At this point in time, getting laid off feels rather inevitable. For the past year or so, my social media timelines have been flooded with layoff announcements. Some are sober and straightforward, while others read as pitiful odes to the very companies that abandoned their workers. It's sad and ironic that some people feel the need to express corporate loyalty even after experiencing an event that shows how unrequited employer-employee relationships truly are. Sometimes I want to comment, “Please, stop!!! That company does not care about you!” But I never do. When it finally happened to me, when I was finally laid off, it didn’t come as a total surprise. I’d experienced and survived two other rounds of “organizational restructurings” in the past year and assumed my luck was waning. And, eventually, it did. 

Up until a month ago, things felt relatively stable for me. My job was chill, my salary was cozy, and my day-to-day was comfortably predictable. I considered myself fortunate and financially secure. Yet, now that I’m on the other side of that, I realize how naive I was. Despite those shallow markers of so-called “middle-class” privilege, my livelihood was still at the mercy of some CEOs’ financial decisions, which made me realize I wasn’t as secure as I thought. Unless you’re a thriving shareholder or a lucky heir, then you’re likely also a member of the working class, effectively coerced to attempt survival under a constant state of precarity—negotiating subpar wages, managing ever-increasing rent, receiving deficient healthcare, faring with the faults of a society that values profit over people and rewards greedy, ego-driven behavior. It’s depleting. 

Recently, I came across a TikTok of someone emphasizing the extent of inflation and its impacts on the housing market. The individual—a 30-something-year-old man with a six-figure salary—highlighted a few houses he could imagine himself purchasing one day. Each house was a modest, run-of-the-mill suburban residence. You likely know the type: model homes boasting of mid-size square footage, pristine lawns, and exterior shutters adorning each window. They weren’t exactly ugly, but they weren’t exquisite either—just standard dwelling properties that you can find outside most American cities, the kind many people eventually settle down in. In the video, the TikToker states that the prices of these homes have nearly doubled in the last three years, making them out of his budget despite having a partner and a high-earning job. It is easy to recognize the frustration and angst this person feels. He did everything right, checked all the boxes, but still cannot achieve home ownership. Of course, we all know this dilemma quite well. According to New America, a DC-based think tank, “the wealth of the typical Millennial … is much lower than would be predicted based on the wealth accumulated by previous generations at the same ages.” And for Gen Z, wealth is essentially nonexistent. Yet, despite how the TikToker lays out the blatant impossibility of attaining a very basic desire, he finishes the video by declaring his dedication to making more money and reaching his goal. I found this conclusion rather jarring. Instead of critiquing the system enabling the housing crisis and imagining something beyond all this, this person doubles down on his commitment to his personal version of the American Dream and therefore to the system that gatekeeps it. Of course, I don’t exactly blame him. Many of us—including me—lack a deep awareness of the alternatives to the head-banging churn of capitalism, to the perpetual grind of our bodies, of our minds. 

Once upon a time, we were told to work hard and strive for ornate prosperity. Within the last decade or so, it has become quite clear how one in a million those kinds of aspirations are becoming. But now as the costs of basic, everyday necessities—housing, food, healthcare, etc—continue to rise, it seems as though even trying for a bare minimum lifestyle is becoming increasingly impossible. Social protections are fragile and inconsistent, forcing us to rely on the very conditional, very uncertain support of corporations instead of a government that claims to care for us. As I search for a new job, it is difficult to shake the feeling that I’m grueling away at a task that will likely lead me to the same position I’m in now: unemployed, uninsured, and involuntarily stuck. But alas, I have no other choice. Until another world comes to be, I must follow the whims of this soul-eroding cycle whether I like it or not. 

In hopes of escaping the grating quality of American life, my boyfriend and I have been spending much of our time imagining a life elsewhere. Though, we often bicker about the destination—Spain is his country of choice while France is mine—we can agree on a shared desire to leave. Our motivations are quite obvious: better healthcare and public transportation, vibrant lifestyles at a slower pace. After the workday, we watch vlogs about people, both locals and immigrants, documenting their daily lives elsewhere, which in superficial ways seem similar to ours: waking early, preparing something to eat, working through the afternoon, exhaling into leisure at the end of the day. Their routines are familiar and boring. They pay bills and get drunk. They pay more bills and get drunk again. It is not their day-to-day that we covet. Instead, we see how they exist without a tinge of American anxiety and we sigh. Of course, our gaze is saturated in ignorant naiveté. We avoid thinking about the global chokehold of fascism and neoliberal politics, though, of course, those things loom as European skylines cascade across the screen. For 30 minutes, in our overpriced American apartment, we indulge in the possibility of anything but this; of anywhere, but here.