microdosing retirement
Hello ratlings!
For once in my adult life, I have been offline. I spent the month after being laid off flitting between meetings, freelancing, obsessively tweeting, writing, pitching myself and being pitched by boorish Tech Guys, and optimizing until I whittled myself into the Ultimate Girlboss. I was determined to work myself out of the existential spiral. Instead, I girlbossed myself into resenting everything I’ve been working on.
This is what I call my Great Rot. Aside from working on a few longer-term projects, I have spent the last month relishing in funemployment. I have watched six seasons of Vanderpump Rules, read a dozen books, and logged about 150 hours in Tears of the Kingdom. I reread the first four Dune books, watched Dune Part 2, and then annoyed everyone close to me by explaining the plot of the first four Dune books. I knit a hat, hated it, and knit an identical one in a different yarn. I’ve cycled between despairing over not producing content and delighting in just existing.
My friend Miriam, who’s been navigating her own career upheaval on TikTok, described this life stage as “microdosing retirement.” Miriam’s path as a creator has been unconventional; she worked for nonprofits and “mission-driven” organizations for her entire career, but built a TikTok following for her discussions curated from articles, podcasts, and books. Disillusioned and burned out by her work as a project manager, she left her job without lining up another.
I considered microdosing retirement after grabbing coffee with Miriam last month. She quit her job earlier this year, and cushioned by her TikTok earnings, is taking time to consider what she actually wants to do next. Her father, a retired professor, couldn’t fathom that her identity no longer revolved around her career.
“I don’t think I have professional aspirations but I’m incredibly driven and ambitious, which has been an interesting thing to reconcile with. I don’t know where it’s going, but I do have a lot of energy,” Miriam told me. “He’s like, ‘What if you find the thing that you’re passionate about?’ and I’m like, it’s not going to happen. I am not going to find my passion at work. Something is changing.”
Upon quitting her job, Miriam posted a video asking viewers to share their experience with work, collecting their answers via Google form. What did they like about their jobs? What are they curious about in fields they don’t currently work in? She also asked viewers about their “unofficial resume” — the experiences that weren’t “professional” but are still pivotal in their lives.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Miriam’s project piqued my interest, both as a culture writer and currently unemployed journalist. Trend reporting has distilled the generational disillusionment with work as “quiet quitting” and dismissed Gen Z as “difficult employees,” but this discontent has been simmering for years. In a 2021 episode of the Ezra Klein show, titled “The Case Against Loving Your Job,” guest host Rogé Karma discussed “moral injury” in modern work culture. The phrase was first used to describe the trauma that war veterans experience when they’re forced to contradict their own moral beliefs, like committing acts of extreme violence. We’re seeing a version of moral injury in the workplace because people aren’t just overworked, but also experiencing a disconnect between their sense of purpose and the reality of their jobs.
“I don’t know if it’s even really limited to professions with an explicit moral aim ... I think it’s something that can affect anyone, when the harsh realities of profit and efficiency collide with your moral compass,” Karma said. “And as millennials and Gen Zers continuously view their work as something that is a calling, a meaning, a purpose, something to make their world a better place, and then they go into workplaces where they’re being 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.”
By the time we met for coffee, Miriam’s Google Form had roughly 200 responses. It was clear that people weren’t happy in their jobs, no matter what field they worked in — across the board, they dreamed of pursuing something else. Neuroscientists fantasized about teaching calligraphy while teachers wanted to be gardeners. According to Miriam, people had“really crystal clear ideas of what they would rather be doing.”
“Why have we not developed those interests outside of work?” she added. “If we have these ideas of things that give us more joy, what are we supposed to do with that? Are we supposed to just try to squeeze them in, in the evenings or weekends after work? Or are we supposed to monetize them, then probably burn out because if you do your art full time and then try to make money, odds are you’re going to hate it. Or do we let the dream go and then know that we’re not living this fulfilled life?”
I roll my eyes at TikTok, Tumblr, and Twitter harping on the plight of the eldest daughter — women who are burdened by familial expectations and consumed by their own ambition. The eldest daughter in a maternal force. The eldest daughter is the new “former gifted kid” online, and I find the overuse of the phrase exhausting. That being said, I am an eldest daughter, and I am guilty of meticulously planning every step of my life.
As I started my freshman year of college at 18, I wrote out a five-year plan that detailed the classes, internships, and first jobs I wanted. At 23, I mapped out the next five years of my career. For the most part, I have followed the trajectory I set years ago: land staff jobs, live in an apartment long enough to put up a gallery wall, and keep my monstera alive.
Days after my 28th birthday, I sat on this sunny coffee shop patio with Miriam. I had zero desire to make another five-year plan. I had no desire to write at all, actually. The thought of sending an email ever again was nauseating. I started my first job the summer after I turned 14 — the youngest that minors are legally allowed to work according to New York’s child labor laws — and have been working in some capacity since. Last summer I took two weeks off to visit Seoul, which is the longest break I’ve taken from work, and even then I was still responding to emails, squirreling away story ideas in my Notes app, and keeping tabs on my beat out of fear that I’d return to the States out of the loop. Buffered by severance, I decided to give myself a month of microdosing retirement and went into March with plans to write absolutely nothing.
Was this plan loosely inspired by My Year Of Rest and Relaxation? Maybe. I slogged through the book during quarantine and I’m still not sure whether or not I enjoyed reading it, but the thought of hibernating was appealing. The story follows a deeply cynical unnamed narrator who decides to sleep for an entire year after she’s fired from her job, in hopes that cocooning herself from the world will reset her life. Like the novel’s insufferable narrator, I had become increasingly embittered and was convinced that I would return from my self-imposed break with a renewed enthusiasm for writing. Unlike the narrator, I had no plans to languish in my apartment.
As it turns out, there’s a fine line between microdosing retirement and rotting. I spent the first week waking up early, reading, and knitting. By the second week, I slipped into a comfortable routine of sleeping in and then scrolling TikTok for four hours and loathing myself for it. Then my Vyvanse would kick in, and I would continue despairing, but now vibrating with restless anxiety. By the late afternoon, I’d consider going for a skate, and then settle on the couch to binge Vanderpump Rules and play Tears of the Kingdom for the next seven hours. Around midnight, I’d head to bed and read Am I The Asshole posts until I fell asleep. I cycled between three drab sweatshirts. Occasionally I’d have a meeting, which forced me to wash my hair. I read an ungodly amount of smut. I (mostly) stayed off Twitter.
I emerged from my Great Rot last week. If daylight savings hadn’t started, I probably could have kept rotting for another month. But I had more frequent meetings, which meant putting together outfits that didn’t revolve around an oversized college sweatshirt, and the sun wasn’t setting until 7 p.m., which pushed back my nightly Vanderpump binge by several hours. (I can't bring myself to watch white people in statement necklaces drunkenly throw drinks at each other in the glare of daylight.) Consistently popping 150 mg of Wellbutrin every morning for the past three years probably helped too. With a week left in my attempted break, I careened back into girlbossing.
Whether I am any more motivated to write after this month, much less embodying a renewed sense of joie de vivre, is debatable. I can’t shake this compulsion to be productive, even if I’m not technically working.
Whether I am any more motivated to write after this month, much less embodying a renewed sense of joie de vivre, is debatable. I can’t shake this compulsion to be productive, even if I’m not technically working. Instead of writing, I obsessed over cable management, optimizing my desk so that every wire I’d ever use was neatly tucked and velcroed out of sight. I designed an unnecessarily complex Notion database of my favorite bars and restaurants, organized by neighborhood, who I would take there, how horny the vibe is, and a swath of other arbitrary categories. Then I learned how to write Notion formulas so I could see which bars currently have happy hours. I’m in the process of knitting three separate garments, teaching my cat how to communicate through buttons, and considering if I want to organize my bookshelf by genre or by color. And like it was before my Great Rot, my life has been consumed by projects.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to extricate myself from the desire to optimize. Is it a symptom of supposed eldest daughter syndrome? Is it the pressure to live up to the model minority myth? Perhaps it’s the prescription stimulants. Jia Tolentino’s 2019 essay on optimizing is especially resonant as I emerge from my Great Rot. She writes about “the ideal woman” whose carefully curated lifestyle is only as empowering as her market value. The ideal woman will take the occasional social media break, but always return without actually changing her habits. “Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system,” she writes.
Writing and work have been constants for half of my life now; I started writing fanfiction (albeit poorly) the summer that I started working. The five-year plan I concocted at 18 culminated in turning writing into my work. When I wasn’t working, I was still writing. The Great Rot has been the longest I’ve gone without writing anything, aside from functionally necessary texts and emails, for the last decade and a half. I aspired to monetize my writing for the entirety of my adolescence and then spent my young adulthood resenting it. Like the ideal women of Instagram in Tolentino’s essay, my break from the system has not radically changed anything. After all, I will probably go on exactly as before.
I was optimizing even in my Great Rot. In my Tears of the Kingdom fugue state, I optimized, running around the fictional kingdom of Hyrule to farm the best ingredients to cook the best recipes that would grant me the most hearts while taking up the least amount of space in my fictional inventory.
But I have, over the course of microdosing retirement, rotting, and then emerging, gradually untangled my identity from my work. This is not something that I will achieve in a month. I will likely get wrapped up in another project, another job, or another monetizable task, and then have to pick out strands of my being all over again. Miriam told me that she wanted to be able to take six months off every decade and microdose retirement at least three more times in her career. I anticipate untangling myself from work over and over again until I retire, if I am one of the lucky ones in my generation actually able to.
I can only hope that during my next Great Rot, whenever that is, I’ll have another 11 seasons of Vanderpump Rules to binge.
Paid subscribers can read the rest of my interview with Miriam in tomorrow’s Rat Chat. <3