I am not my job.
The Raven Express - 11/8/23
In this first (quite long) issue, I’m going to talk about being newly unemployed.
I am not my job.
Ah, to be unemployed again. What an amazing and terrible thing to be!
Through no fault of my own, again, I have been laid off from my arts and entertainment-slash-culture reporter position at the Colorado Springs Indy, a hyperlocal alt-weekly print publication. I was laid off previously along with six other teammates in mid-March when the board of directors uncovered a massive six-figure debt (or sum of debts) and realized operations could not resume without immediately removing a bunch of expenses. Namely: people.
Sniffing (tasting?) the blood in the water, critics past and present came out of the woodwork with knives out in hopes of a share of the publication’s rhetorical guts. Having gone through a disastrous rebrand and consolidation (we were seven publications merging into one in a hope of surviving the ongoing print/local news apocalypse) and having forfeit the storied 30-year old brand we’d built the company around, we had many of those critics.
Naturally, these people were just shitheels adding fuel to an unnecessary fire as people were trying to escape the flames. No quantity or weight of “I told you so’s” can compensate for their lack of empathy or cover for their half-assed, misinformed “sounds about right” commentary that inspired similar asshats to dogpile on.
But anyway.
The Indy lived to fight another day. I was brought back part-time and then full-time yet again. I have quite a few cover stories under my belt now in this second stretch and have really come to understand so much of the local arts scene, although I will still pale compared to those who have been in this for years and decades.
Then, last Thursday, I got an e-mail that I was invited to a meeting on a Friday afternoon with the top brass. This is not my first rodeo, I knew what that meant. A phone call confirmed it — because I wasn’t willing to sweat my way through the next day — and I was officially laid off, alone this time, as part of a reduction in force.
Again.
My thoughts on all this are complicated. I cannot tell the future and this is not the time or the space for me to speculate on the fate of the Indy.
So now I have to find work or I cannot pay rent. Or eat. Or… exist, I guess. And, like, what a shitty situation this is.
Again.
Thought one: Get a new job
Cool, so using this pen and this napkin, I have to apply for, interview for, screen for and successfully receive a job offer and start said job within a week so that I can start getting paid so that two weeks later (or so) I can acquire a paycheck. This isn’t going to cover the fact that I have next to nothing in savings having worked a reporter’s wage for over a year (or that that wage was still marginally better than the jobs I’d had before), so, y’know, that sucks.
I’m too qualified for the tedious, crappy jobs that line my resume, I’m not qualified enough for the jobs I actually want and the YouTube algorithm is not very generous at the moment. I sit in a slurry middle where I have to leave off experience from my resume as to not look like I’m about to no-call/no-show as soon as someone pays a dollar more an hour. And bear in mind: most of my resume, as I have told others out loud, in person, is useless entry-level crap work because I have no formal education in anything and not enough luck or connections to get by any other way.
Oh, and I have to make at least $20/hour.
Cool, like, no problem.
Thought two: Unemployment
So because I was laid off through no fault of my own, I qualify for unemployment. And what a cruel system it is.
Ah, yes, look at me making due after losing my job through no fault of my own so that I can (hopefully) receive half the pay I was receiving. And to receive that benefit that does not cover my base expenses, I have to provide proof that I am looking for work (which, as I understand, was made slightly lax during COVID) in a specific quantity and quality of ways.
Each week, I must prove to the state of Colorado, through this byzantine system, that I am deserving of my half-wage and when I submit my evidence, they can reject me with no appeal or rationale to speak of.
“Better luck next time,” the grim unemployment robot says through its baritone vocoder.
Unemployment is a fucking joke. I would happily testify to that fact in front of a state house committee. It is a system of levers, pullies and linkages designed by cruel ass-monsters who want to see public support fail because they hate people and what they stand for: existing.
In March, I had to navigate this forest of cruel, greasy cogs in which I was rejected multiple weeks without any explanation why. One of those reasons came when I went back to part-time work.
“Yes,” you might say, “the goal of only paying out half an unemployment benefit is to encourage you to seek a real job!”
A-ha! Eureka! Proclamation! Yes! That’s truly it! Except for the fact that any kind of earned wages count against your unemployment benefit. You cannot have your shit half-ration from unemployment and even a part-time job because that is simply “too cush.” As the math worked out last time: even working quarter-time (just 10 hours a week) would completely annihilate my part-time unemployment benefit. Therefore, it is better to get a half-time unemployment benefit and not work at all (or work under the table) versus working anything less than a new full-time job.
This isn’t to say I won’t try to gain some unemployment benefit — I’ve been paying into it for most of the 23 years I’ve been working (which I realize is not how the system works at all) — but I demand some kind of moral victory from it, if only so I can afford my cell phone bill.
Thought three: do art.
I have spent a long time now talking to people about how they make their art, but now I am suddenly given so much access to make my own. Make no mistake: I enjoy writing, you can probably tell, but it’s a bit like asking a runner to use their left leg exclusively to run a marathon: it’s drastic underutilization and a lot of soreness.
This year I have made my living two ways: my day-time job at the Indy and through some algorithmic luck on YouTube where I make hours-long essays about video games. These are two exclusively distinct crowds. My Colorado Springs neighbors do not give a shit about what I think about the Thief games and my international YouTube audience does not give a shit about the latest gallery exhibit in Downtown Colorado Springs. I cannot leverage what meager clout I have with either to assist the other. It’s great.
My knee-jerk reaction the day before I was laid off was, “well, gee, I could start some sort of weekly online thing where I just type words and you read them and hopefully you enjoy this experience enough that you send me money.” Namely, those words would focus on the kind of journalism I was doing full-time. What you’re reading now is the first fruit of that effort.
But as I gaze around at the local journalism scene — a scene I was lucky to stumble into myself, having worked exclusively in warehouses, call centers and other warehouses to that point — is how fucking frail it is. You could start a publication that fed exclusively on the stream of dead and dying publications around the country being rendered inoperable by high operating costs and shifting media trends.
When I was hired at the Indy in June 2022, it was to fill a fellow reporter position where I would learn the ropes of journalism. But with my background in multimedia, it was very easy to wonder, then plot, then execute on a plan to introduce podcasts when the company hadn’t done that before… very weirdly, they hadn’t done that before. It was my dream that we would eventually invest in video and make our stories pop and become more relevant to the new TikTok generation.
But it was beyond that: before I worked at the Indy, I had never read the Indy. Not once. I had read a couple of individual articles online over the years, yes, but I hadn’t otherwise engaged with them. I don’t pick up local print papers, which has been the Indy’s bread and butter business for three decades, so I wanted to make an Indy that I would read, listen and watch. Our efforts were gaining steam but it wasn’t nearly successful enough.
And then I was laid off. It was disappointing to not have any of my contributions listed in post-mortems after the lay off, even though I was the tip of the spear in getting those multimedia efforts kicked off. I was merely an unnamed reporter. When I returned to the Indy, all those multimedia dreams were set aside.
What I’m trying say is: shit is hard out there. People know who I am and I get by at best. I don’t have the clout to win investment capital, nor sell my funny little drawings, nor… well, have people hammering at my door with job offers. In March, I was told this was inevitable, that people would be chomping at the bit to scoop up an asset like me. Didn’t happen.
Art = $$$
Something I probed often when talking with local arts leaders was the need for art to be monetized for it to have value, that people couldn’t just live on making art. Lots of us artists, make money by producing and then selling art. That money then allows us to make more art, live life as we choose and not have to worry about basic life expenditures.
Full disclosure: I am a proponent of a universal basic income, which is basically giving people a $1,000-1,500 a month just for being people to cover their basic needs. No means testing required: you get the money no matter what. While this would require huge federal investment and vast cultural change, there have been trials in various municipalities and regions over the decades that have proven out that people who receive this benefit live healthier, less stressful lives and, surprise, still work.
We have this kinda shit thing in America where we are our job. Minus said job, we are basically driftwood. If we are not a servant to another entity, we must somehow make money on our own in another way. If we cannot do that, we are intrinsically useless.
I hate the idea of making art purely to sell it, because making art, writing this long rambling thing is something that I would (and will) do for free because it is part of my being. I would love the opportunity to make art and sell select chunks of it to make people happy or enlightened or whatever so that I can continue to channel the fiery imagination inside my head into reality and allow people to join me on that journey.
But the creative marketplace is not a meritocracy. Lots of people who make art toil in obscurity because their name, ideas and branding have no weight to anyone else. You cannot sell if no one is willing to buy. My weight as an artist is more now than it was a year and a half ago before I joined the Indy. Before that, my weight was more than before I moved back from Arizona in 2015 because of my political connections. My YouTube channel, again, only cares about a specific kind of art that I am more than happy to produce, but carries no currency with the people I know locally, in-person.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve put almost 80 hours into Bethesda’s new massive game Starfield and I have a space apartment on another planet in a space high-rise that is entirely empty and I have no idea how to fill it. Taking studious, intricate notes, I’m cranking away at what will probably be a 2-3 hour video that doesn’t require me going door to door or message to message asking for handouts to ensure my rent gets paid and my critters’ mouths fed, but it does lean on luck. I’ll end up having to do that other stuff anyway
I would love a sack of money to show up and say “hey, write about the local arts scene like you did at the Indy” and have this be the vessel for that, but that’s one of many non-guaranteed hustles I could pursue and time is ticking. I would love to start a podcast, but to what end? Who would listen to it in a sea of other podcasts? Writing this, I feel the pressure of trying to find where the next paycheck is coming from because otherwise, I simply evaporate into the ether.
So, yeah, check out my Venmo and Cash App and stuff while I spend every waking minute pondering the best use of my time and effort to stay afloat, like so many people barely are.
Holla.
N
Not an easy lesson - I am not my job - but such a critical one! Thank you!