I’m certainly not the first person to enter my chosen field already disillusioned by my career. I am, after all, of the generation born on the cusp of GenX and Millennials who have endured three major economic upheavals (and counting) in our adult lives. The first of these upheavals was the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. Even worse for me personally, though, was the dot-com boom before that. I remember sitting in the classroom of my Media Law course in 1999 as the professor lamented how the Internet would bring the downfall of journalism. “It’s only a matter of time,” he deadpanned as he predicted the AI takeover of journalism more than 20 years ahead of its time, “before content mills produce everything for free. Anyone sitting in this room today should seriously consider law school if you care about your future.”
I believed him. I considered law school, seriously. I took the LSAT, scored well, and started applying, even receiving an acceptance letter from my alma mater, the University of Utah. But before any of that happened, I took a year off before potential graduate school so I could work and earn money for tuition. I toiled in a minimum-wage graphic design gig before scoring my first journalism job, editing a weekly called the Murray Green Sheet. After four weeks, both the ad designer and office manager quit. I had to take over their tasks. After six weeks, the publisher stopped paying me — the only person besides him left in the office. I believed him when he said he just needed to move some assets around, but was not particularly surprised when I walked up to the office one day — about eight unpaid weeks later — to find the door locked and an “out of business” sign taped to the glass.
This was my future. It was either minimum wage, unpaid overtime, and endless uncertainty, or it was toiling over stacks of documents in a stodgy law office — because no way would I succeed as an actual lawyer in a courtroom. I hated confrontation. Still, I went through the motions, and might have gone through with enrolling in law school if the guy I was interested in dating hadn’t caught me at a particularly vulnerable moment — mid-panic attack in a hot spring — and asked, “Why do any of it?”
This guy traveled around the country while following Rusted Root and Dave Matthews concerts and selling homemade hemp jewelry out of his Volkswagon Rabbit. He had everything he needed in the trunk of his car and no interest in pursuing a career of any kind. I was 21 years old and the notion of this lifestyle was idyllic. He told me what he had in his bank account and I realized that I had access to more resources than him. His freewheeling life could be mine.
“If you don’t have money, you don’t need money,” he told me, which made perfect sense to my 21-year-old mind. So I deferred law school registration — knowing I’d never go back — and took off across the country with Geoff in my Geo Prism.
I made a few of these big leaps with Geoff — our cross-country road trip in 2001, a three-month van trip to Alaska, and a cross-country bike tour in 2003. But I could never be happy the way he was happy with being completely untethered to anything, unsure of where we’d sleep that night or whether we had enough saved up for rent when winter came. I’m far too anxious a person to be okay with shivering in a Walmart sleeping bag at 10 below zero in the front seat of a Honda Civic at a Wyoming rest stop in January as my partner coos about how awesome this road trip has been. (Oh wait … I still do similar sorts of things with Beat.) But my point is, this freewheeling life — no health insurance, no permanent roof, a diet made up solely of pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches, with no safe space to land — was never for me.
So I went back to work. I landed a fantastic job as the Community News Editor of a biweekly newspaper in Tooele, Utah, just two weeks after returning from my road trip with Geoff and two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I was given a lot of freedom in my role and took to it voraciously, devoting my heart and soul to my community news puff pieces, my playful page designs, and the joy of occasionally landing a hard news assignment (On Sept. 11, I ended up shut in a small office with the commander of the Deseret Chemical Depot for hours during the nationwide lockdown, scribbling his impassioned manifesto about chemical weapons and freedom and terrorism, an interview that was unpublishable but fascinating nonetheless.)
I did love that job. Still, youthful yearning and the open road called to me … and Geoff could be quite the bad influence. So I left Tooele but then came back. Then I left Geoff and took a job in Idaho, but then I came back to him. Then we moved to Alaska, and I took a minimum-wage job at a tiny weekly newspaper in Homer, and then I took a better job in Juneau, and then I got promoted and started making $58,000 a year and almost tasted what it was like to reach the middle class. But then Geoff broke up with me and working in management unraveled me and then I wanted to feel untethered again. So I left. I left and moved to Anchorage and told everyone who cared about me that I was going to write a book — but I had already written that book while sick in bed with Swine Flu, and while toiling in my Juneau office, waiting for reporters to turn in their copy or for print proofs to arrive after 2 a.m. I didn’t need space or even time to write a book. I just needed time to convince myself I didn’t need journalism to live.
This only lasted a few months and then I relapsed, relocating to Montana to work as an assistant editor for a cycling magazine, earning half of what I was making in Juneau. This newfound freedom went on for a few months before I met Beat, and convinced myself I needed to move to California to be with him, write books and blogs, and be happy. I eventually tapered off the remote work I had continued for the magazine and transitioned to full-time (okay, underemployed) gig work in 2011. For nearly a decade, I didn’t look back.
Now, as I wade through what most would consider the middle years of my career, I can’t help but reflect on it. Did I ever actually have a career? Or did I simply support myself through hobbies and adventures until I met a partner who could shoulder the majority of the financial needs we had as actual adults while I continued to pursue hobbies and adventures? My gig work has never been completely in vain. Especially in the early years, when book sales were still robust and the Guardian would still pay $2,000 for a feature, I was often doing better than the full-time salary I accepted working for a nonprofit in Montana. But it always felt a bit aimless.
And to be perfectly honest, I never cared that my “career” was small and elusive. Even in my more ambitious youth, I could never convince myself that the work other people were willing to pay me to do had any value besides the money itself. I understand how many people can gain a sense of purpose in their productive labor. But, genuinely — I like to work for the sake of work. I need money, I like money, so I’ll take what people will pay me and be grateful. But money doesn’t add to the ways I value myself or my life. Some people fret about life after retirement — how they’ll cope with all of the space and time they used to fill with productive labor. I have no notion of this fear. I could live out my life embarking on little adventures, staying as active as possible, reading, and writing. I don’t need anything else — except for, of course, clean water, clean air, food, shelter, medical care, etc. But I could draw a happy line at basic needs. Everything beyond that is a gift.
I left newspapers because newspapers died. They were on life support before I’d even graduated from college, and by the time I quit the Juneau Empire in 2010, massive layoffs across entire corporations convinced me that it was only a matter of time before they were all dead. But then, in 2019, shortly after my 40th birthday, I received an offer from the Anchorage Daily News to work remotely on their copy desk. It was the kind of position that showed how my career had been nothing but a lateral move, drawn straight from the beginning to 20 years later with a lot of breaks for faffing around.
This didn’t bother me. I was honestly thrilled. I’d gotten used to the freedom of gig work but also had tired of the uncertainty and the constant demands for self-promotion. Shift work was going to take a big bite out of my free time. I’d have considerably less time to write. If I wanted to travel to Europe I still could, but I was going to have to keep working through the night on Alaska time. Still, I was excited.
During the first week of January 2020, the managing editor flew me up to Anchorage so I could get to know my co-workers and learn the system. I hadn’t been inside a newsroom in nearly 10 years, yet it felt as though nothing had changed. Reporters ate greasy dinners at their desks and shouted over cubicles. The police scanner droned on in the background. The ad reps ran up to me, frantically asking for last-minute changes. I hooked my laptop to a desktop screen and pored over the day’s news. The temperature never rose above 0 the entire week I was in town. I walked to work through the frosty winter twilight. After work, I ran through a sparkling wonderland on snow-packed bike paths, faster and faster to stay warm. I took the city bus to the mountains. I had dinner with longtime friends. I didn’t know it at the time, but the first week of 2020 would seem like a long-forgotten dream for the rest of the year. I came home from Anchorage with a terrible illness, even worse than the Swine Flu of 2010 (Early Covid? I’ll never know.) Then came two horrifically difficult race efforts in Idaho and a failed 1,000-mile attempt on the Iditarod Trail. Then came the pandemic. Then came the lockdowns, the sameness of days, the sadness, the drawn-out anxiety. All that time, I’d look back on that January week in Anchorage with wistful nostalgia. My whole career could have been like that. Why did I ever walk away?
All of this has been on my mind because Beat has been talking more seriously about retirement … sooner than later is his hope. The tech economy and American politics are not especially inspiring right now, and he has his eye on a more permanent residency in Switzerland with forays to the States for family and fun. This would be an enormous change for me — for starters, I strongly need to get started on learning to speak French. I also will need to steel myself for culture shock and isolation. And I’ll have to give up some of my favorite things (icy drinks and Diet Pepsi, sniff.) But I like big leaps and big changes. It’s all a grand adventure. What makes me most nervous about this prospect, however, is the fact I’d have to quit my job. I can work remotely from anywhere, but Switzerland’s time zone and Alaska deadlines don’t mix.
“You can write a book about trails,” Beat assures me. “Cater it to American visitors in the Alps. Hike all of the trails and take a bunch of photos.”
This sounds like a fantastic idea. Ideas like this keep me going as I mull returning to gig work. This will be the test of whether I can indeed go for my little hikes and write my little essays and be completely content in the world. I probably would be. It’s such a privilege that I can’t even begin to question the opportunity.
And yet.
Maybe I do value my small, underpaid, and underappreciated career more than I realize.
Chasing concerts and selling hemp jewelry. Your parents must have loved that!
I dated a guy just like Geoff in my twenties. He was magical, but bathing in an ice cold river and changing clothes in a forest service outhouse, it turns out, was not my thing for long term. Funnily, he ended up in Southeast right after I left there.