Brittany Luce

Talk soon.

I was very committed to skinny jeans.

I had just graduated from college and everyone was playing Angry Birds.

It felt like All I Do is Win by DJ Khaled featuring T-Pain, Ludacris, Rick Ross, and Snoop Dogg was bumping in every club across the country.

But in the job market, all I did was lose.

Like many millennials, I graduated into an economy still very much rocked by the 2008 recession.

It took me years to find the kind of full-time salaried work that many people once thought of as the pot of gold at the end of the undergrad rainbow.

But even though the economy recovered and I got jobs and lost them and landed new ones, I never felt fully secure.

I felt and still feel like I always got to have a second or third thing I can fall back on if the work in front of me dries up.

I can never get off the grind.

I know a lot of other people feel that way too.

And there's a reason for that.

That's Eric Baker.

He's a lecturer at Harvard University and the author of the book Make Your Own Job, How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

When reading the book, I kept feeling like that one scene in the TV show Euphoria where the kids in school are watching a play about them, and one character says, Like, the pressure of the grind set is something that's plagued me my whole working life.

It was weird to read a book arguing that that pressure was not only intentional, but also structurally enforced over the span of decades.

This is Nun Employment.

For the next few weeks, we're breaking down why getting a job and keeping it feels so hard right now and how our ideas about employment just aren't matching up with today's realities.

Eric, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Hello, hello.