Brittany Luce

All right.

That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR.

I'm 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.