WORKAHOLICS ANONYMOUS

Art by Esme Jablonsky

Dear Hiring Manager,

We here at Jerk are delighted to apply for this position (that we don’t really want) at your company (that could go bankrupt for all we care). We are so consumed by the pressure to succeed that we’ve given up on enjoying our lives. Thank you so much for the opportunity!

Sound familiar? At this point in our college careers, we could probably write a cover letter in our sleep. With constant exposure to our peers’ success on campus and hustle culture on our feeds, students face a lot of pressure to wring every possible drop of productivity out of their days.

Hobbies are going the way of the dinosaur. Because we are constantly online and keeping tabs on our friends (and enemies), we share more of our lives than ever before. We feel the need to make everything we do into something worth posting.

Thankfully, there is a light at the end of the doomscroll tunnel. We can remove ourselves from the grind-set culture by confronting it head-on with conscious decisions that redefine “achievement.”

The pressure to succeed doesn’t just exist in our digital lives. From class to conversation and awkward rendezvous with acquaintances at parties, achievement culture looms large. Unfortunately, these online and in-person environments mean that we can’t be listening passively, otherwise we’ll absorb all the toxic messaging out there.

For creatives with big dreams, relaxing hobbies are hard to maintain because they inevitably become academic and professional pursuits. Majoring in our passions can make us better artists, but it might ruin the fun along the way.

For television, radio and film senior Chloe Fatuova, the best way to keep out toxic messaging and keep art fun is to focus on her own goals. She says she is constantly competing against herself, not others, so she knows she can put her all into her major.

While Fatuova produces her senior thesis film— which follows a ballerina who pushes herself to the limit at a heavy personal cost—she confronts her self-optimization issues during the writing process. Her film addresses the idea that the things we’re passionate about aren’t always what we’re cut out to do full-time.

A competitive dancer throughout her childhood, Fatuova had to confront the realization that she didn’t want to pursue it full-time. Now, she runs a dance-based TV show for Orange Television Network called Rhythmic, where she combines her passion for dance with her true love: film.

“I want to work for a studio,” Fatuova said. “There's literally nothing else I want to do with my life. I love it.”

Junior studio arts major Abigail Shim avoids negative hustle culture by “keeping her art fun.” Rather than isolate her creative activities, she lets herself break the rules sometimes.

“I've learned to really just do things for me,” Shim said. “Some assignments come with prompts, directions. Sometimes I just don't follow those directions and I really just go with the plan or the concept that excites me rather than what my professors might want.”

When it comes to competition and optimization, Shim says art lends itself to frustrating, stressful comparisons. Her work is tangible and literally placed side by side against her peers, so it’s difficult not to feel pressure to put 100% into “every single class and every single thing you do.”

On the other hand, Shim said the positive side of a close group of artists is the community they share. She and her friends experience the same classes, pressures and artistic practices.

“Most of my best friends are in my program and in my major and we all have the same stresses and we all have the same struggles,” Shim said. “[We] validate each other's struggles and work together to alleviate them and continue to move forward.”

Another studio arts major, senior Flynn Ledoux, also mentioned the close community he shares with his peers in his classes. He said he sometimes learns more from his peers than their professors, because they all know each other’s work so well.

“There are definitely moments where I'm like, oh, I wish I was just doing it for fun as an escape from everything else,” Ledoux said. “I feel like it's hard to stay passionate about something when it's demanded of you for all your classes as well.”

Ledoux manages to isolate his fun hobbies from his work by keeping a few creative outlets completely separate from academic and career goals. They embroider in their free time—enjoying a three-dimensional craft as a fun break from two- dimensional work.

It takes effort to consciously keep a hobby fun, but we have to. None of us would stay sane if we tried to live in a constant state of achievement. Every day, college campuses overwhelm us with new metrics for success—from LinkedIn to exam scores—let’s fight back and do art badly.

If adopting this approach sounds like another task to add to your never-ending to-do list, don’t panic! The good news is that our relationship with success is fluid, and there really are no rules.

For now, we at Jerk will continue to search for low-pressure, fun creative outlets to pursue. With this approach, after we’ve established some structures for achievement in our lives, we can stop worrying about optimizing ourselves 24/7. If you need us, we’ll be working on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Thank goodness.