A couple of weeks ago I wrote about this useless new term, “quiet quitting.” The piece was well read, but in the end I felt like kind of a sucker. Seemed like some goofball writer for a clickbait website had coined a useless phrase, then mindless LinkedIn logrollers had spread it, and now the rest of us were engaged in a pitched debate about a phenomenon that isn’t.
Now comes “the soft life.”
And I almost fell for this one, too!
Read about it on Monday morning, in Fortune. This isn’t a clickbait site, I reasoned. Also, I’m a sucker for anything called “soft,” on a Monday.
The Fortune headline was: “Millennials want to live a ‘soft life,’ and it’s changing how they work.”
The nut:
Life has changed a lot in the last two years, and many people are embracing a so-called “soft life”—a rejection of the struggle, stress, and anxiety that comes with working a traditional 9-to-5 career and spinning away your days on life’s hamster wheel. Instead, living the soft life is about throwing yourself into joy, and prioritizing the richness of experiences.
Rather than provide any evidence on how “many people” are embracing a “soft life” (or establishing who calls it that), the article goes on for quite awhile about a 31-year-old New York marketing guy named Dar LaBeach, who got laid off last year and instead of scrambling for a new job, moved to the Mexican coast. “He had been earning between $100,000 and $150,000 a year but was stressed, disenchanted, and tired of living for something other than himself.” LaBeach explained to Fortune, “I was very much, F-all this.” La Beach is “part of a new ilk, who are out here just living to live,” according to Fortune.
After five more paragraphs on this lad and how he now splits time between Mexico and New York, Fortune turns to a New York sociology professor, who gasses on about the changing American Dream for three paragraphs, before we go back to the aptly named LeBeach, who the article claims—again, without evidence—is “like many Americans who used the pandemic as an opportunity to disrupt their lives. The collective trauma of this worldwide tragedy allowed some to pump the brakes, turn into the skid, and realize that perhaps there was something more important in their lives than the stressing over whether they were living for their job hard enough.” (The automotive travesties in that sentence alone!)
After briefly touching on “quiet quitting,” the piece further attempts to define the “soft life,” a term that, we learn, “really picked up some steam among Black women earlier this year.” Several YouTube videos are cited. “Life is not always roses,” one of the YouTubers declares.
LaBeach gets the last word:
“I have zero regrets,” he says. “Maybe I’ll go back [to a full-time job], and the only way I could at this point is because I know what it means to me to be in that space. I know I’m not there because I have to be … There are now stipulations and boundaries in place that allow me to live the life I want to live.” For now, LaBeach “does his freelance while chilling on the beach, or even sitting in the stands at the U.S. Open.”
And that’s it! Really, that’s the whole thing.
When I first came across this article, I wanted so much for there to be even a wee dram of there there.
I could have used it to discuss the early 20th century madness of my industrialist grandfather, who demanded of my father every day when he came home from elementary school, “Did you strike a blow today, Tom? Did you strike a blow?!”
Could have talked about how my whole family absorbed (though not all obeyed) that sense of regular required accomplishment, and what a confusing inheritance it has been for every one of us. (Including my grandfather, who desperately poured so much Old Grandad down his gullet in his miserable retirement that he died of throat cancer in a few years.)
Could have told you about my (actually unrelated) “Uncle” Gish, who lived the softest life of any man I’ve ever seen—a corporate pilot who galavanted around in green plaid suits, played tennis and scratch golf, and rode in the backseat of a big Lincoln reading magazines and napping, while his younger wife drove him to Florida every year. Gish was a curiosity to me—genial, handsome into his 90s, and as deep as a frying pan. For anything unpleasant that came up—whether it was a local restaurant that had closed, or Treblinka—Gish had only one response: A facile, head-shaking, “Isn’t that terrible?” And at that very instant, the hors d’oeuvres would always arrive.
Could have said to all young people: No, kids, life is not meant to be “soft.” It’s not soft for the vast majority people in the world so you’re not allowed to make it soft for yourself. You can reject the corporate grind, sure: But not for anything soft. For something hard, instead. Something as hard as you can handle—which is much harder than you think.
But I’m not going to bother with any of that shit, because this whole Fortune piece is a pure sham, designed to create a series of straw-man debates, just like “quiet quitting” did.
Also, because most young people already are facing hard stuff, whether they’re in the corporate grind or not.
And finally, because Dar LaBeach deserves notice in Fortune magazine about as much as I deserve notice in Cosmopolitan.
I guess this does mean that COVID is over, George Floyd is disappearing into the rearview, we’ve stopped taking the Proud Boys seriously and started taking Russia’s war in Ukraine war in stride and science-fiction weather events for granted.
We’re addicted to unprecedented things, but we’re fresh out of them. So we’re making them up out of whole cloth.
These are the soft old days.
P.S. Like Dar LaBeach’s professional career, this video is almost a decade old.
Well this is going to ring through my head and haunt me for a while:
“Did you strike a blow today, Tom? Did you strike a blow?!”
You’re just lucky it wasn’t emblazoned on your soul at seven years old.
Can you imagine Studs Terkel interviewing Dar LaBeach?
Ha! He would have appreciated Mr. LaBeach’s hatred of corporate work. But he would have encouraged Mr. LaBeach to find some meaningful work to do in this troubled world. Pronto!