I can understand the disillusion expressed in Leila Latif’s article (The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race, 2 April). We’re conditioned to compete academically and then are turned into a world of work where the reality is a painful shock to the system. Many are robbed of our highfalutin dreams fast. The lucky few will find genuinely fulfilling work with remuneration to match.
It’s easy to work like a possessed being when you enjoy what you do and are purpose-driven. Working long hours, often unpaid, is an act of altruism that keeps the public sector afloat, as any clinician or teacher will confirm. It is much harder to sustain this in a role that you don’t enjoy, or that doesn’t align with your values: dissonance is destructive and the suffering will be your own.
At a recent social event, I was greeted by an old acquaintance with “What are you doing these days?” The question was designed to elicit professional and material status. Understanding that my actual wellbeing counted for naught, my answer was polite but suitably inane. Middle age brings cutting insight: I set my own benchmark of achievement.
The aeroplane oxygen mask theory applies: it is not soft to look after yourself, it is smart. I for one am heartened that some in the next generation are finally putting themselves first. Yielding to societal expectations of conventional ambition doesn’t bring happiness; could trading the rat race for an alternative be the answer?
A basic income model might just allow people to play to their strengths and use their time for the greater good before market forces prevail. But at least no one would go hungry.
Mona Sood
Southend-on-Sea, Essex
Rose Gardner’s story as a millennial who quit the London‑mortgage-career rat race hit exactly on my dilemma. I just finished a PhD in macroeconomics and public policy at the University of Leeds, getting to spend a luxurious four years near my Yorkshire family, living the Yorkshire life with country air and space on my doorstep. But now that I have a doctorate, and am mid-career with a decade of policy experience, the relevant jobs are all in London.
I am fortunate in being at a (relatively) decent pay level, even in the public sector with its decades of pay stagnation. So I can avoid the rabbit-hutch-style shared housing, which was almost bearable as a sociable twentysomething but would crush my sanity now as a 35-year-old. But do I want to spend the next three decades working only to pay the mind-boggling mortgage on a tiny flat in the Big Smoke?
Living with parents isn’t ideal, but a part-time barista job in a cosy market town, with not a single work email boring into my soul every hour of the day and night, feels much more conducive to my wellbeing. Rose’s story makes me think a trip to the local dog rescue shelter may be the deal-breaker.
Dr Caroline Bentham
Wetherby, West Yorkshire
Your article put to words the overwhelming fatigue of treading water. Millennials have been handed an untenable position, with adversaries citing avocado toast and a poor work ethic as symptoms of a failing generation. The piece engaged with those who played the game at an elite level and who are worn down by it. Understandably so.
Most of us are not CEOs or highly paid executives, but pressures have infiltrated spheres beyond that of work. We need only look at key workers using food banks and birthrates in decline. Our generation expected that we could work an honest job and afford to live, but that is simply not the case. We now live precariously and there is no margin for risks or errors.
“Soft” has become a shorthand for entitlement, but what is entitled in the expectation that working should afford you the basic costs of living? Twice I have been hidden homeless while working at full capacity; and my last landlord was legally allowed to raise rents from £600 a head to £900, with no maintenance or material changes to the property.
We are the generation told to work more for less, and when we physically have no more left to give, we are made to feel that we are the problem.
I now work in accessibility, with those who are chronically ill, for whom soft living is not a choice but a means to sustain life. While a softer life is not available to me at present, I work with people to set those boundaries in work and other spaces. These people grieve their past selves and I see no entitlement in that. Soft is by no mean easy, and it is often misunderstood.
Lara Marshall
Brighton
I have to say I do not think this concept (of a soft life) is anything new. As a Gen X-er, I did this in the early 2000s, when I gave up my highly paid but stressful full-time job to work part-time as a receptionist in the mornings so that I could work on my art in the afternoons. I took a hefty pay whack, but I had planned for it, and without doubt it was the right thing to do and I have never regretted this choice.
Creative people have often lived this way. Charles Bukowski wrote his novel Post Office in 1971, which detailed his morning job as a mail carrier that allowed him the freedom to write, drink and bet on the horses for the rest of the day. And you also have Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, heralding an entire movement who chose to drop out and tune in. I do wish millennials would stop thinking their generation invented the wheel.
Emma Durand
Charenton le Pont, France
What a lovely middle-class story. For those of us who didn’t have all the advantages listed in this article, the option of leaving a hated job and going back to live in mum and dad’s beautiful home was not there. We had to work for 44 years to afford a decent standard of living and a home. For the millions of people who have nothing in this country, this article is not aspirational – it’s irrelevant and insensitive.
Ruth Rosenthal
London
What saddens me about this account of millennials is that it appeared to present a choice between working hard for money and power or opting out to please yourself – and not so much about finding what was truly meaningful and making a worthwhile contribution to the community. Whereas I have myself felt truly inspired to know bright and able younger people who have chosen, for example, to work on the land, growing food sustainably; in “organic arts”; in ecologically based construction; or in various forms of education, social or community work.
However, I do acknowledge that quitting a high-flying job is an act of courage, and giving time to self, to art and to family in chosen ways is authentic and worthwhile. I wish these millennials well.
Margaret Turner
Exeter