Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Feeling it? Let's go through some definitions of burnout and how you might be feeling it or dealing with it.
Get the weekly newsletter to read more.
Carl: What are you doing?
Gene: You're live. Watch what you say.
Carl: Oh dude. But you had just said the thing. How do I not reply to that? That's not fair. Oh, Gene.
Gene: You feeling good?
Carl: Yeah, let's go.
Gene: What's up man?
Carl: I can't. I was going to do the theme song. I was going to mimic it, but I can't.
Gene: Takes practice.
Carl: Not for contractual reasons, but just, I can't hit that note. Yeah.
Gene: Oh, it's royalty free. So you could sing it as much as you want.
Carl: Now why am I not surprised? Why am I not surprised? How you doing, man?
Gene: Good. Feeling good. It is. I don't know what it's like in Florida, but-
Carl: Shit.
Gene: What you got there?
Carl: It's a Jaguars glass.
Gene: Jaguars.
Carl: I haven't been able to drink out of this in 20 games. Just goes to show you, Gene. You keep trying-
Gene: You hang on long enough.
Carl: ... you can get through anything.
Gene: Yeah. If you're a Jaguars fan, you can stand just about anything.
Carl: Yeah. Says the South Carolina [crosstalk 00:01:17].
Gene: Except the really crappy job.
Carl: No. See the transition was-
Gene: No?
Carl: The transition I sent for you was if you keep trying, you can really get through anything.
Gene: Okay. Okay.
Carl: And then you didn't say, yeah, burnout.
Gene: Yeah. Burnout. Yeah.
Carl: What a bad thing that is so last week-
Gene: Speaking of burnout, I got burned out from reading that article. It was so long.
Carl: Oh man. So we did. We dropped an article, the Burnout Generation. Let me make sure I get this right here. Hold on. Dropped this in the Slack. The Burnout Generation Wants Some Answers. So first of all, which one of us is the burnout generation? I want an answer on that one.
Gene: Yeah. You can't really claim it.
Carl: But last week, our episode on not defining yourself by your job. Right? We got a lot of feedback on that one.
Gene: Ooh.
Carl: And it was mostly thank yous because people had forgotten. And so especially given that most people listening are running a team, or running a shop-
Gene: That was your stop it episode.
Carl: Exactly. Don't do that. It's so hard not to, but don't. And the thing was so many people that wrote in were just like, "I'm doing it. I keep telling myself I did a bad job because somebody else left. And I can't create a place that somebody wants to be at," or, "I can't do as well as somebody else is doing in recruiting and retaining the people that I need." Right? So just the idea of doing something you used to do, like call that friend and go play tennis. The weather is amazing. Define yourself by how badly you crushed that inferior opponent. There you go. No. But you know what I mean?
Carl: So then everybody that did write in, and we had about a dozen, right? Which felt great, except felt horrible because they were all suffering. They were beating themselves up because of what was going on with their jobs. And that's the nature of defining yourself by what you do in a pandemic. But then this article showed up, and I can't remember, I want to say it was Craig Bryant, maybe, who Bureau old school, and he put this in there, I'm pretty sure. Burnout Generation Wants Some Answers. And so I dropped it in the Bureau Slack. And yes, so it struck a chord with you, huh?
Gene: Yeah. It really did. I read it the moment you dropped it in there, for some reason. I usually ignore all that stuff.
Carl: Especially from me.
Gene: Yeah. And it just kind of hit me. It was like wow. Am I burned out? And then I got to thinking, am I really? And then if I am, why?
Carl: So explain the article just a little bit. And my favorite is, it's called scambition, right? So they have the word ambition, but then scam is almost spray painted over it. Like somebody came through the article and actually tagged it like it was a wall. Scambition.
Gene: [crosstalk 00:04:28].
Carl: Is that all there is? Why burnout is a broken promise. What is the promise of burnout, Gene?
Gene: Well, I don't know that the article actually lived up to the title, because it didn't really answer that part. But what I glean from the title and the article is that if we use the term burned out, are you burned out, that means that you're implying that you can sort of correct it, or you can fix it by whatever, right? You can take a week off. You can get a new job, whatever. But maybe that's the broken promise, right? I'm going to quit my job, and I'm going to go somewhere else to a better job. And then eight months into that job, I hate it just as much.
Carl: Yeah. I mean, this is so weird because burnout, to me, and if you've ever been around me and we've had this discussion, you've heard me say this, burnout is when you put all your energy into something and you get nothing back, right? Energy needs two points to travel between, or else it just goes. It just disappears, and then you've got nothing. So if you're putting-
Gene: And the nothing you get back could be being treated like crap from your boss. Or it could be no results in the thing you're trying to do.
Carl: Which is even worse. That's even worse, right? If you put all your energy into creating some sort of a proposal, and you put that proposal out there, and your team doesn't respond and the client doesn't respond and whatever, but you get nothing back, you may feel that initial relief of, oh, I got it done. But then there's like, what just happened? Nobody said anything. And if that happens for a period of time where you're not getting any kind of... And it's not just money. Money is the least of it. You just want to know you're being treated fairly and you want to get paid. But then to me, when I start looking at, it it's like, especially in this article, it starts asking you is burnout just the nature of work. That was what I got out of it. Right?
Carl: And if so, to your point, like in the article, they say that they were raised around this concept that if you love what you're doing, it's not work. Which was not the way I was raised. And if you look up the definition of work, it's basically... I didn't look it up first. So I'm just going to make this up. I hope I'm close. No, but it's to put forth effort to accomplish a goal. That was pretty good.
Gene: Yeah. That's pretty good.
Carl: To put forth effort to accomplish a goal. And I think maybe what we're seeing is you put forth the effort, but you don't accomplish the goal. Maybe the not accomplishing the goal is the part where the energy doesn't come back. Right? So the other-
Gene: Well... Go ahead.
Carl: Go ahead.
Gene: Well, along those lines, there's a couple of parts in the article that made me start to think about things I've done in the past and stuff. But one is this explanation-
Carl: I'm just glad you're finally going to think about what you've done.
Gene: This explanation from Camilla, "Burnout happens when work consumes your mind outside of the office, yet your only opportunity for a long time is to tread water while killing yourself."
Carl: Oh my God. Somebody check on Camilla because that's not good. Some of these people, their jobs, I mean, these are not people in the web space, right?
Gene: No, no. The health industry, [crosstalk 00:08:22].
Carl: They talk about, the one person said, "Yeah, the thing I trained thousands and thousands of hours for, I decided instead to get a part-time job at a deli, and I feel so good." Cool. I mean, you said Gene, when we were talking before, I think you said this, that when you never stop thinking about work. That might have been the article. But when you're thinking about work and you're not at work, that's when burnout starts to happen. I could see that. I mean, honestly, I'm not so sure how I feel about this article. I am the one that put it in there, but that's because it got me thinking. And I think-
Gene: Right. Me too.
Carl: ... sometimes an article isn't because it's giving you answers, but it's making you find them yourself, or challenge something that's been sent to you. And so for me, I think burnout has so many different aspects to it. And there was the one thing in the article where burnout was a medical term, right? It was most used in medical situations.
Gene: The World Health Organization is actually labeling it as a occupational, what word did they use, occupational phenomenon. They're actually studying it, spending money to study this.
Carl: Gene, you know what you're doing right now? I'm doing it too. But you know what you're doing? We're at the zoo. Okay? And you just saw a cheetah. And everybody's looking at the cheetah, and you see the little plaque. And you said, "You know, a cheetah can run 70 miles an hour." You want we should just read the article to these nice people.
Gene: Do you ever do the dad joke where you're with your kid, and you look at the monkey cage, and you go like, "That's you. You're that monkey." You ever make that joke?
Carl: I don't understand the joke.
Gene: That's a great joke.
Carl: You're that monkey?
Gene: You never do that?
Carl: No.
Gene: Whatever. I'm sure someone's done, or had that done.
Carl: Yes. Now about burnout. We are not suffering from it. And I think that's obvious. We're having a damn good time.
Gene: Yes, I have fun.
Carl: But the medical, so in the medical world, they were talking about how there's a higher rate of burnout among students than other students. But they said it's not because the work is intrinsically harder. It's because it's taught in a soul crushing manner. Right? I think that is a huge part of it. When we are feeling that we're not being respected, or we're being treated it unfairly or just ignored, which can even be worse, I think that's a big part of burnout because nobody's giving you their energy. Once again, when you put energy out there, you have to have it refilled.
Gene: The only thing I know about medical school is from the sitcom Scrubs.
Carl: Which honestly, I think is a valid source of information.
Gene: Well, so if you look at the show, I mean, they were medical students or whatever, but the dude they worked for was competing with them, right? And I look at that like the thing burns me out in what I do is usually sales related scenarios, right? And that's usually because it's just constant noes, and you're just going through the same cycle over and over and over and over and over and over. And that usually burns me out.
Carl: Yeah. Because-
Gene: There's no positive response thing.
Carl: Right. It's a numbers game. You have to survive being rejected 900 times to get the one yes.
Gene: Yeah. Boo.
Carl: Also like dating in college, but that's fine. No, I hear what you're saying. But it does get back to that idea of people say celebrate the little wins. I think that's huge because it creates energy, right? It's when you don't celebrate anything, when you just say, "Okay, here's the next one," right? That's when it gets to be a may major problem. They had some questions in here that I think are really interesting.
Gene: You're reading my mind.
Carl: Am I?
Gene: You are.
Carl: So the sentence leading up to the questions, there certainly does seem to be variance in what we talk about when we talk about burnout. Okay. So I think we should tackle these questions.
Gene: I like-
Carl: Does burnout imply a length of time you've gone without a break, or a certain degree of severity?
Gene: I don't know.
Carl: And those can kind of be the same thing.
Gene: Yeah, they can. But it really depends on what it is, man. I mean, I've done some pretty tough shit for a really long time, and I didn't get burned out.
Carl: You're talking about our friendship again? I got it. I understand.
Gene: I'll just shut this podcast down. Let me find the button.
Carl: There you go. God, he keeps finding the re-podcast button.
Gene: Yeah. I don't know, man. What do you think about that?
Carl: So I'm with you, what you just said. There're things I've... I didn't listen. Sorry. I was just waiting on the joke. Okay. No. But there's times that you put a lot of effort into something and you don't burnout. There's times that that degree of effort, the severity, which maybe that word's not the right word, but the intensity is so much, but you also can't quit working on it. And that's when people start say, "Oh, workaholic," right? No, if you are in the zone, if you are just in a groove and you are just cranking on something because you know this is going to be great, and I'm going to get it done, and I'm going to put it out there, that's that whole loving or believing in what you do.
Carl: And that's not burnout. Because when you're in that perfect moment like that, I think you're actually giving yourself energy. Right? That energy loop is kind back to you because you're seeing progress, and that progress is making you happy. And you're continuing on. We were talking about running before the show. I think running can be like that. When you're seeing progress, you're like, yes. And you want to go more and you want to go more. I think anything can be like that. Learning to play an instrument, right?
Gene: Oh, absolutely.
Carl: These are things that once you realize, holy shit, I just got that lick down. I never thought I'd be able to play that. And you're like, what else can I do?
Gene: It feeds that cycle.
Carl: Yeah. But when you're doing something that doesn't feed that cycle, but you have to do it, that's the shift, right? It's a shift in, is this something that is giving you energy back or not regardless of another entity? And the thing about money, the Motley Fools put this in a book that they wrote a long time ago called Your Money or Your Life. And I'll never forget this. And maybe somebody else said it, probably it feels like something that would've been said by Buddha, right? But money is stored life energy.
Gene: Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carl: It's stored life energy. And that's why it's so important to make sure you get a good exchange rate. Because the life energy, you don't ever get back. That is one minute of your time that you're putting into something that's never going to come back. And when you do it for years, that's some painful shit if you did not get the right exchange rate. And that exchange rate's not just going to be cash, which is stored life energy, but it can be other life energy. Other thing coming in to just lift you up.
Gene: Can you be burned out even if you don't have an extreme workload?
Carl: I think so.
Gene: Yes. I've seen my old business partner, actually. He didn't didn't do shit and he got all burned out. But it was sort of like reverse psychology. He was getting burned out from not being needed. You know what I mean?
Carl: No, I think that's valid. Right? I understand what you're saying. But burnout, which kind of is a sense of, I would say, feeling helpless and without direction.
Gene: I mean, really, what's the difference between a certain type of being burned out and being depressed?
Carl: Well, I think depression often accompanies burnout. I think, not a doctor, so for me, burnout is I'm just clicking tabs in a browser. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, but I feel like I've got so much to do, and I don't know how I'm going to get it all done. So I think maybe there's a lot of flavors of burnout. Maybe it's different for everybody. My burnout comes with a little more anxiety than depression where I feel like I'm not getting it done and it needs to get done. And I can't focus on anything because there's so many things, and I don't even know where the things are. I can't slow down long enough to write down a list of what it is I should have to get done. Now luckily, I haven't been burned out in a long time. But I know that when I had those feelings, it was intense.
Carl: Now I also think that burnout can come with depression. And this is probably more the other flavor, like you were saying, the person you were working with, where you're burned out because you don't feel needed, and you don't have anything to do. And that time is still being spent. That life energy is still gone. It may not been an intense stream of life, and you're putting all your stuff into it, but it's still that one minute, that one hour, that one week, those years are all still gone. And now you're probably looking more on the loss of that energy, of that time. And-
Gene: You're feeling that.
Carl: ... that's the depression cycle. Whereas when it's there is stuff to do, and that is the overworked kind of burnout, where you're just like, you know what? Somebody just asked me if I could have lunch, I'm out. I'm done. I can't do anything else. You know what I mean?
Gene: You don't have time.
Carl: And it could be the simplest thing. But it's that whole straw that broke the camels back. You just felt so much of it. Yeah.
Gene: It's interesting. Like depression and anxiety, it's kind of two sides of the same coin a lot of times.
Carl: I think that, yeah, there's a lot related there for sure. And all of this, yeah, get back to it, all of this gets back to sleep.
Gene: I think so. If you're recharged after a few days of PTO, is that not burnout? I would say no. Not in every case. I feel like they're trying to make some absolute, and I don't think it's absolute. I mean, you can be tired.
Carl: Yeah. I mean, again, and the thing is when you look at the source, I'd never heard of this, right? I don't know what this is, the people who wrote it. I think they put together a great article. I take issue with some of it. But to your point, yeah, if you can take time off and come back and feel better, yeah, I mean, I don't know that that was burnout.
Gene: Yeah. It's being tired.
Carl: It's interesting question. As much as it was exhaustion.
Gene: You know, I was just thinking of that.
Carl: And these are two different things. Burnout and exhaustion are two different things.
Gene: They're not the same thing.
Carl: You can fall over exhausted, happy with the work that you did, and sleep with a smile on your face, and still need that time off. I mean, I hate to get back to the running metaphor, but you run a marathon-
Gene: You're tired, but you still loved it.
Carl: And you're going to need to take some time off. But you're going to be eager to come back. If you take that time off and the whole time you're just dreading coming back, that's burnout. If you've got toes in the sand and you're sipping a margarita, and all you can think is, damn, I got to go back to work on Monday, yeah, that is... When you have angst around the end of that PTO, that's probably more likely you're suffering some sort of burnout.
Gene: Yeah. I don't know about the one here, but can you love your particular job, but still be burned out? Of course.
Carl: I think so.
Gene: I think so.
Carl: So all of this is so weird. And now I'm starting to understand the burnout as a false promise. Burnout is almost a junk drawer of all of these issues that we have.
Gene: I think so. I think it's getting very confused with other very specific things.
Carl: Yeah. And it's one of those things. I'm going to get to that question in a second. But it's one of those things that we talk about at camps normally, right? Like small group discussions. And if I say we're having a health and wellness breakout, you get two people sign up for it, and you apologize to them because nobody cares. But you say you're having a burnout, and you end up just not having a breakout because it's the main session. Because everybody's like, "Yeah, I'd like to talk about burnout. I don't want to talk about being healthy. I'd rather talk about where I am right now." And I think it's just that association with a feeling.
Carl: But getting back to what you just had here, let's see, I'm trying to find it. No, it's can you love your particular job, but still be burned out? I think so. In fact, I'm confident of it, especially in the pandemic, because I know a lot of people who run web shops who love what they do, but they are at the end, man. They are just hanging on by a thread. Because they can't get it to work and they don't know why. It used to work and it doesn't work now. And so again, it's that feeling of being kind of out of control and not knowing where to go. But you have nothing but passion to make it work. But eventually that gets depleted with your energy. So I think so.
Gene: So you could keep going down that, but I want to shift over. There's a link in this article to, we don't have time for that, but a much larger Buzzfeed article about millennials. Let me see. How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and I don't want to pick on millennials.
Carl: Okay. So it's millennials. I honestly didn't know. Because I got to tell you, there are a lot of burnouts in my generation. That MTV generation basically. We were pretty burned out.
Gene: I don't like it when people just kind of, not that this Buzzfeed article is, but when people blanketly just kind blame millennials for stuff, or blame-
Carl: You know, it gets people to click on stuff-
Gene: Yeah. Yeah. That's all that is.
Carl: ... Gene.
Gene: But I wonder. It just makes me think about... So my point of view in any of this is from a middle class sort of professional. I have a cool job. I'm a owner operator in a couple of businesses. It is not from a blue collar worker who is burned out. Right? And I think that's two very different discussions. And we are talking about through the lens of the Bureau, right? Because that's where we live.
Carl: Yeah, I am. That's my context. That's what I know.
Gene: Me too. And that's the whole point of having this podcast. It doesn't really help our-
Carl: Screw everybody else. That's what you're saying.
Gene: ... [crosstalk 00:24:11]. Yeah. But I think we're trying to compare apples and oranges with a lot of this stuff, right? When we're talking about being burned out from a job that's like driving a bus. You know what I mean? That's a different level of burnout than like-
Carl: Well yeah, that is.
Gene: ... I don't want to see emails anymore.
Carl: I think, and it's funny, because that gets back to, Draplin talking about people building the web. You're not digging ditches, right?
Gene: And see, I love that you just brought up Aaron because I actually go to that, his cosmic mantra and that very same thing a lot. When I'm having a bad, like I got to fix this motherfucking page one more time because they're being nitpicky. I do like to think, dude, you're sitting at your desk on a computer. You're mousing around, bro. You're writing CSS. It's pretty good.
Carl: What you just brought up is, I mean, it's kind of fascinating. I never thought about this before. But burnout, when you are that bus driver, or burnout when you are a police officer, or burnout when you are that ditch digger, or a school teacher, or somebody who's not in this, I think a lot of it still gets to factors outside of your control. And maybe some of this is bleeding in to the Bureau now, and some of the roles we have. But that, what am I doing with my life? Or how did I end up here?
Gene: I've been there.
Carl: And I'm not dogging anybody who has one of these other jobs. But if you're driving a bus eight hours a day, like a school bus, and you've got a bunch of kids, you've got a bunch of responsibility, you've got a lot of voices yelling at you, you're hearing all these different things, that's exhausting. And you're not getting a good exchange rate for your time.
Gene: No, not at all.
Carl: So yeah. So burnout outside of professional services, definitely I think has a lot more of spending that time probably feels a lot heavier than a spending our time because their days and months and years probably bleed into to something bigger that just feels like everything's going away, and here I am doing the same thing again.
Gene: But now I say that, but I think about like a designer. Because I've had employees that were designers. And there's been times where I've definitely felt like they were burned out because their work quality wasn't... They were working hard, but it just wasn't there. And you investigate it, and you realize, well shit, for the past three weeks, I've done nothing but rammed this guy through meetings. He hasn't actually spent a full day designing, which is the thing he loves to do. So I think there's a layer of it there too, where in our industry, you can wind up kind of assuming roles and doing things that isn't really the thing you got involved in doing all this in the first place for. I don't know that that's burnout as much as frustration, but I don't know that at what point one dovetails into the other, right?
Carl: I think there's such an overlap with all of this. And you know what? I think you can even be burned out if you don't have a job, right? And that does get more to the depression. I don't think you have to have a job to get burned out. I think it can be societal pressures, your friends, whatever. And this was one thing that was in the article that I thought, and it's interesting, I wonder how different generations would relate to this, but this idea that, if you don't have a job, it's social death, right? That without a job, who are you? What are you? What do you do, right? And I bet boomers would probably be kind of devastated if they didn't have a job. Gen Xers, like us, you're Gen X, right?
Gene: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Carl: Yeah? You can come on.
Gene: [crosstalk 00:28:30].
Carl: Come on. I know we're at little different ends of it.
Gene: Different ends of the Gen X spectrum, but yes.
Carl: But with Gen Xers, I think we'd be like, I'll figure it out. I'll do something, right? But then you get to millennials and Gen Z. And I kind of think they're resilient too, but I think where we would try to figure it out, like you and I would spin something up. We would just create something because whatever's in our makeup, that's what we would do. And I really think millennials are the same way in a lot of ways. I think that's why they get a bad rap. Because they go to work for other people, and they're like, this is kind of dumb.
Gene: What is the generation that comes after millennials?
Carl: Gen Z.
Gene: Is it Gen Z?
Carl: I'm pretty sure. Yeah.
Gene: Well the generation that's our kids, right? I got a 15 year old and a 18 old. I think you're pretty close there. That generation-
Carl: Digital natives. Yeah.
Carl: ... it's like, they are very inventive, I'm noticing. They're not adult enough to have had a successful run at a business for several years yet. But they, I think they will.
Gene: They were making their own movies at the age of four with title cards.
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we just don't understand it yet.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: No. And the thing is-
Gene: And neither do they because they're 18.
Carl: Yeah. I mean my 20 year old and my 18 year old, my 20 year old [Kaylee 00:29:55], one year in New York. Going to Joffrey, one year at the Studio School in LA. Decides she might want to be a dancer for Royal Caribbean. Thinks she wants to get back to New York. Wants to work for six months, save a bunch of money, and then just make a decision. But you know what? It's funny. I don't know that I would've done that at 20. I wish I would have, but I was convinced my life was supposed to be happy because I was at the University of Florida and I was watching football and I was going to parties.
Gene: Yeah. But it was harder for us to have the vision then because our scope was so much smaller, right? They have-
Carl: College was necessary then, right?
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: It's not now.
Gene: And they have a vision that's like the world. They can get on Instagram and Facebook and see everything, right? We didn't have that.
Carl: Well, and Stephen Gates said this, and I think it's brilliant. And I think this is one thing that generations, all of them, suffer from. We're comparing our insides to other people's outsides. They're showing us how they want us to see them, and we're comparing it with how we feel. And it's just not fair. It's just not good for society as a whole.
Gene: And I'm glad we've touched on social media. I think social media has a huge impact on everybody's sort of feeling burned out. Because what you just said. There's so much comparison media going on, and you can't help but do it. And it's like you said, everything you see is just shit happy, right? And so you're-
Carl: And everything that you see that resonates with you, positive or negative, and you click on, the algorithms just feed you more of that shit.
Gene: Well, that's been uncovered. I mean, that's legit real.
Carl: Right? So yeah. So I follow Runners of Instagram. I am not a competitive runner, but I do call my myself a runner now.
Gene: I would. I would call you that.
Carl: And then when I follow Runners of Instagram, I see other people who are just runners. They're not competitive runners. I see their times, and I'm like, I could run with that person. I think that is one of those things that I think there's good in social media.
Gene: Absolutely.
Carl: I think there there's so much that we can do that helps. I think there's so much bad though. And it's all things that we can't control. But to your point, yeah, I think social media probably plays a huge role-
Gene: I think it does.
Carl: ... in burnout.
Gene: Think about us going through this pandemic, right? That's pretty much our primary way of communicating with each other, and finding out what the hell's going on. I mean, I don't know about you, I don't watch mainstream news anymore. I don't read any... I mean, it's like, I get it all-
Carl: I pick up stories from it, but I never watch it.
Gene: From a link that I've gotten through social media. And then I'm sort of like, I've got to figure out what's going on. So yeah. It's just in front of you all the time. And think about this, think about what is the generation, I don't know them all, but right after Gen X, but the next one, right? The ones that are so straddled with college debt. It's like the 25 to 35 year olds.
Carl: I'm pulling up generations. Here we go. So we have baby boomers, Gen X, millennials or Gen Y, Gen Z, iGen, or centennials.
Gene: Centennials.
Carl: But they don't have digital natives. That was my favorite.
Gene: Yeah. That was cool. But that there's that generation that's, talk about addition to burnout, I mean, I don't know. I didn't ever have this. I assume you didn't. But I didn't have college debt-
Carl: I didn't.
Gene: ... when I got out of-
Carl: College was cheap compared to now.
Gene: That's my point. That's the thing that, like my kids, I have decided, and me and my wife work hard, we save money, we're working hard now, to where they will not have college debt when they get out. Because I see the generations before them, the amount they're carrying, and how big of a burden that is.
Carl: Oh yeah.
Gene: We were like-
Carl: There you go.
Gene: ... I'm going to get out of college, get a job, buy a house. Right? That's not what happens.
Carl: Well, and wrap that back into burnout, imagine starting off, and like you, I'm going to carry my kids' debt. I'm going to take care of it. When I went to UF, I was thinking about this the other day. I know that my parents had to pay a few hundred bucks a month for the apartment because I was splitting a cheap apartment with a friend. Probably a few hundred bucks in food groceries. Okay. Like 50 bucks in the cheapest store I could find, and 150 in beer. And then the tuition was, maybe 2,500, 3000 a semester.
Gene: Right. I was $7,000 a year. It was like University of South Carolina back when I was in school.
Carl: Right. So that would've been kind of similar probably.
Gene: My son's housing budget is more than that.
Carl: Oh, are you kidding me?
Gene: Just the apartment.
Carl: The apartment when Kaylee was in New York, the apartment was more than my mortgage.
Gene: Yeah. Like what the...
Carl: And it was a dorm room, but the thing is-
Gene: You pay for that yourself, how do you get out of that, and be able to... So you're working a job.
Carl: It's the hook.
Gene: Even if it's a professional job, or the thing you went to school for, you still have 700, 800 bucks a month. How the fuck do I buy a house? I mean, that's a lot of pressure. You start to think about all this stuff piling up, piling up, piling up.
Carl: Well, and that's where I think really, and people can come at me for this, I think with a lot of different jobs, on the job training is going to be more valuable than four years of college.
Gene: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Carl: And 200, 300, $400,000 worth of debt. I mean the path that my kids would've gone, and that Kaylee is on right now if she keeps going, it's a good 80,000 a year. And I've been paying that off because I'm lucky because I got a great job. But you think about it, the stress on a family, the stress on the parents, the stress on the kids. And then to your point, yeah, suppose I get my dream job and I'm getting paid a entry level salary, which may even be $60,000 a year. Yeah. But I do have like 40 years worth of $1,000 payments.
Gene: I mean, that adds to it, man. That's part of it.
Carl: But, you know what I think is the hot take? I'm going to go hot take, Gene.
Gene: It's time.
Carl: I think the hot take is we have got to undo these beliefs that have been built into us, right? This idea that we are our job. We talked about that last week. But I want to bring it back up right now. Because this idea that if we don't have a job, we're not worthy? Of what? Of being a human on this planet, of helping others. There's two people that don't have jobs. Those that are incredibly wealthy, and those that just want... Well, okay. Three types. Those that can't get a job. Sorry. That was so fucking entitled. Oh my God.
Carl: But then you've got those who are just like, I can't find a job that fulfills me. I can't find a job that I want, and I'm willing to take the hit. I'm willing to take the hit of not getting paid. Right? And I'm not talking about living on government money. I'm not talking about all that type of stuff. I'm saying these are people who are willing to lower their standard of living. That's another thing. Standard of living. Like it's a video game, we're trying to set high scores. I bet if we were to really dig into it, and I'm sure other much smarter people already, have sociologists and such, man, we've created quite the mouse trap for ourselves where we're just defining ourselves based on this crap that pays taxes. I think I may actually be a socialist. This just happened. Okay.
Gene: Well, I'm out of here.
Carl: Well Gene, hot take, you-
Gene: Hot take.
Carl: ... are a lovely human being, and I love you Gene Crawford.
Gene: Carl's a socialist. It's all right.
Carl: Why does it say extortion on your shirt now? You leaned forward so it just... Mine says non-alcoholic and yours says extortion.
Gene: That's how I get paid.
Carl: All right.
Gene: That's great.
Carl: Gene Crawford-
Gene: Yes sir.
Carl: ... next week, more tomfoolery.
Gene: Oh. Yes.
Carl: How come Tom got the foolery? What's that all about?
