Letter to the Editor: I’ve had writer’s block for over a year

By Sujay Utkarsh, Tartan Alumnus

I have talked about writing a letter to the lovely editors at The Tartan for all of last year and then never actually gave it to them. I would write entire articles ready for publication but then never send them. In fact, for more than a year, I haven’t really been compelled to actually write much except for whatever my job needs me to write. I know all the reasons why I wasn’t able to, but I really just want to focus on the main one:

Life is soul-crushing and getting churned into the capitalist meat grinder sucks.

This isn’t a joke to scare people or make you dread whatever is coming. It’s just reality. Since the audience for this piece is primarily college students, I am going to talk about all this as a Carnegie Mellon graduate and relate it to my experience and understanding. This is not universal, so don’t take this as gospel.

College is already soul-crushing, but there’s a certain bubble of innocence that still remains at the undergraduate level. While in college, some of you may think to yourselves “I won’t let myself get churned into the meat grinder.” But you’re already deep in the churn at this point. The bubble primes you to accept the dogma of brand-name degrees and “prestigious” corporate jobs even if you can see through the ruse.

With the cost of living in relatively livable American cities becoming more absurd, the churn is more obvious. You liked what you studied and want to do research? That’s cool! Will you do it for unlivable wages, overpriced substandard rentals, and no benefits? That’s unfortunate, but luckily for you the private sector is booming! Just don’t look at the jobs that are 50+ hours per week with no overtime and a barely livable salary for the current cost of living. Instead, get yourself a competitive private sector job that the world values at six figures and can help you afford an overpriced rental in a gentrified neighborhood. You spent the money on this degree so you may as well reap the rewards that are promised. If salary dictates the actual value of the job, then that job has to be something good right? Well it turns out that you’re still working over 40 hours per week with no overtime and won’t have energy to do much else when the day ends, but at least the apartment is nice.

I was frankly depressed by this, and I really let it get to me. In my case, my current job is government consulting. After years of railing against corporations and the system in opinion articles and my political science/economics courses, I “sold out” as one would say. However, it is hard to admit just how much the government is reliant on consultants to do many of the tasks that one would think the government should do themselves (there are various reasons for this, some of which are out of the government’s control and some of which are by design, but that’s a separate discussion).

This depression was compounded by the state of affairs. Workers across the country are fed up, rights are being taken away, fascism is overt and is holding our legislative branch hostage, everyone is numb to violence, the media is unreliable, consumerism is a dystopian parody of itself, and economic divides are more sharply present. It’s hard to wake up and feel motivated to do anything when the weight of the world is unavoidable at every corner. It’s even harder to stomach all these problems knowing that the government does have a lot of money and can actually fix things if politicians tried.

I let these thoughts swim in my head and paralyze me. I had a lot of opinions about things, but I felt it was useless to say them anymore. What good would it do apart from feed my ego? I am benefitting from the system now, so I no longer had any right to complain. I spiraled a lot, and I felt a certain resentment towards my life path. I honestly thought a lot about how to get out of the corporate track the fastest I possibly could when I was struggling to find work I liked. My creative and artistic spirit felt dead, as I couldn’t even see a track for that to help pay my bills. I also didn’t want art to become another thing that crushed my soul. On top of that, my desire for happiness couldn’t overcome my obligation to my overpriced degree, which my parents spent their money paying for. I could hear the voices of boomers in my head saying “just work and die like the rest of us.” I wasn’t ready to accept that, but I couldn’t think of alternatives to that philosophy to ease my existential horror.

Having said all that, I knew I had to learn to accept the fortunate outcomes that my path does bring in a healthy way. I became close friends with people who don’t have lucrative jobs or a brand-name degree, and some of them have to choose between rent and food during the month. It is messed up that people who have such physically and emotionally demanding jobs are forced to struggle with basic living costs. Complaining about my job where I get to sit at a desk in my apartment is extremely privileged. Simultaneously, many of them tell me how they would never want to work the kind of job I have, so showing pity is also privileged and condescending of me to do. The pity doesn’t help anyone.

As kids, we were raised in an industrialized world that inherently pits us against each other and forces us to put our happiness last. There are many of you in college right now who are staring down the barrel of graduation and job hunting, wondering whether life will be kind to you. I personally know or knew of a lot of Carnegie Mellon graduates who have been affected by layoffs in tech, which was once considered a safe career track. It’s a rapidly changing world and almost all of us are helpless in some way, trapped in whatever we need to do to survive and fueled by fumes of the hope that we will eventually thrive.

However, it’s easy to forget that none of us are alone in feeling crushed by the world. A job is just a job. Sometimes you do need to look out for yourself. It’s not your fault. You have to be the one to make the choices that are good for your well-being. You have to improvise your way through life to actually get somewhere you like and you have your whole life to do that. It’s daunting, but it’s a lot easier when you’re able to accept that it’s ok to do what you need to do for your practical well-being.

The takeaway from all this is that I am fine now. I had to stop letting life get to me and start taking care of myself. I found a project at work that I do like, and it turns out many people who work at my company and in the government have similar outlooks on life and the state of affairs I do. I make art for the sake of art when I can, and now I am writing again for the sake of writing. Your energy in this world is better channeled if you do the things you like for the sake of doing, take care of yourself, and most importantly, do things for others. The most punk thing you can do is unconditionally support your community without flaunting your altruism or making a big deal out of your privilege. At the end of the day, we need each other and our communities need us to do the right thing. Just don’t feel bad when you have to put yourself first sometimes because life gets in the way.