As a filmmaking duo, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig get the zeitgeist like no one else. Baumbach recently wrote While We're Young, which skewered hipsterdom with glee. In Mistress America, Baumbach and Gerwig go further still. Gerwig plays Brooke, a woman who exudes that 21st-century brand of ambition and pseudosophistication, wrapped up in the fakery of being a self-starter. Brooke's ambition is matched only by her lack of motivation. Her entrepreneurial ideas are scatterdash. Her career is half fantasy, half latching on to trends. Her frenemy points out that she doesn't follow through. Brooke is a composite of a modern worker bee, where job security has been so devastated that we have to kid ourselves into believing we are fist-pumping go-getters.
The real generation gap isn’t to do with privacy, social media or property ownership, it’s about work. The permanent, pensionable job has been gone for some time, but now most things resembling it have disappeared. The only people in their 30s I know left in secure jobs are public servants who got in at least 10 years ago. Pretty much everyone else is in insecure work.
Inability to plan
What many of our parents didn’t experience is the pressure, difficulty and stress these types of working lives create. Without the safety net of that sense of permanency there’s an inability to plan for the future, a lack of a financial security, the absence of power in the workplace given the disposable nature of contracts, and the low level of anxiety the lack of security causes. When “jobs” no longer exist and everything is temporary “work”, lives are constantly disrupted.
This new reality has also made many people self-starters out of necessity. It's no coincidence that when job security is so rare, entrepreneurialism is fetishised. The evangelisation of entrepreneurs has created a culture of professional adoration, as if entrepreneurs are somehow better or braver than others. In Ireland, this delusion culminated in a ludicrous scenario in 2011 when Seán Gallagher from Dragons' Den was almost elected president of the country.
When people work for successful organisations, they are associated with and comforted by the success of the organisation. If you work for an impressive company, people assume you too are impressive. But when you are the business there is no buffer. There are no other managers or teams to create an aura of success for you. You must be the success. That’s pressure.
It takes a lot of focus and motivation to be self-employed and to create your own employment opportunities. The problem with self-starter culture is that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Plenty of people just need jobs, secure work they can be happy doing, or even jobs that they’re not massively happy with yet at least earn them money for other parts of their lives, such as raising a family or pursuing other interests. That’s okay. We are all cut out for different things.
When there is forced entrepreneurialism, as opposed to vocational or inspired entrepreneurialism, however, that's when we get into Mistress America territory: delusional entrepreneurialism. With long-term options of employment eroded and coupled with the glamorisation of entrepreneurs, people who otherwise would have been in regular employment end up having to sustain themselves.
This new working culture is coinciding with a culture of the self, where personal branding is self-perpetuating. If you say often enough that you are something, people will start to believe it.
With the internet offering countless platforms to project your success however false it is, the fake-it-until-you-make-it philosophy becomes not one of enthusiastic bolshiness but one of dishonesty.
This has coincided with an era in which fame is synonymous with success, especially when its biggest celebrities are famous not for achievements or discernible talent but rather for being able to make themselves famous. This constant projection of success sees some who want to “make it” confusing lifestyle with life. People want the trappings of success without doing the groundwork that created success so the trappings would come.
If there was a career pyramid, with the bulk of it being all the work you have to do, and the point at the top being the prizes and payoffs for that work, that is now being inverted, something which is completely unsustainable. Some entrepreneurialism has become a phoney brand to project the idea of individual success, rather than the reality of working. People have diverse careers now. But there’s a difference between being multifaceted and throwing crap at the wall and hoping people don’t notice none sticks.
Who benefits from everyone being self- starters anyway? A hypercapitalist ideology creates a scared workforce clinging to flimsy contracts. A self-satisfied government wants more people to become entrepreneurs so it doesn't have to create jobs. A self-obsessed generation wants to project individualistic fantasies. Previously, nine-to-fivers were slagged off for conforming, and working for the Man was the death of cool. But at least they had certainty. Unfortunately, like Mistress America's flights of fancy, that job security has been traded for illusions, uncertainties and, sometimes, the delusions they're all wrapped up in.