Unions can be somewhat of an abstract idea — a concept you’ve definitely heard of, just not very relevant to your own life. After all, the union representation rate in the private sector is just 7%, indicating that private sector workers covered by a union are a rare minority. And that scarcity is not that surprising. It isn’t exactly easy to organize your workplace; it can be a lengthy, contentious process. 

The right to form a union is supposed to be protected by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — though it doesn’t protect all workers — and the National Labor Relations Board exists to enforce those union rights, but its muscle depends on many factors, including who the current presidential administration appoints to the board. A company might be found to have violated the NLRA, but only face relatively minor consequences. Even if the NLRB steps in, the unionization process can drag on for years. Case in point: Amazon workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, AL, first took a unionization vote early last year, but their fate is still up in the air because the NLRB ruled that Amazon had meddled in the first vote. A second vote will begin on February 4.

To grow up in the U.S. unfortunately also means that you absorb a lot of anti-union attitudes. How often have you heard that unions are corrupt, skeevy institutions that mainly serve to obstruct a friendly, efficient relationship between workers and managers? Or that they’ll eat up your hard-earned wages through exorbitant dues that go toward nothing useful for you? They’ll stymie your career growth and make it impossible for you to truly shine at your job. Even if the rhetoric isn’t that explicit, in a society that lauds rugged individualism above almost all else, the idea of a union becomes easier to scoff at.

All this to say, there are a lot of misconceptions around unions — like who should have them, and who doesn’t need them. The persistent stereotypical image of a union worker is someone in a manufacturing job, like an auto worker. When Google employees formed the Alphabet Workers Union last year, for example, some detractors wondered why highly paid, privileged Silicon Valley employees would need a union, as if people need to experience a certain minimum threshold of suffering in order to deserve collective bargaining power. 

The reality is, people with all kinds of roles in all manners of industries have organized or are trying to organize right now. The past several years have seen a boom in unionization efforts within digital media, for instance. Vice Media Group, the parent company of Refinery29, unionized in 2016 with the Writers Guild of America, East. But digital media is far from alone. Ahead, Refinery29 spoke to five people from different industries on what they do in their union — and what it does for them.

Amelia*, 32, works in marketing. “I grew up in a pro-union household,” she says. “My mom was a nurse and my dad worked at a potash mine. I was very aware of the importance of unions, and I spent two of my spring breaks as a child walking — or, more accurately, rollerblading — the picket lines during nursing strikes.”

“That being said, I never thought unions would factor into my career,” she continues. “I went for my business degree right out of high school and didn’t associate the white-collar jobs I aspired to with unions.”

But after working at a handful of non-unionized companies, she ended up taking a job at a unionized workplace, where she still works today. “Before even applying for the position I experienced a benefit of the union in that the job posting outlined the pay scale for that position. In previous roles, one at a boutique firm and the other at a large public corporation, I didn’t know the starting salary until the position was offered to me, and in both cases it was lower than I anticipated,” Amelia says.

“The pay [at my current job] is significantly better, and my day ends at 5 pm. I rarely have to work evenings or weekends, and if I do I’m compensated accordingly,” she continues. “I would say I have an above-average work-life balance, especially compared to previous jobs where I frequently went into the office early and left late.”

Amelia’s union is pretty active, she says. “Given the pandemic, everything has been virtual, but there are monthly meetings and socials as well as topic-specific meetings when issues arise. Involvement in the union really varies, with some of my peers being highly involved and others not. The majority of people in my department of roughly 200 have been at the company over 10 years, and that tends to be the group that’s more involved in our union,” she says.

“Currently, our union is fighting for permanent remote work arrangements. We’ve all been working from home full time since the start of the pandemic, but it wasn’t an option before,” she says. 

Still, Amelia points out that being in a union isn’t a magic wand that makes all problems suddenly disappear. “Management and the union are often in conflict, with both parties frequently calling out the other in front of employees,” she says. She finds this aspect disappointing. “It makes it difficult to want to participate when it feels like they occasionally take an antagonistic approach with our management who, at the end of the day, hold all the cards in terms of our career opportunities and advancement.”

A part of the difficulty is that her union represents an immense number of people at her company. “We are such a large and diverse group, the final decision and details are up to the union leadership,” she says. “There are 7,000 members across the organization, and it includes blue collar and white collar workers.” It can understandably be difficult to agree on everything.

But when asked whether she thinks being in a union has positively affected her pay and work environment, her answer is an unequivocal yes. “Marketing and communications roles are, in my experience, often overworked and underpaid,” Amelia says. “I make a higher salary than most of my peers and work significantly less hours.”

“I would say that, overall, a union will likely result in higher pay and a better work-life balance. Career advancement does happen, but it’s not as dynamic as in non-union workplaces so, if you have time-specific goals, I would really dig into that in the interview process and try and understand if or when those opportunities are available and what the process is — will union members get priority, do those with more seniority get preferential treatment?”

“Some people find getting involved in the union to be very rewarding, but if you don’t choose to go that route, in most cases, it’s totally acceptable to enjoy the benefits without engaging directly in union matters,” Amelia points out.

“Unions are often reflective of the culture of the company,” she says. “A company that has a positive workplace culture will likely have a good union.”

Amelia believes the opposite holds true as well. “I think the union definitely influences the culture. My colleagues and I feel more empowered to ask management for what we need and it really evens out the power dynamic,” she says. “And among colleagues, people are open about their career goals and there’s room to be openly ambitious since the process is so regimented and transparent.”

Sophie*, 34, currently works as a financial analyst at an academic medical center. But she originally went into teaching — a career experience that didn’t end well. 

“I graduated in 2009 with an education degree,” she says. “It was the worst time to try to be a teacher. People who had been teaching for years were being let go due to budget constraints, and I was fresh out of college with no experience.”

Eventually, though, Sophie got a science and math teaching position at a local parochial school. “Since it was a parochial school, there was no set curriculum, and no one else taught the subjects I taught. So I was building my own lessons for seven different subjects and I made decisions as a teacher that the parent population didn’t really agree with, and I was struggling in general.”

But the final straw occurred in early November. “Our principal happened to be out one day, and the acting principal came to ask me something highly unusual. They said that the county sheriff wanted to speak with me. I had no clue what’s up or why, but I went to talk to him,” Sophie recalls. “It was about an assault that happened on Halloween in the neighborhood. My truck matched a description they got, apparently, and it had a piece of orange plastic riding around in the bed that matched some of the pumpkins that had been smashed,” she recalls.

Sophie later learned that someone had planted the orange plastic in her truck while it was in the school parking lot, but by then, the damage had been done. “[The police] chased down my story and alibi so long that the class period ended and my classes switched out in the hall. This conversation was unfortunately happening in an office with a window, so my students saw me talking to the sheriff,” she says “I came back to my classroom at the end of the day and of course my 8th graders had questions. So I was faced with a choice: I could either be honest with them, or tell them it was none of their concern and let the rumor mill fly. I chose to be honest rather than make up fictions,” Sophie says.

“The kids of course told their parents and I’m sure that didn’t help anything. I had taken a probationary contract when I started the job for the first three months. The school decided to exercise that right.”

“My mom worked at a public elementary school at the time and said that what happened to me was totally out of line, and the secretary should have told the police that I was with students and to come back at X time and to speak with me after hours,” she says.

“Had I taught at a public school with a union, they would have had to show what I did wrong, and prove that I had endangered the kids or done something illegal,” Sophie says. “I didn’t know any better, but when you teach at a private school the parents are essentially paying your salaries. So if the parents aren’t happy or are concerned about who this teacher is and why law enforcement is talking to them during school hours, that’s the ball game.”

Sophie considered suing for defamation or personal damages, “but that costs money, and I just needed to be able to pay rent at that point.”

Since that harrowing experience, Sophie has taken union jobs in other industries. “I got the opportunity to apply for an admin assistant job at a hospital via suggestion of someone in my network. I knew once I was in there, I could move and grow into a different position. I utilized tuition benefits and the knowledge of position title requirements — a union perk — to determine what I wanted to do next and needed to do education-wise to retrain and be qualified, since I clearly wasn’t going back to teaching,” she says.

After six years, Sophie took a non-union job as a project accountant in the construction industry. But she says construction was “a very different world, very old school — and I thought healthcare dragged its feet on technology!” After two and a half years, feeling overworked and underpaid and wanting a better work-life balance to support her future goals of being a working mother, she returned to the hospital system. “The hospital would get me paid family leave, more flexibility on schedule and working hours, the option for remote work even after the pandemic, [benefits] that weren’t an option with the construction gig,” Sophie says. “It was a choice about the type of place I wanted to work as I prepare for my life to possibly change in the next few years.”

“It was totally by accident that the hospital role ended up being union, but it did provide a level of comfort in accepting the role,” she adds.

“My current job is great. I work my 40 hours and that’s that. I have a really good work-life balance; my manager is super flexible about time off for appointments and life needs. I’m also in a rare position where I’m still a union employee, but I’m salaried.”

Teresa*, 29, is a journalist. Like many of us, she didn’t know much about unions growing up. In fact, the first time she became conscious of what roles unions might play in people’s lives was in high school. “In junior year, my teachers went on strike for over a week,” she says. “I didn’t fully understand, but I just remember the word ‘collective bargaining’ being said. I was a very active junior, so I stood outside my school and protested for them to have union rights.” But when she thought of her future career, unions didn’t factor into the picture.

Her first personal brush with unions came when she was 25 and worked as a freelancer for WNYC. When she joined the company, the podcasters in the digital media department were in the process of joining WNYC’s union as part of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). “I was still on my parents’ health insurance back then,” she recalls, “and I went to all these union meetings and I was like, oh my God, this is fucking sick — SAG has the greatest health insurance. How much you pay for it is based on how much money you make.”

But about a month before she would have been eligible to start receiving SAG health insurance, Teresa was laid off.

At her next job in the media industry, she was eligible to join the Writers Guild of America. “I finally got to actually benefit from being in a union. Now, I feel like being in a union is part of my personality, honestly. I would not go to another workplace that didn’t have a union, unless I was making over six figures.”

For Teresa, the difference before and after having a union job has been stark. “Before WNYC, I was at a film distribution company for three years and I made no money and had no rights. I worked 60 to 70 hour weeks making between $30k to $40k at this company.” She felt like she was “constantly fighting” for herself, and despite asking for several raises, and making “these huge documents detailing why I deserve this promotion and this raise,” her efforts were typically in vain. “I got shut down all the time because [the company] was just these two dudes who got to decide my fate. Sometimes they’d throw me a bone and give me a $3,000 raise,” she says. Without WGA, “I think I would have stayed comfortable at $50k and been like, this is what I deserve. I just don’t think I would have pushed as hard to make more money. And now I’m making $80k,” Teresa says. 

In her current, unionized job, Teresa also has a better work-life balance. “Part of that is because I’m older and care about myself a little bit more,” she notes. But she says a large part is the epiphany that she deserves a livable wage, especially in a high-cost-of-living city. “[Being in a union] opened my eyes to what I should look for in a job. Whether or not I recommend working in digital media is a different story,” she adds.

“I also think that having the union throughout the pandemic, especially with layoffs, was so important to me — having this space,” Teresa continues. “[The union] just made me feel like I have agency. I don’t think I ever felt like I had agency before.”

Finding that personal agency also enabled Teresa to form a better sense of community. “When I was in SAG, it was really nice to see that someone else cared that I got benefits because they knew that I needed them,” she says. “Obviously it didn’t end up working out, but that was beyond my union’s control. I just think that it teaches you to care about other people more.”

“When you’re trying to figure out how to talk to employers, when you’re trying to negotiate certain things about your job, it’s so easy to get lost in the barrage of information on the internet,” Teresa notes. And most of the advice focuses on how an individual can savvily negotiate, overcome the odds, and actually get the higher pay they desire. “People on TikTok are going to tell you, what’s the worst thing that could happen [when you negotiate] — they say no? But actually, the worst thing is that you could be severely underpaid and overworked.”

“There’s just such a big difference between you negotiating for yourself and a collective unit negotiating together for the benefit of everybody.”

Melissa Campbell, PhD, is a 38-year-old postdoctoral scientist researching brain development at Columbia University — and she’s also the vice president of the Columbia Postdoctoral Workers, which is affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW).

Postdoc researchers often face long hours in the lab, without adequate compensation for those hours. According to a survey conducted by Nature, only 42% of postdocs said they earned between $50,000 and $80,000 a year, and just 3% earned more than that. The Columbia Postdoc Union, which voted to unionize in 2018, is one of a growing number of postdoc unions fighting against overwork and for better pay, among many other issues. 

“The person that recruited me, or got me interested in [the union], actually was a student at Columbia and was part of a student unionizing effort, and then graduated and became a postdoc,” says Dr. Campbell.

“When you’re at a place that isn’t really paying attention to the needs of certain workers, there’s talk that happens. People start talking about things that need to be improved and things that are a problem,” she says. 

Dr. Campbell’s experience speaks to how unionization efforts, while they can seem too complex to undertake at first, often begin with everyday acts such as venting and complaining with your colleagues — which, one could argue, are a necessary part of a healthy work life.

As the postdocs began to talk to one another, “there was a groundswell of interest and sort of banding together and convincing Columbia to make a change,” says Dr. Campbell. “The students really, I think, helped push the postdocs to be empowered to unite and fight for their interests.”

Dr. Campbell also echoes Teresa’s thoughts on how unions build a feeling of kinship, especially if you’re feeling siloed at your place of work — stuck in your literal or metaphorical cubicle. “At Columbia, there wasn’t that much of a sense of community. I think that’s a real lack of this place. And the union gave us that,” she says. “You feel part of something with your fellows that you wouldn’t necessarily always talk to. It just gives you some shared identity that you didn’t feel before.” 

“The thing about postdocs is that we’re all part of these tiny little islands. I work in a lab that has about five or six people, and we have a boss. And there’s many, many, many little labs at Columbia,” Dr. Campbell says. “Much of your experience actually is determined by your supervisor, and the supervisors vary greatly.”

While Dr. Campbell says she’s been lucky to have fantastic supervisors and therefore good experiences at Columbia, that’s not always the case. “I can say, as the vice president of the union and also just when I was part of the bargaining committee, one of the big things we did was to go around collecting stories and sharing what was going on with people. When you hear someone tell you a story and they say, ‘My supervisor is doing this,’ and you go, well, that’s not okay, and there’s no recourse to do anything about it — it’s really disempowering, and I felt like we were always hearing stories like that.”

“But after we unionized and signed our contract, we could write an email to HR or whoever and say, I’m this person from the union and this is not allowed. And it would be fixed immediately,” Dr. Campbell says. “That’s the first step in feeling like what’s happening matters and that those individual parties or supervisors are going to be held accountable and held to a standard that is reasonable,” she says. 

A lot of what their union has done, according to Dr. Campbell, is to codify in their contract what was already in the university’s faculty handbook. “They shouldn’t tell you that you can’t go home for Christmas and you have to work,” she says. But now that ‘shouldn’t‘ is enforceable.

It took some while to adjust to the new reality where they, as workers, suddenly had more power. “I was just thinking about someone who didn’t get their paycheck on time,” recalls Dr. Campbell. “This happens at Columbia all the time. I can’t even tell you it’s crazy how often it happens. We’re not making all that much and you’re living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and trying to plan ahead for when HR makes a whoopsie.”

After forming their union, Dr. Campbell remembers emailing HR about a paycheck issue a member was having. “The supervisor, the person I wrote to, called me on my cell phone to apologize profusely for having done this,” she says. “I was like, well, thank you for taking care of it. I hung up and I was just like, wow, I gotta not let this get to my head.”

Dr. Campbell says that their union is fairly active, with monthly member meetings and weekly Executive Board meetings. “It’s quite active, and actually a lot of people wanted the union because they appreciated the advocacy aspect of it,” she says. “This came up especially during the pandemic with BLM, and we had a lot of discussions about signing onto letters, supporting other efforts to bring unionization to other universities, putting out statements about various activities, like Columbia’s relationship to New York City police.”

“There’s been a lot of discussion about what we should support, what we don’t support. And I’d say that makes up probably the majority of our meetings,” she notes.

While Dr. Campbell says that their union operates in a “flat” structure, she adds that their union meetings aren’t a free-for-all where everyone speaks at once, either. They set agendas, and the meetings’ structure is laid out in the union bylaws that they passed. Making sure the process is democratic is a big priority, she says. “I’m the VP, but it’s just a title,” she adds. “Everyone contributes.”

Some people may fear having to adopt an adversarial attitude toward management if they join a union. But Dr. Campbell believes that this doesn’t have to be the default. “My uncle used to be a union leader at GM and then eventually got promoted to management,” she says. “When [the postdoc unionizing] was all happening, I went to talk to him and he said that during the negotiations of the contract it seems very adversarial. But an enlightened management would realize that the union can be really helpful if you’re about to roll something out that you know people aren’t going to like but have to do. You talk to the union people first. If you have a good relationship — which everyone should always be trying to go for — you can work with the union to see what their biggest sticking points are and you can work together so that people aren’t blindsided at the end and it feels more like a compromise. It feels like people’s needs and the union’s interests are being taken into consideration, and I think that can soften the blow.”

During the pandemic, Dr. Campbell and other Columbia employees fought for more childcare support. The union and management talked about the options together. “They asked us, ‘What do you think your members would like the best?’ We spent some time workshopping it with them, and at the end of the day, the university just gave people money and they also expanded some of the back-up childcare stuff.”

Her advice to people who’ve never been in a union, or who feel any degree of wariness about joining one, is this: “You have to take a look at the union, because the culture of the union matters. And I think I’m really proud of the culture of our union here at Columbia,” she says. “Unions themselves aren’t something to be feared. But you have to look at a place and think about, What does the union spend its money on? Do you support it? Does that feel good to you? I think it’s an opportunity. It shouldn’t be seen as the immediate fear.”

“We’re an institute of higher learning, the ivory tower. We’re not working in a factory,” Dr. Campbell says. “Just by that alone, some think, why would you need a union for that? But the truth is, any place where there’s this power dynamic, it’s possible for it to be abused — and unions help defray that problem.”

The Columbia Postdoctoral Workers won their latest contract in 2020, through a lot of Zoom bargaining sessions. A lot of gains were made, including a higher salary minimum. “We’re the highest-paid postdocs in New York City now,” Dr. Campbell says. “We have the longest parental leave.”

Angelica Campos, 27, has been a home care worker in Indiana for the past six years, and she’s unionized. As a member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — one of the largest unions in the U.S. — she’s a vocal advocate of the benefits and protections that being unionized provides. 

Campos took her first home care job while she was trying to save money for college, where she intended to get an education degree with the hopes of becoming a preschool teacher. But, she says, “I found that I got everything that I was wanting in home care.”

Home care work isn’t the kind of job that allows you to remain emotionally, mentally detached. “You are taking on a client, someone who’s relying on you,” Campos says. “They tell you not to get too close, but you can’t help it. They do eventually become a part of your family. You’re responsible for an entire life.”

“Honestly, it’s a beyond stressful job, and it’s not easy — you just take it one day at a time and try to breathe as much as you can,” she adds.

For Campos, one major benefit of the union is that it gives her a place to unload some of this emotional burden. “It gives you an outlet where you can talk about these things, because we’re not legally allowed to be discussing everything that happens. We have to be protecting our clients at all costs.” If she weren’t in a union, she’d only have coworkers or managers to lean on, and, she notes,  “I learned the hard way that I couldn’t rely on my coworker and my manager.”

She first saw the benefits of her union after she faced disciplinary action at work. Due to an injury, Campos was prohibited from working nights for a period of time. “But the company begged me to come back,” she says. Campos checked to make sure everyone at work would be okay with her working night shifts, then relented. But when she did, she was punished for working — despite being pressured by management to do so.

“[Management] told me, you can either quit or, if you call the union, we will have to throw you in jail. My manager literally told me that. And that fueled me. How can you throw me in jail for something that you told me to do?” she says.

“I felt so betrayed by everyone. I’ve never felt so alone,” Campos continues. “That’s when I looked through my papers and found my packet from the union. I was like, Oh, I have a union. I called and told them everything,” she says. “I remember my union rep said, ‘What were you thinking in believing that these people were your friends?’ He’s a very honest man, I’ve got to give him props. He will tell you when you’ve messed up.”

“[My union] got me my job back,” she says. “From that point, I promised myself that I wouldn’t let anyone else go through what I went through. I was fortunate,” Campos adds. “At the time, I still had my other restaurant job, [and] I was still living at home with my parents, so I could go an entire month without a salary. But I can’t imagine that situation for a mother, or someone living on their own.”

Campos is now a leader within her union. “I’ve truly never felt so strong in my life,” she says. “In the past five years, I’ve been able to be a part of bargaining committees, and my pay has gone up almost $5 an hour since I’ve been a part of this. We were able to sit on the bargaining table and won COVID relief pay, PPE gear.”

The union has also opened the door for her to get involved in broader labor advocacy. “I’ve been involved in every possible thing that the union could possibly get their hands on,” says Campos. “I joined the Women’s March; I went to D.C. to be trained on how to properly speak out and be a better leader; just recently, we went to D.C. to try to get the Build Back Better plan passed. Seeing all these changes, all of this impact that we’re able to make honestly makes me feel like I’m a part of something so much bigger.”

For anyone who feels uncertain about how a union could benefit them, Campos’ advice is this: “Don’t wait until it’s too late. Don’t wait until you’re in a situation that you can’t get out of yourself,” she says. “The union is there to honestly help you, to build you up, to teach you how to succeed in your job. You have that foundation of help and support, where people truly understand that we all deserve to make a living wage and live our lives without being mistreated at work. You have that place to go to when you think you have no one to go to. How can you pass up that security?”

“I’ve been offered jobs at other companies where they’re paying more, even management positions — but how can I give up my union?” she asks.

*Names have been changed to protect identity

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Welcome to Taking Stock, a space where we can take a deep breath and try to figure out what the COVID-19 economy really means for our finances. Every month, personal finance expert Paco de Leon will answer your most difficult, emotionally charged questions about money. This year has forced many of us to reprioritize our finances, and there’s no clear road map for getting through the pandemic yet — but Taking Stock is here to help us figure it out together.

Last time, we talked about how to get through to a loved one who doesn’t see that they’re about to get scammed. Now, we’ve asked Refinery29 readers to share their brushes with scammers.

Do you have a question or dilemma you’d like to see answered as part of Taking Stock? Submit it here or send us an email at moneyquestions@refinery29.com.

Jasmine, 26, Massachusetts

“My mom fell victim to a scam that ultimately cost me my whole inheritance — the value of her house, approximately $271,000 at time of writing,” says Jasmine.

“After my dad died of cancer, a man turned up at my mom’s door saying he could help her. My mom was diagnosed with an illness a few years ago and had never dealt with any of the household bills; she’s lived her life very innocently naive about money,” she continues.

“I can’t prove it, but since none of the neighbors got a knock at their doors, I believe my mother was specifically targeted,” Jasmine says. “This man stated that the windfall my dad had left her — roughly $680,000 — was at risk, and that she needed to put this money in a trust immediately in order to protect it from it being taken away to pay her nursing home fees.”

“She ended up buying another house in my brother’s name that she intended to rent out, as the house that she lived in was going to me in the trust,” Jasmine says. “She completely paid off the mortgage on her own house, completed some repairs and was left with approximately $68,000 which was to pay for her everyday expenses, since she’s too ill to work and has no income. So the inheritance was the new house for my brother, and the house that she lives in was for me.”

“The company took about $4,000 from her in fees to posthumously change my dad’s will to put the money and house into a trust,” she says. “They then stated that they needed a lot of information from my brother and me, which we willingly gave.”

“I had a bad feeling about the whole thing in the pit of my stomach and asked a friend of the family to come and meet this man, who spoke to him and said that everything seemed legitimate and above board,” says Jasmine. “I found the website and checked the name of the man who arrived against accreditations online, and that checked out, so I swallowed my fear and let it happen.”

“Over a year later, I was still calling them trying to hear back about this paperwork. The man we couldn’t get out of the kitchen in the beginning — he would literally come over once or twice a week for us to ask questions and to meet the friend of the family and gather paperwork — once the check cleared, we could not get hold of him,” she says.

“Eventually I got a call back and they put me in touch with another lawyer who worked there, and I gave her the story. She explained that this practice is illegal and that it should never have been started,” Jasmine says. “She got in touch with her colleague, the man in my mom’s kitchen, who claimed the process had stopped because my brother didn’t hand over his ID. But he did. He then found my brother’s ID and said that it was too late to do anything, despite me telling him that this was illegal, we wanted no part in it and wanted our money back.”

“I’ve heard nothing at all since. We will not get my mom her $4k back. I’ve stated that my brother should keep his inheritance, as without it he would have no house to live in, and that is not his fault,” Jasmine says. “My mom called me in tears saying she’ll never get the care she needs, because she wants me to have an inheritance. I’ve told her that that will never happen. It absolutely broke my mom to find out she had been scammed. We never pursued this further as we were involved in hiring someone to carry out something that was ultimately illegal, and my mom really would not be able to handle the stress in her condition.”

“She’s going to live out her remaining days as comfortable and as happy as we can make her with all of the care that she needs,” Jasmine says. “My warning is that people should please tell their fragile relatives to never ever listen to a person who knocks on their door with an opportunity that will ‘change their lives.’ This was a very expensive lesson to learn.”

Henrietta, 62, Canada

Henrietta was nearly scammed by someone she met online. “He became friendly and then romantic, until there was an urgency for money. He said he was widowed — that wins sympathy.”

“He showed me a contract with Shell saying he’s an engineer working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico,” Henrietta continues. “It said he would receive a $200k bonus if work finishes early, and he urgently needed money to repair the crane or he would lose the bonus. This was the scam.”

Henrietta didn’t send any money, though. “Seemed sketchy,” she says. “He could not provide a bill/receipt for a deposit for the repair because he was short $5k.” The warning sign was how quickly he brought up money, and the sense of urgency the would-be scammer communicated. “Such an emergency! Very desperate,” says Henrietta.

“If someone hints or asks for money, I abruptly disengage. Break all contact immediately.” 

Amy, 69, Massachusetts

“On Christmas Eve, I got a text saying I had just signed up for a dating app for $400 — I hadn’t,” says Amy. “It instructed me to click on a link if I had not made the purchase. I was connected to a smooth talking ‘Apple’ rep. While my family was doing Zoom Christmas in another room, I was helping a thief move $900 to gift cards with long, complicated addresses!” 

“Luckily,” Amy says, she managed to get her money back.

Stacy, 24, Michigan

“In high school, when I was unaware of common scams, I helped my mom list her suitcase set on a Craigslist-like site,” says Stacy. “We were over the moon when someone offered us $300 and… sent a check for more than $1,000 over the list price with a ‘whoops’ and a ‘wire the extra money back please.'”

“It seems silly and obvious now, but we wired them the money and were absolutely flabbergasted when the check bounced three days later, and we were out all the money,” Nicoe continues. “We filed a police report, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the case is solved. Just kidding — that $1,300 is gone forever.”

For Stacy, the warning signs are now clear: “Anything with a wire transfer, a deal that seems too good to be true, a person far away with an ‘assistant’ that ‘messed up’ and, obviously, checks written for more than the agreed amount.”

“I would never do an online deal through any websites that aren’t protected now,” she says. “Websites like eBay are great because you only communicate and pay through the website, so there’s no possibility of a hot check scam.”

Valerie, 54, Texas

Valerie lost about $20k due to a scam. “I’m still in damage control,” says Valerie. “I moved in with a boyfriend who had one identity theft charge. He convinced me and the court he was just holding three pieces of mail for a friend.”

“Never allow anyone to get close,” Valerie warns. “I’m living in a hotel with my most loyal BFF — my dog.”

Diana, 34, Texas

While traveling overseas to see family, Diana met a man through mutual friends. “So I assumed he was vetted,” she says. “We fell fast, and I thought he was the one. He was an entrepreneur, and in the first year he never asked me for money. He was in fact covering me for things. But in the second year, he’d ask for little things here and there, or wind up in situations where money was needed.”

“We were in a relationship, he met my family, and then things started to get suspicious. A series of incidents happened, including my money being sent to get exchanged and never being returned, and ultimately he attempted a grand scheme on me, where his friend claimed he was in jail,” says Diana. “By this time I’d already lost some money and was suspicious. I didn’t contribute to the emergency ‘we need it in 48 hours’ bail fund, and from there the relationship went downhill. I broke up with him a few months after.”

“A week after breaking up, he asked for an iTunes gift card and when I refused, he called me selfish and said that I thought the world revolved around me,” she says. “He disappeared from WhatsApp and all social media, and his company website gives a 404 error now.”

In total, Diana lost about $1,500. “I will never give anyone foreign currency to change on my behalf,” she vows.

Names have been changed to protect identity.

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The thing about personal finance that is often underemphasized is just how personal it really is — and how so many of our financial choices are driven by emotion. Maybe you’re a compulsive online shopper who knows you need to rein in spending, but can’t seem to stop buying things when you’re feeling low. Maybe you’re stingy to the point that thinking of how to pinch a penny here or there takes up way too much mental space; you want to stop, but your brain won’t let you. These aren’t just poor spending habits. They’re often related to intense, lifelong associations of money with difficult past experiences, insecurity in our childhood, and our deepest fears.

“There’s so many hang-ups people have about money that are emotional,” says Paco de Leon, personal finance expert and author of Refinery29’s Taking Stock column, whose forthcoming book, Finance for the People, is out on February 1, 2022. De Leon believes that we are all told certain “stories” about money — like maybe that money is the only path to happiness, or that people without money are lazy, or that financial stability isn’t a right, but a privilege.

“There’s such a strong brand of shame with personal finance,” says de Leon. “I think maybe because I grew up queer and went to Catholic school for 13 years, I know what it’s like to be told you’re fundamentally flawed, and I know what it’s like to reckon with that feeling.”

Throughout the book, which is separated into sections about financial fundamentals, debt, investing, and more, de Leon explains that we’ve all internalized certain beliefs about money because of who we are and how we grew up. Coming from a wealthy family might mean that you had a head start on investing and wealth management resources. Or if you grew up in a setting where money was unpredictable and saw your parents struggle with bills, you might be unduly terrified of any form of debt no matter the context. Our perspectives on handling money are not just about crunching numbers and making a plan; often, they’re not even rational. But that doesn’t mean we should simply try to ignore these feelings; rather, we should consider why they exist in the first place. The goal in learning about personal finance isn’t just to be better at budgeting or to save enough for retirement, it’s to feel less anxious and less ashamed about money.

“It’s so easy to tell somebody: Save 10 percent of what you earn… save 50 percent of what you earn. It’s so easy to rattle off all these very practical pieces of advice. But what was crazy and kind of heartbreaking to me was watching people understand what they rationally needed to do, but they were so unaware of why they were driven to act against their best interests,” says de Leon.

In order to get to a place where we can act as rationally as we think, she says, “we have to think about how we think. We have to think about our cognitive biases.”

In one section of the book, de Leon suggests readers look at their budgets, not just in terms of how much they can spend, but in terms of how much money they need for their ideal lifestyle. What would their income need to be to attain that?

“It forces us not to just accept the default, which is what I was taught to do,” she says. “I come from immigrant parents, and they were just like: You go to school, you get a degree and then you apply for a job and you accept the default.”

De Leon also emphasizes not simply achieving a single goal or milestone, but creating automated systems and guardrails that help establish new habits — because we’re human and fallible, after all, and need to make our own safety nets. “I think that Western society is way too focused on that photo for the ‘gram — the end goal,” says de Leon. “I think that one of the things that helps you actually achieve your goals, which is counterintuitive, is to release this tight grasp on an outcome and to just follow a lot of the process, because the process is all we have. You can’t just love the outcome, because your day-to-day is the process.”

Of course, that’s not to say that a lot of money problems are only personal — they’re also structural. De Leon spends plenty of time acknowledging the inequality baked into our capitalist system. But until that system is radically changed, what can individuals do in the meantime? That’s the question de Leon tries to answer. Early on in the book, she talks about a concept called the financial “shit sandwich.” Every generation is served their own particular kind — for young people today, that shit sandwich might be called “late-stage capitalism.” So what can we do about it?

“I think that I’m a very strategic thinker, so when I think about problems that I want to solve, I think about what problems I want to accept,” says de Leon. “Because no matter what workplace you’re in or no matter if you decide to work for yourself, you’re going to face problems. So when I accept that there are just going to be some shit sandwiches in life, it at least allows me to look at the menu and try to decide, okay, what can I choose?”

“I remember sitting in the conference room when I was working as a financial planner, and I just felt like I was getting secrets,” says de Leon. “The things that I was hearing, the insights I was getting are information that’s normally passed around from, you know, a wealthy grandfather to a wealthy grandkid or something like that. Something inside of me felt like, Wow, I really have to set this information free.”

“There’s so much opportunity to have a different conversation, to share a fresh perspective, especially because I live in a world that wasn’t built for me,” de Leon continues. “I’m a woman living in a man’s world. Short person in a tall world. Queer person in a straight world. And a brown person in a white world.”

She believes that one of the things that the personal finance industry tends to be guilty of is “assuming everybody is at a certain level of income and that they don’t have beliefs to work through,” she says. “Traditional financial experts don’t look at things outside of your paycheck that can impact your actual paycheck” — like systemic inequality, or emotional and cognitive biases around money. “And I think that’s a huge flaw. I think so many of us are operating from a place of our own personal trauma, of intergenerational trauma, and societal trauma as well. Not recognizing our pain, I think, is a big failure, frankly, in the industry.”

“I hope that people realize that they have the power to influence their own relationship with money,” says de Leon. “They can change. Their potential for change is much greater than they think it is.”

Finance for the People will be available for purchase in February 2022, but can be pre-ordered here.

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It’s often said that a classic Capricorn trait is to scoff at astrology. The sea goat, born between December 22 and January 20, is apparently too pragmatic and rooted in the material world to understand a misty art involving the stars.

But I have an alternate theory. Maybe Capricorns have a reputation for being zodiac skeptics because the people born under this sign — including me — feel so misrepresented, even maligned, by our horoscopes, which never make being a Capricorn seem, well, all that fun. And astrology can be a lot of fun. Who wouldn’t like to selectively zero in on the parts of an astrological profile that resonate most, while conveniently ignoring the rest? It’s an exercise in introspection — on who you think you are, who you want to be, and who you’re afraid you might be. It’s no wonder that countless people seem to embrace their sign as a point of pride, frequently noting that they’re such an Aries or the ultimate Scorpio. But Capricorns? It’s not a sign people tend to embrace — unless they’re really into being workaholics, or worse.

Let’s not forget that the stereotypical Capricorn is Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, except boring. Wealth and status are everything, and Capricorns have no emotion other than feeling pleased at accruing more wealth and status, or enraged at losing them. It pains me to acknowledge that Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, is in fact a Capricorn. What a sick, cosmic joke.

Somehow, the entire world seems to be in on the joke, though, and has run with this anti-Capricorn narrative. According to Monster.com, for one example, good jobs for Capricorns include: CEO, human resources manager, business analyst, intelligence analyst, etc. On the other hand, for Pisces, there are suggestions like filmmaker, motion graphics designer, 3D artist, wedding photographer. Seems unfair! As a Capricorn, I would never be a SheEO, nor work as an intelligence analyst. Though not a Pisces, I am an artiste.

Worse, Co-Star’s career suggestions for us sea-goats include “Sisyphus” and “elementary school hall monitor,” burns so savage that I have to respect them. This is the other thing: If a horoscope doesn’t go hard on portraying Capricorns as serial killers in designer clothing, it just portrays us as the world’s dullest, most straight-laced humans: loyal, responsible — the kind of person who values order and “tradition,” loving nothing more than a long day of hard work. Basically, the stars want us to know we’re the sidekick, not the main character, in our own lives. 

I, for one, am tired of it. It’s time to set the record straight about what Capricorns are — and what we aren’t.

Lindsey*, born on December 23, is a Capricorn who embraces being “lazy” — what some would argue is a Cap cardinal sin. “I’m currently unemployed and enjoying doing nothing while my husband works full-time remotely for a tech company,” she says.

“I honestly enjoy being lazy so much. It’s not like I don’t know how to work hard — much of my career has been spent in the restaurant industry, where it was normal to work 50 to 70 hours a week,” she continues. “But if no one is forcing me to work, I’m fine watching YouTube all day. My husband makes enough money to support us, and we don’t have any children or debt, so I don’t know if or when I’ll get a job. I don’t have to budget, but I also don’t spend a lot of money, except on food.” I personally find Lindsey’s outlook on life very inspiring and wish nothing but more laziness for her future.

Julia was born on December 28, and also feels misrepresented by her astrological archetype. “I typically hear [that Capricorns are] workaholics or leaders,” she says. “I’ve also heard ‘emotionless’ and ‘boring’ or ‘overly consistent,’ which is not true! I definitely can say that in circumstances where I feel like I’m not supposed to show emotions, I definitely suppress them — BUT I STILL FEEL THEM!“

“I am super loyal, but only when I feel it’s deserved,” she adds. “If someone does me wrong and it’s ‘final straw material,’ I can cut them off and never talk to them again quicker than most people.”

Despite our reputation for being unemotional, “cutting people off” is something I hear a lot of Caps say they do, and something I’ve done a lot in my life, too. Breanna Davis, a social editor at Refinery29, was born on January 12 and is a triple Cap — as in, Capricorn sun, moon, and rising. “It takes nothing for me to block someone’s number immediately,” she says. Blocking is a rare last-resort move for some, a lifestyle for others (aka Capricorns).

I tell Davis that I sometimes worry about being too severe with people. “That’s something I talked to my therapist about — I’ve told her how easily I cut people off,” she replies. “And she used the same word: severe. She was like, Why does it have to be that severe?“

But Capricorns are constantly curating who is and isn’t in their inner circle. If you’re out, you’re out. No stragglers. And it likely contributes to the Cap reputation of being cold and reserved. “If we’re not around people we’re super-comfortable with, the way we express our emotions is very calm. Inside, we’re going crazy. But on the outside, it’s very contained,” Davis says.

“I will never forget, I was on the waiting list to get into my college, and I had to do an interview with the admissions lady,” she recalls. “She came in at the end of the interview and on the spot was like, ‘We’d like to offer you admission to the school.’ And I just sat there with a blank face. I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And my mom hit me and said, ‘You got in!’ And then I said, ‘Thank you so much.'”

Last week a friend sent me this video of a man looking completely deadpan on a rollercoaster, saying to me, “I died at that tweet thinking about you.” I replied, “I just don’t think my feelings/joy are anyone else’s business.”

It’s not that Caps are truly as cold as the season in which we entered this world — it’s that the world is really big, and our goal in life is to protect the tiny sphere of light where we can find real nourishment. Everything and everyone else is irrelevant.

“It’s being high maintenance, but people take that in a negative way — like, you can be high maintenance spiritually,” Davis says.

Sara Tan, Refinery29’s beauty director, was born on January 6, and feels similarly disconnected from the mainstream Capricorn image. “They always say that we’re assholes, or we’re emotionless. So savage. And that’s the complete opposite of who I am,” she says. 

And yet, Tan mentions Renata, Laura Dern’s character in Big Little Lies. “She’s ball-busting, wears a lot of power suits, makes a lot of money,” she says. “At an event, I got to interview Laura Dern. I was like, ‘By the way, Renata has to be a Capricorn, right?’ And she was like, ‘I definitely was thinking that in my head when I was playing her role.'”

Of course Dern was, because Renata was emblematic of a Capricorn’s persistent image — but being the embodiment of a girlboss is increasingly likely to be seen as an insult rather than a compliment. It’s partly why Caps need a rebranding. “Obviously I work hard and I like to get paid, but it’s not everything I do. I’m not a penny-pincher, I’m not stingy,” says Tan, then asks: “But also, if [Capricorns] all were really good with money and obsessed with money, wouldn’t we all be in finance?” 

This question gets to the heart of why “being good with money” is actually a pretty weird attribute for a zodiac sign. It’s not a personality trait. It’s an outward-facing skill that people might have a natural tendency for or not — mainly, though, it’s something people learn, not something they are.

Tan, in typical Capricorn fashion, expresses some disbelief around the whole concept of astrology, thinking about a friend who’s also a Cap. “We’re such different people. So there’s just, like, no way that all of us Capricorns are the same,” she muses. Still, I ask her what she admires most about her friend that is also a Capricorn characteristic.

“If she doesn’t like someone or if she feels that the relationship is done,” Tan says, “she will put her foot down and say no — she’ll just walk away from it. The discerning trait of a Capricorn is something I’ve always admired in her.” 

As the astrological poster children for capitalism and corporate culture, Capricorns seem to embody the idea that hard work and wealth are directly related. This would be depressing if there weren’t more to focus on, like the deliberate, ruminating nature of our personalities, which have the power to subvert all the stereotypes.

“The Capricorn path is purposeful, intentional and growth-orientated,” says Sade the Astrology Vixen, an astrologer based in London. “On a whim, pop astrology blankets these qualities as ‘success hungry.'” But in fact, she says, this sign is about “moving with integrity.”

She also notes that various combinations of Cap sun with moon and rising signs can be very distinct from one another. “For example, if you have a water rising or moon, you’re very sensitive in competitive environments, so being money-obsessed is probably at the bottom of the list,” she says. “If you add the fire element into the chart, passion and a sense of adventure is needed to light up their world. Experience over money is the mantra. Throw in a dash of air placements, and you’ll find that a linear process isn’t the main priority. Air signs sometimes take the ‘chaotic’ route to get the job done — no shade.”

“Capricorns see life as an investment, which requires a strategy,” she says. “This doesn’t make them cold, per se, it just helps give their life enough structure and distance to see the mechanics of the bigger picture. The discerning Capricorn are able to teach us the fine art of seeing our time and effort as a valuable and priceless resource.”

Alice Sparkly Kat is an astrologer and author of Postcolonial Astrology. They explain the mythological basis of the sign, which paints a darker but more interesting picture of Capricorn than the way we’re typically depicted. “The ruler of Capricorn is Saturn,” Sparkly Kat says. “We think of [the Greek god] Saturn more as an old man now. We think, Oh, age — that must bring power and authority. That’s why Capricorns get this rigid label. But actually, Saturn is aging. So it’s about the growth of power and the loss of power, too. In mythology, he usurped his father, and then he was usurped by his son, Jupiter. Saturn is about this generational conflict.”

“The other ruler of Capricorn, the exaltation ruler, would be Mars. You have the two malefics in astrology doing well in Capricorn,” they continue. In astrology, malefics refer to planets that tend to have a difficult influence on your life. The benefic planets are Jupiter and Venus. “Benefics go back to the concept of ‘benefactor.’ They usually represent politicians, people who have a lot of power, wealth, and people who design what the social norms are,” Sparkly Kat says. “So the malefics — they represent rebellion.” 

Capricorn and “rebellion” aren’t two words you usually hear together. But far from being the reliable rule abiders, Sparkly Kat contends that this sign meditates on which rules ought to be overturned. It’s not about having power and authority necessarily, but being concerned and interested in the nature of those things. “I think we project a lot of father archetypes onto Capricorns. But that’s not the point of the father in the [Saturn] story,” they say. “The point of the father in the story is recognizing the generational conflict. There is this feeling of, I’m looking at my parents, trying to figure out what I want to change.”

“That’s why [the sign] is associated with gods like Pan,” they say. “But then, later, Satan. It’s this rebel label. I would call Capricorn a little goth. You’re rebelling, but it’s this kind of quiet or sad way of doing it.“

There’s often an existential heaviness to Capricorns. We are saturnine people. So rather than looking to Jeff Bezos as an exemplar of the sign, I propose someone more like Hayao Miyazaki, the director behind many of Studio Ghibli’s films, or at least the internet’s narrative of him. Aesthetically, the movies are dazzlingly colorful and charming, and you might assume that the creator of such fairytale landscapes is a cheerful, carefree optimist. You would be wrong:

the studio ghibli documentary is a glimpse into hayao miyazaki’s magical world pic.twitter.com/EqMyVxMwfD

— tweety (@weirdwithwords) July 16, 2021

There is in fact nothing contradictory about a Capricorn being unmaterialistic, or being more interested in redistributing wealth than hoarding it for themselves. “Most Capricorns I know are honestly people who are like, You know what? I decided cleanliness is rooted to white supremacy, and then not shower for a month,” Sparkly Kat says. “I feel like they’re pretty hardcore about their beliefs. That’s how I see Capricorns. There is a seriousness to that kind of decision — but it’s also funny, too.”

It turns out, we’re not a more boring version of Patrick Bateman or even of Sisyphus. We’re a more boring version of Saturn, the sad old goth god who devoured his own son. Having realized that, what I feel now more than anything else is… that I have shared too much about myself. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. If you liked it, Venmo me.

*Name has been changed to protect identity

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Welcome to Taking Stock, a space where we can take a deep breath and try to figure out what the COVID-19 economy really means for our finances. Every month, personal finance expert Paco de Leon will answer your most difficult, emotionally charged questions about money. This year has forced many of us to reprioritize our finances, and there’s no clear road map for getting through the pandemic yet — but Taking Stock is here to help us figure it out together.

Last time, we talked about what exactly constitutes “financial infidelity.” Now, we’ve asked Refinery29 readers whether withholding financial information is always a lie — and always a deal breaker. Are there some money-related things that you shouldn’t have to disclose to a romantic partner?

Do you have a question or dilemma you’d like to see answered as part of Taking Stock? Submit it here or send us an email at moneyquestions@refinery29.com.

Mae, 32, Oregon

For Mae, a former partner’s secrets have had long-term financial and emotional impact on her life. “My long-term boyfriend hid enormous amounts of business and personal debt from me,” she says. “He was self-employed in a well-paying field, and I had no reason to suspect anything was amiss.”

“He revealed a terminal illness to me that he had known about since the beginning of our relationship, about a year before he died,” Mae says. “I discovered the debt after his death. We had a comfortable lifestyle and he assured me that he had life insurance in my name for when he passed.”

“When I was trying to find the policy information, I discovered he had kept his business afloat with many bridge loans that had exorbitant interest rates. In fact, there was no life insurance at all,” she continues. “He had stopped making payments on his car and our home and was under investigation by his field’s regulatory board for fraud. It was incredibly devastating, and I suddenly found myself with nothing. I had to sell almost everything we owned and move out of our home within a week of his death.”

“Had he still been alive, I think this may have been a deal breaker,” Mae says. “It revealed so much about his character that I didn’t see, and I felt deeply betrayed. It wasn’t the fact that his accounts were empty, it was that I wasn’t respected enough to be told the truth.”

“My current partner and I are open about finances and had discussions about our financial past and how our shared financial future will look,” she says. “We don’t know the balance of each other’s checking account, and I would never ask. As long as we each take care of our shared financial obligations, I don’t feel that either of us has the right to that information. We both have retirement accounts and investments and agreed that we would continue to contribute to them separately if we were to get married and to sign a prenuptial agreement releasing any claim to those accounts.”

“Obviously, the deception in my previous relationship has shown me the importance of being transparent with a partner,” says Mae. “Conversations about money can be really awkward, but secrets are worse.”

Kay, 31, NYC

“I’m the one with the secret debt, and I’m broke,” Kay admits. “I think it will be a deal breaker if my partner finds out.”

“I’m keeping this a secret, because I don’t want to let him down. We want to move [in] together and possibly put money down on our own place. I feel embarrassed and ashamed that I’m the one who will likely be setting this dream back.”

And though she feels guilty about hiding debt from a partner, that doesn’t mean she believes romantic partners need to disclose every little part of their respective finances. “Not everything should be shared,” Kay says. “Just joint matters.”

Nooreen, 29, UK

“My ex-husband withheld finances from me,” Nooreen says. “He was a bouncer at a club — as well as a drug dealer.”

“I didn’t know about the drug-dealing,” she says. “I found out when we bought our house and he insisted on paying with cash in full. This house was worth over $2 million!”

For Nooreen, this lie of omission wasn’t a complete deal breaker, though. “We worked through it, although I made him stop dealing and doing drugs,” she says. “We later divorced for other reasons.”

“I think the major [financial] things should be shared! At the very least all joint/fixed expenses,” she says. “I believe that each person should have their own fun money, but the majority should be shared.”

Kinsey, 34, Texas

“It wasn’t a secret account or debt, but he alluded to the fact he owned his condo,” says Kinsey. “When it came to buying a house together, I found out he actually didn’t own it, which decreased the down payment I had assumed for our home. I then found out he didn’t have a savings account for a huge purchase like a new home.”

“This wasn’t a deal breaker for me, as it wasn’t like he was hiding a huge amount of debt. I ended up fronting all the down payment through the sale of my condo,” Kinsey continues. “I also used a portion of that to renovate the house. The only issue we had about the situation is he wanted to use the money for something he wanted for the house, like an outdoor  kitchen, instead of updating the existing kitchen. Sorry (not really), but if I put up the money, I get what I want right now. You can save up for what you want.”

“My husband knew I had inherited money from my parents, but I never told him the amount. Currently, he still doesn’t know the full extent,” she says. “I have told him our kids’ college will be covered by the inheritance, but that’s about it. I don’t want him to know he’s married to wealth, because I want us to be equal partners. We do well in our careers, and so we live comfortably off our salaries. Plus, I don’t touch the money anyway, just let it grow through investments. I may tell him in the future, if we ever have an emergency.”

Kinsey doesn’t believe that being in a relationship means you have to give your partner complete knowledge of your finances. “I think some things are none of their business,” she says, “but you have to talk about everything. For example, my husband and I have a joint account that we contribute to separately to pay shared expenses — mortgage, utilities, insurance, etc. As long as we each pay equally into the bills, we’re fine.”

“We also agreed to contribute to retirement and save separately, since we both work full-time,” Kinsey says. “I believe it’s none of his business what I’m spending my personal money on, as long as I don’t go into debt and can still contribute the agreed-upon amount every month.”

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In the story of our lives, we might be the main character, but work is the dominating theme, our constant motivation. It’s the central thing we do as adults, the primary focus of our mental function for most hours of the day, most days of the week. The types of jobs we have influence who we know, where we live, how much society respects us. Being jobless, then, isn’t only difficult because of the financial instability — it’s also a kind of social death. As such, the fate of the jobless — the attendant derision or pity is often used as a cautionary tale. And the warning works: Most of us are terrified of losing our livelihoods.

The so-called Great Resignation has been making headline after headline for months now, as people have been quitting their jobs in droves. There were predictions that when federal pandemic benefits expired just after Labor Day, industries facing a labor shortage would find an influx of job seekers. And yet, snatching away benefits hasn’t worked that way. So far, there hasn’t been a dramatic increase in applicants. It’s not just a perplexing economic problem. People rejecting available jobs runs counter to what we’ve been taught since childhood — that work isn’t just how we live our lives, it’s why we live our lives.

It’s a sign of the times — and of how fed up people are with the conditions of work — that people are now rejecting this worldview, and doing so to such a degree that it’s become a movement. If the movement has a motto, it would be the word that’s been on everyone’s lips over the past 18 months: burnout. According to an Insider survey of over 1,000 American workers, 61% said they were currently “at least somewhat burned out.” An Indeed report from March found that the majority of respondents said their burnout had worsened during the pandemic, with 52% overall saying they were currently burned out. You’ve probably heard — or said yourself — the following things repeated ad nauseum: “I’m so tired. I’m so exhausted. I can’t believe we have to keep going.“

But burnout isn’t just fatigue. It’s far more insidious and complicated.

“Work burnout happened to me when I worked at a large corporation and realized that although I was putting in long hours, doing good work, and it looked good on paper — I was going nowhere,” says Alexis, 38, who works in the PR industry. “Then I saw a meme [that said] ‘if you died tomorrow, your job would be posted faster than your obituary,’ and it sucked all the joy out of everything I did.”

“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,” she says.

Camilla, 29, saw her health deteriorate. “For me, the burnout was serious when I relapsed badly into anorexia nervosa,” she says. She worked in health and safety in the meat industry. “It took me a year to recover to the point where I could work again, and even at that, I only work part time out of the house. Anything more, and I can easily slip back.”

Her husband, who works in hospitality and retail, is burned out, too. “[He] realized it was bad months ago, but felt trapped. He has since handed in his notice with no job to go to, because he simply can’t take it anymore,” Camilla says. “He feels suicidal, exhausted, and hopeless. But having put in his notice, he instantly felt better.”

Camilla has come to the exact same morbid conclusion as Alexis: “At the end of the day — your job will be posted before your funeral notice ever will be. Remember that.” 

Maybe a telltale sign of burnout is when you start thinking in such extreme terms, ruminating on life and death as it pertains to your work satisfaction. If you’re wondering what would happen if you died tomorrow, and weighing how deeply your workplace would feel the loss of you, you’re not just tired. You’re preoccupied with existential questions related to meaning and purpose. And they’re all related to your job.

Alice, 28, felt suddenly and wholly burned out after her company announced a major restructuring. It soon became clear that there was no longer a future for her there, but it was a job she had sincerely loved. She had worked hard at it for years.

“I sobbed,” she recalls. “And I was like, I haven’t cried like this since I was dumped by my abusive ex.” It was as painful as any romantic betrayal, she says: “I felt empty.” Only, unlike a breakup, Alice still is connected to her employers, “because I’m financially dependent on them.”

There’s a lot of debate about what exactly burnout is: A medical condition? A philosophical matter? Is it just the cost of doing business? Of being alive? According to the World Health Organization, it’s an “occupational phenomenon.” But that seems to be an anodyne way of saying that the exact nature, cause, and solution to burnout aren’t entirely clear.

And there certainly does seem to be variance on what we talk about when we talk about burnout. Does burnout imply a length of time that you’ve gone without a break, or a certain degree of severity? Can you be burned out even if you don’t have an extreme workload? If you’re recharged after a few days of PTO, is that not burnout? Does it come with depression? Can you love your particular job but still be burned out? Does burnout cause a fundamental shift in how you think about your work? 

For some, burnout is just another way to say their stamina has been used up, and they need a vacation. But for others, “burnout” is a term that encompasses a kind of melancholic meditation on the unrelentingness of work; more recently, the pandemic and climate crisis anxiety seem inseparable from it.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is a test developed by psychologists to measure this “phenomenon” on three scales: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. An online test on MindTools asks you to rate yourself on statements like, “I am harder and less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve,” and “I feel that I have no one to talk to.” It also includes a statement on perceived workload, but it doesn’t include a numeric scale of the average number of hours worked. Overwork in sheer hours seems to be too simple a metric to diagnose burnout.

For a long time, “burnout” was a word most commonly used in the medical industry. In 2014, Dr. Richard Gunderman wrote an article for The Atlantic in which he argued that the reason medical students seem to suffer higher rates of burnout compared to other college students isn’t because the work is intrinsically more difficult, but rather because the way they were being taught was often soul-crushing. It was an educational environment, he claimed, that did little to nurture compassion — ironic, considering these were training to care about the wellbeing of others. Gunderman contends that burnout is not, then, necessarily caused by stress and overwork, but “the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice.”

Thinking of burnout as a form of betrayal is illuminating, because it frames burnout not as a solitary experience — an agony you battle alone, something that’s your sole responsibility to heal from — but a relationship in conflict. For those medical students, the conflict comes from being let down by their professors and mentors, and their subsequent interrogation of whether this path would allow them to be the kind, empathetic doctors they wanted to be. For others experiencing professional burnout, the details of the conflict vary, but the core problem remains the same: Workers feel betrayed by their employers.

This is why burnout hits when work fails to live up to our expectations of it. Many of us were raised on the mantra: “It’s not work if you love what you do,” and so we want to believe that our jobs can not only provide financial stability, but also emotional and spiritual nourishment. Not all work is a calling, but the journey toward finding the right job can be likened to a pilgrimage. In a time of increasing secularism, work remains our steadfast religion.

In Peggy Lee’s 1969 anthem Is That All There Is, she sings about the end of a great romance. But she’s not despairing over the extreme pain that came with losing love — rather, she’s disappointed that the end of her relationship wasn’t more ruinous. “I thought I’d die,” she sings, “But I didn’t. And when I didn’t, I said to myself: Is that all there is to love?”

Lee’s disillusionment isn’t just about mourning something tangible, but is also about the loss of a fantasy — that this love was the most important thing to her being, that it was necessary for her survival. For many suffering from professional burnout, there’s a similar disillusionment. When your dream job disappears, shouldn’t you be allowed to disappear, too? Instead, not only can’t you disappear, but you’re also staring at many more decades of meaningless work until you can retire. How do you cope with that? The disappointment can be staggering.

And yet, in the depths of disillusionment and burnout, there can also sometimes be a strange sense of freedom in recognizing that work might never provide the purpose and emotional sustenance you once believed it would. And that’s okay. You’ll survive. Collectively, we will simply need to come up with a new way of thinking about work. It turns out, work — like any relationship — isn’t the be-all, end-all we’d thought it could be.

Journalist Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote a viral Buzzfeed article on burnout that garnered millions of views, agrees, and believes purpose-driven passion is a particular trap for burnout. In her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, she observes, “The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the ‘honor’ of performing it.” Studies have also shown that “obsessive passion” can increase work conflict, which in turn increases the chance of burnout.

Connected to the “cool job” being a bourgeois preoccupation is the recognition that the omnipresence of the burnout conversation right now is due to relatively privileged workers experiencing it — including many who work in media, whose thoughts on burnout are inherently going to be more amplified. But, burnout, after all, has long been a regular feature of many low-wage, precarious jobs.

“That’s the thing — when middle class people realize it, it bumps it over into a majority realization,” says Petersen. “Because, ostensibly, middle class people are the largest component of the United States or of most countries. And so that bumps it over into more shared public consciousness. I mean, it kind of sucks, right? You have to wait for the people who have previously been comfortable to realize something for it to become part of a larger conversation.”

Now that burnout is a well-established part of the conversation, is it time to just throw up our hands and reject any notion that we might find work we love? Not exactly. In fact, it’s not that we should be seeking jobs we feel nothing for, or feel ashamed for loving our jobs — it’s more that we should recognize that passion can make an already unequal relationship even more unequal. It’s realizing that “passion” is irrelevant to the reciprocal obligations between employers and employees. It’s acknowledging that it’s okay to have a completely transactional relationship to work, especially when facing the threat of burnout.

In order to survive without a passion for labor, work itself has to be less necessary for survival. But that’s hard to imagine — a world where work doesn’t take center stage, where you don’t mention your job within minutes of meeting someone new. The concept of a post-work world has existed for a while now, but the idea that people should care less about their jobs, let alone work less, often causes deep moral outrage. This isn’t all that surprising, considering how much of our identities are defined by work. It’s as if, without work anchoring all of our lives, society itself will disintegrate.

“I have internalized capitalism — which is when you really think of yourself only in terms of your ability to work,” says Petersen. 

She also reveals that while she’s gotten some pushback from older generations on the idea that work doesn’t need to be the great, overwhelming passion of your life, not everyone feels that way: “I think some [boomers] have gotten to this point in their life where they have a midlife crisis and are radicalized, like, ‘I shouldn’t do this. I look back on my life, and what do I have to show? What is a career? Who did I serve with my career?'”

Throughout her book, Petersen not only surveys what burnout looks like, but lays out the ways in which it’s a structural rot. If a bridge collapses, we wouldn’t just tell people how to drive around it, we would demand it be repaired. In the same way, we need to repair the crumbling infrastructure of work, not get emails from HR about how to “practice self-care” and be told to take PTO without ensuring that we can realistically take time away from their jobs, or any guarantee that things will be better once we’re back from vacation.

Petersen has some ideas about what to do: “It has to be things like making emailing after hours or slacking after hours into something that you actually get a talking-to about,” she says. “A negative performance review instead of something that’s implicitly praised because you’re working all the time.”

Petersen is also in favor of a four-day workweek. “If we were actually working four days, then you would see some shifts, because people would have time for things that give them sustaining recharge every week,” she continues. “This is very different from taking a week off one time.”

“We’re talking about really reorganizing the way work finds its place in your life,” says Petersen. “We have to think about, What if work wasn’t the center of our lives? How do we reorganize our entire life, our entire society, so that even if we are spending the most time doing it, that it is not the number one priority. It is not the way that we define whether we are successes and failures. It is not the primary access of our identity.”

However much it feels like “everyone” is quitting their jobs, we should be wary of thinking that all, or even most people have the ability to do so. It’s also unclear yet that we’re seeing a major shift in power between workers and employers. The Great Resignation has likely been bolstered by stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. But most of us need jobs as a matter of financial necessity, and quitting on the spot remains only a pleasant fantasy for many, rather than a plausible reality.

Still, though, what it represents is a hopeful blip, and a reminder to employers that their futures are also precarious if they don’t take care of their workers. Perhaps it could be an inspiration toward implementing a long-term bulwark against burnout. Instead of encouraging vacations, discrete periods of rest, it’s time to enact labor protections that guarantee higher wages, that end at-will employment, that boost unemployment benefits permanently, that disentangle healthcare access from employment status. In other words, creating a world where workers who aren’t being treated well, who aren’t satisfied with their jobs, can simply quit without a backwards glance. Until that happens, burnout will continue to be endemic in our society, and individuals will continue to find their own solutions for how to cope.

Alexis, who identified her burnout thanks to a meme, is currently working at a different company — and that change alone has helped. “I feel phenomenal,” she says. “They treat me like a person who deserves kindness and a future they want. I know it feels like a low bar, but I’ve been amazed at the people I’ve met here who feel the same way.”

“Maybe burnout is what led me to a better place. But traveling through the muck to get here was about as painful as it gets,” she says.

Camilla is doing better, too. “I’m happily working at a deli in a local shop,” she says. “It’s not what I spent thousands training for, but I’m happy doing that part-time while I write.”

Alice, though, is still at her burnout job, finishing up a long-term project that could take anywhere from six months to a year. “I dream of working 30 hours max a week,” she says. “I would love to take a year off. But I don’t have the money.”

When psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term “burnout” in the 1970s, it was a very personal endeavor, a result of his attempt to describe what he was feeling in his own line of work. “I don’t know how to have fun,” he observed in a voice recording describing his symptoms. “I don’t know how to be readily joyful.” 

He didn’t explicitly ask, “Is that all there is?” But he might as well have. After all, part of the recovery from burnout is making a promise to prioritize being joyful, in whatever ways we can. If the old career adage promised that as long as you do what you love, you’d never work a day in your life, the new one is simply: Work is just work. And life is too short and important to be wholly dedicated to it. As Peggy Lee sings: If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing.

Names have been changed to protect identity.

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In February, a historic winter storm and ensuing mass blackouts killed 111 people in Texas. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to the climate crisis, but the tragedy was worsened by a system set up to profit when disaster strikes.

For days, the price of electricity in many parts of the state remained around $9,000 per megawatt-hour, because the rate changes based on demand. Texans were faced with electric bills in the thousands of dollars, with one man reporting a bill of over $16,000. Natural gas prices soared, and The Wall Street Journal reports that two Texas energy companies profited upwards of $200 million during the storm. Big banks like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America that have investments in fossil fuels were also reported to have made over $200 million in paper profits. During a call with investors, Roland Burns, chief financial officer of natural gas producer Comstock Resources, said, “Obviously, this week is like hitting the jackpot.”

It’s a classic case of “disaster capitalism” — a term coined by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism — in which politicians and the private sector exploit disaster to grow richer from it.

“It’s such a perfect self-contained example because, back in the ’90s, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he pushed for the privatization of the energy grid there — deregulation and this free-market approach to the grid,” says Amy Westervelt, an environmental journalist who hosts and produces a podcast called Drilled that investigates the fossil fuel industry’s crimes in the climate crisis. “In the absence of government oversight of those utilities, they didn’t have to have the kind of emergency power storage that public utilities do. No one was checking to see if they were winterizing appropriately — which they clearly were not. They straight-up caused that problem, and then profited from it.”

Disaster capitalism isn’t just about any business that makes money during a disaster. It’s more intentional and far-reaching than that. The basic premise of the “shock doctrine” Klein describes in her book is that it’s easier to enact drastic political change after a big shock — whether it’s war, a coup, a natural disaster, a pandemic — than attempting a series of incremental changes.

The numbing effect of shock and the urgency of repairing destruction provides a pretext to impose radical policies that might otherwise be rejected by the populace and legislators. The ultimate goal is to use disaster to push through a free-market utopia of deregulation and privatization. In her book, Klein calls disaster capitalism “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.”

Such privatization efforts have altered large parts of the U.S. public sphere by now, including disaster response. In the past few decades, the government has become less and less a provider of services and more a contractor of them from private firms. “With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters,” Klein writes, “responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits — why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships?”

By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, the Bush administration had thoroughly restructured the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and combined with budget cuts, it was clear that it could not manage the disaster on its own — so it outsourced much of the recovery effort to big corporations, which was not well-organized or cost-effective at all, despite common conservative talking points about the efficiency of the private sector. The Bush administration also rapidly waived a number of laws purportedly in the service of speeding up post-Katrina recovery. Environmental standards for fuel were relaxed to bolster supply and head off a spike in gas prices, among several other environmental regulations. A federal law requiring workers on public projects to be paid at least the prevailing wage of that area was also quickly suspended since that would make the reconstruction cheaper and “incentivize” companies to take on the contracts. The result was that many undocumented migrant workers took on clean-up and rebuilding jobs. After an onslaught of regulatory rollbacks, tax incentives, and extremely profitable contracts for the private sector, there was austerity for public programs, with a $40 billion cut to the federal budget that was packaged as necessary to pay for the cost of Katrina.

Klein argues in another book, The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, that a similar strategy was accelerated during another disaster — an economic one — more recently in Puerto Rico. In 2016, Congress established an “oversight board” to restructure the island’s government debt and take control of its financial decisions. A major facet of the board’s recovery strategy has been to sharply cut the budget for public programs, like pensions. Not long after Hurricane Maria, which led to widespread, months-long blackouts, then-governor Ricardo Rosselló announced that Puerto Rico’s public power company would be sold off and privatized.

It shows how disaster capitalism’s mission to keep expanding and enriching the private sector doesn’t just take advantage of crises, but can actually intensify their severity. It continuously shrinks the size and power of the public sphere, whether it’s infrastructure or healthcare, thus stymieing its ability to withstand crises. Then, this failure to adapt is used as another reason why public resources, instead of being invested in and improved upon, should be entirely turned over to the private sector for management.

Given that it was mostly fossil fuel companies and investors that profited from the winter storm in Texas, politicians immediately pointing the finger at green energy wasn’t just randomly grasping at straws. It’s the obvious move from the disaster capitalism playbook: using this moment of shock to continue empowering the profitability of disaster. “The fact that they mentioned the Green New Deal in particular was very clever,” says Westervelt. “It’s like, ‘Let’s immediately talk about something that has been branded as socialist, so people won’t think about how this is a clear failure of capitalism.'”

In the early days of the pandemic, there were theories about whether lockdowns would heal nature, with the implication being that humans are the “real” virus. Leaving aside the problematic nature of denying the value of human lives, did the pandemic really help us avert the climate crisis? “Not at all,” says Westervelt, who is not a fan of the narrative that the coronavirus disaster was a salve for the environment. “We’ve already hurtled past whatever emissions reductions there had been from the pandemic — and we’re not even back to full steam, at all.” A recent estimate showed that fossil fuel emissions were 2% higher in December 2020 than in December 2019. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) also reported that there was a “significant jump” in levels of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat exponentially better than carbon dioxide. According to the NOAA, 2020 saw the “largest annual increase [of methane] recorded since systematic measurements began in 1983.”

As was the case after Katrina, over the course of the coronavirus pandemic the Trump administration also rolled back environmental regulations, using the crisis as an excuse. “The reason methane emissions went up is actually because there weren’t regulators out checking on them, and refineries were just flaring methane up into the air whenever they needed to,” says Westervelt. “And because of those environmental rollbacks, they could do that without fearing any kind of fine.” The pandemic also led to suspensions on single-use plastic bans or reduction policies, in part influenced by right-wing think tanks promoting the idea that reusable items were more dangerous during COVID.

“A few of the rollbacks that happened towards the end of the Trump administration are maybe more straightforward to undo, but the rest of them have to be litigated,” Westervelt continues. In addition to these deregulatory moves, COVID relief measures continued to give money to the fossil fuel industry.

Clearly, this isn’t really a would-you-rather game between two disasters — climate change or a pandemic. Instead, it’s about how to rein in corporate greed and accountability. In Westervelt’s view, the climate crisis and the coronavirus crisis are two inter-related consequences of late-stage capitalism, where profit supersedes public interest. In such a system, the desire to maximize the bottom line is seen as obviously rational, while prioritizing the public good requires more justification. “Of course people need to be able to profit from it,” says Westervelt. “What other incentive could there possibly be?” That’s why it’s frustrating for her when people cling to the myth that the fossil fuel industry can be a part of the clime crisis solution. “Even a lot of people who think we should act on climate and who think there should be climate policy still have this idea in their head that, somehow, oil companies are going to be involved in some good-faith way,” she says. 

The heated national debates over coronavirus lockdown measures that hurt corporate profits, contrasted with the moral panic over giving too much aid to struggling workers, is an example of a fundamental conflict of interest between private interests and public good. While e-commerce retailers like Amazon made record profits during the pandemic, its workers’ wages rose only about 7%, with COVID-19 hazard pay being suspended in May 2020. It continued to face accusations of awful working conditions during COVID and more recently fought hard to bust a historic unionization drive organized by Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama.

Amazon’s COVID wins didn’t just come in the form of huge profits, but also in selling the perception that it’s basically providing a public service, essential to surviving the disaster. It delivers everything to your doorstep quickly, reliably, often more cheaply than anyone else — and the convenience it offers hopes to make itself indispensable to you. Meanwhile, the USPS faced another resurgence of privatization calls during the pandemic, its financial complications used as an example of textbook government mismanagement instead of the result of a controversial 2006 reform that forced the USPS to pre-fund medical benefits for employees, combined with continuously falling revenue.

Often the framing pushed by proponents of privatization and deregulation is that the private sector can serve public interest better than the public sector. But one of the most egregious examples of pandemic disaster capitalism, and how this can’t be true, has been the refusal to make the vaccine more accessible worldwide — a public interest if there ever was one. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccine developments were in large part made possible by tax-funded research and government grants, yet the pharma companies are on track to generate immense profits, in the billions of dollars. What’s more, in order to protect future corporate profits, the wealthiest nations of the World Trade Organization — including the U.S. — have voted to block the waiving of certain patents that would enable countries with fewer resources to dramatically ramp up vaccine manufacturing. The message seems to be that the right of corporations and their shareholders to generate profit is more important than preventing further illness and death.

In the months and years to come, it’s possible that government austerity, deregulation, and privatization will once again be advanced as a necessity to healing from disaster. But it’s also possible that this strategy is becoming too predictable by now, used so often that more of us are growing wiser to the machinations of disaster capitalism, and corporate greed more generally. “I do think there’s a higher level of awareness,” says Westervelt. “For example, I think that young people are so much more impervious to the kinds of things that the [fossil fuel] industry has been doing for a long time than people of previous generations were. The industry is being caught flat-footed by the youth climate movement. They’re shitting their pants about them.”

“They’re like, ‘What do we do? How do we position ourselves so that we’re seen as part of the solution, how do we come off as authentic online?'” Westervelt continues. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. For the first time in a long time, I really feel like their social license has been pretty dramatically eroded.”

“I look at how the conversation has progressed around the Green New Deal in the last few years. When that was first announced, a lot of people criticized it on the right, of course, but on the left too, people were like, ‘Oh, this is just biting off more than we can chew’ and ‘why would you make people think about wealth inequality?'” she recalls. Those objections and questions from the left aren’t happening as much anymore. “Now it would be weird for a Democrat, in particular, to come out with a climate policy that doesn’t have some kind of environmental justice component to it.”

The time is now to take brazen steps to address climate change, not timid ones. Maybe, if the shock of disaster has historically served as such a handy pretense for ramming through major changes benefiting corporate interests, it can also be used in the opposite direction  — to pursue radical climate and economic justice.

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