My Career Path Disappeared. At Least I Have Tennis.
I don't even want to think about what my mental state would be like without it.
Everyone I know who ever worked in media was texting each other two weekends ago about the New York Times’s story “The Gen X Career Freakout.” The gist is that the long careers we all thought we would have in magazines, advertising, graphic design, et cetera, have been cut short and no one knows what the f*ck to do anymore, and most of us are just out here flailing and feeling washed up and old and useless.
Or maybe I’m projecting? There was a period last year when I decided I was going to try to get a full-time job and it was depressing and humiliating and such a massive, massive waste of time. One company had me do a full edit test and sit through interviews with five different people based on the STAR method. It’s one of those corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo rubrics that Douglas Coupland definitely would have made fun of that, as far as I can tell, is just judging how good of a bullshitter you are. Turns out I was reasonably good at bullshitting because as the chirpy recruiter told me, I “passed” the interview but I still didn’t get the job. This was my face when she told me this:
This company recently had a full return-to-work order so I wonder what the guy who interviewed me who said he stops working at 3 p.m. every day is doing now.
Another company had me write a memo about a new section they were thinking of launching and had me meet with the boss’s boss and then just sort of strung me along for months and then ghosted me, and then I applied for a somewhat junior role there because I was like what the hell else am I doing and the hiring manager for that position, who is at least 15 years younger than me, was like, sorry sweetie, you’re overqualified and frankly this is an embarrassing email to have to write. (She didn’t really say that, but that was the subtext.)
Anyway, I won’t go through all of the other experiences, but suffice to say, if you can tolerate your job at all right now, just hold on to it. It’s grim out there.
(And let’s not even get into the way the whole world feels like it’s just crumbling around us, OK?)
You’re probably reading this and thinking, okay, cool story, but I thought this was a tennis newsletter? And it IS! The way this all relates to tennis is that in the throes of all of this misery and abject humiliation, tennis was practically the only thing keeping me remotely sane and not completely spiraling. For one thing, on the days I could play, it meant that for at least two to three hours I wasn’t sitting at home doomscrolling or staring at LinkedIn and thinking, “Should I apply for this job that over 100 people have already applied for that pays what I was making in 2010?” Instead I was thinking about swinging from low to high and accelerating on my serve and trying to remember to come up to the net if my partner hit a volley.
I’ve needed to obsess over something that wasn’t our extremely precarious financial situation or my feelings of inadequacy or that my career—almost my entire industry—had essentially just disappeared. Also, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that just as my career path seemed to shrivel up, I became the captain of my tennis team and threw myself into that role as if it was my job. I’m just saying.
On the tennis court no one cares if you’re unemployed or going through an existential crisis, just that you can get a little yellow ball over a net more consistently than your opponent. There’s something really comforting about that. Maybe that’s not very Gen X of me, but then again I never really identified with Gen X that much anyway.
I have been gently ribbed for having secret prepper tendencies. How this manifests on the tennis court is that not only do I have a first aid kit in my bag, but I also have ibuprofen, KT tape, and instant cold packs. The cold packs in particular have come in handy lately. I was playing singles recently and hit a ball pretty deep to my opponent’s ad court corner (she was right-handed, so it was to her backhand), and she was running backwards to get it and tripped over herself and conked her head. Falling full-force, backwards, onto a tennis court is pretty freaking painful, and she was clearly hurt. “I have an ice pack!” I announced, somewhat triumphantly, and broke the little packet inside to make it cold. She sat down on the court and applied it to the back of her head, and after a few minutes said she didn’t think she could continue playing. I asked her to text me later to let me know how she was doing and it turned out she had a minor concussion! But—ice pack came in handy.
The second time was the other night when I was meeting up with someone on my team to sub for her doubles partner in another league she plays in. I was getting out of the car and dropped a bunch of stuff and was also carrying my enormous 40-ounce Stanley water bottle, which I had just filled up at home, and so I put the water bottle on the roof of my car so I could pick my stuff up off the ground. The Stanley has a narrow base so that it will fit in a car cupholder, but that also means that it doesn’t balance very well anywhere else. Do you see where this is going? The Stanley fell off the roof of the car, and instead of just letting it fall to the ground—it’s made of stainless steel! It had water in it! I was outside! Who cares!—I tried to break its fall with my hand. Like…what. Why would I do that?! But lo and behold, I had an ice pack, so I was able to reduce the swelling immediately and it wasn’t so bad. (Truly, this could have been very bad. I feel like I was maybe an inch away from breaking my hand.)
Anyway, I got these Clever Health cold packs—they come in a pack of six for $9.99. It’s not a bad idea to keep them in your tennis bag, because you never know when your opponent is going to get a concussion or you almost break your hand.
Hey, thanks for reading. (A lot of you are reading! THANK YOU.) I’m wondering: What else do you want from this Substack? Is there anything you’re curious about? Respond to this email and let me know what’s on your mind.
See you on the court.
Gen Xer here who hates my job but am trying to hold on. I know I don’t want to be doing what I am doing but don’t know what to do. And why would they hire a 49 year old when they can hire a 29 year old for half the salary. This literally keeps me up at night and is the biggest source of my panic attacks. Sigh.
Loved the post. I don't play tennis but took up sewing in my early 30s. I wasn't thinking about it this way at the time, but I was on the academic job market then and there was something really mind clearing about smushing two edges of fabric together and sewing a seam. And doing that over and over again until I had something that looked like a bathrobe or curtains or a shirt. And little by little I got better. I sewed a lot during COVID and tried to keep up after becoming a parent. I made a coat when my husband went back to work and I was still on leave. It felt a little nuts and maybe I should have rested but also it felt nice to work on something for myself with my hands and have a little bit of progress every few days.