Pop Culture Enables Toxic Work Environments

In August of 2021 I was hired as the Marketing Director for a performing arts organization housed at a university and the School of the Arts at that university. This was a job I should have loved. A dream job. At first, I was out of my skin with joy. I would get to engage with and promote the arts every day! How wonderfully perfect!

And I did love this job. For a while.

Sometime after I was hired, I was told I would also be the Marketing Director for a Museum. And its Grand Opening. At a mansion. Donated by a prominent local family. With an exhibition that encompassed not only art on walls, but multiple lectures, workshops and performances. When the date of the opening was set, it coincided exactly with our season launch for the performing arts series that year – a recipe for a cauldron of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion.

This was never mentioned in any of the many rounds of interviews I had for the job, nor was it in the job description.

I was already overworked as Marketing Director for two organizations, before adding a third organization to my responsibilities. Around this time, I learned that my predecessor suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of her workload, went on medical leave, and ultimately quit without ever returning to the job. And this was without the Museum on her plate.

As the opening of the Museum loomed alongside the performing arts launch, I was beginning to experience physical and mental issues related to stress, including hearing loss in one ear for several days. I went to a specialist and they asked me if I had been experiencing any stress. I just laughed.

The doctor told me I had suffered some hearing loss. He predicted some of it would likely come back, but I needed to find a way to minimize the stress.

 So before I succumbed to the fate of the previous Marketing Director, I quit.

I know this situation sadly isn’t unique. Excessive burnout is just an accepted facet of modern American life, and it happens everywhere from multinational corporations on through state-run universities. Saying “No” to this fixture of burnout feels a bit like Oliver Twist – shyly asking “Please Sir, I want some more.” You just don’t do it. And if you do, you pay a hefty price. The fixture bellows backs at you. “WHAT?!” Who dares to confront this system, so entrenched in every bit of our lives?

Prior to quitting, there wasn’t much differentiation between work-time and leisure-time for me. I was so burned out that I would come home, sit in my egg chair on the porch sipping wine, and just stare at the wall. I had no head space. No room for any thinking outside of work.

The Frankfurt School hypothesizes that all of this is by design. Employment exhausts the working class so much that all they can do in their leisure is consume the “art” of pop culture. But this isn’t truly rejuvenating, and just propels us back into work in an unending, depleting cycle.

Adorno expands on this, asserting that we are denied novelty in the drudgery of our work, but our work depletes us so much that we are too exhausted to look for novelty ion our leisure time, so we turn to easily digestible, mass-produced popular culture.

I can attest that this is true to some extent for many folks. When I asked fellow employees on Mondays what they had done over the weekend, the overwhelmingly common response was, “I laid on the couch and watched Netflix.” This is the epitome of a work-leading to mass culture-leading to work cycle. Workers are too spent to consume anything other than mass produced drudgery, which reinforces the ideology of the very system that is causing workers to feel spent to begin with.

Marcuse, however, holds out hope that “images and positions of authentic culture” may persist and even experience a sort of renaissance if we are aware in our perception and intentional in our actions.

I can say with confidence that after I left this toxic, “burnout” work environment, indeed my headspace has returned, and I am not resigned to consuming only mass media (although admittedly, I still consume some). I have more headspace and energy for everything from exercise to visiting museums to reading, which I had to all but forgo in my previous situation.

What do you think? Is the seduction of mass media too difficult to escape in modern life with its pressures, responsibilities, and pervasive burnout culture?