This is the first August in 17 years where I’m not preparing to go back to school. Do you know what that means? I think I do, but really I don’t. It sounds disingenuous when anyone says it, but I’m still going to say it: I love school, and I still still can’t imagine myself doing anything else but returning eventually to academia. (I mean, isn’t that why people keep doing it? I feel too weird to be a lawyer, I feel so out of place everywhere else. Hah hah hah.)

But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged. […] When I expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to “re-evaluate what work means” and to consider “post-work imaginaries”. A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: “Why don’t you tap into your trust fund?”

After all the warnings, what I’ve witnessed and experienced, how sick it has made me…still. There are places people belong, and no amount of crying and head-shaking undoes that, nothing shames you out of your belonging. You shoulda known better, girl. This is what makes it so confusing. I can’t go on right now, I must go on, I don’t know where else one could possibly go. There isn’t a post-work imaginary for me, except maybe sometimes when I speak to Debbie. But Debbie is a poet and an artist and beautiful, and I’m none of those things. I want my entire life to be a kind of work, don’t you?