The “Enshittification” of Work: Why Your Career Feels Broken

Per My Last Email

Kaila and Kyle explore the concept of the "enshittification" of work, applying a tech platform degradation model to modern careers. They discuss how traditional promises around college

Key takeaways

• Kaila introduces the "enshittification" framework, originally from tech platforms like Facebook, to explain how career systems degrade after users are locked in.
• Kyle notes that trust in higher education has declined by 20 points since 2015, making college degrees less of a guaranteed differentiator.

Main topics

• Enshittification theory applied to careers
• Higher education value and trust decline

Notable quotes

"We were sold a dream... you go to college, you put in the work, you get that like prestigious first job and then you're locked in for life and you are set."

Conclusion

The episode reframes widespread career dissatisfaction as a systemic shift rather than personal failure,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I have a theory on why you might not be feeling so great in your career right now, and it's called the ens***ification of work. Speaker 1 (0:05) And I have a little bit of a pushback in why I think there's actually more opportunity out there than ever before. Let's Speaker 2 (0:12) get into it. Speaker 2 (0:18) So I don't know about you, but I've been feeling a little icky recently. Speaker 1 (0:21) Oh, yeah. I just went to the doctor, too. Speaker 2 (0:23) Yeah, they said icky. Speaker 1 (0:25) Sir, you have a bad case of the icky. Yeah. Speaker 2 (0:28) No, I just so so bear with me here, because I feel like I have had these like feelings of delusion, delusionment. with not my job, love my job, love Morning Brew, but with like career in general. And I was like, maybe this is just age. Maybe this is just like where I am in my life, you know? And I'm noticing that all of my, many of my friends are expressing similar feelings of disillusionment with. The current format that we're living in. And I'm like, why? Like, what is this? And every discussion of why the job market is bad right now feels like it's addressing the symptoms and not the problems. Speaker 1 (1:04) And Speaker 2 (1:05) so I have been thinking about this a lot. And the TLDR is I still don't have like the perfect answer. Speaker 1 (1:14) You haven't solved why we're feeling icky across the board. Speaker 2 (1:18) Where nobody else could. But here's kind of let me just describe what I'm feeling like. Like, I feel like we as employees were sold a dream. And this is maybe very millennial of me. But like you go to college, you put in the work, you get that like prestigious first job and then you're locked in for life and you are set. Speaker 2 (1:39) You're going to work at a company that cares about you and invests in you and you're going to grow in your career. And every two years you're going to get a promotion with a 15 % raise. You're going to get a sick bonus at the end of the year. And then you're going to be happy forever. And obviously that is not true in almost every case. There are probably three people in the world that have experienced this. Yeah, Speaker 1 (2:01) they're in Tibet. They don't even know what careers are. They're meditating. Speaker 2 (2:06) And at the same time, to have a little empathy for the employers, I feel like there has been this system that's been put in place. It's like, you know, you have to continue to grow. You have to show improving results, not every year, every quarter in order to be considered a success. Speaker 2 (2:29) keep your job at the top in order to like be viewed as a positive, good company. You have to be constantly growing. And the only way to do that at a certain level is by squeezing costs and by squeezing the consumers that you have and like finding new ways to grow revenue, I guess, in perpetuity. It's like find a Speaker 1 (2:53) new lemon or take the lemons you have and squeeze the shit out of them. Exactly. And extract every last drop of lemon in this metaphor. Speaker 2 (3:02) 100%. And I feel like we're at the point where there's only a few drops left. Stop squeezing me. Speaker 1 (3:07) You Speaker 2 (3:08) know, into our lemon juice. And it's just like, okay, like, A, this feels like a bargain that I didn't necessarily sign up for. Speaker 1 (3:18) And. Speaker 2 (3:19) Even though I have empathy for everyone in this situation, like I feel gross. Speaker 1 (3:22) And Speaker 2 (3:23) B, what is possibly next? Yeah. Like everything in this lemon is juiced. The zest has been grated. You know, the lemon poppy seed muffins are in the oven. Yeah, Speaker 1 (3:34) yeah. What can we do next? I'm Speaker 2 (3:36) sick of lemons. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:37) I don't have a lime up in here. Speaker 2 (3:38) What is next, you know? Speaker 1 (3:40) And I also think just to add a societal layer onto this, what's interesting to me is. If you look at a lot of the individual stats around like, I don't know, GDP growth per capita, you know, all those stats like they're they're fine. And in a lot of ways, they still have been going up. But if you look at happiness, at least in the United States, it's been decreasing relative to other countries and on an absolute basis of how we rank ourselves. And so it's this weird thing. And I think it applies to what you're talking about. We're like. If you look at the individual components maybe of the job market or, you know, how companies are growing and blah, blah, blah. It's like it feels fine. But when you think about it in like your own lived experience, it feels icky. And it's hard to understand why that is. Speaker 2 (4:31) Right. And this is a conversation that we've had in the past, which is like, are we just sadder? Yeah. Like, is it an us problem or is this a systemic problem? Or like, what is explaining this feeling of like, this isn't really how I expected this to be. And I can't imagine this is sustainable. Speaker 1 (4:51) And Speaker 2 (4:51) so TLDR, the term that has felt the maybe most accurate in my experience is in shitification, which. Speaker 1 (5:03) Kayla, I love this. This was Kayla's. I just got to say. This was your entire idea for this episode. It's so good. Thank you. And shitification. When I heard that, I was like, we have to do an episode on this. Describe what in shitification is and why it best describes what we've been feeling. Speaker 2 (5:18) Yes. So it is not a term to describe career and apologies. If you are driving your kids to school right now, we're going to say in shitification a lot in the next 15 minutes. I don't Speaker 1 (5:28) know Speaker 2 (5:28) about a lot, Speaker 1 (5:29) but we, I mean, they can hear like three or four words. Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:32) We're rated PG-13 on this episode. But the concept is actually initially about tech platforms. And I can use Facebook as an example here. So the concept is that Facebook and other tech platforms have gained users with a premise. And the premise is... Come join my platform. Hang out with your friends. Everyone is here. This is amazing. You're going to build these incredible communities. You're going to be able to talk to your friends in Europe that you haven't seen since you were in fifth grade. Like everything is good here and we're never going to use your data. We're never going to, you know, sell you ads or whatever. Speaker 1 (6:08) And Speaker 2 (6:09) then everyone joins on to this premise and then it's good for, it's good for consumers. Second round is. Okay, consumers are hooked. Now, how do we monetize that? Well, we have a ton of value on this platform. There are a ton of people willingly putting information and their own data into this. We can absolutely monetize this. Let's bring in the advertisers. Let's bring in the businesses. And then they can pay to get access to this community that we've created. And then that... continues to work. Maybe consumers are, again, this is not just Facebook, but I'm using Facebook as the example. Users are on Facebook and they're like, gosh, like I'm scrolling and I'm getting a lot of ads per scroll. Like I'm seeing two of my friends' kids' pictures and then one ad for a dog food company. Okay. I'm still getting my friends. I have to be on here because otherwise how am I going to communicate with my friends? We're all here. And then finally is okay, we've kind of reached the limit of the number of people that are here that are locked in, the businesses are locked in because now this is how they're growing their businesses. How do we extract maximum value for us, the company, the platform? And that goes with, now there's, again, I'm not speaking about Facebook specifically. I don't actually know that this is true, but now there's maybe more fraud in the B2B space. Now maybe you have to spend more cents. to get a single conversion, more dollars to get a single conversion or to get a click on your ad because the platform is so inundated from a business perspective with ads. On the consumer side, now you're getting one picture of your friend's puppy for three ads. Speaker 1 (7:55) And now Speaker 2 (7:55) you're like, wait a minute. Why am I here? Like, why am I still engaging with this platform when the value that I'm getting is so much lower than the value that's being extracted from me because my eyeballs are the value that I'm providing? Speaker 1 (8:07) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:08) And so anyways, again, no, no hate, no shade to Facebook. But just as an example, like then people start boycotting Facebook. Then people start leaving. They're like, why would I