This message comes from There's More to That, a podcast from the Smithsonian magazine. With an insatiable curiosity, host Ari Daniels covers history, science, and culture. Subscribe to There's More to That and find out how much more there is to almost everything.

The year was 2010.

I was very committed to skinny jeans.

I had just graduated from college, and everyone was playing Angry Birds.

It felt like all I'd do is win by DJ Khaled, featuring T.Pain, Ludacris, Rick Ross, and Snoop Dog was bumping in every club across the country.

But in the job market, all I did was lose.

Like many millennials, I graduated into an economy still very much rocked by the 2008 recession.

It took me years to find the kind of full-time salaried work that many people once thought of

as the pot of gold at the end of the undergrad rainbow. But even though the economy recovered

and I got jobs and lost them and landed new ones,

I never felt fully secure.

I felt and still feel like I always got to have a second or third thing I can fall back on

if the work in front of me dries up.

I can never get off the grind.

I know a lot of other people feel that way too, and there's a reason for that.

There are all these books now that will offer you a guide for how to, you know, detach from your

work and, like, chill out a bit, and, you know, of course, all that's for the best, but there are

really deep structural and material forces that are pressing this way of thinking on people. That pot

of gold has been very elusive for a lot of people. That's Eric Baker. He's a lecturer at Harvard

University and the author of the book, Make Your Own Job, how the entrepreneurial work ethic

exhausted America. When I was writing the book, Make Your Own Job, while the entrepreneurial work ethic exhausted America.

When I was writing the book, I sometimes told people that I was writing

...