Nobody Wants To Work These Days
Nobody Wants To Work These Days
Written by Kat Boskovic
It’s spring semester of 2025 and you’re the Assistant Style Editor. You wake up, hit your Mexico Mango Geek bar, and swipe off of Do-Not-Disturb to find an onslaught of emails, all from prospective Your Magazine writers gunning for a spot in our print issue. Pitch review is tonight, where you’ll argue for over an hour on which pitches to pick up and which ones to toss to the side, the Google Doc now spanning six pages of potential.
Today? No Geek bar. No pitches.
My lungs are officially in recovery, but at what cost? Apparently, the entire Emerson student body has decided to flush their respective $80,000 tuition checks down the drain and waste their days away smoking in the alley in preparation for unemployment. I didn’t know y’all had Frank Gallagher on your 2026 vision boards, but here we are. We all certainly know after my scathing review on the SKIMS bush line (shameless plug here) my thoughts on Kim Kardashian, but perhaps my least favorite pubic toupee saleswoman wasn’t far off: get your fucking ass up and work! “I overcommitted myself” this, “midterms are killing me” that; meanwhile, we put out one model call and all of a sudden everyone and their mother has time to look hot for Instagram. It’s a 500-word article, we’re not asking you to solve world hunger.
Journalism and WLP students talk so much about AI stealing their jobs, but—and I apologize in advance—it’s not like you’re putting up a fight. For our March issue, of the eight pitches we received that weren’t written by members of our executive board, six of them were from a bot. That’s right—you got outworked by a bot living its best editorial life. While you were making the perilous three-minute trek to El Jefe’s to fulfill your munchies, a non-Emerson email under a name that doesn’t even show up in our Merit Pages sent six full pitches. And sure, they were incredibly surface-level ( “Dress For Who You Are Becoming, Not Who You Were” is not unique). Sure, they all ended with “The tone is candid, relatable, and emotionally resonant” or “The approach is intimate, reflective, and human-centered.” Sure, there was even a pitch for a Culture section we don’t even have, but at least the bot sent a pitch—on time, if any of you could imagine that. I myself am terrified of AI narrowing my own career prospects as a complete one-trick-pony whose only talent is rearranging words around in a Google Doc, but we’re only making our own beds if we let AI already do a better job than us when Large Language Models are only four-years-old.
The only comfort I can find amongst the crickets of my Gmail are the rumors I hear from the Emerson grapevine of other struggling magazines. Not to celebrate another’s misfortune, but each time I open Instagram and see that another magazine extended a deadline, I take solace in our shared suffering. Misery loves company, I suppose! Not to worry, misery will love you too when you receive the diploma you went into tens of thousands of dollars of debt for and realize your portfolio is as empty as our inboxes.
If Your Magazine was supposed to only showcase the work of our executive board, it would be called Our Magazine. But we want you to show up, pitch, write, and make this magazine the amalgamation of student work it’s supposed to be! Sure, we’re not a Conde Nast publication, but there’s only one way to get there. Make this magazine yours… or else I’m going to start vaping again. Don’t make me do it.