Redundancy is a Feeling
Published in Stadtsprachen magazine March 2025
Tuesday, 8.15 am, April 2023
“I’ve got a feeling wooo hoooo that …”
“Come on people, show me what you got! 60 seconds left on this station!”
“That tonight’s gonna be a good night. That tonight’s gonna be a…”
“That’s it girl, just go a bit lower. Lower still. Yes, feel that burn!”
“Tonight’s the night. Let’s live it up. Got my money, let’s spend it up!”
“Beep beep beep!”
I got a feeling, and it’s burning in my butt. I’ve been squatting up down up down for god knows how many frenetic seconds til the bleep. I move stations to the jumping jacks, and Kirsty, bouncy Kirsty, with her swinging ponytail and rippling bod is back at my side.
“Alright girl, your tracker doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s get you hooked up to another one.”
I pull up my sweaty ‘Weather the Storm’ t-shirt and unclip the numbered red bit of plastic strapped to my chest.
“Take the band off as well, maybe that’s the issue.”
Reluctantly, I unstrap the elastic band, releasing a few droplets of my sweat onto the floor.
“I feel stressed out, I wanna let it go. Let’s go way out spaced out and losing all control (Ch-ch-ch).”
I don’t have the time or heart to tell Kirsty that I don’t give a shit about tracking my heartbeat. I’m not signed up for the app to measure my success. I am not looking at the TV screen to see if my little box containing my name and number is red (fast and good) or blue (slow and bad). I am not comparing my bpm to the other 14 people stretching their lycra to the sped-up beats. But now that it seems difficult to locate my heartbeat, I’m glancing up at the screen to see if anyone else is having the same struggles as me.
The playlist runs through David Guetta ft. Akon Sexy Chick, Sean Paul She Doesn’t Mind, Flo Rida Club Can’t Handle Me and every sugar-shooting hyped-up sexist track that I was necking Jägerbombs to, and fist-pumping to, and snogging to, and tottering to the bathrooms ready to puke to, at age 18. It’s no longer Saturday night, it’s Tuesday morning, 13 years later, and part of my soul is still a little stuck to that icky, sticky feeling spilt all over the carpeted dance floor.
“I got a feeling…” and it isn’t a whimsical nostalgia. It’s maybe millennials’ number one hit, the hit that hits them hard in the chest when they repeat and repeat and push and repeat and thrust and drop to the floor, run from it, on the spot. Going nowhere, because they are the built-in spare part just in case the system fails. Not even a cog but an extra cog.
We are underground and the walls are painted black. The lights are flashing red and green, but we feel orange. Disinfectant and sweat particles battle it out in the air, while the puffing, straining bodies compete against each other, themselves, their tracked PBs. In the 45-minute session, no one makes eye contact. Maybe this is why I am struggling to locate my heartbeat.
10.03 am
Login to Slack. Scan the left-hand bar of active and inactive colleagues to see if my boss is already online. Green. Of course. I scroll through the channels in BOLD to read through all the messages that don’t affect me to kill some time. In ‘general’, someone else has announced their leaving. As these messages are now popping up every week, no one but the obliged CEO has the energy to comment on the post: “Thank you so much Derek for your contribution to the company.” I click + on the red heart emoji turning the count from 7 to 8. I consider adding to the count of crying face emojis, but seeing as I have never met Derek from devs, nor even heard the sound of his voice or Zoomed or ‘huddled’ with, or pinged him, or interacted with him in any meaningful or unmeaningful way at all, I decide it’s a bit much to react to his announced departure with a crying face, so I go for a rocket. Instantly regret it, and so undo. That overthinking about emoji choice helps my sedentary brain to thaw.
The company I’ve been working for as a freelance content writer didn’t take off. Its big US competitors hoovered up that promise of success. The founders are fighting, the investors pulling out. There have been so many colleagues eliminated that at this point, no one is even sending around an e-card for me to add a GIF to. The HR manager left last month so luckily there are no longer suggestions of virtual leaving drinks. Remote work gives rise to a general feeling of detachedness to one’s colleagues, and oneself. Yet, although I don’t care that Derek is leaving, I still groan at the empty copy-pasted tone of the CEO’s comment on his leaving announcement. Although I still believe in the ethos of the company, I feel myself starting to give up this particular fight for a better world. I can taste that the water is stagnant at the imaginary water cooler, and perceive my manager’s increasingly shitty mood, the more cuts there are, and the worse my work apparently becomes.
I see the ‘…’ appear next to my manager’s green dot and start to panic.
“Hey there, how are you? Did you get the chance to see my feedback on the article?”
Oh god. I open the document and all I see are the crossed-out lines and congested stream of comments boxes on the right-hand side.
“Hi, yes, just looking at it now.”
“It needed a lot of reworking. Most of the content is there, but the style is not what we need for this kind of piece. Please refer to the TOV guide again if you need to, and make sure to be hitting the keyword count. I counted only 11 mentions of “podcasting”. You can use the find and replace tool to see how many you’ve packed in there. When my manager’s ‘…’s have calmed down, I go through my article, trying to find the traces of me left in it, seeing that I have been replaced by a flat matte coating of frequently Googled and easily programmable neutral tones. People search for key terms. “Podcasting equipment”. They search for information. They want it quick. Easy to digest. They are not looking for your jokes. Metaphors are inefficient. They don’t need to see you.
Startups have been stripping the souls of the people in this city, and stripping the soul of the city in the past few years. Corporations destroy you gradually with their disinfectant-tasting tepid cups of tea, but startups come at you with brightly coloured company-branded free water bottles full of some kombucha-flavoured DEET that hasn’t been properly tested yet. It strips your pages of words of their meaning. When you put on the “weather the storm” t-shirt they sent out to help you get through the start of the pandemic and notice the softness of the high thread count, you start to disintegrate a little from the inside. Your self-worth is weakened to the point that you slip from “I might as well not be here” to “I am not here in any real sense.” So the feeling of being redundant is not necessarily dependent on being unemployed.
12.04 pm
It’s my lunch break, yet rather than eat or go outside, I am still online. I am in the waiting room of a Zoom call, waiting for my therapist to let me in. Where is she? I feel the frustration rising, rising.
“Oh hello, sorry I’m late. My last session ran over a little. I will account for the time with you though. So, how are you feeling today?” She speaks incredibly slowly. This is probably her mastered “soothing tone” but it just riles me up because when it comes to online therapy, time is money, and the slower she speaks the less I am able to offload in our 50-minute session.
“Erm yeah, pretty fine. Well, I was home last weekend, as you know, and it was pretty… difficult.” My voice cracks. “Pretty explosive.”
“Hmm, right. And what, may I ask, was the trigger of the explosion?”
“Oh, the usual. We went around in the same old circles and they didn’t listen to me. He quit his job again, without telling them. Mum found out by going through his mail and finding the leaving confirmation paper or whatever it’s called, so there is a lot of tension between the three of them and I don’t know what to do. They keep pushing him to do a course in marketing or something, but they just don’t get that studying isn’t for him. Their other big idea for a solution is meeting someone, but Tinder is not the answer to problems. Then my mum blamed me because I don’t call him enough. Then I exploded.”
I didn’t really know where to look in these Zooms. It was kind of impossible to connect with Sarah the CBT therapist’s eyes through the screen. If I look at the green light next to my laptop’s camera, I feel watched, which I know is the point, but it creeps me out a little, nonetheless. So I stare off into space, and disconnect again.
“Right, well. Next time you are faced with a situation that presents an emotional overload, think about using some techniques to help those raging emotions pass. Physical excursion is always recommended. For example, doing some jumping jacks.”
“Jumping jacks?”
Something inside me starts to shut down.
“Or change the environment. Go out for a walk and take in some fresh air. Engage with nature.”
If I just don’t stop moving – jumping jacks, walking about, doing rings around the park on my lunch break rather than Zooming with Sarah for hot tips on how to stay sane, will I be able to stomp out these complicated feelings?
Before, I understood redundancy as being a term to describe a status of employment. Now, I see that it does not just hang with emotional weight, but is in and of itself a feeling that many people struggle with. I realised this when I recently searched for a new therapist on the UK’s psychotherapy and counselling database, and listed next to anxiety and depression, is redundancy.
Is the feeling of redundancy specific? I think so. You can be anxious that you have no money, and depressed that you find no purpose in the day. When you lack that structure that holds you in place, that window of time to stare out of and suppress thoughts like “is this it?” When you are pushed out the window, you don’t float, you don’t fly like a loyal worker bee. You fall into a frenzy, splat into a puddle of spilt craft beer that tastes bitter, that overwhelms you with all its deep, complex flavours – powerlessness, uselessness, insignificance. It’s flat, and laced with hoppy undertones of stuck loser. But still, no one drinks for free. They drown.
6.13 pm
Swipe swipe swipe. Nothing is catching my eye here so I leave the app and start downloading a different one. While that is loading up, I go back into OK Cupid and scroll through my messages. Out of the people Cupid hit me with 92, 94, 96% match estimations, none struck. Despite having all my data, Cupid could also not locate my heart.
I didn’t reply to the ones that messaged me because they were either not hot or they had a girlfriend and just wanted “something casual, ONS” on the side. Most of the ones I’d bothered to message didn’t reply to me. Then there were the ones who I already knew: the absolute jerk I was stuck with at an artist’s residency for a month, who is going by a different name on his dating profile, and is, apparently, a 92% match. IRL, he never asked me how I was or what I was working on. But now he wants to know “Hey you, whats up? ;)”. Then there is the guy I dated for a year who pretended to the outside world that I didn’t exist. He has listed his desires as “non-monogamy, short-term hookups” and is only a 78% match, which I think is stretching it. He had messaged me asking if I wanted to come over and watch a movie. Thinking about those dark grubby sheets, I sigh.
The other app has now finished downloading. This is the one they say you should try if you want to find people who are up for a real connection, who want to develop something more than being someone’s Tuesday night person. I have been wary of trying it. You have to strike up a conversation by responding directly to something they have put on their profile. Their prompts are supposed to help make them stand out from the rest, but frighteningly, everyone seems the same. They “have a passion for road bikes” and their “ideal Sunday” is bouldering followed by browsing records at the flea market. They are all looking for “deep, meaningful connections”. Their “best travel story” is represented by a picture of their muscly back, as they stare off into the distance at a generic epic mountain view. Surely not everyone can like bouldering? Are these copypasted personalities? Are these actually bots? Or is the problem that people don’t really know who they are anymore?
One guy looked pretty decent. But when I messaged him, a few minutes later, he had vanished. He must have blocked me. What the hell? Being blocked by the only guy I liked the look of and had sent a funny little message to, felt like having a drink thrown in my face.
As a woman, getting matches was supposed to be easy. Men swipe right three times as much as women. But now I have a better sense of myself as a fish in a ginormous school in a rising sea, I know I am less than nothing special. Then imagine how the men must feel. Especially those in the bottom 50% of men, who are thrown a 4% scrap of women’s likes to fight for amongst themselves. 41% of women’s likes go to the top 5% of men. A top 1% man gets 190 more likes than a man in the bottom 50%[1]. Those stats explain why the only guy I kind of liked on Hinge, who was probably a top 1%er, didn’t care to message me back, but it still doesn’t dislodge that hard feeling embedded deep in my chest. And again, imagine how those crab-like men looking up from the bottom of the ocean bed must feel.
Women don’t need men in the same way that they used to. Now we have a lot more independence: to vote, own property, take birth control, be openly gay. Women have also recently begun to evolve metal plates over their breasts in the form of #METOO. Many women would now rather be on their own than married to an ugly, unemployed Joe Blogs. A woman’s self-worth is also no longer intrinsically tied to her marital status, or the success of her husband. So there is a surplus of undesirables, those bottom 50%, who find it very hard to attract women. Their general feeling of redundancy must cut deep.
8.35 pm
My parents call for a chat. I whinge a bit about work, how they keep cutting my hours. “But why don’t you get a stable job and a proper contract rather than freelancing?” Dad says.
“I told you. It’s not a choice Dad. The job market is fucked!”
“Don’t swear.”
I move the conversation on to more positive topics – that I made a new friend in my writing class.
“What does she do for work?” he asks. “Oh she must earn a lot of money then.” “Does she own her flat then?” “What does her boyfriend do for a job?” His usual script of inquiry about people is running over me like a reversing car – his judgement of my “poor choices”, his anxiety that his kids are losers of life, spawns that god-awful feeling.
The people my brother and I turned out to be did not fulfil expectations, because all of my dad’s hard work did not yield a bountiful crop of success. His generation’s manual for The Good Life had a pretty straightforward set of instructions: get a degree, work hard, get a good job, buy a lot of stuff, get married, own property, have children, go on nice holidays. Yet the children produced from all that didn’t grow in the same conditions. Our parents tried everything – tying our unruly impulses to sticks to encourage us to grow straight up. Pruning. They wanted that prize marrow so hard to enter in the competition, they didn’t see that what they had to work with was a funky-shaped carrot and a new potato. If I feel prematurely wilted, from the expectations raining down like pesticide, as they anxiously compare my growth rate at X years to theirs, imagine how my brother must feel. Still at home, still just a seed in a pot, a white spiked marker with my dad’s handwriting stabbed through the topsoil, indicating his existence.
After the call with my parents, I felt the abundance of empty space around me and briefly closed my eyes. A few big moths fluttered into a frenzy in the darker corner of my mind. I left them to it, opened my eyes and grabbed my phone.
“Sure, we can watch a movie. Now? ;)” I couldn’t fake the winky face so quickly hit backspace.
11.49 pm
“Take it easy tiger, take it easy.”
“Well my boss scheduled a meeting with the CEO, her and me, which means only one thing. That never happens. And I don’t know what I am going to do for work now. All the copywriting jobs have dried up because of this bloody AI, and I don’t know how I am going to make money. I want a profession, not going back to waitressing.”
“Take it easy, Capricorn girl.” He was facing the wall, mumbling into his pillow. I didn’t like how he saw me through this filter of astrology, that he reduced my behaviour to my apparent star sign traits, that he used them to explain me, and to shut me down.
76% was an overestimation, and I had told myself that I would not come back here – to lie very alert all night between those graffitied walls, to feel the dampness of the sweat-stained sheet, stuck in the grove of the weed-stenched memory foam.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Getting late.”
“Exactly. It’s nighttime. Time to chill.”
After marking out our retired routine, we hit the inevitable ending and curled into the shape of a speech mark signalling the end of a phrase – ” –. He pulled my arms around him, and clasped my hands firmly in his, pressed over his beating heart. Holding him there, I turned my face to the side, so he could not feel the emotion dropping onto his bare back.
*****
A week later
Last Tuesday morning, I was in an underground room with black painted walls and flashing lights and big Bose speakers that grabbed me by my clammy palm and dragged me back onto the dancefloor of 2010, aged 18, where my sloshed out Jägerbomb stuck my high-heeled sole to the laminated bathroom floor, and there I think I and many of my Millennial mates, there we have remained a bit stuck.
My whole content team was just cut. Even the email the company sent out to announce the ‘strategic shift’ was written with AI. So that redundancy feeling is now an acute pain, exacerbated from the constant dull ache – which has been in the background even before the inception of Chat GPT. Back even when I was in stable employment. Back, back, back, to when I entered adult life.
Due to forces bigger than Jägerbombs – financial, tech, global pandemic forces. And so the feeling I am trying to squat and sweat out of me at 8.15 on a Tuesday morning is a serious concoction comprised of many shades of bruise. I don’t feel myself → I don’t feel real → I don’t feel anything. Just a gaping, empty hole that I’m trying to get out of by doing more jumping jacks than I’ve ever done in a minute, that I try to get away from by running on the spot, to the beats of the same playlist I’ve been subject to since I officially entered adulthood.
At the bottom of this big hole is a lot of bad stuff out of our control. It’s the piled-up plights of the world that have been brewing and exploding since we crossed that threshold from teenage angst into an adult reality, riddled with money anxiety and the sense of everything falling apart. Our generation entered the labour market in a global recession, with nine-grand-a-year university fees. Zero-hour contracts became the norm, which, unsurprisingly, have a negative impact on young people’s physical and mental health[2], due to the anxiety insecure employment conditions induce. Three-quarters of 16-24-year-olds voted ‘Remain’ in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Young people have been disproportionately negatively affected by Brexit – from the travel restrictions to the unregulated housing market.[3]
Then there is the escalation of hard times on a global scale, and trust in governments dwindling with every blow. 911, war in Iraq, financial crisis, terrorism, war in Syria, refugee crisis in Europe, Global pandemic, Ukraine war, inflation, recession, genocide in Palestine, Trump 2.0. Every new year is stormier than the last, less affordable than the last; every August the hottest on record, singeing that easy breezy summer feeling. Where to perch in this supermassive black hole and rest our weary feet, many of which haven’t even left the starting blocks? On our mum’s couch. “Adult Children” is the term the Census[4] uses to describe the fully grown young people living at home – which sums up the situation without needing to crunch the numbers.[5] So we sink into our butt-moulded pessimistic state as we crack open a Stella, sit back, and watch it all slowly burn.
The big hole is plastered over with recycled motivational sentiments, t-shirts with an embroidered company logo on a cartoon sinking ship. But how to weather the storm that we feel inside? Try to find a partner to buy a house with, escape the rental market, get off our mum’s couch and finally start to ‘do life with’. Climb up on the pile of duff dating matches, swipe swipe swipe, but we can’t reach the next step, can’t see out of this emptiness. “AI IS COMING FOR US,” they scream. Coming for what? What is left to surrender? Our ‘connections’ rarely go beyond an ad or a profile view, our goodbyes nothing more than a copied emoji. We run the chatbots, we write articles that the algorithms will rank us highly for, we post with tags, perform their little tricks, at the right time, in the right rhythm, for who?
Redundancy is a feeling. Broke is a feeling. Unwanted, rejected, useless, purposeless pointlessness are all difficult feelings that crawl towards lethargy, curl up, and fall down into the big hole. Now too desensitised to the alarm of climate change, the collective anxiety currently in vogue is that we will be replaced by machines. But I have been feeling part-machine, part-replaced with absence, redundant, for years.[6]
[1] https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s40750-023-00219-w?sharing_token=40N6YjCfUp9H2dU1iYE0Rfe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4efINn8nMHVEB0-vsrtQKeyGpO79cSA_efTc2GfCnlce3Ys8voYTEdDFyVkDT0Gu_uA9Spo6SpP2pEKHY54wFdS3tsmiAFe4_Zdu-xTrbz6_2pm1xepMTtjL50UAzSTaY
[2] Next Steps longitudinal study of millennials
[3] A quarter of private renters in the UK spend more than 40% of income compared with just 9% in France and 5% in Germany on rent.
[4] Conducted by the Office of National Statistics in 2021
[5] The amount of Adult Children living at home increased by 14 percent and the average age of an adult child living at home rose from the Census in 2010, and the rising trend is not due to the pandemic. What stayed the same was the higher ratio of male Adult Children compared to females – 3-2.
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/05/england-worst-place-in-developed-world-to-find-housing-says-report