'Hardly Working' Brews Up Millennial Malaise

On the occasion I decide to spend $4.50 on a drip coffee from an artisanal shop, the barista serving me is usually a bubbly woman with a septum piercing and a tasteful forearm tattoo—or, if male, a pasty environmentalist with flabby arms. Obedient and helpful, they smile and wish me a good day as they hand me my order. This is not to say that Caleb Caudell, the author of the new essay collection Hardly Working (Bonfire Books), isn’t obedient or helpful as a professional barista. He has held this role across various Indianapolis cafés for over ten years. But he is overeducated and underemployed, the Emil Cioran or Arthur Schopenhauer of latte salesmen.

Economists like Richard Reeves, Aaron Renn, and Oren Cass have long warned that 1 in 10 prime-age males are neither working nor seeking employment, a result of economic and cultural shifts since the 1960s. Then there are men like Caleb Caudell, who, while technically employed, are underutilized, stuck in positions misaligned with their education. Hardly Working narrates this phenomenon with sharp, sarcastic wit, chronicling Caudell’s adventures as a reluctant barista and perpetual jobseeker.

Too poor to afford “a room of one’s own,” Mr. Caudell doesn’t work in construction or carpentry (though he tries). Instead, he follows the tradition of blue-collar writers, finding time to write when he’s “so tired [he] can’t follow the plot of America’s Funniest Home Videos.” But Hardly Working has a distinctly millennial twist: Mr. Caudell is trapped in the longhouse. “My coworkers are women, and they seem to have unlimited energy for reminding people of the [masking] policy,” he writes, reflecting on the COVID era, “and browbeating them when their masks fall under their nose…”

“All childless women act like daycare directors,” he concludes, even as he notes their secret excitement at confronting the “toxic masculinity” they claim to despise. In the longhouse, jobs are scarce for men who haven’t learned to code. Mr. Caudell has mastered navigating low expectations and the self-esteem annihilation that accompanies job hunting for the unskilled: “Half of work is convincing other people to let you work for them.” Applying for administrative positions he doesn’t even want, he explains, “I’m in competition with three-hundred-pound women with associate degrees from Johnsonville Tech who watch The Bachelor and post glittering gifs on Facebook, and I lose every time.”

Despite grim prospects, Mr. Caudell remains realistic: “And I’m doing better than most, by global standards. My own lowly station rests on the backs of even lower laborers; the flannel shirt I’m wearing was stitched by an enslaved Chinese child.” Yet through his sardonic wit, there’s a sense that the whimsical, wandering millennial artist—once defined by whimsy, wanderlust, and wide-brimmed hats—now suffers silently in repentance.

Reading Hardly Working, I’m reminded of the late Harvey Pekar, the creator of American Splendor. Pekar, a Midwest curmudgeon of the 70s and 80s, wrote comics on the job as a file clerk at a VA hospital, where he found ample downtime for his abundant social criticisms. Though he never lived off his earnings as a writer, he achieved underground fame and even appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. First lauded, then lampooned, Pekar was late-night TV’s lovable ogre. Today, Mr. Caudell would only appear as an alien.

But while Pekar’s Midwest was forgiving—he owned a house, had mindless work with benefits, and was married twice—Caudell’s Midwest is hostile: he can’t find steady work, keep a partner, or afford rent or car repairs. Pekar became famous for grousing at work. If Caudell groused at work, he’d be fired, flagged, lynched, or called fascist. His Midwest would make Pekar weep.

Still, Mr. Caudell avoids political identification; he’s simply tired of the hypocrisies of a dominant culture enslaving the minds of wannabe coastal trendsetters in his ascending Midwestern city. Even this apolitical outlook is enough to label him “right wing.” When he organizes a reading to launch his short-story collection at his café—a favor from his boss—“some anonymous commie…sent messages to the owner” to sabotage the event. “Commerce doesn’t care about your inborn identity,” he writes. The boss agreed to the event to sell coffee and books, not exclude LGBTQ+ identities. But to radical leftists, propped up by woke corporate attitudes, the world revolves around them. “All enterprise wants is your mouth and your asshole, your drives. In the modern market there are no divisions between race, sex, or religion—there are only compulsions.”

Yet despite adversity, aimlessness, and poverty—now common among middle-class millennials without technical skills—Mr. Caudell offers solace: “even a bleak story speaks to the joy of creation.” Everything else comes second to writing, the real work, the reason he lives: “We work not to build wealth…but to expiate our guilt, pay back the debt on our existence.” He makes a pretty good iced latte too.

Jonathan Mittiga is a writer in New York.