Your Career Crush Isn't Really About Work At All

I write this at the risk of sounding like the first act of a Lifetime horror movie, but here goes:

I follow a woman on Instagram — the wife of a friend of a friend — with a life that makes me irrationally envious. She shares a flat in South London with her illustrator husband, her cherubic toddler, and a 6-foot 19th-century loom. Yes, this woman works as a weaver. Her artisanal tapestries and rugs have been featured in Vogue, as well as several important-looking design publications I haven’t heard of. It goes without saying, but: She’s French.

I am an author and a screenwriter; I am very well acquainted with envy in my field. It’s impossible to see someone else’s book on a big table at Barnes & Noble, or scroll past an acquaintance’s buzzy Deadline announcement, without the briefest flicker of I wish that was me. (A moment later, I remember to be happy for them.) I mean, did you see Madeline Cash’s ad for Gap? Hey, Gap, feel free to call me!

That longing makes sense to me. But with the weaver, I find myself staring at images of her — a person I’ve never met IRL — sitting behind her loom in flowy dresses, and I am jealous of her, despite the fact that I do not know how to weave, I have no interest in working as a weaver, and if I go 10 minutes without checking my phone I start gnawing at my own limbs.

And it’s not just the weaver. Bakers. Bookstore employees. I don’t actually want these jobs. So why am I envious?

To get to the bottom of it, I spoke to W. Gerrod Parrott, a professor in the psychology department at Georgetown. We all know it intellectually: People present their best days, their best angles, their most glamorous parties, and create an impression online that that’s what their life is like all of the time, he says. But knowing it intellectually isn’t the same as feeling it emotionally. Their lives look glamorous, and so I imagine that they must be.

The fact that I don’t really know anything about a given career field just makes the fantasy more enticing. I only have to imagine the romantic parts — I don’t need to know about neck pain or callused fingers from sitting at the loom all day, or how, exactly, she pays for that flat. This is my fantasy. I’m imagining a Nancy Meyers movie! With regards to the weaver, she represents a cottagecore fantasy without the tradwife association.

Fantasizing about a new job is fantasizing about an entirely new life, a fresh start: If I were, say, a baker who lived in London, I wouldn’t be the kind of person who procrastinated over every writing assignment by scrolling TikTok for 45 minutes.

“There’s something about this person other than their occupation that’s triggering the envy,” Parrott says. I tell him about my pastry chef dreams, too. “Maybe you actually don’t want to get up at 4:30 in the morning. Maybe scrubbing baking sheets isn’t your idea of fun,” he (correctly) theorizes. He spitballs about why I romanticize opening my own bakery: Do I want more autonomy? Do I want to work with my hands?

Part of the appeal of fantasizing about a new job is fantasizing about an entirely new life, a fresh start: If I were, say, a baker who lived in London, I wouldn’t be the kind of person who procrastinated over every writing assignment by scrolling TikTok for 45 minutes. I would be more patient, and more thoughtful. I would write in the mornings by hand, drinking my coffee and enjoying the silence. My wardrobe would be full of chic eco-friendly designers. I would know how to get stains out without using harsh chemicals. This version of myself would never have to be insecure about whether or not she’s a “real” writer because her newest book is a dark-academia fantasy, not literary fiction. I probably would also look good with bangs.

I jokingly ask Parrott whether that’s the secret to happiness. Should I move across the world and start a new career? “Uh,” he says. “No.”

Instead, he offers infuriatingly practical advice. “Think about what it is about this person’s life that you want, and think about ways in which you can incorporate that into your current life,” he says. “Without dropping everything and going off, only to discover that the other life has lots of downsides as well.”

I don’t actually want her job; it’s that her life appears slow, and thoughtful, and centered on artistic integrity.

This is where my envy can be a positive thing. “We have evolved to feel envy for good reasons,” says Sara Protas, an associate professor of philosophy at University of Puget Sound and the author of The Philosophy of Envy. “It’s [not always] immoral … It’s a social emotion that can help us push ourselves to be better. And it can be harnessed for good.”

Despite the fact that I don’t want to be a baker or a weaver or any other career that would fit into a Victorian’s children’s rhyme, there are some pretty tangible elements of those lives that I do want.

When I really consider the Frenchwoman I lightly stalk on Instagram — with, I must add, absolutely no malicious intent — I don’t actually want her job; it’s that her life appears slow, and thoughtful, and centered on artistic integrity. I also envy someone’s ability to create something that is self-evidently impressive and skillful (all writers, in my experience, secretly believe themselves to be frauds). Someone can look at an intricately woven rug or bite into a croissant and know that it’s good; writing is subjective, and sometimes people can’t tell if a computer did it and not a person.

And so, as is the case with so many things, the solution is miserably tedious: small, incremental changes to my own life. Turns out I don’t need to be a baker living in Europe in order to write by hand and drink coffee at my table in the morning instead of balancing a mug on my knee while I scroll TikTok.

Trying to fit a 6-foot loom in my very small living room is not going to make my life better, but maybe I can take up knitting. I don’t even need to be French.