Many millennials are taking second jobs to pay for student loans and increasing living costs, and it’s almost making one-job millennials look unusual.
Millennial “side hustles” include teaching yoga, selling random goods, writing freelance articles, and numerous other attempts to earn extra money. The side hustle is so commonplace in millennial life that the April edition of Glamour asked: “You don’t freelance on the side… What kind of urban-dwelling millennial are you?”
Catherine Babb-Muguira, a side hustler, wrote in Quartz that those who don’t have a side hustle could be prone to having a “millennial identity crisis.”
While many millennials participate in the side hustle to cover expenses for a more comfortable lifestyle, they’re driven by more than economic need.
“The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. This psychological benefit is the real reason for the millennial obsession, I’d argue, and why you might want to consider finding your own side hustle, no matter how old you are,” Babb-Muguira said.
Once again, millennials strive to do things differently than Gen X and the baby boomers. Millennials saw their parents work boring 9-5 desk job. Millennials do that too, but they want to work on the side to turn a passion or hobby into a second career.
“Put another way, what happens when a generation raised with a ‘you can be whatever you want to be’ ethos meets the worst job market in years? In which many of the traditional dream careers–from working in the arts to becoming a lawyer–go from being long shots to being totally untenable, or more or less cease to exist altogether?” Babb-Migura said.
Hundreds and thousands of results come up after googling “side hustle,” with plenty of websites offering guides for how to start one.
The millennial generation has always been told to “follow your passion” and “you can do whatever you dream of doing.” The revolutionary desire that millennials have to pursue their passion as they grow up in a post-recession era with high living costs and student debt has propelled the trend.
