Six digits, three jobs, zero fun Fridays at 22: Is it worth it?
By
Jack Banac
Every week, PhilSTAR L!fe explores issues and topics from the perspectives of different age groups, encouraging healthy but meaningful conversations on why they matter. This is Generations.
I started earning six digits straight out of graduation.
Earlier this year, having defied my family’s dream of me becoming a lawyer, I had doubts about whether I would thrive in the sector I had chosen to build a career in. In my mind, I had something to prove: that I was doing well, that I could make a living out of the work I wanted to do, and, perhaps most importantly, that I had made the right choice.
On paper, I was doing exactly that. Despite a difficult job market and funding cuts that sent shockwaves across the development sector, I managed to earn enough to tell my parents they no longer had to give me an allowance. I could pay my own bills and even treat them from time to time.
At 22, this felt like something I was supposed to be proud of. There was just one catch: It took three jobs to get there.
Six digits would have felt more impressive if it did not mean spending Friday nights juggling three calendars and three sets of deliverables on three hours of sleep.
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Before affixing my signature to three contracts, I had already done the math. Eight hours for one job, another eight split between the other two, and eight hours left for sleep. Sixteen hours of work and eight hours of sleep somehow felt to me like a sound plan. Somewhere along the way, Friday nights went from alcohol to workahol.
It took actually living those sixteen hours to realize that my math had left out practically everything that made the remaining hours worth working for. There was no room for dilly-dallying, afternoons at cafés with friends to keep myself sane, or reading books simply because they made life richer.
Ironically, earning more also made me more conscious of spending less. I started cooking meals in batches and freezing them for the week, partly to save money and partly because figuring out what to eat three times a day had somehow become another task I did not have time for. Going out meant spending money, but it also meant losing hours I could have spent catching up on work.
Eventually, I decided I needed to lock in. I deactivated my social media accounts, turned down plans, and tried to remove as many distractions as I could. I told myself I was CV-maxxing: collecting experience, building my network, and making myself more employable while I was still young.
For a while, I treated anything that took me away from work as the problem, rather than asking why work had taken up so much space in the first place.
And no matter how much my back hurt from sitting at my desk all day, there was still the lingering question of where I would find myself once my contracts expired later this year.
For a generation so often described as "lazy," I seem to be surrounded by people who are constantly working. My two roommates and I are rarely home at the same time because all three of us juggle multiple jobs just to afford the lives we have in Metro Manila. Sometimes, the only way I know whether one of my roommates is home or out on fieldwork is by asking them on Messenger. We live in the same apartment.
Through my work with people in street situations, I started questioning whether having several sources of income was really the Gen Z phenomenon I had made it out to be.
Six digits looked impressive on paper. Three jobs made them possible. But somewhere in all that arithmetic, I had forgotten that there was still only one of me—and only so many Friday nights I was willing to give away.
In conversations about livelihoods, I encountered people whose days were pieced together from different kinds of work—street vending, taking in laundry, irregular work when it was available, alongside the unpaid work of caring for their families. Nobody needed to call it a “side hustle” or brag about having multiple income streams. It was simply what making ends meet required.
I had thought multiple jobs were part of my generation's hustle culture. My work reminded me that piecing together livelihoods predates “side hustles” and “CV-maxxing.” We have long had a word for it: raket.
I could package my three jobs as ambition. I could call myself driven, joke about being a workaholic, and update LinkedIn every time I signed another contract. More importantly, I had choices and the privilege of doing work I actually cared about. For someone else, taking on more work might not feel like hustling at all. It might just be Tuesday.
I do not pretend that our situations are equivalent. What those conversations changed was the way I thought about my own.
Even the word “hustle” started sounding a little different to me. The same word can make taking on more work sound like ambition when you have the privilege to choose it, while obscuring the circumstances that make additional work necessary in the first place.
And perhaps that is what bothers me now when I look at my own six digits. I am fortunate to have three jobs. I chose them. I care about the work I do. I am still proud that, at 22, I can support myself, tell my parents to keep their allowance, and take them out from time to time.
I just stopped believing that the number told the whole story.
Six digits looked impressive on paper. Three jobs made them possible. But somewhere in all that arithmetic, I had forgotten that there was still only one of me—and only so many Friday nights I was willing to give away.
Generations appears weekly at PhilSTAR L!fe.
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