Dingus of the Week: The "No Days Off" Dingus

This week, I invited comedian, and Emmy-winning writer Taylor Kay Phillips to crown a dingus for the newsletter. You might remember Taylor from one of the best dinguses of all time — when we did a dingus double header and she made fun of the Chiefs superfan who loves to do crimes. Or from when she roasted Aaron Rodgers with a fire hotter than Hades.

Thank you for my vacation, friends.

– Lyz

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Happy Friday, friends! 

It is a joy, honor, and privilege to facilitate the rest and relaxation of one of my favorite writers by going off about some dummies for a few hundred words. To maximize Lyz’s vacay time, we’re locking this piece down about a week before it goes out. In another time and place, I could pick the dumbest politician of this week and bank on them still being a dingus the next week (today), but the way things are moving, whoa Nelly, an embarrassment of riches embarrassments. All this to say: Yes, the biggest Dingus of this Week actually was the person you’re thinking of! I just don’t know it yet! 

Today, however, and in keeping with the theme of “Lyz deserves a vacation more than maybe anyone on the planet,” I’m going to ruminate on a more evergreen dingus, which is the “No Days Off” breed of grind-culture macho douche. (“Douche” here being a gender-neutral term, albeit one whose assonant similarity to “dude” doesn’t quite feel coincidental.)

In my mid-20s, I worked for one of those hip ad agencies with an office in a refurbished warehouse, cold brew on tap, and a neon sign over the entrance that said “creative as fuck.”

My coworkers were brilliant, the clients we worked for were sexy, and we had Pride parties on the roof. It was a New York millennial’s paradise. 

It was also taken for granted at that agency that if you were working on a “cool” project you were working until midnight on weekdays and all through the weekends. That was the price, of course, of being creative as fuck. Sure, we were salaried and therefore unentitled to overtime, but that’s what the cold brew was for! 

Of course anyone reading this now, six years later, is screaming, “That’s so many red flags, babe!” at 25-year-old-me. But you’re too far away and she can’t quite read lips and so she just looks you in the eye, smiles, and raises her bottle of free work shandy that she’s allowed to have after 3pm because Summer Fridays. This is the hustle, baby! This is what it means to make things. 

In the beginning, that job was the best work experience I’d ever had. I got to write more than just tweets and I was around creative people who actually enjoyed what they were doing. It’s fun to work hard. It’s cool, at first, to feel thoroughly wrung out at the end of a project and say, “Every single drop of my possible output is in that Powerpoint Presentation we’re about to do for the CMO of Hydroflask.” I could not have done any more. I took all I had and I gave it to the concept that “refresh” is something that water does but also something you do on your computer and that’s why Hydroflask has teamed up with online influencers to sell their next round of no-spill gamer cups.¹

The way to perform better than other people (and/or agencies) was to work harder than them. And working harder meant working longer and more. Quality was quantity. 

Of course, this is simply not true. It’s demonstrably not true. You’d think it would be intuitive that a life form that spends a third of its living hours sleeping requires rest of other kinds to function optimally, but people are still putting out studies to prove it while so-called experts keep posting shit on LinkedIn like “I will do what you won’t today so I can do what you can’t tomorrow,” but about answering emails at 2 am. 

Studies about the benefits of a four-day work week keep saying Summer Fridays forever is good business that improves well-being without hurting productivity. Burnout is a meaningful and devastating risk. There’s just so much data in so many places actively disproving this most is more philosophy of work! And this isn’t a “new study about red wine and cheese will surprise you” situation. The findings are pretty consistent!

But that line of thinking isn’t only dingus-worthy for the bodies and well-being of the labor force (though it is that in spades, diamonds, and clubs); it’s also a devastatingly stupid way to think about ideas. 

When the prevailing attitude is that strained effort begets brilliance, we look at inspiration that comes easily with a derisive skepticism. In my final few months with that agency, I was being briefed on a new pitch for a cool, high-profile client whose product I was deeply, personally familiar with. Sorry for the NDA-required vagueness but just imagine if a woman from Columbus, Ohio, who’d spent her entire childhood taking piano lessons got asked to pitch “The Midwestern Girl’s Piano Store.” Within the first 10 minutes of the meeting, I had the idea. The insight, the tagline, the activations, everything. But I’d been sipping the company nitro long enough to know to keep my mouth shut. I sat on it for three days, knowing that unless the higher-ups felt like we had sufficiently suffered for our stroke of brilliance, it would get struck right down. 

Eventually I pitched it, claiming it had come to me in a hazy, exhausted fervor in my 11 pm company-expensed Uber-ride home. I read aloud from the pitch I had “word vomited onto my notes app on the train this morning at 6:30 am” (I’d written it right after the meeting three days prior). “That’s it. We got it!” someone said. And we went to work, a bafflingly necessary 72 hours behind, on an idea that had come easily and clearly to me on a Tuesday morning after a rare long weekend. 

Sometimes for the ambitious, the inspired, the influential, or the journalists and late night TV writers covering the RNC, a period of no days off is a temporary requirement. For many parents and caregivers, it’s an unimpeachable reality. For some underpaid laborers and people without access to a social safety net, it’s a horrifying captivity. 

But no days off is not a permanent personal business philosophy. Or at least not one that makes anyone seem tough, cool or smart: It makes it seem like they don’t know how being a person works.  

A few years later, I had a Zoom meeting with a creative officer for a big fancy brand. He asked about my work ethic and how I would handle a fast-paced creative environment. ²

Since I was already happy with my current job and had nothing to lose, I told him the truth. “I’m a very hard worker, but I also don’t believe that good ideas require a blood sacrifice. I’m a team player, so I know that sometimes staying until 11 pm is a necessary evil. But I think regularly needing to work until 11 pm is a sign of bad management.” 

I never heard from him or the still-not-profitable company he works for again. :) 

Happy vacation, Lyz! It brings me nothing but happiness to give you many days off. 

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Taylor Kay Phillips

1. I made this up. This did not happen. But also, Hydroflask, if you like it, text me. 

2. Taylor will not say this, but I will: Taylor Kay Phillips has two Emmys. So, wherever that man is, I hope he’s having the day he deserves. Love, Lyz