The Dream Job Reality Slap – The REAL Disneyland Experience
Todd: Last year, articles started emerging about the video gaming industry, about how these thirty and forty-something-year-olds were landing their dream jobs making video games. Except, those jobs are hell escapes of overtime, stress drinking, anxiety, and Human Resources nightmares. So, we started looking at the dream jobs across the spectrum - writers, artists, designers, creatives, and Disney workers. After all, if you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life, right? Then Joe started talking to his girlfriend, who got to work at her dream job as a cast member at Disney World. So, you had an image in your head about what this would be like?
Rachel: So, my image was I would be going to the parks even on my days off. I would be making tons of friends; I would be friends with everyone and all those who were characters - it seemed like it was just going to be months upon months of fun, but I didn't even make it a full year. I had this image that it would be months of just happiness, dopamine, and everything you could think of while at Disney, but that was not the case.
Todd: See, and I think that's realistic. I would think that I would be in this family and build friendships with like-minded people. But what was the cold reality of it?
Rachel: It all started just two weeks into my program. My roommates were all people who just like drama. Where I worked was nowhere near the park; I worked at a resort, and everybody was caddy - There was so much drama between everything and everyone. The people who worked there forever knew that you'd be gone soon. So, it didn't really matter if they got to know you or anything. In short, they all acted like they were better than you because they had been there so long, and you're new. It didn’t matter if you knew your job, and they didn't expect much of you.
Todd: Did they treat you like you're lucky to work here? Like, 20,000 people could replace you right now?
Rachel: Oh, yeah. A couple of people did, but the people who had worked there for so long weren't the ones indicating that. It was actually the newer people who just became coordinators and those in the Disney College Program who got bumped up. There were one or two coordinators that were like, no, you are lucky to be here, and I can treat you the way that I want to.
Todd: Now, with 20,000 applicants for these jobs, it must pay great. I mean, I know how much it costs to go to Disneyland. They must pay their employees a lot, right?
Rachel: No, not at all. When I went there in 2018, I made $10.50 an hour, which was not very much over the minimum wage for Florida. And they paid all four thousand of us about that. You were pretty lucky to get the extra 50 cents if you worked at Bippity Boppity Boutique. Basically, if you worked at Magic Kingdom, you got 50 cents more.
Joe: You said at the beginning that it was mostly other college-age kids doing this.
Rachel: Yes.
Joe: Did you ever get a sense that this was their dream too?
Rachel: Oh God, every single one of them.
Joe: Would you guys have worked for free?
Rachel: Some of them, yeah. There were some things that Disney would give us, but we had to pay for our housing there.
Joe: Wait, you had to pay for your housing there?
Rachel: Yeah.
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Do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. That quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, Confucius, and Marc Anthony. None of them worked in a gig economy. According to Indeed, the average salary for video game designers is $22K per year, about the same as a restaurant server in any busy urban area. The average salary for actors is about $22K a year; the same goes for musicians. Artisan dog walkers make a little more, closer to $36K per year. And writers, they make about 36k as well. Sorry, Joe. So, our myths today are all about our dream jobs, myths like:
Myth One: How easy is it to land your dream job? Actually, shockingly easy. Lots of companies will put you behind a desk to live out your fantasy, but there's a catch.
Rachel: Going there, I always thought that I would stay here forever; that I'm going to find the love of my life, we're going to be Disney nerds, and we're going to just do this forever. And that did not happen. I kind of lost some of my love for working at Disney because of how hard I worked for such little emotional pay. I enjoyed my time there, and I would do it over again if I had to, but I do not plan on ever working for Disney again because it's not a good company. When you're a full-time person, they treat you like family, but they don't have that many of those.
Joe: So, everyone has an idea of what their dream job is when they are a kid. What was your dream job, Todd?
Todd: I heard a story from a friend, and he'd worked on a cruise ship. And he had told me about how much fun it was and how they would travel, date the dancers, etc. And as a young 20-something, I thought that was a great life. I never did it, and I'll probably always regret that. And as a happily married man, I think if I went away for six months on a cruise ship, I'd come home, and there would be a new husband here.
Joe: I wanted to be an artist, like a comic artist. I went to school for graphic design and before that, I did a lot of life art. So, my background was in art because my dream job was drawing. Then I found out how grueling and difficult the job of a penciler is. Think about being like a cartoonist; that's got to be awesome. But I think after thousands of the exact same drawing with little, tiny movements in the arms…not so much. So, what would you define as a dream job? Let's start with that.
Todd: You always get those people who were destined to be firefighters. You know, that's what their parents did. They just think it's the most important thing. I think it's what you get your value in and how you identify yourself. Certain people are born to do certain things. The rest of us are just trying to figure it out. Also, they're so proud of what they do; they think this is the best thing, and they would never do anything else.
Rachel: Whenever I applied, I was like, okay…what am I okay with doing as a job? And at some point, I was just like, you know what, I don't care. As long as I'm working for Disney. I applied for four different jobs, and I was one of the first to get accepted.
Todd: Say there are four thousand job openings. How many people would apply for those four thousand job openings?
Rachel: I want to say about like 20,000.
Todd: Holy shit - like a big city. So, I imagine the people you're interviewing with are just Disney crazy.
Rachel: Oh God, yes. We got to go into the HR department specifically for college programs, and everyone's desks were filled to the brim with their favorite Disney things. So, you know everyone drank the Kool-Aid; they dived deep into this because it is such a dream job. And even HR there is absolutely insane. And that used to be my dream job, but there's no way in hell that I would do that now.
So, I want to run some statistics. I want to shock you into giving up your dream, which is a weird thing to want to do. And also, it makes this episode sound a lot less harsh because there is a way to work your dream in a practical way - in a way that is sustainable and makes money and doesn't crush your soul. And the way to do that is to look ahead. Look forward and look at the businesses you're getting into because whatever you think your dream job is, so many companies are ready to take your dream and turn it into a chain around your ankle attached to a desk with a very small paycheck. Millennials seem extremely vulnerable to this, the idea that you would go to work at your dream job. I would go out and try to be an artist, and then I would end up chained to a drafting table with a pencil in my hand. Or we would become programmers for a popular video game and end up in a very hot room with 80 desks and computers.
They try to imitate Google and say, " Look, we have bean bags and foosball tables," but these people have work; they don't have time to play foosball. So, the reason I pick on Millennials is because they are 22% of the population. They are currently the largest pie in that population graph. Boomers are like 20% or 21%, and then everything gets smaller from the population groups from there. However, even being 22%, Millennials only hold 5% of the wealth. So, the largest group has only 5% of the wealth. Millennials are currently 20-something to early 40s, so they are actually the main labor force and have a tiny piece of the wealth. This means if you tell a Millennial I've got your dream job, they will jump at it. Like they are more susceptible to that game. Boomers statistically have ignored the siren call of dream job and fulfillment, and we will talk about that in a little bit. But I just found it very interesting that, as a generation, Millennials followed the Confucius advice.
Myth Two: Let's say you follow Confucius’s wisdom. You've picked living your dream over making money. Are you more mentally healthy because of it?
I want to talk about this workplace happiness report that came out in 2019. It's by udemy.com, and it's a research paper where they pulled a thousand full-time workers and 37% rated good work-life balance as the most important in their lives. I'm betting it was older people who said that. Even more, 84% of Millennials said they are already in their dream job. With how many miserable and poor Millennials are out there, 84% of them think they are already in their dream job. Maybe they just mean they got their foot on the ladder at the bottom of their dream job.
When those articles started coming out about video game businesses that were burning through their workforce, doing what's called crunch time because they have a triple-A game about to come out, and they burn out their programmers – that has to be the Millennials that think they're already in their dream job. It must be the ones getting burnt out at these crazy companies. A lot of data sets and businesses fixate on the Millennials as a generation. It's because they are such a large part of the population, and they are going through such an enormous economic slump, so they get singled out as data very often. That said, 54% of Boomers say they're in their dream job. I assume all the other ones are working in something practical like real estate.
In most of these careers where you get your dream job, you would expect once you've done it, once you've reached that tear, you now have the experience. And like a pro athlete who has made a real big name for themselves, you’d think they'd be able to step down and coach or open their own business or get a job elsewhere. But that’s not the case. We are going to refer to a New York Times article about unionizing for this part. So, one of our myths is, is it healthier for you mentally to work your dream job and have lived that dream even if it personally costs you? It doesn't bring you money, it brings you the experience, but you're not at the top of the career pyramid yet. Is it better to have gotten your dream job for your own mental health to have done that? Or is it better for your mental health to have gone into something safe and gotten the money?
I think it's nice to have that permanence romanticized. Napoleon Hill wrote in his famous book Think and Grow Rich about this. Case scenario: Let’s say you work for the richest man in the world, and he didn't pay you. So, do you tell your wife you are working for the richest man in the world for free but learned all his secrets? Then you go on to have wealth using those secrets. That's hopefully what we all do. If you accept a dream job, what are the chances you get to sit in the same room as Carnegie and hear him talk about a secret versus being stuck at a desk crunching numbers?
We found an article answering the question - is it better to do your dream job or take the money by doing somebody else's work…which one is mentally healthier. We're asking whether it is healthier to have secured money doing a job you don’t like that much, or is it healthier to risk being poorer. Because that's effectively what these dream jobs look like. I am very sorry to say that according to science.org, there was an article from the Department of Massachusetts and Harvard, and it has a graph that shows the prevalence of depression based on income. There are many shows that try to convince us that super-wealthy people are just as miserable as everybody. They have just as much depression and anxiety, but it's not true. I'm sorry to say money actually does solve some levels of depression and anxiety.
Myth Three: Most dream companies know they're a desirable place to work at. They'll make you outlast and outwork all the other ones to prove you can join the inner circle. But is it worth it in the long run?
Rachel: At Disney, we had to pay for our housing. If that was free to us, I bet most of us would have worked there for free. I heard that the housing projects were given to Disney by Coke; they built the projects and all the buildings. It was all owned by Coke. And I think it was supposed to be free housing for the college program, but Disney still had us pay for it.
Todd: Now, I went into the army, and this sounds very familiar. How much did you pay monthly for that?
Rachel: We shared rooms, and it cost us about $500-$1K every two-ish weeks.
Todd: Are you kidding me? For $10 an hour, that’s tough. You had to pay for food too?
Rachel: They did not provide us food at all. They did have a cafeteria, but we had to pay for the food there.
Todd: This sounds a lot more coltish. You go to college, and then you go to live in these dorms. And then you have all these happy people telling you how lucky you are to work there. They're paying you less than a living wage. You have to pay for your food there. It's almost like most of these people, I'm guessing, are getting support financially from somebody home to live their dream of living at Disneyland?
Rachel: Oh yeah. I was one of those who had support from home, but it was only to pay for insurance. It was tough for a lot of us because we were all just kind of cooped up, and we couldn't do anything. Many of us wanted to get season passes for Universal and then go there on our off days, but we couldn't because we didn't have the money for it.
Joe: Were you basically being Millennial taxed to work your dream? And what was the end goal? Like, what was the last position you hoped to end up in?
Rachel: I wouldn't say that I was worked to the bone. They definitely worked us as hard as we could and got as much as we could offer. But also told us it doesn't matter if you can get your job done. It matters more that the guests are happy. So, it wasn't physically taxing, but it was emotionally taxing. Whenever we would get off work, we would all just be emotionally dead.
Quoting the article itself, contrary to widely held preconceptions, anxiety and depression are not diseases of affluence within a given location. Those with the lowest incomes are typically 1.5 to 3X more likely than the rich to experience depression or anxiety. If you are in the lowest bracket, meaning you are well below the poverty line, you're 3X more likely to be depressed or anxious.
So, this graph is a straight line. It shows the lowest level of income has the highest amount of depression anxiety. The highest level of income has the lowest amount of anxiety and depression. I can just hear somebody somewhere saying, I don't need to make a lot of money. I just need to be comfortable. That said, if you've ever wondered is it worth being poor if you work your dream job, it's a personal decision, but here are the effects:
- You're more likely to suffer anxiety.
- You're more likely to suffer depression
- You’re more likely to suffer from all the other emotional disturbances that come with not making enough money to cover your basic needs
The happiness plateau (index) is currently sitting at $75,000] a year. That means about 57% of Americans don't qualify with their current jobs to reach “happiness.” If you compare those two very closely, do you want a job of fulfillment or mental health and stability? If you can get both, then absolutely do it. That is not a question. If you set aside the time in your life to work your dream job, do it but don't do it expecting to hit that happiness quotient and to have the best mental health while you're making all those sacrifices. I think if you take the time to plan ahead and are willing to work towards your dream job while doing a sustainable one, then that is a worthwhile gamble.
Rachel talks about how much they weren't being paid, and I want to point out that this was not long ago. I don't know if you caught that, but it was 2018. So, they were paying $10 an hour, which is less than you would get for working at a gas station. I don't think Disney is hurting for money; they made $9B in profits last year. They received a $1.5-billion-dollar tax break from Trump because of lower taxation for rich people. And recently, they reached a four-year compensation agreement with its CEO for about $423 million, and yet they are currently in a battle with their resort workers on whether they should pay them livable wages.
Now, this is a shocking part for me. Between 2017 to now, how much do you think their pay changed? It didn't go up. It went down. They did not just keep up with inflation; they lowered their rates - it dropped 15% over this timeframe. According to this article, over 80% of Disneyland workers right now make less than $12 an hour. The lesson here is you really need to be very aware and willing to put your foot down and say, I'm worth more than this. My time is worth more than this. People have been doing this and reporting on it, which has led to Disney now being in negotiation with Unions for the position Rachel was talking about. So right this moment, it's finally shifting.
Final Thoughts
Joe: Are there any dream jobs now that you would work for cheap (or free) in the future that you're just like, it's too good of a job?
Rachel: No. I think that’s what hit me hardest coming home. When I finally did come home, I realized that it doesn't matter how much you pay me at a dream job; I'm not going to want to do it because of how taxing it ended up becoming. Realizing that I didn’t know if I wanted to continue my degree in Hospitality, which I thought would be the perfect way to get into Disney. I didn't know if I wanted to continue it, and that would have been six years of college down the drain. Here I am about to graduate with that degree, but it was a shock to realize that I did not want to work there. If I had to give younger me any advice, I would say go, but don't expect anything from anybody else. You have to make it yourself.