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For the fourth edition of the series “Interviews with Non-Evil People,” I talked with culture journalist Candice Frederick.

We talked about layoffs, being unemployed, and feeling like you have no place to put your ideas.

Context: We talked via Zoom and because I don’t have a paid account, it kicked us off after 45 minutes.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Honestly, how are you?

Not well. You know how when people say, "How are you?" And it's the reaction to just say, "Fine," and that's like the end of the conversation? I don't even feel like faking it. I'm just like, "I'm not well." Like that is the truth and I don't wanna say otherwise.

Being unemployed sucks, and being unemployed sucks for a myriad of reasons because it impacts everything: your livelihood, your state of being, all of that. It’s been a deeply frustrating experience for this last year. I've been unemployed for over a year now.

You’re are a culture reporter. What's it like being in award season and having no outlet?

It's weird. The bulk of my team was laid off probably a couple of weeks prior to the Oscars last year, so of course, we were preparing and discussing what the coverage was gonna be and had been operating like we did in the previous years that we were there. There's so much I'd love to say and so many ideas I've had. I think I'm much better at developing and communicating my ideas through writing than in conversation, but I’ve been talking about them to anyone who will listen. It's been hard to have ideas around an awards season—now the second year in a row—and not be able to flesh them out and to really go through that process and really be a part of the conversation.

It’s also frustrating because the way I always approach my work is that I'm not going to write something unless I have something to add to the discussion. So to continuously see my ideas not be part of the discussion, and with no one else is talking about them or writing about them in such a way, it’s been difficult. And that's even beyond award season. That is all year-round. Just having these ideas and not being able to, generally speaking, place them anywhere. 

I assume you're pitching them and just they're not landing?

Yeah. I've been pitching. A large part of last year, I was pitching more aggressively, especially at the top of the year around the awards conversation. But generally this year, I haven't been doing a whole lot of pitching because I've been kind of feeling defeated. One, either people don't have a budget at all, or people have a tiny budget that I just don't think is appropriate to be paying people. Or editors don't get back to freelancers. And it might be because there's no budget, but I do appreciate when editors actually say, "Sorry, no budget," rather than not saying anything. 

Occasionally I do have editors respond saying like, "Yeah, we don't know what's happening." Like, "We might not exist in a week, so hit us up later."

I appreciate something, but that's usually not the ideal response at all.

So are there any opinions that you want to share in this just to get them out there?

I've been invited to a few different podcasts, so I was able to hash out complicated feelings I have around movies like One Battle After Another and Sinners, and also like the One Battle After Another and Sinners discourse. We are a culture that's really devolved into making movies and TV shows and other works our entire personality, which is very strange to me. People feel the need to defend a movie that is not theirs. Just a movie that they like. Or they troll or be unnecessarily mean to people who have even a slightly different opinion or are approaching the art in a different way that doesn't perfectly match their own. 

That's not something that is specific to this year or last year. I think that's something that has grown immensely in the social media era. I think that all kind of folds into the way people have developed parasocial relationships with celebrities. I think on one end, artists do fan those flames, but I think on the other end, it does probably bother them as well. Because it really hinders the art, it certainly hinders the artist.

What do you think the responsibility of the audience is for reading criticism, for reading about the background to these films, especially One Battle After Another?

I think the audience is always gonna bring something to a film. Denzel Washington says this more plainly. Whenever someone says, "What do you want people to take away from your film?" He always says, "It depends on what they're bringing to it." Because that's always gonna be subject to the viewer because we all have different experiences that we are bringing to the film. But I think what's happening a lot more now is instead of people questioning why they felt this way about a certain film, it’s just like “this is what the film is doing, and if you don't agree, then something's wrong with you. Or it says a lot about you if you don't agree with my very specific interpretation.” 

The discourse always tends to be a bit broken in that way and it's unfair. It's not healthy. It's not any way to engage with art, and that's across the board. Not just movies. It's TV. Even a painting. We're all different. It's not meant to be experienced in the exact same way or be interpreted in the exact same way. So I think the responsibility of the viewer is to really sit with their feelings for a moment before releasing them. When I watch something or attend something, people ask me almost immediately, "What'd you think?" And I'm like, "Let me digest it. Let me think about it for a moment before I respond to it.” Because my feeling could change in the next five minutes and I don't wanna be beholden to what I think of it right now.

Have you felt that your movie-going experience, your music-listening experience, theater-watching, or TV-watching experience has changed now that you're no longer responsible for reporting on it?

It's hard for me to turn off the journalism part of my brain because it's so inherent to the way in which I approach art. And I really appreciate that because I want to look at art in a more interrogating, more questioning way. Not just about the art itself, but my feelings around the art. I don't wanna shut it off. I think it's gratifying to have this sense of being able to ask yourself questions that you're asking of the art and asking of other viewers as well. 

It’s frustrating now because I’m like, “what do I do with this great idea?” Earlier last year, I started writing ideas down that I knew I was gonna pitch. But once pitching was almost useless, I started writing the ideas down so they are somewhere, and if anyone ever wants to reach out to me to write something rather than me chasing people down, that would be where I would go. Like "oh, yes, I've been storing ideas for the winter."

In your cheeks.

Yeah, exactly. They're all in an email draft I have. It's been difficult to not have an outlet to really examine these things more fully and also to know that a lot of the questions that I would ask are not being asked at any of the outlets. Yes, journalists are covering a wide breadth of topics, but there are huge topics that are just completely being left out of the conversation or nuances that are not even being mentioned. And certainly not interrogated. 

There's someone else who I know who was also laid off who said that while obviously layoffs aren't personal, it does feel personal, particularly when your voice is very specific and what you were adding was very different from other people. That's hard to wrap your head around and to navigate as you deal with a depleting bank account, depleting mental health. So many things are just kinda going down the tubes. 

What does it feel like seeing all these other layoffs and how people turned up for the Washington Post layoffs, but were silent around so many others. What does it feel like to see that kind of support being extended to one group of people but not others?

This is my fourth layoff, so I feel like every time it's kind of like this. People have very short memories. Definitely writers from more well-known publications like the Washington Post get this sense of urgency. But they also said that about Teen Vogue, like “this is really urgent.” It's always really urgent for like two weeks and then it's just completely forgotten. That certainly happens most to legacy outlets. I'll say that when myself and a lot of my team got laid off at HuffPost—and we got laid off pretty soon after Trump took office—we were among the first, and it was a big layoff. It affected a lot of the newsroom. We did get a lot of condolences and it felt really good. But because there's just so many layoffs, people are just forgetting. I think the farther and farther away your layoff was, the more forgotten it is because somebody else is now getting laid off at another outlet that people think is really important.

Journalism is almost exclusively white. More white now than it was in 2020. But it largely has always been very, very white. So with these calls to rehire laid off people, it’s generally only for legacy outlets where most of the staff are white. 

I wouldn't wish a layoff on my worst enemy. It’s awful. I think we all should be rehired. I remember the Atlanta Journal Constitution experienced a number of layoffs, and their staff was largely Black. And it happened around the same time as another major layoff. I think very few people actually acknowledged that that was even happening at the same time because it wasn't the Washington Post even though, yes, that's a bunch of people who now have their livelihoods in turmoil as much as Washington Post people did. But it’s interesting to see how some of these journalists who have been laid off have been almost immediately rehired. I should also say that that is not generally the case. But that it is overwhelmingly white people when it does happen.

But folks who are non-white in newsrooms are more vulnerable than anyone else. Certainly most vulnerable to not being rehired for a while, most vulnerable to being laid off, and so that's a truth that I think is as troubling now as it always has been. It’s frustrating. And not just non-white. There's also folks who are queer, like at Teen Vogue who were laid off and they didn't have a huge queer queer staff. It's frustrating to see this over and over when you are also unemployed and your layoff is pretty much forgotten. Because so many others have come after you. I remember when probably the last year I was at HuffPost, there were a number of layoffs that we were hearing about and it just felt like a blur. Like this is crazy. It hasn't felt any less like that now that I'm also among the unemployed.

People forget about those of us who've been unemployed for a while and I fear that it's like when a house is on the market for too long and people are like, "Well, there has to be something wrong with it." And I worry that it's the same for us, where it's like, "Well, you haven't had a job in so long, what's wrong with you?"

I assure you, it's never for a lack of trying. I'd much rather not have this be the case for me. 

There's a lot of energy and rallying when it first happens, which is great. But that dissipates because something else catastrophic happened. When the Atlanta Journal Constitution staffs were laid off, it barely registered to people. 

They also have the fact that they're a more local working against them because that's also looked down upon, quite unfairly.

Being in a largely Black city, being a largely Black staff, being local, being also within this moment where the largest group of people who have been laid off since Trump took office have been Black women. All of this sounds not great, but forgettable. That last part is what never sits with me.

The thing I keep trying to figure out, and there's no good answer to this, is at this point, what can we even do?

Well, I wish someone would pay my rent. That would be nice. I don't know how it is with you, but I know people in my life are like, "Oh, man, I wish there was something I can do," and "Gosh, this is so awful." And like even when I talk to my mom, my mom's super hyper worried about my situation and everything. But at the end of the day, I'm the only one in it. I'm the only one that has to wake up every day and be in this nightmare and go to sleep in the same nightmare. As time has progressed, I've been trying to do things that help a little bit for me, like meditation. Try to take in the same amount of art that I was taking in before—that still keeps my mind moving and ideas still percolating. But none of that is paying my bills. It's extremely difficult. Another thing I've tried to do more of is have conversations with other people who are laid off so that I don't feel so isolated. I feel that's kind of helpful to commiserate with other people in similar situations.

I remember telling one of my friends, "I don't feel like I'm good company." I said that a lot last year. Because in my head I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, how much did I spend today?" Or, "If I do this, I won't be able to do that." I'm just constantly thinking about money all the time.

The city is so cold for people who don't do the nine to five, have their 401k, have their investments all lined up and in pretty little stacks of paper that they can hand over.

I want to do my thing. People who don't have work are looked down on, and it's just like, no, I want to work. I actually like working. It feels like if you're not with a company, then what are you doing? Like, why is your opinion or expertise of value when you don't have a job attached to it? Why is your health of value? The capitalist society will have your mind going like that because when you don't have a job, oftentimes that means you don't have health insurance. That means your health doesn't matter. And so it's a really destructive thought process, but also a destructive society that makes us have that thought process.

I wanna work and I want to do work that matters to me. I want to do work that is substantive. Like, I actually really, really loved my last job. And I thought I was good at it. So I'm trying to not have these really demoralizing thoughts in my brain.

Find Candice at https://candicefrederick.contently.com/