Blogocentric Formulations

What The Hell

"Barrel of Monkeys" 
Day 3





"What The Hell"
by Avril Lavigne
from Goodbye Lullaby (2011)

Of all the songs on her discography (not including Love Sux, which I've been listening to a lot this year), this is probably the song of Avril's that I listen to the most. Every time it pops up on the radio or a playlist, I listen to it for an extended period of time. It was the lead single off this fourth album of hers, and even though this is ostensibly a love song (or at least a song about relationships), the chorus/refrain is something that I identify with more and more as I get older:

All my life I've been good
But now I'm thinking, "What the hell"
All I want is to mess around
And I don't really care about

If you love me, if you hate me
You can't save me, baby, baby
All my life I've been good
But, now what the hell
What? What? What? What the hell?

To me, this song has been more applicable to my job than my personal relationships lately. Disney just laid off another few hundred employees this week; it's the third quarter in a row they've suddenly laid people off with no warning, and it's now been almost two years of constant uncertainty and rolling layoffs as they've sought to streamline the organization. It used to be a company that people felt seen and valued at, and now we all feel like numbers on a balance sheet who are one quarterly earnings call away from getting abruptly called onto a Zoom video call with our boss and HR to be told that the company has eliminated our position to save overhead.

Sadly, that makes them just like almost every other company I've worked for in my career. And I've spent my entire professional life working hard, over-delivering, and making a lot of sacrifices for the company's benefit. As have my coworkers, some of which had been at the company twenty-two, twenty-five, in some cases thirty-five years and now suddenly find themselves looking for new jobs at the tail end of their careers without much more than a perfunctory conversation with studio leadership. It definitely gets me into "now I'm thinking 'what the hell'" territory and wondering whether my work is worth the priority I give it in my life. Which is not to say that I'm planning on quitting or completely checking out; but I think the days of not taking my vacations and putting in tons of overtime might be coming to a close in favor of, you know, just putting in my hours and then going home at the end of the day.

Anyway, I really enjoy this song because it's often a reminder to take ourselves a little less seriously. Sometimes you really do just have to say "what the hell" and have other people accept you for who you are, for better or worse. That's probably why this song finds its way onto my playlist rotation more often than most songs.



(500 words)