♩ I said they always got me
working, got me working all day long. ♩
Let's start by expanding on a status I posted earlier regarding your “work ethic.”
I find it funny that there are terms so duplicitous in their ability to sound and function explicitly while retaining a world's worth of a hidden underbelly. Don't we all know what is meant by work ethic? It's how hard you're willing to work in order to achieve your ends. It's the extent to which you push your body and mind. It's the amount of respect you carry for yourself and those who are also putting in the time. It's as striking an entire code of ethics as it is common parlance regarding something we're all expected to do in order to earn our place in society.
Given my complicated relationship to work, I'm frankly aghast I haven't explored this in great detail already. If, and you might as well for this digression, you take the above paragraph as more or less true regarding our conception of work ethic, there seems to be a gigantic story involved with how we get there. Rarely does it seem people are keen to discuss “ethics” at all until they're nodding along at the punishments bestowed from cops or a judge on TV, but one can only strike the bell of our cultural folly once again and move on.
Personally, I used to work a lot. I say that after my last 6 months of working primarily 11+ hour days and taking 5 or 6 off a month, usually only because my car died. Before that I had 3 jobs I worked most of the day and night on. Before that was 2 years of needing to stay basically sedentary to refrain from screwing up my blood work to get into drug studies. I've experienced prolonged periods of both extremes. I tend to function in extremes for reasons I don't have the best explanation of. Increasingly, I feel the imposed conditions of my experience have taught me lessons you only get from suffering through them. Patience becomes a virtue when the alternative is to be driven mad. A naive full-throttle go-getter spirit is not an endless well of energy.
My ideas about work came from stories about my grandparents and seeing what my dad has been through iron-working. Mind you, it wasn't until relatively recently that my stories and molding got to interact with what I was learning about the world and the diminishing power of the dollar. If my grandparents could work 9-5 closer to home and raise four kids in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, my parents had to commute an hour away, one gone a good portion of when I was younger, in a modest house in a neighborhood on the verge of white-flight. My brother and I either lived with roommates, or still do, or had to move back home, only in our late 20s flirting with distorted versions of the kinds of things a newbie family in the 60s or 70s might get right out of high school, and definitely with a degree.
As the times changed, as the pressures became varied and the dialogue about how to understand it flooded from the internet, we never took the time to examine where we were going or why. We never bothered to ask anymore what “the good life” or what “middle class” stood for. We let the people born into wealth scheme to keep it from “trickling down.” We adopted self-destructive narratives of self-sufficiency. I'm telling you, read the comments on facebook under plans for a universal basic income or articles about the minimum wage. Without fail you'll get the nastiest judgmental, “WELL WHY SHOULD I PAY FOR YOU FOR ANY REASON!?” Somewhere along the way we forgot that we're beholden and rely on each other. More than that, we built up an entirely new working ethos that appears to be aimed at destroying even the memory of empathy.
If there's anything my work ethic has taught me, it's that I'm not shit. It truly is worth mentioning, a lot, that you can work yourself to literal death or passed out exhaustion, and you can still live in poverty. You can still go hungry. You can humble yourself and take the “lowest of the low” positions, you can take 3 of them, and people will balk and call you lazy and entitled and smug as you explain to them why freezing your account over back taxes might as well drive you to suicide. The situation is dark. But the only dialogue you tend to hear is the most ridiculous shit about the stock market or one-off company raising wages while pretending they're not laying off thousands or destroying the environment.
Consider, I still feel guilty about taking days off. I wait until several points on my body are throbbing and I've gained an extra 10 pounds before I think it's okay for me to cook for myself for a week and take a walk on the climate change induced spring day in February. That's a bad work ethic. I don't want to die of a heart attack delivering idiot children their food. I didn't want the majority of my memories from my last year as a 20-something to be of TV shows I watched while driving my car.
I posted an article this morning about how neoliberal ideas presenting “gig economy” jobs as a “lifestyle choice” are robbing people of the ability to recognize the power of organizing and being members of their society when they're not working. I've never felt so understood. I genuinely can't remember the last time I was a person. I don't recall when I was doing something fun or immersive for me, and not as a desperate escape to masquerade as someone more free than he feels. That scares me. I'm not making this sacrifice for kids. I'm not seeing some humanitarian effort manifest at the end of each exhausted day. I'm trying to stem the bleeding of payments set up in exploitative interest schemes for my tiny house garage. I'm trying to break even with back taxes. I'm trying to keep my car running. I'm trying to start more work with entrepreneurial gigs I hope can net equal or more without me needing to spend every waking hour doing them.
Every dollar that stems the tide of the poverty plague speaks to what the land represents. Really, truly, by the numbers, even if I'm throwing the IRS $95 a month to leave me alone, I'll be able to be as “bill free” as you can reasonably hope to be in life. And for all of the hell that it took to get there, I'm afraid it's going to feel like a cheap imitation. I'm still going to be doing things alone. I'm still going to have to circle round and round or make bets in trying to work out something that grows large enough to compensate for the ongoing cultural decay. I'm still going to cross my fingers I can mentally exhaust myself enough to mock my anxiety to death in order to get back into studies, after I stick to salads and a treadmill for a month. I'm still going to be obligated to the cultural work ethic that keeps me as tied down as everybody feels and despotically praises.
Right now was when I was supposed to be “living it up.” I was supposed to take my brain and work ethic to the top of something and revel in the glory. What am I doing repairing a car every month and delivering food 11 hours a day? It's the incidental “lifestyle choice” I'm making to try and put out fires I never started in the most efficient way. It's a job that at least allows me the option to dip into protecting my mental health verses forcing me to sit through a 6 hour presentation on how to organize cans. It doesn't promise the world and then expect free labor. It's a new kind of exploitation. It's an algorithm that has a number for your psychological breaking point. You see, the ethic evolves to meet the pathology of the times.
The difficult part is feeling stuck either way. I like feeling like I can progress on my house. The immediacy of my, in some form or another, perpetually suffered moment is pressing. When I can black out and wake up to a dollar amount high enough to accomplish something, it's a nice higher ride in a period of otherwise self-immolating wretchedness. I realized that I've been trying to trick my brain into tying what I'm doing that day to something happening on the land. I'll try to plan for when he's going to pick up supplies before I leave, so that while I'm working I can connect in real time each dropped off order with a pipe installed or hammered nail. If I take time off, what am I doing? Hanging out and talking with you? Seeing a movie by myself? Spending too much on restaurant food? I don't have a life any way you slice it. Explicitly, I don't have a reason to live that isn't on credit. To the extent I believe my own hype about what I can accomplish or who I want to be for the people in my life I care about is it.
In being forced to sit and save with studies, I started to feel a certain sensibility take hold that speaks to what I'm feeling now. It's summed up in the phrase, “It's all part of the plan.” I had to start couching the “shit years” in a larger context of the story of my life. When a comedian gets on Colbert and exclaims, “Do you have any idea how long it took to get here? 25 years! I've been doing comedy.” What's 2 years of being poked and prodded and a year delivering food in the face of that? What's a few extra pounds and assorted pains if you spend 30-31 actually going to the gym consistently and eating better? You'll be able to afford it, after all. Why am I stressed out I can only drum so fast and barely play my first scale on a trumpet? A good weekend's wages will pay for lessons for a year. “The moment” of your suffered circumstances becomes next level compelling, and the boss battle at the end is your capacity to accept it.
That's perhaps a funny and horrendously sad thing as well. I can feel myself accepting it. I don't work as often or hard as I do because I accept anything less than all of the shit I'll need to drag into the future I desire. What I struggle with is knowing what any form of balance looks like. Again, I can see friends taking off on trips or seeing shows, certainly having saved up during the same months I have. Is it back to the grind when they return? Does it ever really get “better” or does the shit just stir in more or less shitty configurations? If I saw all the shows I wanted and took all the trips I flirted with, I might not have my land. Were they worth the sacrifice if every other week from 31-32 I can travel nearly anywhere in the world? My standards, my comfort levels, and my goals are apparently fundamentally different. The only people I engage with at length about them have the ignorance and arrogance to disregard waking up an hour early to even bother discussing making something work.
There's a scene in Vikings where Rolo is freaking out about his place in Ragnar's shadow and seeks guidance from the Seer. The Seer starts laughing. If Rolo only knew what his future held.
Let's start by expanding on a status I posted earlier regarding your “work ethic.”
I find it funny that there are terms so duplicitous in their ability to sound and function explicitly while retaining a world's worth of a hidden underbelly. Don't we all know what is meant by work ethic? It's how hard you're willing to work in order to achieve your ends. It's the extent to which you push your body and mind. It's the amount of respect you carry for yourself and those who are also putting in the time. It's as striking an entire code of ethics as it is common parlance regarding something we're all expected to do in order to earn our place in society.
Given my complicated relationship to work, I'm frankly aghast I haven't explored this in great detail already. If, and you might as well for this digression, you take the above paragraph as more or less true regarding our conception of work ethic, there seems to be a gigantic story involved with how we get there. Rarely does it seem people are keen to discuss “ethics” at all until they're nodding along at the punishments bestowed from cops or a judge on TV, but one can only strike the bell of our cultural folly once again and move on.
Personally, I used to work a lot. I say that after my last 6 months of working primarily 11+ hour days and taking 5 or 6 off a month, usually only because my car died. Before that I had 3 jobs I worked most of the day and night on. Before that was 2 years of needing to stay basically sedentary to refrain from screwing up my blood work to get into drug studies. I've experienced prolonged periods of both extremes. I tend to function in extremes for reasons I don't have the best explanation of. Increasingly, I feel the imposed conditions of my experience have taught me lessons you only get from suffering through them. Patience becomes a virtue when the alternative is to be driven mad. A naive full-throttle go-getter spirit is not an endless well of energy.
My ideas about work came from stories about my grandparents and seeing what my dad has been through iron-working. Mind you, it wasn't until relatively recently that my stories and molding got to interact with what I was learning about the world and the diminishing power of the dollar. If my grandparents could work 9-5 closer to home and raise four kids in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, my parents had to commute an hour away, one gone a good portion of when I was younger, in a modest house in a neighborhood on the verge of white-flight. My brother and I either lived with roommates, or still do, or had to move back home, only in our late 20s flirting with distorted versions of the kinds of things a newbie family in the 60s or 70s might get right out of high school, and definitely with a degree.
As the times changed, as the pressures became varied and the dialogue about how to understand it flooded from the internet, we never took the time to examine where we were going or why. We never bothered to ask anymore what “the good life” or what “middle class” stood for. We let the people born into wealth scheme to keep it from “trickling down.” We adopted self-destructive narratives of self-sufficiency. I'm telling you, read the comments on facebook under plans for a universal basic income or articles about the minimum wage. Without fail you'll get the nastiest judgmental, “WELL WHY SHOULD I PAY FOR YOU FOR ANY REASON!?” Somewhere along the way we forgot that we're beholden and rely on each other. More than that, we built up an entirely new working ethos that appears to be aimed at destroying even the memory of empathy.
If there's anything my work ethic has taught me, it's that I'm not shit. It truly is worth mentioning, a lot, that you can work yourself to literal death or passed out exhaustion, and you can still live in poverty. You can still go hungry. You can humble yourself and take the “lowest of the low” positions, you can take 3 of them, and people will balk and call you lazy and entitled and smug as you explain to them why freezing your account over back taxes might as well drive you to suicide. The situation is dark. But the only dialogue you tend to hear is the most ridiculous shit about the stock market or one-off company raising wages while pretending they're not laying off thousands or destroying the environment.
Consider, I still feel guilty about taking days off. I wait until several points on my body are throbbing and I've gained an extra 10 pounds before I think it's okay for me to cook for myself for a week and take a walk on the climate change induced spring day in February. That's a bad work ethic. I don't want to die of a heart attack delivering idiot children their food. I didn't want the majority of my memories from my last year as a 20-something to be of TV shows I watched while driving my car.
I posted an article this morning about how neoliberal ideas presenting “gig economy” jobs as a “lifestyle choice” are robbing people of the ability to recognize the power of organizing and being members of their society when they're not working. I've never felt so understood. I genuinely can't remember the last time I was a person. I don't recall when I was doing something fun or immersive for me, and not as a desperate escape to masquerade as someone more free than he feels. That scares me. I'm not making this sacrifice for kids. I'm not seeing some humanitarian effort manifest at the end of each exhausted day. I'm trying to stem the bleeding of payments set up in exploitative interest schemes for my tiny house garage. I'm trying to break even with back taxes. I'm trying to keep my car running. I'm trying to start more work with entrepreneurial gigs I hope can net equal or more without me needing to spend every waking hour doing them.
Every dollar that stems the tide of the poverty plague speaks to what the land represents. Really, truly, by the numbers, even if I'm throwing the IRS $95 a month to leave me alone, I'll be able to be as “bill free” as you can reasonably hope to be in life. And for all of the hell that it took to get there, I'm afraid it's going to feel like a cheap imitation. I'm still going to be doing things alone. I'm still going to have to circle round and round or make bets in trying to work out something that grows large enough to compensate for the ongoing cultural decay. I'm still going to cross my fingers I can mentally exhaust myself enough to mock my anxiety to death in order to get back into studies, after I stick to salads and a treadmill for a month. I'm still going to be obligated to the cultural work ethic that keeps me as tied down as everybody feels and despotically praises.
Right now was when I was supposed to be “living it up.” I was supposed to take my brain and work ethic to the top of something and revel in the glory. What am I doing repairing a car every month and delivering food 11 hours a day? It's the incidental “lifestyle choice” I'm making to try and put out fires I never started in the most efficient way. It's a job that at least allows me the option to dip into protecting my mental health verses forcing me to sit through a 6 hour presentation on how to organize cans. It doesn't promise the world and then expect free labor. It's a new kind of exploitation. It's an algorithm that has a number for your psychological breaking point. You see, the ethic evolves to meet the pathology of the times.
The difficult part is feeling stuck either way. I like feeling like I can progress on my house. The immediacy of my, in some form or another, perpetually suffered moment is pressing. When I can black out and wake up to a dollar amount high enough to accomplish something, it's a nice higher ride in a period of otherwise self-immolating wretchedness. I realized that I've been trying to trick my brain into tying what I'm doing that day to something happening on the land. I'll try to plan for when he's going to pick up supplies before I leave, so that while I'm working I can connect in real time each dropped off order with a pipe installed or hammered nail. If I take time off, what am I doing? Hanging out and talking with you? Seeing a movie by myself? Spending too much on restaurant food? I don't have a life any way you slice it. Explicitly, I don't have a reason to live that isn't on credit. To the extent I believe my own hype about what I can accomplish or who I want to be for the people in my life I care about is it.
In being forced to sit and save with studies, I started to feel a certain sensibility take hold that speaks to what I'm feeling now. It's summed up in the phrase, “It's all part of the plan.” I had to start couching the “shit years” in a larger context of the story of my life. When a comedian gets on Colbert and exclaims, “Do you have any idea how long it took to get here? 25 years! I've been doing comedy.” What's 2 years of being poked and prodded and a year delivering food in the face of that? What's a few extra pounds and assorted pains if you spend 30-31 actually going to the gym consistently and eating better? You'll be able to afford it, after all. Why am I stressed out I can only drum so fast and barely play my first scale on a trumpet? A good weekend's wages will pay for lessons for a year. “The moment” of your suffered circumstances becomes next level compelling, and the boss battle at the end is your capacity to accept it.
That's perhaps a funny and horrendously sad thing as well. I can feel myself accepting it. I don't work as often or hard as I do because I accept anything less than all of the shit I'll need to drag into the future I desire. What I struggle with is knowing what any form of balance looks like. Again, I can see friends taking off on trips or seeing shows, certainly having saved up during the same months I have. Is it back to the grind when they return? Does it ever really get “better” or does the shit just stir in more or less shitty configurations? If I saw all the shows I wanted and took all the trips I flirted with, I might not have my land. Were they worth the sacrifice if every other week from 31-32 I can travel nearly anywhere in the world? My standards, my comfort levels, and my goals are apparently fundamentally different. The only people I engage with at length about them have the ignorance and arrogance to disregard waking up an hour early to even bother discussing making something work.
There's a scene in Vikings where Rolo is freaking out about his place in Ragnar's shadow and seeks guidance from the Seer. The Seer starts laughing. If Rolo only knew what his future held.
