[1014] Chop Chop

Let’s talk out dumb old stuff again to see if I can get it to break or advance. I’m thinking the next time I attempt to figure this out, I’m just going to take a ton of shrooms and look for an angle only a kaleidoscope brain could access.

Stupid, easy, pointless, work. It’s not provoking elevated levels of anxiety like when I first began, but I can’t quell the unease entirely. I spent several hours this morning slowly mind-creeping my way towards doing, always, 10-30 minutes of work depending on how well I can focus and not have to redo something. Later, I conducted my groups, and it’s almost 5 hours later, and I haven’t done the next 10 minutes of work, and I’m nowhere near doing the prep that would complete the vast majority of the time it takes me to do notes.

I can do the notes with a show or movie on, especially the prep stuff. I can do them weeks in advance and it might take me an hour or two if I dragged it out. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why I allow myself to think about the notes, write about the notes, anticipate and mildly-anxi-e-tize myself about the notes, instead of just picking a focus lane and knocking the notes out. I enjoy the feeling of opening up the prepped notes and speeding through pasting the individuated portions. I literally have nothing else I do in service to my job beyond sending a few texts and emails occasionally. There is a greater series of absurdities at play.

Today I also attempted to turn that note prep into something more efficient. Well, I asked about how I might be able to. We use templates that the company has populated, somewhat. If they populated them more, it would save me another 5 to 10 minutes per note. That’s 1 to 2 hours a week, over the 6 months I’ve been working there, for 24 to 48 hours of time I could be speeding through sitcoms or cartoons. The response I got, eventually, was that my ideas were great and they’d be discussed at the next software updates/overhaul. That is, after I got a weird amount of pushback and confusing responses that I would even bother to ask for a way to be more efficient.

I don’t own my time. It’s the wretched tickle in the back of my throat that never goes away. Every second I spend in an email debating whether someone who isn’t appropriate for this level of care actually is, is stolen. Every time I’m asked to “support” someone who I don’t have the tools, license, referrals, nor any business pretending I can help betrays being a part of the whole endeavor. That I would specifically set aside time to do the functional equivalent of shoveling shit never makes the shit smell good. I have a perfectly good shovel. The shit is dry and ready to fly. But it smells like shit, and I’m conscious of the mess it makes of my psyche and uncomfortable with how it pollutes my lungs.

I lose when I go into “efficient Nick P.” mode. I feel an extra layer of defeat. They tricked me! They got me to “work like I do” on another thing that is meaningless to me. They designed something that made my wall come down, and now I’m over here knocking out tasks and staying on top of my game…but it’s not my game. My game is figuring out the insurance companies I’m impaneling with and starting my own company. My game is getting back outside and tending to my fence and pallets. My game is the stacks of books around me that need to continue to look like opportunities and trips more than antagonistic escapes.

What if I quit? Then I’ve put this effort into prep that never comes to fruition. If I do the prep, it makes it harder to feel in my bones that the option to quit is as close as it needs to be. Buy-in is how you fall for your captors. If I let myself go, I might start wearing their clothes and thinking their cheap version of my coffee mug isn’t half bad. This is a company that is still holding me hostage for $2,000 if I leave sooner than a year. I will never not think that is bad and a severe form of exploitation.

I never experience a palpably poor consequence of “procrastinating.” It feels like the wrong word. According to Google, it means “delay or postpone action; put off doing something.” Except, I’m not putting off doing something, I’m deliberately and aggressively *not doing something* in standing by my aggrieved principles. I’m not just plagued by some vague notion of “work” or “obligation.” I’m actively engaging in protest that I should ever conceive of the task as the thing that should happen “now” or take top priority. I have until Thursday to put in 10 minutes of notes from today. I only have 2 groups tomorrow. It’s a totally open question if I’ll be inclined to knock them all out tomorrow morning, tonight, midday, 2 in the morning tomorrow or early as fuck Thursday. I wait for the mood to find me, I don’t betray what I’m capable of.

Yes yes, that’s all well and good for a lot of excuse-making and demonstrating you have no appreciation for your circumstances that let’s you get away with making money for doing so little. But how do you really feel?

I can’t lose. I can’t lose myself to the drudgery. No one can protect me from the chances to give up dozens of little ways to protest and feel like an agent of my own making but me. It’s superficially a persistently dumb and petty ask to be tasked with some redundant clicks and boxes to fill. It feels like an existential threat. They know, and I know, that it doesn’t have to be this way, but the time-honored bureaucracy means, maybe, next quarter, we’ll give you back a day or two for every 6 months you stay chained to us.

Will I make any more money if I save everyone else time with my ideas? No. Is it now more likely efficiency will mean they’ll pile on more people until they reach new fail points? It’s practically guaranteed. Our ends are not the same. I want time. They want money. I evaluate the relative effectiveness of the use of my time in my overall sense of being, recognition of opportunities, and reflections on how freely I move about the world. They evaluate the effectiveness of their organization through the recitation of “we’re helping” propaganda and balance sheets. If this job allows for me to watch cartoons and fuck around until the last minute, that makes me feel good, like I’m capitalizing on an opportunity, and when I skip going to the office, that’s freer than a desky 9-to-5.

In school, most classes I could approach the same way. Very rarely was I doing homework right when I got home. I almost never studied until hours before the test. People mistake this for a kind of arrogance or indication of how “smart” I think I am. The bar was just that low. It’s been that low for a very long time across many domains. It’s set just behind the middle of the bell curve. Any average asshole is going to register as acceptable to the broad psychological zeitgeist. It’s the space of the familiar and mundane. It's where you celebrate the ease with which you can do your job instead of let it terrify you. I don’t brag about getting As and Bs; to this day I still shit on IU for failing me, just like I shit on predatory DCS workers, and negligent caseworkers who won’t schedule you to see your children, or ambivalent “harm-reduction” pill-mills that downplay health risks.

I don’t want to feel myself getting enthusiastic about shoveling the shit. That’s what being proactive does to me. It drives me to want to do even more. If I get two weeks done in advance, why not 4? Why not reorganize my spreadsheet and dig up resources and design a whole 6-month plan so I can take the thinking out of what to discuss each week? I could invite myself into more client drama with useless outreach. I could double-down on trying to fit more insurance company puzzle games in between sessions. The anxiety and drive will push me to “capitalize” on the “momentum” until I finally get disgusted enough with myself to relearn how much I like a balanced, modest, and self-aware pace.

A rich man has money, a wealthy man has time.

I won’t allow myself to lose sight of how much I enjoy using my time for “whatever.” My limits brought on by capitalist conditions aren’t going to disappear, but if I must remain a slave, I want it to be a slave that has the time to contemplate and write about his servitude. I want to be the slave that can, somewhat, pick his moment to get back to work. It will always be there and always gets done. My persistent pithy rebellion hasn’t stopped the bills from getting paid nor provoked me to get too dramatic in how or whether I cut off the flow of money. I have no reason not to trust myself that I will do what needs to be done. It doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t need a constant anxious refrain as though this week is different or there’s some prize for forcing my focus. I’ll get to it.