5. February Digest/Digress
Bullshit jobs, creative lives, silenced voices, and the world of work: how can we live with lower carbon and higher care? A letter from the periphery.
Of all the arts, poetry is the most economical. It’s the one which is most secret, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps.
- Audre Lorde
Welcome back to the monthly newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere! Happy Leap Day! A once-every-four-year phenomenon that puts lie to the sensible sheen of time - oops, the denomination we call a year doesn’t quite track, let’s add in an extra bit. My dear friend’s dad and his partner were married today. Does that mean they will only celebrate their anniversary every four years? Go them! I’m personally still highly ambivalent about marriage (which could be a topic for a future newsletter), especially when proffered and bandied about by strange, stunted heterosexuals (through a wall!). That’s the reason this newsletter is so close to the wire (my end-of-month missive squeaking in just in time - I’m on Greenwich Mean Time now, so I still made the deadline, okay!): instead of writing to you last night I instead watched Love is Blind, the insipid and addictive reality show that’s taken the chattering internet by storm, released by Netflix just ahead of Valentine’s Day. I always thought that if ‘love is blind’ it referred to the figuratively obscuring power of love to eclipse our senses and generate silly decisions. But the show means it in a more literal (and ablism-skirting) way: that the inability to see a suitor (simulated blindness) may stimulate a less shallow brand of love. But who says “I love you” after three measly conversations? The show’s artificially-induced rush to connect reminded me of the heady tween days of MSN Messenger - intimacies formed hard and fast when all social context is removed from conversations; little performances in the dark. I think I once ‘fell in love’ with a boy named Reuben who lived in Rotorua when he told me all about the romantic poets over messenger one evening. Bless.
But as for this month’s newsletter theme, well, it looks like I have done the unimaginable: in the subject line I have turned a verb into a noun. Yes, that’s right, nominisation alert! You can digress, in writing, but you can’t write a digress. But a) I don’t care about pedantry and b) I thought I might just traffic in the irritating vocabulary that I am here to complicate: the language and structures of work. Jia Tolentino of juggernaut Trick Mirror fame (see my October review if you missed it) shared a link to this Vulture article by Molly Young on “Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?” If corporations love to turn verbs into nouns, they also love to verb nouns. And it’s all done with the unconscious aim to spool out time in the working day, inflate the length of tasks and meetings that have very little reason for being. The best denominisation/verbification in the piece?
“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”. Too good. But, more seriously, work is the word this month for Think Club. Work is on my mind.
People - good people, kind people - are asking me what on earth I’m doing with myself in London, since I’m not currently in a 9-5 job. Well I’m nearing the end of what my masters supervisor unofficially prescribed for me: a three-month hiatus - a break in which big new commitments are off the table. Of course this is a luxury but I’ve decided it is a luxury worth paying for. I am the worst for signing up to something in a rush, out of fear. I’m trying to learn and look around before I, ahem, leap. So looking around is what I’m doing - not only at job listings and descriptions, but at how we value and talk about work. In a way I feel ruined for smooth re-entry to a 9-5 by postgrad study. All I want to do is research, write, and teach; to challenge, tease, read, speak, prod, and listen. But I’m not ready to leap into a PhD yet, either. Me - the magpie with the manifold interests - committing to one niche for three to four years seems anathema. Everything is moving so fast: pandemic spread, the rise (again) of nationalism, the gamification of politics, the tragedy of the environmental commons, the calcification of white supremacy - it all feels too big and urgent to focus on one, small thing. But such grandiose thinking is a warning sign; I need this limbo period to come back down to earth and settle into the idea of my next small thing. Small things are all we’ve got.
But how am I managing this limbo, practically? First off, I’m lucky to have been a full-time student without debt thanks to scholarships and thanks to working through my studies and thanks to moving in with my partner’s parents for a few months when I needed to scale back on work to make the thesis come together. Right now I’m keeping myself going with freelance writing jobs. Not cool, name-in-lights kind of writing, just the careful work of communicating in as elegant and economical a manner as possible the concepts and resources that my employers’ people need or want to hear. I think I could do more of this, if I get in step with some local organisations - or maybe in a full-time capacity somewhere. I have written for charities, photographers, illustrators, florists, coffee shops: email newsletters, social media posts, essays, research reports, website copy. I could do more of it. But, looking at it all from the periphery, salaried employment is feeling so fatally compromised. On a personal level I’m not sure that working in an office full-time would be good for my health (is it good for anyone’s? Not a rhetorical question - I would love to know if there are some good news stories out there). But on a social level it’s even worse. Despite all of the out-loud activism, many of us are still working for at worst extractive and at best pointless jobs. Or if we are doing a useful job it’s highly likely that we aren’t being remunerated fairly for it.
I am tired of the ‘Instagram vs. reality’ posts that are as carefully stage-managed as the solely slick ones ever were. But what I will never, ever tire of is the behind-the-scenes look at how ‘successful’ people fund their lives. (I’m not using inverted commas because I am cynical about meaningful contributions but because we each have different heroes). I’m obsessed with money - not because I want more of it myself but because I want a de-carbonised, creative, critical, loving world - and I believe that our arrangements of money are strangling such a possibility. Oftentimes when I find out the material reality behind someone’s life I want their life a little less. These are not personal judgements but systemic ones. How can we de-centre individual success narratives so that we can live in a way that is low in carbon and high in care? This is not only a middle class question. The aspirant narrative peppers and pressures education in working class contexts. Getting up, out, and beyond the working class is still framed as a huge raison d'être for education. Social mobility is an almost uncritical aim. But what’s wrong with doing genuinely useful work? Caring work, construction work, public transportation work, food-growing work, forest-planting work? Despite utility and sense, it’s no wonder that an ‘escape from the working class’ narrative sells so well when doing an honest day’s work is paid so poorly that it squeezes out leisure and creativity. It’s not our fault, exactly, it’s more that we need to stop accepting a system where, as anthropologist David Graeber of ‘bullshit jobs’ fame puts it, income and utility are inversely proportional.
Cultural work is also useful work (yes, I realise the arts have an important anti-utility quality, too: that we are beings not doings, etc, etc - but we also desperately need the arts to stoke the embers of revolutions where they first grow: in the imagination). But what’s behind the money curtain of our cultural heroes, big and small? What allows the likes of writers to write? Is it a sequence of service jobs that pays the rent and buys pockets of time in which to live a creative life? Or is it inherited wealth? Is it a network of elite contacts to draw upon for assignments? Is it a permanent/tenured staff contract from days of yore? Is it a commercial job that uses your creative talents and lassos them for the purposes of sales and ‘growth’? Of course we have more agency as consumers. Our incomes are not at risk for making principled decisions or protests in the same way when we’re the spenders as it is when we’re the workers. People have people to provide for. People have people that depend on the income that comes from that extractive, high carbon, low care work, I know. Paradoxically, caring for your family is oftentimes enabled by uncaring work - work that does not care about the health of people and planet, or work that greenwashes its activities to ease the pain of indifference. But I’d rather we talk about dismantling that inverse reward system than just talk about consumer choice. Not just talk but tax. Taxation is simply a means to redistribute the value that workers have helped create. That would be one way to make sure that creative activities and subcultures aren’t just a luxury for those that can privately fund it with high carbon, low care means.
I’ve been reading Carmen Maria Machado’s fantastically iterative memoir In the Dream House, borrowed from the personal library of my friend Laura (the one in the photograph up the top). I love that Machado talks about the book’s construction within the book itself, and I also love that the writer went on the record to share how she paid the bills while she wrote the book. I also love The Guardian piece (found via Maxine Beneba Clark) on a dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it. In this piece Lynn Steger Strong points out, through gritted teeth, that “delusions around meritocracy continue to pervade the writing world”. And I love the way that Nadine Anne Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) helpfully troubled the dazzling Pākehā dream of Citizens’ Assemblies in The Spinoff by questioning who gets to be an ‘ordinary citizen’ and by honouring the unrecognised work of her father: “[h]e’s worked his entire life in jobs that census data would define as ‘unskilled’. He lost his hearing to heavy machinery and his native language to shame. He wasn’t rewarded in wealth or status by the forces that drove him from his papakāinga in Waiomio to help build Auckland’s motorways and bridges and tunnels.” See that’s the thing - a published writer can be lauded breathily as ‘a voice of a generation’, but what about the generations of voices that are silenced by the violence of assimilation and/or by the violence of poverty?
It’s still foggy, for me, what my next version of work is going to look like. I’m happy with my commitments for now, but I do want to get more locally involved while I’m living in London (always so happy to hear from people with London ideas and enthusiasms). I’m going to try to avoid grandiose thinking. I’m also going to try to avoid the old social mobility narrative that’s been implicitly stitched into most of the advice I’ve received, work-wise. If I keep low carbon, high care as guiding lights then I should be able to live with myself (and not just for myself). Funnily enough, my first full-time work experience is looking uncannily right for the criteria: teaching. We’ll see.
Thanks for reading along, thinkers! Happy March. See you next month for more of a review-shaped letter (so many goodies on the shelf and on the screen).
H x
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