I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said something I immediately regretted about never wanting to retire. In that moment, conceiving of my profession as playing tuba in public, it seemed like a fair statement. What I really meant was that I hate being idle and I hope never to stop doing the work that I care about. A decade and a half later, it seems like no one in any profession cares about work, period, not even those whom many others envy. Work is, definitionally, unimportant, usually involving offering up something others don’t really care about either and convincing them that, in a moment of weakness, they could take it or leave it and don’t want to miss out. A great many people are idle at work in precisely the way I can’t stand being idle anywhere. If I was stuck in that bind and couldn’t ever retire from it, things would be dark indeed.
So, as of the precise moment that I am clicking the “Post” button, I do not like idleness and I do hope to retire someday. But I also self-identify as part of the silent majority who likes work, not just activity; who finds the structure helpful, even if it is minimal; and who is mildly to moderately unhappy being totally unemployed. Because there is so little dignified work, this seemingly adaptive and salutary characteristic is functionally the reverse: however much you dislike idleness, you can always find a job that you hate even more. Slowly but surely, pre-millennial generations are having to admit that millennial altruism only looks idle and destructive because the structures these generations bequeathed to us are insidiously designed to punish initiative, shame creativity, and enforce idleness as a defense mechanism. The scholars who foresaw this almost perfectly were dismissed as extremists, so the realization has had to proceed literally block by block, industry by industry, until enough scattered individuals have become upset enough at the meaninglessness of work that they actually start to relate to us a little bit more. Some have long since accepted that money can’t buy happiness while insisting that consumption is good for the economy. But now, production is not good for the worker, and no rate of growth will make it any more possible to buy our way out of that abyss.
09 December 2019
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5 comments:
Richard Sennett
The Culture of the New Capitalism
(2006)
"When retirement age is kept to the old standard [yet people live longer], males now spend fifteen to twenty years in which they could be productively employed but aren't. Burnout more accurately applies to the character of work than to the physical state of the worker."
(p. 95)
William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)
"Freud saw only mental sickness in daydreaming. The child wants to feel "grown-up," and thus plays. The adult gives up such playing, he thinks, but may daydream instead. We all create fantasies, as long as we live; but, for Freud, the more "normal" we are the less daydreaming we do. I would rather say that the more we work and live by work, in Freud's inner-directed world, the less we have time for daydreams. But by the same token the development of self is likely to have stopped when we lose ourselves in work."
(pp. 200-201)
More:
http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/stephenson-ptmcwork-and-play-and-work.html
Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)
section heading: "Ironic Detachment as an Escape from Routine"
"When jobs consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the worker...seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. ... He takes refuge in jokes, mockery, and cynicism. ... By refusing to take seriously the routines he has to perform, he denies their capacity to injure him. Although he assumes that it is impossible to alter the iron limits imposed on him by society, a detached awareness of those limits seems to make them matter less. By demystifying daily life, he conveys to himself and others the impression that he has risen beyond it, even as he goes through the motions and does what is expected of him.
(pp. 94-95)
Well...see [name of coworker-bandmate redacted], and to a lesser extent [name of another coworker-bandmate redacted].
If this was less in evidence at TSA, where one would otherwise expect it to be endemic, and if it is endemic where I currently work despite the conceit to being nothing short of paradise, perhaps this has something to do with the strictures of the TSA job precluding the display of such attitudes quite so openly, whereas in paradise you can be yourself even if the bureaucratic bloat surpasses that of the federal government.
Admittedly, [#1] and [#2] are absolutely NOT "narcissists" by any definition...the point being, nonetheless, that the description above fits them perfectly, and hence while it resonates as a accurate description and a plausible generalization, I once again find myself dubious that "narcissism," especially in Lasch's narrow technical sense, can serve as either the cause or the effect.
Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)
(quoting Duchamp)
""I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view." He avoided both marriage and military service, treating both love and war with disdain. And these are attitudes which his disciples are likely to develop."
My note says:
"Likely to develop"? Or likely already to possess?
David Riesman
Abundance For What? and Other Essays
(1964)
"Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity"
(with Warner Bloomberg, Jr., 1957)
(pp. 147-161)
[149] "a counterattack soon began against the central place of work on the simplest level of demanding shorter hours, with men choosing to take part of their increasing productivity in the form of time off rather than of an increase in real income. ...
[150] "At a certain point, however, workers seem to want to buy leisure inside rather than outside the plant. No doubt this in part reflects still operative conventions as to a proper working day... And in part men may fear to have too much time outside—time perhaps on which their wives could make demands."
"Leisure and Work in Postindustrial Society"
(1958)
(pp. 162-183)
[169] "some 80 per cent of industrial workers stated that they, in effect, kept on working for lack of alternatives, not for positive satisfactions. ... Work may not be an active presence in the life of American workers, but its absence would be an active absence."
[175] "there is some slight evidence that application lists to medical school are no
[176]
longer so full, a decline which is attributed to the belief among young people that medical education is too arduous and takes too long before one is stabilized on a plateau of suburban life and domesticity."
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