work

Valéry Triptych

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, work

In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant, or a nobody. Had Richelieu spared the ax and Robespierre the guillotine, the former would be depreciated, the latter completely forgotten. The lesson to be drawn from this is hardly of a moral order.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

This is worth remembering whenever someone speaks solemnly of leaving his mark on history. History is marked chiefly by blood, fire, conquest, collapse, and spectacular error. Its admissions policy should make obscurity look respectable. A quiet man who tends his garden, keeps his promises, and refrains from terrorizing his neighbors leaves little material for the chronicler. His life may be good precisely because it is uneventful. Eric Hoffer similarly noted that many problems are caused by nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up becoming busybodies. Aspire to be a nobody.

What is essential in every domain is always the work of quite obscure persons, nondescript, individually valueless. If they did not exist or were not what they are, nothing would get done. If nothing got done, it is they who would lose least. They are essential — and without importance.

Maintenance is so easily mistaken for insignificance. When it succeeds, it erases the tracks of its own necessity. The people who leave no trace are generally the people who keep everything running. They carry, clean, repair, stock, file, deliver, maintain, and dispose. Their success consists in preventing events. The shelves remain filled, the water runs, the garbage disappears, the lights stay on. Because nothing dramatic happens, nobody thinks of them.

The sanitation worker’s achievement is that nothing happens: no garbage mountains, vermin surge, or epidemic. Maintenance produces an absence, and absences attract no glory. We ordinarily imagine achievement as the creation of something visible — a building, a fortune, a victory, a name. But much of the most useful work leaves behind no object at all. Its product is continuity.

People who perform the most necessary tasks are looked down on; most honored is the man who is most helped.

Prestige increases with distance from direct necessity. One man cooks his own food, carries his own bags, answers his own correspondence, drives himself, cleans his own rooms, and keeps his own appointments. Another has a cook, driver, secretary, cleaner, assistant, adviser, scheduler, guard, and publicist. Society looks at the second man’s elaborate dependence and concludes that he must be important. The great man is not necessarily the man who can do the most. He may simply be the man for whom the most is done.

The tyrant receives a statue. The great man receives assistance. The nobody takes out the trash.

The Creature of Letters

By in foolosophy, work, writing

“Which, Mr. Author, do you prefer: to be read a thousand times by one person, or once by a hundred thousand readers?”
“A thousand times by a hundred thousand,” replies the creature of letters.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Freddie deBoer:

What Substack offers is a different kind of precarity, not an escape from it. My income is entirely contingent on 65,000 people continuing to find me worth reading and 6,000 of them finding my work worth paying for, which is not exactly a pension. I think about it constantly. Sometimes I lie awake at night about it! But here’s the thing—it’s legible precarity. I know exactly where I stand. I know what I earn, I know what I owe my readers, I know what happens if they leave. The institutional world offered the illusion of stability while being perfectly capable of firing me on any given day for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of my work. For now, I prefer this version. In the future… who can say.

The revealing phrase is not even “I lie awake at night.” It is: “I know what I owe my readers.” At that point the relation has changed. The readers are no longer merely welcome guests; collectively, they are the revenue model. No individual subscriber is his boss, but six thousand of them together make payroll.

The obvious fear is cancellation — What if I say the one thing that makes them leave? — but it needn’t operate as crude self-censorship to affect the work. There are subtler pressures: You notice which topics convert subscribers. You feel guilty when you have nothing ready. An experimental post is no longer merely an experiment; it may disappoint paying customers. A month spent reading and thinking begins to look like failure to deliver. Even ignoring the metrics becomes a deliberate act of resistance, because the metrics now describe whether you can pay the mortgage.

I can write with no fear and pure enjoyment. If one person writes me an email, or returns repeatedly to favorite posts, I’m gratified. Sure, I would naturally like $300,000, but not this particular $300,000, because income never arrives as an abstraction. It arrives bundled with obligations, fears, incentives, and six thousand people whose continued goodwill has become a household necessity. My position is materially poorer and artistically luxurious. I can publish an odd fragment, a joke that amuses no one but myself, disappear into Valéry for a week, write something no one asked for, or change my mind without wondering what the cancellation rate will look like. Nobody is owed a posting schedule, a recognizable product, or the continued performance of “Outis.” A reader’s email therefore arrives as surplus, a pure gift, rather than customer retention.

The danger for the creature of letters is recursive self-consciousness. You write freely. People respond. Their response becomes valuable, even lucrative. Then, because it is valuable, you begin watching yourself write. The audience that arrived because you were not courting it becomes the audience you now feel compelled to court. You start protecting the conditions which were produced by not trying to produce them. You notice which posts traveled, which subjects drew subscriptions, which tones brought praise. Soon you are no longer asking, “What do I genuinely want to think through?” but “What sort of thing do my readers come here for?” You get in your own way, overthinking things. You keep trying to replicate what worked before, but the reason it worked is because you weren’t trying to replicate anything.

As I’ve said many times, I think deBoer is appallingly stupid about everything of importance. But it’s only fair to say that I’m not mocking him here, as if he’s a pathetic slave to the grind and I’m not. His anxiety is not evidence that his arrangement is fraudulent or miserable; it is evidence that it is employment. A livelihood always comes with exposure to forces you cannot control. My business has clients, payroll, costs, competition, and technological change. His has subscribers, output expectations, reputation, and audience volatility. We’re all vulnerable in our own way.

No, I’m just saying what I’ve always said. You should have something that rejuvenates you after you’re done earning your daily bread. For me, writing does that. One reader reading a thousand posts does that. But if I turned it into a job, even a “side hustle,” it would become just as stressful as a regular job. Whatever brings you money will also bring you woe, so choose carefully.

On Exactitude in Leisure

By in books, foolosophy, work, world football, writing

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

— Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

The joke is simple: a perfectly accurate map ceases to be a map. A useful map must omit, compress, distort, select. The more it approaches total fidelity, the less useful it becomes. At a 1:1 scale, it is not a guide to reality; it is a useless duplicate of reality. The map’s power comes from being less than the territory.

My writing philosophy is also simple: I do this for the pure enjoyment of it. It’s a hobby. I would never turn it into a job even if I had the opportunity. Once you bring money into a labor of love, professional obligations sneak in behind it. Suddenly, you have deadlines, subscribers and all the rest. You end up writing because you have to, even if you don’t want to.

Or maybe it’s not so simple. Since last summer, I’ve kept a nine-month streak of writing every day. That’s partially because of conversing with AI to flesh out thoughts, which allows many more of them to come to fruition rather than rot on the vine. There’s been a lot of low-hanging fruit to gather. On the one hand, this is a bit of an artificial standard to impose on myself. Why not take a day off whenever I feel like it? On the other hand, I like the mild challenge. Coming up with something even when it seems hopeless is fun in itself. But it could easily become a yoke. If I get to the point where I’m making myself write something, anything, just to hit “publish” every 24 hours, haven’t I just reproduced the very thing about a “job” that I didn’t want? How is it different whether I have to write something every day because I’m making myself do it, or because a boss makes me do it? The fact is, there are some days when I’ve written something when I didn’t really feel like it at first. I have to be careful to not let this artificially-imposed logic take over my own will.

Lifting weights is another example of something that is both fun and rewarding, even for a non-competitor, but yet isn’t merely “having a good time.” Training is hard; injuries happen in addition to routine soreness; and there’s often a tough process of having to psyche yourself up mentally before leaving your comfort zone. The whole point of being there is to make yourself do difficult things when you don’t necessarily want to, because you know it’s better for you overall.

In the world of soccer, I started following Liverpool FC in the English Premier League some twenty years ago. The most enjoyable time was the Jurgen Klopp era, from 2015-2024, when he managed the club to multiple trophies and countless enthralling individual matches. Last season, the first after his departure, they won the league title easily, albeit with largely the same squad. This year, after many comings and goings, there’s been a lot more turbulence. They’re currently fourth place with two games left in the season, which would be tolerable in the abstract, but supporters are divided, to put it mildly, on whether Arne Slot, Klopp’s successor, is good enough to stay in his position as manager beyond this season. Worst of all, the playing style is simply atrocious. Slow, boring, and often ineffective. As a mere distant spectator, I’m forced to ask, as I just have this past weekend: why should I devote two hours of my time to watching this dreck? If this is how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future, why not take a break from it and do something else?

Dozens of arguments over this occur daily on various forums like Reddit. For some diehards, anyone who would even think of turning their backs on the club during a rough patch must be glory-hunting fair-weather fans. Anyone even casually familiar with the world of sports knows that sport fandom can be a surrogate religion. Soccer clubs have long histories, complete with rituals, chants/songs, martyrs, and most importantly, bitter enemies. You wouldn’t opt out for selfish reasons any more than you would stop going to church. But for someone like me, with no real personal stake in the club or the local tribe, I keep coming back to the thought: I already have obligations, many of which are tiring and taxing; why do I need to have another one? What kind of magical thinking is it to pretend that my eyes on the TV screen contribute some meaningful support to the team? Whence this compulsion to fill up my days with things I have to do? Isn’t this supposed to be fun?

I don’t know what Borges had in mind with his parable, but I find myself thinking that it makes a very good metaphor for the way in which we allow our play to turn into work. It seems to me like a compulsion: we methodically set about turning enjoyable acts into rituals and routines until they become rote and boring. Play starts secreting duty. It forms a shell. The shell does not know when to stop hardening. It has no judgment. It is only accretion. Another rule, another expectation, another “I do this because this is what I do,” another little layer of duty. Eventually the living thing inside has less room to move. For all our vaunted intelligence, an extraterrestrial ethologist might watch us turning play into obligation with the same detached interest we bring to spiders weaving webs: curious little creatures, secreting duty wherever they go.

Or, like Borges’s map, play expands until it becomes a 1:1 representation of life, with all the unpleasant parts included. We take the logic of duty, productivity, proof, loyalty, self-surveillance, and moral seriousness, and we smuggle it into the very things that were supposed to relieve us from those pressures. We take up hobbies to escape the scale and burden of ordinary life; then, by some strange instinct, we rebuild ordinary life inside them.

The answer cannot be pure selfish gratification. A life made only of “what I feel like doing” becomes thin, flabby, and stupid. But neither can the answer be blind obedience to an artificial rule. The point is to keep asking whether the rule still serves the original good. Lifting weights is chosen difficulty. Writing daily can be chosen difficulty. Supporting a football club through lean seasons can be chosen difficulty. But once the choice disappears, once the activity continues only because of momentum, the hobby has become life-sized. The map is ready to be delivered up to the inclemencies of sun and winters.

Detestable, Hearing Servants Moving About

By in the statusphere, work

Sian Cain: I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.

Fran Lebowitz: A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems. We have every other kind of problem. When I was a kid, we had leaf raking. Which is quiet. Leaf blowers are the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. First of all, they are incredibly noisy. And second of all, 10 minutes after you use it, that big leaf blower in the sky blows them all back. It’s a very stupid invention.

S.C.: What is the worst job you’ve ever done?

F.L.: Boy, I had a lot of bad jobs when I was young. New York City was full of bad jobs in the 70s. You could get a different bad job every week, and I did. I used to think, “I hate this job. I’m going to get a different bad job.” And then I would hate that job. Finally, I realized, and this is the truth – “Fran, you just don’t like to work”. I would have been a fantastic heiress.

— “Fran Lebowitz Lays Down the Law“

This immediately reminded me of something Douglas wrote on the performative hatred of leaf blowers. There’s a certain kind of conscience that expresses itself as manual labor for other people. Like Virginia Woolf forgoing the corrupting influence of modern plumbing in favor of earth-closets maintained by an elderly servant, Lebowitz visits the countryside, discovers how the tidy-landscape sausage gets made, recoils in horror, and returns to the drawing room to demand the rest of us do it the hard way. Calling leaf blowers “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen” has the faintly Bourbon tone of someone discovering during a brief country interlude that the world does not, in fact, maintain itself. You can dislike the noise; fair enough. But the tone is pure class tourism: offended that the labor required to keep things clean is not only happening, but happening audibly, with modern tools, in daylight. And half the neighborhood is wearing noise-canceling headphones anyway. Low-status labor is simply a socially-safe target, especially for would-be heiresses. Oh, for the days when we could openly enjoy knouting poachers and running down peasants in our coach and six!

Bartleby the Scribbler

By in books, identity, work, writing

There’s nothing like the book section at Goodwill to serve as memento mori for literary ambition. Shelf after shelf of novels and memoirs you’ve never heard of, each one the culmination of somebody’s dream. Years of work, an agent, a contract, launch parties, reviews; and now, a buck and change on a thrift-store shelf, moldering away after the original owner stuck it in a box with unwanted Christmas gifts and old sweatshirts and dropped it off in the donation bin like Rousseau leaving an infant on the orphanage stoop.

And that’s the ordinary outcome. At the more spectacular end, you get something like Olivia Nuzzi’s recent memoir, American Canto. A wall-to-wall media circus, months of scandal coverage, an affair with a cabinet secretary, her ex-fiancé serializing his side of the tawdry story on Substack — and after all that, the book moves a little over a thousand print copies in its first week. Imagine whoring away your privacy and integrity for an audience smaller than a mid-tier YouTube channel’s Tuesday upload.

Rob Henderson has a post about what it takes to be a writer now: not just writing, but running a one-person media operation. Newsletter, social feeds, a constant stream of “content,” and enough personal disclosure that readers feel like they “know” you — so that occasionally you can step in and say, “By the way, here’s where you can buy my book.”

On paper, I look like the sort of person a publisher might get ideas about. I’ve been blogging regularly for years. There’s an archive, a recognizable voice, recurring obsessions, a small audience that keeps wandering back. If you’re a literary marketer, this is the kind of thing you point at and say, “Look, a platform.”

This is not to say I could have a career as an Author if I wanted. If I ever published a book, odds are it would sink without a ripple, like most books do. The only point I’m making is narrower and more boring: the visible behavior the publishers and marketers want — regular posting, a sense of personality, a trickle of readers — is already there. What interests me is how the meaning of that behavior would flip the moment it became someone else’s plan. Right now, when I write a post, I’m just following an itch from inside. Something bothers me, or amuses me, or catches my attention, and I want to see what it looks like in sentences. That’s the whole story. If I don’t post for a few days, no one is waiting with a spreadsheet and a frown. The activity begins and ends with my own curiosity. Now imagine the same surface routine, but add a publisher, a publicist, or a boss.

“Time to produce some topical content; your recent posts haven’t really done numbers.”
“You really need an Instagram account; the marketing data are clear.”
“Could you say something a bit provocative on Twitter to juice interest before the launch?”

Nothing material has changed. I’d still be typing words on a screen. But suddenly the internal itch is secondary. The primary thing is fulfilling an obligation someone else has defined: keep the graph pointing up and to the right. The exact same habit becomes part of a strategy deck.

I don’t think obligations are bad. It’s normal to have them. Civilization more or less depends on people doing things they wouldn’t spontaneously choose at 7 a.m. on a Monday. You can even take pride in meeting your obligations, whether you resent them or cheerfully accept them. But obligations have a way of draining some of the spontaneous joy out of an activity. The more something is tied to money, status, or other people’s expectations, the less it feels like play and the more it feels like work, even if you’re doing precisely what you “love.” Which is why I’ve always preferred to keep writing in the hobby column. I’ve heard it said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” For me, this gets it precisely backwards. The surest way to ruin something you love is to make it responsible for your mortgage and your self-worth at the same time.

I already have a job. I treat it as a task: something I do competently in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t need to express my deepest self. It just needs to keep the lights on. Writing is the thing I do for its own sake, the place where a stray thought can turn into an afternoon’s entertainment. No deliverables, no targets, no sense that I’m failing if it doesn’t lead to anything. No one has to care. No one has to pay. If I never earn a cent from it, nothing is “wrong.” In my view, something in your life needs to work like that, something that is allowed to be pointless in the best sense. Hobbies are ideally placed to fill that role. For me, writing is a hobby.

Maybe there’s something quintessentially Gen-X about it after all. I’ve never dreamed of being an author, but I do find it amusing to imagine practicing passive resistance against a publishing house and a publicist. “But you like blogging! You’ve already been doing it for decades! Why can’t you just keep doing it with a link at the bottom of every post to the sales page at Amazon?!”

“I would prefer not to,” I’d say. “That’s all.”

Trust In the Fragmentary

By in foolosophy, work

Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as “non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. …In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of “not-being-able-to-grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the “trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.”

— Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

We don’t inherit meaning the way dukes inherit acreage. Most of us are not living on rents with a private chapel for contemplation. We’re workers, owners of small shops and warehouses, parents with tight margins. If “leisure” means what Pieper says — receptive, unhurried attention — then the question isn’t “ought we?” but how people without estates can actually practice it.

Stuart Whatley’s essay on “the West’s boredom” describes the problem: abundance plus aimless free time invites worthless uses of attention and extremely-online identities that feel like purpose to lost souls. But he stops one step short. It’s not enough to say we need a “leisure ethic” cultivated from youth; once the skills are lost, you have to rebuild them with structures that ordinary people can use tomorrow morning.

Let’s be blunt: anyone reading thinkpieces at the New Statesman is already in the choir. The media-literate are inside a symbolic economy that rewards worry, nuance, and tasteful despair. They read, nod, share, and feel morally awake. Meanwhile, the people who most illustrate the diagnosis — the “underemployed pothead gamer” archetype — aren’t in that audience and aren’t interested. We’ve effectively got two nations of leisure who never meet. The audience for Whatley’s diagnosis is his peers — the already-attentive — who close the tab feeling confirmed that “someone ought to do something,” then return to their symbolic labors. Meanwhile, the attention-poor do the obvious thing: follow the path of least resistance that their apps, budgets, and peer groups make easiest.

Re-teaching a culture how to use leisure is not an op-ed project; it’s decades of patient effort. Schools can seed the canon, sure, but the heavy lifting will be done by households, shops, gyms, libraries, parishes, and clubs that refuse to cancel. If you want a rule of thumb: swap thirty minutes of nightly screen time for thirty minutes of practiced leisure for ninety days. Keep a journal. Rope two friends into it. Whatley’s right about the problem, and right that habituation is the remedy. But habituation doesn’t appear out of a thinkpiece. It appears when someone shows up at the same time week after week. A forklift driver who joins a book club, a shelf-stocker who records his own songs on GarageBand and sells them on Bandcamp, a parent who reads an hour at night and lifts weights twice a week — these are closer to Pieper’s spirit than a trust-fund “aesthete” doomscrolling on edibles at 2 a.m. We can make another path, built from thrift, craft, and micro-rituals, one hour at a time.

The Liturgists of Retail

By in foolosophy, work

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. — Ecclesiastes 3:1

I saw the first maple, green-apple, and pumpkin caramels on the shelf in Aldi yesterday. They show up like migrating birds — unofficial heralds of the turn. You spot these seasonal harbingers in late August and feel the inner weather change: soon mornings will start getting chilly, dusk will creep forward, hoodies will be roused from their summer slumber. The sight is trivial and, somehow, restorative. A small ritual object appears on schedule, and the world clicks one notch closer to “as it should be.”

But behind that reassuring click is a crew of people living on a different calendar entirely. For them, “autumn” starts somewhere around June. While the rest of us are mowing lawns and swatting mosquitoes, they are tasting pumpkin spice variants, approving proofs for harvest-orange packaging, booking time on depositors and flow wrappers, arguing over whether the endcap will carry twelve PDQ trays or sixteen. Category managers sketch a planogram that won’t exist on your aisle for another ten weeks. Procurement calls a flavor house for another run of natural-and-artificial maple; logistics reserves dock slots; a production scheduler plays Tetris with batch sizes and cleaning cycles. Someone, somewhere, is chasing a delayed shipment of cellophane wrappers because the factory that extrudes the film had a maintenance overrun. And a store reset crew, working under the fluorescent midnight, will pivot a whole aisle in a single shift so that one morning you round the corner and, bam, there they are: the caramels of autumn.

If you took any of these people and forced them to live by the same sentimental calendar the rest of us enjoy, they’d never ship on time. That’s the rub. They keep the world on time by living out of time.

There’s a cost to the sainthood, too. Anyone who’s worked a seasonal production cadence knows the mild dislocation it brings. Your senses say “July;” your task list says “Halloween.” You’re packaging snowflake window decals while sweat runs down your spine. The mental trick is to cultivate a private liturgy: you learn to keep two calendars. The natural one tracks the weather and the leaves outside the window. The retail one counts down to ship dates and resets and ad weeks — its feast days are “Back-to-School,” “Harvest,” “Holiday 1,” and “Holiday 2.” You don’t get to be surprised by a season; you get to midwife it.

Maybe that steals some of the magic. But it also grants a different kind. To knock one domino at the right moment — so that miles away, weeks later, a stranger feels that small, grateful click — is its own pleasure. The line worker hitting rate on a caramel cooker, the QA tech with a refractometer, the buyer who fought for on-time PO approvals, the driver who babysat a load through a thunderstorm, the associate who hangs the clip strips straight on a wobbly ladder at 2 a.m. — they’re all advancing the liturgy so the rest of us can keep faith with our seasons.

That’s why I think of them as off-season saints. Not saints in the pious sense, but in the old sense: custodians of a shared order. They accept a little dissonance so that the rest of us can feel consonance. They live in September while it’s still July so that August can feel like August when it arrives. They know that “a time for everything” includes a time to prepare, a time to stage, a time to disappear from the scene so the scene can feel natural. We like to believe that the most “authentic” experiences are unmanufactured, that autumn is pure because no one scheduled it. Yet a surprising amount of what we mean by “it feels like fall” is choreographed: the color palette at eye level, the scent notes cued up in candy and candles, the endcaps placed just so. Nature writes the big score; people in hairnets and steel-toed shoes handle the arrangement.

So here’s a modest proposal for a new seasonal practice. When you see the first maple or pumpkin caramels, let yourself be cheered; let the inner weather shift. Then spare a thought for the people who celebrated this season months ago so you could meet it on time. Maybe even eat the first piece as a small Eucharist for the unseen: a communion with schedulers and stockers and drivers and line leads and proofreaders. You and I get to live inside the polite illusion that the world simply turns toward autumn of its own accord. They know better. They turn it.

There is, of course, a dark counterpart to the off-season saints: the calendar heretics. They’re the ones who looked at the careful liturgy of seasons and said, “Twice, please.” Thus the unholy abomination of Summerween — a gag holiday from Gravity Falls set on June 22 — escapes the cartoon and metastasizes into real-world parties and merch. Jokes that sell stop being jokes.

The doctrine is simple: abolish Advent. If peppermint cheers you in December, let peppermint reign in August. If pumpkins mean October, carve a watermelon in July. Entertainment brands now run “Halfway to Halloween” promos in late spring; bath-and-candle chains roll out Summerween collections in early July; mainstream retailers float mid-summer spooky endcaps. It deliberately unplugs the communal clock in favor of personal indulgence. A cousin heresy is perma-Christmas: keep the tree up “until March—or even May,” on the theory that prolonged festivity soothes anxious times. I get that slow children, or writers for the Atlantic (but I repeat myself), would be attracted to this idea. But the saints know what’s lost when everything is always Here, Now: surprise, and the sense that time has a shape.

Like the original Jacobins, these modern ones would overthrow the old calendar and replace it with their own — not with Thermidor and Brumaire, but with Constant October and Perpetual Noel. The first crew tried to erase the Christian week with a rational décade; today’s crew erases the seasonal week with a commercial one. Different motives, same impulse: remake time to suit the regime.

I’m not saying law enforcement should be involved in the sale of Reese’s skulls or monitoring how long you keep a slowly-dying fir in your living room (though I’m not not saying it, either). I’m saying the shared calendar is a commons. The saints bear the cost of getting the season to arrive on cue. The heretics privatize it. They worship Whim and Impulse — pleasant gods who never let the appetite rest long enough to ripen into joy.

Praeteritio

By in jests japes jokes jollies, work

In the past ten days, I have unloaded five shipping containers (not single-handedly, of course, though rumors have begun to spread). Close to 100 tons of merchandise. I wish it to be known that I disavow any and all attempts to paint me as a modern-day Alexey Stakhanov. I hate to even dignify such careless talk with a response, but unfortunately, some have said that this sort of heroic labor, combined with my prodigious intellectual output, suggests that I may be an übermensch, a stud, or even a “chad,” as the youth say these days. I give no credence to such idle chatter. In no way do I deserve to be seen as the natural successor to Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, let alone mentioned in the same breath as him. I would remind you that it is no blot on Hercules’s accomplishments that even he didn’t unload five shipping containers, nor is there any significance to the fact that, unlike John Henry, I live to work another day. My only desire is to return to my humble day-to-day life with no thought of recognition, not to live on in legend like Cincinnatus as some would have me do.

Can’t Think Big, Can’t Think Past One or Two

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi, work, Ω

I had a friend, an intelligent and very learned man, who gave no hint of having been in the least troubled by time. He was a university teacher, who taught well but scarcely bothered to publish. After his retirement from teaching, the one mild pressure in his life, meeting with his classes, was removed. He rose, read the daily press with a mordant eye, watched one of the morning television talk shows with his second cup of coffee, drew a bit, read some, taught himself (slowly) the rudiments of Chinese, wrote comic letters, looked up French words, considered etymologies of English ones, gave delight to his friends, took pleasure in his food and drink, and thus lived out his days until a benevolent (or so it seems in retrospect) heart attack took him out of what seemed a not very taxing game. It seems rather pointless to say of him “May he rest in peace,” since, as near as I can determine, he pretty much lived in peace. I’m not sure he owned a watch. Not a man, clearly, on a schedule.

Did he, I have often wondered, have any doubts? Had he got the most out of himself? In suppressing ambition, did he not also kill a certain kind of joy—that very genuine joy connected with achievement? He left no children. His friends, those who have not already died, grow old. His memory will fairly soon be extinguished. He was too clever a man not to have thought about all this. He lived, if not all that intensely, still almost entirely in the now. He met all his obligations, not least among them giving pleasure to his friends, though apparently he never felt that he owed any obligations to the future. Was he more or less intelligent than I in eschewing the notion of a schedule?

— Joseph Epstein, “Time on My Hands, Me in My Arms,” With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays 

My gym is looking to hire a new overnight cleaning service. They already have a few interviews set up, but they posted a notice at the front just in case any of the clientele might know a guy, etc. I’ve been pestering the Lady of the House ever since. This is my dream! Working a night shift by myself? Cleaning? In the gym, where I assume my membership might even be comped? Come on, I said, let’s sell the business and get back to the simple life!

I’m kidding, but on the square. If I were financially set for life, that is precisely the sort of work I’d do. The Lady is fascinated with business qua business; I’m not. I’m just a draft horse. (Thankfully, she keeps her Napoleonesque urges under control, so I don’t fear becoming another Boxer.) I can work as hard as anyone, but I have absolutely no interest in CEO-level stuff. Just give me my menial task and let me get to work, preferably while listening to music, ideally without any personal interaction at all.

Me and my friends sell ourselves
Short but feel very well
We feel fine, ah, we feel fine
Small stakes ensure you the minimum blues
But you don’t feel taken and you don’t feel abused
Small stakes tell you that there’s nothing can do
Can’t think big, can’t think past one or two

— Spoon, “Small Stakes”

Sounds to me like Epstein’s Epicurean friend had it all figured out.

Unhappy Ever After In the Marketplace

By in bricolage, education, eric hoffer, work

Until I was forty I lived as a true bohemian, considered financial matters beneath me, and never really understood why I was always in debt. As with everything in my life, the shift from that phase was abrupt and total, and a sort of law of conservation of vice that governs my existence ensured that the overcoming of spendthriftness could only be bought by quick transition to an obsessive, all-consuming preoccupation with my ledger-books. I rush to add that I hate capitalism much more than I ever did in my bohemian phase. I hate it because it forced me, finally, to submit to it, though I always believed it never could. Capitalism broke me like a mustang cornered in a pen.

— J.E.H. Smith

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Capitalism’s greatest predicament is that several paradoxes of the human condition combine to turn capitalist successes into failures… Take mass education: it was the capitalists and not the intellectuals who initiated and promoted mass education. In capitalist America every mother’s son can go to college. Most capitalist societies are being swamped with educated people who disdain the triviality and hustle of the marketplace and pray for a new social order that will enable them to live meaningful, weighty lives. The education explosion is now a more immediate threat to capitalist societies than a population explosion.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

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Marx, a Victorian intellectual, predicted that capitalism would be undone by its immiseration of the proletariat. Actually, capitalism has done more to jeopardize itself by annoying intellectuals. Many of them look down their upturned noses at the marketplace, and therefore at those who thrive in it. The intellectuals’ disdain is a manifestation of resentment about the fact that markets generally function nicely without the supervision of intellectuals. Their disdain is, among other unattractive things, ingratitude. The vulgar (as the intellectuals see them) men and women of commerce who make markets productive also make the intellectual class possible. As George Stigler (University of Chicago; winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics) said, “Since intellectuals are not inexpensive, until the rise of the modern enterprise system, no society could afford many intellectuals.” So “we professors are much more beholden to Henry Ford than to the foundation which bears his name and spreads his assets.”

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

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The Labor We Delight In

By in work

Simon Sarris:

This is not worship of employment, but a simpler observation: It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have them do, the more they are able to later do on their own. It is important to note that while we shouldn’t allow children to be bobbin boys, no one would describe Steve Job’s summer job at 13 as his exploitation. We should be thinking much harder about making sure children can make meaningful contributions to the world.

Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome. How could we celebrate a higher learning that creates something so pathetic, the opposite of a readiness for life?

A couple who work for us brought their eleven-year-old niece along during her spring break this past April. It was her idea, something she was excited to do, and she seemed to really enjoy it. We gave her simple tasks like opening incoming parcels, but whenever she finished, she would repeatedly ask if there was anything else that she could do. At the end of each day, on her own initiative, she’d sweep the floor with the big push broom. By the end of the week, she was proud to have become competent, if not quite a master, at operating the pallet jack, although she was a little too small to maneuver it with a full load on it. It was interesting to see how eager she was to be given responsibilities. She saw it as getting to participate in something with her aunt and uncle, which just happened to be “work.” I have to admit, I don’t think I would have been nearly as motivated at that age; I would have preferred to wander off by myself to play or daydream. The Lady of the House often talks of wishing she had an army of teenage girls to carry out tasks for her. I remind her that when confessing to being the reincarnation of a robber baron, it’s best to use one’s inside voice.

I started work on my fifteenth birthday in my father’s newspaper distributorship. He had been talking about it for several weeks prior, telling me to be ready to wake up early one of these Sunday mornings and go in to the warehouse. A few weeks went by without anything coming of it. I went to bed the night before my birthday thinking, “Well, surely he won’t pick tomorrow to follow through on that…” Naturally, I found myself in a cold concrete room with hazy fluorescent lighting at three a.m. helping to assemble the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Back then, the Sunday paper came in about four or five different sections — the main, or front page section (“heads”), sports, and a couple others whose names escape me now. One person would insert these sections together and pass them down to a partner, who added the “combos,” the ads and such which gave the Sunday paper its heft, and passed them on to be tied in bundles of ten. I played the combo guy to Jesse’s inserter. That man was a machine. Frederick Winslow Taylor would have whimpered ecstatically in his sleep to dream of such a man on his assembly line. He assembled four sections together faster than I could add one. It was quite the unwelcome lesson in humility, especially with my dad barking at me to pick up the pace.

Nowadays, I’m grateful to my dad for instilling a strong work ethic in me. I still have no desire to manage a warehouse crew composed of teenage girls, though. They’ll have to find some other way to the joys of self-fulfillment through hard work.

Obiter Scripta, no. 112

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta, work

Question: can a philosopher really undertake with a good conscience to have something to teach every day? And to teach it to anyone who cares to listen? Will he not be obliged to give the impression of knowing more than he does know? Will he not be obliged to speak before an audience of strangers of things which he can safely speak of only among his nearest friends? And speaking generally: is he not robbing himself of his freedom to follow his genius whenever and wherever it calls him? — through being obligated to think in public about predetermined subjects at predetermined hours? And to do so before youths! Is such thinking not as it were emasculated from the first! Supposing one day he said to himself: I can’t think of anything today, at least not of anything worthwhile — he would still have to present himself and pretend to think!

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Untimely Meditations

We recently got accepted into a mentorship program, where small, plucky businesses like ours get paired with similar, more established, businesses to reap the benefits of their experience. In addition, we’re moving to a bigger space later this summer. That doesn’t sound artsy enough, though, so if you check in here and see that I haven’t posted anything new in several days, do me a courtesy and just say to yourselves, “Ah, I see Damian is once again following his genius wherever it calls him.”

I Don’t Wanna Play With Them Other Kids In the Sun

By in foolosophy, santutthi, work, Ω

Douglas Dalrymple:

Perhaps that’s something to differentiate human beings from other animals: the need for a calling. Have you noticed that almost no one – especially no one with any pretensions to being educated or enlightened – is satisfied with a simple “job” anymore? It’s not enough to have a job, a career, or even a profession; everyone wants a vocation. Even in business and industry, where metaphysical considerations used to nap from 9 to 5, people want a sense of calling, the conviction that the work they’re doing serves a higher purpose, a transcendent goal. The preacher-teachers of today are really no different from others in this respect.

It’s the “educated and enlightened” part that’s the key. I’ve walked widdershins around the idea of work as a calling for my entire adult life, and it seems to me that a pococurante attitude here puts one on the wrong side of a class divide, even more than income. “Jobs” are for people who, well, can’t do any better, poor things. For the educated and enlightened, work is both personal expression and public service. My goal regarding work has always been to find something at which I’m reasonably competent and that pays me well enough to get by. Self-expression? That’s for my free time; that’s why I have a blog.

Oh, you have a blog? Why don’t you join the exodus to Substack like all the cool kids and maybe get paid for your efforts, or pitch some essays to some digital journals? Because I don’t want to feel indebted to subscribers, or pressured to produce “content.” I want to have a hobby that’s about nothing but enjoyment. Turning my hobby into a job would bring with it all the things everyone hates about their job. When work is done, I get to read books and think and sometimes write down my thoughts about those books. Why would I need to see how far that could be pushed? Why mess with perfection?

Every so often, real-world people discover that I like to read a lot. Some of them suggest I should write a book. I don’t think they really mean it; it’s just a knee-jerk thing to say. Some of them ask if I’m reading for a class. Some of them even ask why I live where I do, in a small, unexciting town, rather than in, I don’t know, some literary hotspot, I guess. The guiding assumption is that any sort of interest or talent should be maximized, monetized, and merchandised, or else it’s just going to waste. Why would you read and write just for the fun of it?

I’m an ordinary guy with no great ambition who likes to read and write. Why should that be an oddity? Whatever happened to the golden age of middlebrow culture, which Susan Jacoby paid tribute to so affectionately? I remember being at a book sale a few years ago and being surprised at the weighty subjects that comprised some of the mid-century Book of the Month Club offerings. When did it stop being widely enjoyable to read biographies and works of history for fun? Off the top of my head, I’d name two potential causes. One, the explosion of entertainment options. There are countless ways to stupefy and titillate oneself, all of them easier and cheaper than a reading habit. And two, perhaps the idea of familiarizing oneself with “the great works” as a means of self-improvement came to seem naïve. Maybe that kind of striving only appealed to a mid-century belief in progress, before disillusionment and cynicism set in. Society isn’t getting any better. You’re not going to have a higher standard of living than your parents did. Everything is crass and insincere, and all that matters is finding an angle to get paid. Why are you giving away your writing for free, like an idiot?

It’s very fashionable to reclaim slurs these days. A while back, I announced my intention to reclaim the term “idiot” as an identity. Today, let me rededicate myself to that effort. Like my idiot forefathers, I will continue to hide my light under a bushel basket, too insignificant to even earn contempt, while sophisticated people go about their important business.

I Wanted Hope From a Grave, I Wanted Strength From a Slave

By in foolosophy, santutthi, work

A.S.H. Smyth:

Most of the time, I was just moving “stock” about, taking maddening credit card orders over the phone, or walking people literally to alphabetised mass-market fiction. All of which required no interest in, let alone knowledge of, literature. To a middle-class nerd such as myself, discovering that working in a bookshop [cue poetic images of James Frain, or similar] was fundamentally no different from working in a Sports Direct or Tesco was about the most depressing thing imaginable. That, and waiting for the Sunday trains in winter.

It’s like the man warned us many centuries ago — render unto Commerce the things that are Commerce’s, and unto Hobby the things that are Hobby’s. No alchemist has discovered a means of combining the two. People who work in bookstores in order to live a literary life 24/7  come away traumatized after gazing long into the rictus grin of the bestseller list. People who keep blogs with visions of becoming Serious Writers, faced with loneliness and dwindling site-stat provisions, typically leave the Blogspot tent like Lawrence Oates, saying “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Lower your expectations to the ground, and suddenly the sky is within reach.

You Don’t Think That By Leisure and Idling, I’m Talking About You, Do You, You Lazybones?

By in fresh hell, work

The Idler — as in, the British website devoted to loafing as a spiritual calling, not the series of essays by Samuel Johnson — is, as I’ve said before, in the business of publishing bodice-ripping fantasies of self-sufficiency for bored cubicle dwellers who fancy themselves born free but shackled by chains. Like one of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs, editor Tom Hodgkinson knows one big thing and he says it again and again: much of what we do to earn a paycheck is senseless drudgery. From the seed of this commonplace observation, he produces a hothouse flower of a philosophy. To wit:

If mankind were hard-wired to work, then we would not be enjoying the autonomy of lockdown. Most people don’t gain satisfaction from work, they gain money from it. That’s why they do it.

In fact mankind is hard-wired to write poetry, play music and nurture plants — which is exactly what we have been doing in lockdown. The other day I found myself writing a short poem about the folk singer Sam Lee and his love for nightingales. And I sowed some seeds in a pot. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a bit more time.

By “plants,” of course, he means the pretty houseplants you look at while swooning and composing poems, not the sort that form the foundation of the food chain, which require a lot of intensive labor, performed by, uh, other people. Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it. Point is, it’s no surprise that we find him pointing to the coronavirus pandemic as proof that he was right all along. Still, despite the familiar argument, I nearly cracked a tooth on this logical gobstopper:

It is instructive as to the mutable nature of morality, that a few weeks ago, being very busy was considered morally good, and now we are being told to indulge in its precise opposite. Do nothing, save lives. This shows you that Nietzsche was right: morality, so-called, is merely a tool of control.

I feel like I’ve stepped onto an Escherian staircase, where no matter how many steps I take, I never get anywhere. The deceptively simple formulation here, like the tip of an iceberg, hides a mass of idiotic and incoherent assumptions below the surface. So…the fact that different rules apply in different contexts…means that rules are always an arbitrary imposition by The Man? If there’s no moral rule that holds true at all times for all people, all moral rules are equally random?

For many, many people, lockdown will beat working. My neighbour is using his furloughed time and the lovely weather to paint the outside of his house and spend some time in the garden. He says he is not particularly relishing the prospect of going back to work.

And on my daily bicycle rides around west London, an alien observer would be forgiven for thinking he’d landed in some sort of William Morrisesque utopia. There are no cars, the air is clean, birds sing, and smiling family groups cycle along the river.

This theme runs through the entire piece. Why can’t every day be Christmas? Why can’t vacation be fifty weeks of the year? The kind of people who can afford to live in west London look around and notice that the world temporarily continues to turn without their labor, and from this, they deduce the perennial validity of Bertrand Russell’s looniest ideas about humanity en masse freed from toil to pursue philosophical speculation and domestic garden cultivation. I know the word “privilege” has been contaminated beyond all safe handling, but it does require a certain type of comfortable obliviousness to think that all professions are equally capable of going on strike without dire consequences. Hey, the Idler’s online courses have quintupled in recent weeks! Why can’t all those manual laborers also just use Zoom and Slack to do their jobs, or offer an online equivalent of their services?

And maybe we won’t want to go back to work. Maybe the leisure society dreamed of by people like William Morris and later Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes will start to materialise. Morris believed in what he called “useful work” versus “useless toil”. Russell said that a civilised society would gradually reduce the hours of work, leaving time for poetry, nurturing plants and studying philosophy. And Keynes of course reckoned that technology would usher in a 15-hour working week.

Oh, you thought I was kidding about Russell? Well, let’s just be glad he didn’t quote Marx’s hunter/fisher/cattleman/critic ideal, or Trotsky’s delirious fantasy of the average man in the glorious future rising to the heights of an Aristotle or a Goethe. Come to think of it, even that seems like it might be a lot of work, and Hodgkinson, like Peter Gibbons, seems to aspire to little more than lying in bed all day. Or, at least, that’s the image he projects to the people who buy his online courses and products. Merchandising the eschaton, you might say. What, you think flats in west London grow on trees?

An Aristocratic Social Order

By in bricolage, eric hoffer, foolosophy, work

He was so cheerful and jolly, so happy in his work, that he lifted our spirits. Intellectuals are apt to suppose that people who do relatively simple or routine work must be wretched and full of resentment at their lowly status, and when they express this view in public, by writing or in the media, they provoke and then stoke the very resentment that they suppose, falsely, must already exist. They project their own feelings onto others, and then tutor them to be more like themselves.

The archetypical routine work that intellectuals cite as the horrible fate awaiting those who do not succeed at school either because of their own or the school’s deficiencies is the checkout till in a supermarket. This is to the school failure—particularly female—what the prison cell is to the murderer. It is the sword of Damocles that hangs over those who have no skills. And yet I think that the work, which is surely destined to disappear in the near future because of new technology, is far from without its interest.

— Theodore Dalrymple, “Hotel Rooms in the Time of Corona”

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I am beginning to think that the activation of the masses—their readiness to work and strive—is a function of individual freedom. When the masses are more or less left to themselves, they turn to work as the most accessible means of providing their worth and usefulness. On the other hand, the ideal condition for the creativeness of the intellectual is apparently an aristocratic social order which appreciates his work and accords him rank and dignity. The intellectual does not want to be left alone, and this is perhaps the reason why he cannot leave others alone.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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