work

Attention Must be Paid

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, work

I was reading yet another positive review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and wondering if anyone was ever going to point out the fucking obvious. So thank you, Evgeny Morozov:
Had Carr looked beyond the neuroscience, he may have found that many of the problems that he blames on the Internet — constant busyness, shrinking attention spans, less and less time for concentration and contemplation — are rooted in the nature of working and living under modern capitalism rather than in information technology or gadgetry per se. In fact, as Pinker correctly points outs, Carr’s are very old complaints.
Exhibit A: back in 1881 the prominent New York City physician George Beard published “American Nervousness”, a book about the sudden epidemic of “nervousness” sweeping America, which he blamed, in part on the telegraph and the daily newspaper (the book later proved a great influence on Freud).
Exhibit B: in 1891, almost 120 years before The Atlantic published Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the same magazine ran “Journalism and Literature”, an essay by the polymath William Stillman, where he attacked the cultural change enabled by the telegraph-enabled journalism much in the same vein that Carr attacks the Internet. Stillman complained that “we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives”.
The Internet may be amplifying each of these problems, but it surely did not cause them. When the famed sociologist Manuel Castells speaks of the “black holes of information capitalism”, there is as much emphasis on “capitalism” as there is on “information”.
If anyone ever listened to me, I’d have probably bored them to death by now as often as I go on about this, but all of our techno-gadgetry fetishes are merely a symptom of a restless mentality that sacralizes work and accomplishment. We’ve been hearing for a couple centuries that new inventions would relieve us of most of the drudge work that made our lives so punishing…and they did! The problem was, and still is, that we just invent new things to do with all the time we saved, and we expect our gadgets to let us do them all at once. No one knows how to stop and say enough is enough, and quite possibly, they instinctively fear discovering how empty they are even if they did.
The part I found most amusing in the review is that she had to download a ten-dollar program that turns your computer off for you for however long you specify. The idea being, restarting it is such a huge chore that you’ll be less likely to just aimlessly drift back online out of habit. I can’t help but think that if you’re so undisciplined that you can’t turn the computer off yourself and walk away to do other things, maybe you should take that ten bucks and go pay someone to teach you how to sit zazen. That’s been shown to rearrange neural pathways as well!

Middle Finger of the Invisible Hand

By in education, foolosophy, santutthi, work

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

…Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
This is why I keep saying that on the whole, I’m glad I didn’t go to college, despite the fact that I would surely have enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere. And while I’m taking stock of my good fortune, I’m even more glad I never absorbed the romantic myth that our job should be the culmination of our hopes and dreams, the fullest expression of our personalities. It’s an exceedingly tiny percentage of people who are fortunate enough to get paid well for doing what they love most of all. Bully for them, of course, but for the majority of people who have to settle for doing whatever pays the bills (including the massive expense of that college education), it’s hard to avoid feeling a sense of failure, as if they’ve missed out on their calling (thanks again, John Calvin, for that stupid fucking notion). And as step one in the escape theory explains, there are often catastrophic consequences to feeling that way:
Most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. Suicide rates are higher in nations with higher standards of living than in less prosperous nations; higher in US states with a better quality of life; higher in societies that endorse individual freedoms; higher in areas with better weather; in areas with seasonal change, they are higher during the warmer seasons; and they’re higher among college students that have better grades and parents with higher expectations.
Baumeister argues that such idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for personal happiness, thereby rendering people more emotionally fragile in response to unexpected setbacks. So, when things get a bit messy, such people, many of whom appear to have led mostly privileged lives, have a harder time coping with failures. “A large body of evidence,” writes the author, “is consistent with the view that suicide is preceded by events that fall short of high standards and expectations, whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” For example, simply being poor isn’t a risk factor for suicide. But going rather suddenly from relative prosperity to poverty has been strongly linked to suicide.
And Ed’s lament is a common one even among those who are fortunate enough to have parlayed an advanced degree into an actual academic career. I have several bright, well-educated friends who suffered like that for years in academia before dropping out entirely.

There’s My Flair! And This Is Me Expressing Myself!

By in ohferfucksake, socmed, work

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

Nation of slaves, indeed. Spending your adulthood fearing the potential job you might not get because of something you posted on the Internet once, what a life. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook Like button…

I had a friend who worked for Pitney Bowes once. She told me with great amusement how she actually got called in to talk with her bosses regarding some concerns they had… over some community college courses she was taking. On her own time. With her own money. They truly felt they had a right to dictate to their employees how they spent their time off the job.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

Onward, No!

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, moralizing, santutthi, unintended consequences, work

It makes no difference in my experience of the world whether Xris continues to consume deep-fried chicken five nights out of seven, playing Zelda every evening with his wife and childhood friends, working at a dead-end job and visiting with his mom every day. It only bugs the hell out of me because of my unspoken assumption that you have to do something remarkable with your life.
It’s easy to believe, given the sheer volume of literature out there touting perennial self-improvement and excellence as the gold standard, that you are a failure for not contributing to civilization.
I think Shanna’s being a bit hard on herself to call it bigotry because, as she says, this sort of attitude is like the air we breathe, taken totally for granted as the natural order of things. Most people never become aware of it at all.
I’ve long been a proponent of principled slacking, and I periodically have to re-explain my credenda to someone or another when they question my lack of careerist ambition. Just recently, I had to deflect yet more importunate attention from someone determined to make me recognize my, uh, calling as a writer. Lord, preserve me from the good they would do in my name…
Look, the vast majority of the human race, past, present and future, consists of people who don’t do anything that “matters” in the big scheme of things. They live simple, unacknowledged lives of piddling accomplishments that are important only to their loved ones before retiring to a grave that no one will visit within a couple generations. To judge by a biased preference for results means having to write off most of the species as a failure, redeemable only by the fact that they served as tiny little cobblestones helping to smooth the way for those with an actual destiny to fulfill, or as minuscule stipples of paint in someone else’s masterpiece. That’s the shadow of this sort of dizzying, utopian optimism that values ends over means: a sour disgust when you finally realize that most people never will actualize their potential for whatever reason.
But even more importantly, there are very few, if any, unalloyed “goods” in the world. Almost anything you can name as a net positive has eventually led to unexpected negative results as well. In an age of mass education, where the average elementary school student is more literate and scientifically educated than most of the ancient world, we’re all too familiar with the strange counter-enlightenment phenomenon of people who have apparently reacted to all this information by taking an insolent pride in being ignorant. Our poor don’t necessarily starve to death anymore, but they suffer disproportionately from obesity-related illness resulting from a cornucopia of food like chocolate-chip-pancakes-and-sausage on a stick. We (at least those of us in wealthy countries) vanquish many of the perennial torments of humanity throughout its history, such as plague, famine and barbarian invasions, only to fall prey to depression and ennui. The Taoists used to shake their heads and chuckle at the earnest way Confucians, in their tunnel vision, thought they had all the answers for how everyone else needed to live. How do we know that the good we do today won’t be the problem someone else has to solve tomorrow?
This isn’t meant to seem like an endorsement of quietism. I, for one, am certainly glad some obsessed geniuses got around to inventing electric guitars, modern medicine and the Internet. And I’m happy to be in unrequited love with writing and music, knowing full well that the more I have, the more I’ll need, never entirely satisfied, always reaching for just a bit more. Striving itself is not necessarily a bad thing. A life devoted to achieving tasks and seeking glory is no more or less valid than a life devoted to happiness. It’s just that too much of goal-seeking places far too much value on the brief moment of satisfaction with one’s accomplishment, which, as we all should know from experience, is never quite as awesome as you’ve imagined it to be while striving for it, and it’s quickly replaced by the hyperactive urge to pick up and get moving again. How many people do we know who spend decades like this, only to conclude that all is vanity because they haven’t enjoyed the time they spent getting there? When it comes to work, the activity most of us spend much of our adult lives engaged in, it seems a lot more psychologically healthy to aim to be content, knowing when enough is enough. The idea that things can endlessly improve along a steady upward trajectory is the product of a historically ignorant, linear-minded culture that thinks we can have good without bad, up without down, or the front of a coin without the back. The idea that our “unique” talent is destined to be recognized and rewarded in the marketplace, of all things, unless we shamefully avoid owning up to it, is a ridiculous fiction, as daft as anything John Calvin or Ayn Rand ever belched forth. And it’s insulting to act as if arête is confined to marketable skills and transactional relationships.
We are not in any way obligated to push everything as far as it can possibly go. I can’t possibly stress this enough.

The Old College Try

By in education, foolosophy, work

Joseph Epstein:

Intelligent people who hadn’t gone to college began to feel a great hole in their lives, and those who had gone could usually be relied upon to hide from them what is all too sadly the truth: they really haven’t missed all that much. Paul Goodman, the 1930s radical who became something of a guru during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and early ’70s, used to enjoy saying that all going to college meant was that in doing so a person showed how badly he or she wanted to succeed in society as currently constituted. Going to college entails a large expense, lots of useless work, and the acceptance of endless onerous, preposterous trivialities, all of which, Goodman liked pointing out, showed that any young man or woman who was willing to put up with this nonsense could be expected to put up with the even greater nonsense of boring and meaningless work later in life. College, in this view, functioned chiefly to turn out useful, moderately high-level drones, finely honed tools of capitalism.
…Of course, undergraduate education is only ostensibly about producing the sound paper on T.S. Eliot or the Renaissance or the Reformation. What it’s really about, or at any rate is supposed to be about, is the development of young minds, teaching them how to think independently, how to combine common sense with proper skepticism, the whole given a fine texture by the attainment of an at first widened and later (after college, acquired on one’s own) greatly deepened culture. But what percentage of the 65 percent of Americans who regularly participate in one form or another of higher education do you suppose derive anything resembling such things from their education? I would set it at somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, though that may be too generous. Most people come away from college, happy souls, quite unscarred by what has gone on in the classroom. The education and culture they are presumably exposed to at college never lay a glove on them. This is the big dirty secret of higher education in America.
This doesn’t mean that their having gone to college isn’t worth it. Not at all. On a strict accounting, a college education, expensively priced though it nowadays generally is, probably pays off as well as any investment. Endless studies show that young men and women who attend college earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over a lifetime than those who, for one reason or another, do not go to college. Why should this be so? For the same reason that degrees in journalism, master’s degrees in business, and other (shall we politely say?) not strictly necessary degrees make for success: because, that is, people who have already paid for these overpriced appurtenances wish others to do so, forming a (not so) little group of those who have already pledged the fraternity.
I had an artist friend in high school who said he wanted to go to college even though he didn’t need it for his career plans, “just for the college experience”. (He wasn’t a drinker, or even overly social, so I guess he was referring to the intellectual aspect.) I think I know what he meant; I still enjoy looking through the course offerings that come in the mail from all the nearby colleges and daydreaming about possibly taking the classes that catch my eye if time and energy will ever allow. But dabbling in the odd class with no real remunerative potential would be good enough for me; I know too many people who invested four-to-eight years and tens of thousands of dollars into their education, only to end up with meaningless jobs they hate, a mountain of debt on their backs, and no capacity for intellectual curiosity or enjoyment anymore.

Fleurs Du Mall

By in foolosophy, sex-you-all, waiting for the barbarians, work

Micah White:

Can capitalism exist without its foundation of heterosexual monogamy? Is polyamory inherently revolutionary? To all these questions we must answer: capitalism is a master of recuperation. What first shakes it, soon motivates it, later strengthens it. We will never know which tactics bring it down until we try.
To rupture the consumer myth will take more than protests in the streets and boycotts of consumer goods. It’ll require a fundamental shift in the structure of society, a revocation of our libidinal investment. Whether that’ll take the form of polyamory or simply neighbors getting to know each other remains to be seen.
Huh? What difference would it make how many people you sleep with if your spending and consumption habits remain the same? What sort of consciousness shift is this supposed to bring? I mean, check it:

The U.S. economy is predominantly driven by consumer spending, which accounts for approximately 70 percent of all economic growth.

If you want to be revolutionary, stop spending money you don’t have on shit you don’t need. If you want to be sexually revolutionary, stop pumping out more little consumers. Period.

Hungry Ghosts

By in foolosophy, work

I’ll dedicate myself to pissing on John Calvin’s grave for as long as I live. I still think he’s one of the most malignant influences on American culture, period. But it’s only fair to acknowledge that he may not be entirely to blame for our insane attitude regarding work, as a new book asserts:

People in the U.S. often pride themselves for working more than our European counterparts. Why do we work so much in the first place?
There aren’t any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans famously had more leisure time than the Japanese back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who are in their late 50s or 60s, they will tell you that they take fewer vacations than their parents did. Now why did that change? It wasn’t because of the Pilgrims. People work hard in America, but there was a period where leisure time was increasing. I quoted Linda Bell and Richard Freeman in an article they wrote about what happened during the ‘90s. There was nobody to stop you from working longer. There was no government check, there was no union check as there is on excessive work as there is in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. These institutional checks are gone. So people feel like lab rats: “If I work an extra 10 minutes over the person in the cubicle next to me, then I’m less likely to get laid off.” It’s a very rational response.

Idleness, Indolence, Insolence

By in calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, santutthi, socmed, technology, work

We have created a monster that is consuming us. And I don’t mean that “the Internet is bad” in that hypocritical and falsely ascetic way. I mean that we, along with the phones that travel with us, the texts we type in movie theaters, the instant messages we receive now even on some planes, the social media many of us are expected to participate in on behalf of our jobs, and the complexes and work ethics we have all inherited from our diverse array of guilt-generating forebears, have bubbled together into a frenzy of ceaseless professional engagement that is boiling us dry.
[…] I don’t own an iPhone or a BlackBerry because I do not want to receive e-mail all day every day. Increasingly I understand this preference to be naive, impractical and really rather twee. On several occasions in the past year, days when I’ve run between appointments and not brought my laptop, I’ve had to call my boyfriend to ask him to log into my e-mail and tell me whether I’ve missed anything urgent. I should get a smart phone because I live in the real world. And in the real world, where I used to receive a few dozen e-mails a day, I now receive hundreds.
[…] I don’t think the notion that we have to be constantly plugged in is just in our heads: I think it’s also in the heads of our superiors, our colleagues, our future employers and our prospective employees. There will be judgment, or at least a note made, perhaps by a boss who’s tried to reach you unsuccessfully, or an employee who has an urgent question that goes briefly unanswered.
To not be reachable if called upon at any time, except perhaps the dead of night, feels sinful; unavailability betrays disconnectedness, and disconnectedness has come to stand for idleness and indolence. How many people have sent needless e-mails at 7 a.m. or perhaps 11 p.m., with the thought, if not the conscious intention, of communicating an intensity of professional commitment, demonstrating defensively or passive-aggressively or in the hopes of beating the next round of layoffs that they were beavering away at every odd hour of the day and night.
America’s excesses are never far from sight: Our endless enthusiasms for boundless capitalism, materialism and hedonism persist. But these three have always had a complicated but close relationship with their uptight buddy, Puritanism, and I can’t help feeling these days like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards have insinuated themselves into everyone’s friends and family network, preaching the gospel of a work world without end.
Well, yes. Once again, though, the machines were created to address the perceived need of more productivity, more convenience, so yes, those fucking Puritans and their diseased minds. We’re still suffering the effects of living in a country they founded. But honestly, how much of what we do for a paycheck is, you know, vital? And how much of it is just frenetic activity in the service of manipulating manufactured desires? We long ago passed the point where we could produce enough of the essentials for everyone to live comfortably. Most of what we do now is try to convince people they can’t live without something they never even knew existed five minutes ago, something that will make them feel special for a moment or two before needing to be replaced with something bigger, better, flashier, newer. Like all drugs.
I think the system will eat itself eventually. In the meantime, though, it’s just a question of how much you’re willing to do without, how much you’re willing to be a pariah, how firmly you’re willing to defend your perception of what is absolutely necessary for you to be content, come what may. Personally, I would rather work as a janitor or hanging off the back of a sanitation truck than to become a white-collar professional (and yes, I’ve done similar work before, so that’s not empty bravado). Luckily, I sat down and thought through this at a time when most of my peers were busy trying to craft fake IDs to get hold of beer, so I was able to avoid the debt that traps most people in this hamster wheel consumer society.

Don’t Give Me That Do-Goody Good Bullshit

By in fresh hell, the wire, work

We follow the same rules in our family, and one of them is: Always stop to buy lemonade from kids who are entrepreneurial enough to open up a little business.
My brother immediately pulled over to the side of the road and asked about the choices.
The three young girls — under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them — explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.
Then my brother asked how much each item cost.
“Oh, no,” they replied in unison, “they’re all free!”
I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: “But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I’m really thirsty!”
His fiancee smiled and commented, “Isn’t that cute. They have the spirit of giving.”
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
I hope no one ever clues this woman in to what goes on in kindergartens across the country. All that propaganda about sharing and cooperation, when what they really need is a Lord of the Flies-style environment to separate the producers from the parasites!
As the urban philosopher Omar Little once said, “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.” Fucksakes, man, whatever happened to the idea of noblesse oblige? Carnegie and Rockefeller would probably look like bleeding hearts to a Randroid cultist like this, what with all that philanthropy they engaged in.
Anyway, Mrs. LifeoftheParty mentioned earlier that they were riding through her brother’s “upscale neighborhood” when they encountered this Marxist outpost. Later, she says:

Or maybe it’s the other way around: The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there’s no free lunch — and all they see is “free,” not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

I agree! Rich kids probably have learned from the “society around them”; namely, that you can take all the risks you want with other people’s money while creating nothing of value and still demand exorbitant rewards while standing in the smoldering wreckage you leave for other people to clean up. Private profit, public subsidy. But somehow I suspect that’s not what our Galtian heroine meant by that…

Norma Scrittura

By in books, foolosophy, language, socmed, technology, work, writing

Even when you’ve got hold of it, e-mail—so often dashed off in place of a phone call—rarely achieves a high literary standard. And it almost never supplies the biographically useful details that letter-writing did back when the contents of a sealed envelope were the best means of communication over a long distance.

…Although nothing stings quite like being “flamed” over the e-waves, Mallon mourns the passing of the handwritten, or even hand-typed, letter—whether loving or vicious. “The glaze of impersonality over what pops up on that computer screen” spoils what once was the thrill of learning to “recognize the quirks of a person’s typing, and typewriter” or a new friend’s handwriting, which “has an intimacy and force that can never be matched.” Never mind biographers; all of humanity will lose something incalculable as letters—those “tactile couriers”—vanish, to be replaced with “uniform pixels on a monitor.”

Mallon quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of the letter as “a kind of picture of a voice.” Handwriting, even if simply a signature scrawled at the bottom of a typed page, has always been part of that picture. Some of Mallon’s correspondents, like WWI poet Wilfred Owen, considered letters an embodiment of the letter writer. “It seems wrong,” Owen wrote to his mother from the front in January 1917, “that even your dear handwriting should come into such a Gehenna as this.” It’s hard to feel the same way about e-mail, IM, or a text message. No matter how you receive it, an electronic transmission, with “Forward” just a click away, can never seem as personal, private, or real as a handwritten letter meant for you alone.

– Megan Marshall

I’ve written sympathetically before about the tendency to cling protectively to one’s aesthetic preferences in the face of seemingly inevitable “progress”, whether it be people who will always prefer books to Kindles, or hard copies of music to mp3s. So, sure, if you honestly get a tactile thrill from the idiosyncrasies of someone’s handwriting on paper, more power to you.

But when oh when are we ever going to stop hearing this mindless romantic complaint about how email isn’t as authentic as pen on paper? Why stop there? Why isn’t quill and parchment more “real”? What about papyrus for all the anti-paper snobs? Cuneiform script on clay tablets with a reed stylus?

Once again, shallow romantics perceive essence where there is only form. There is nothing inherent in the medium of email that prevents users from creating interesting letters full of wit and personality, addressed affectionately to people they know well. I do it all the time with friends. And I also have old handwritten letters from friends that aren’t all that interesting, written in that stilted, uncomfortable style of those who don’t spend a lot of time cultivating and expressing interesting thoughts. It’s not the tools you use, it’s the effort you put into the work. Don’t shoot the instant messenger.

Speaking of work, it bears repeating: one thing that has changed in the last few decades is the fact that more people have to work longer hours for declining wages at less rewarding jobs. Thus, all we do with our “labor-saving” devices is use the little bit of time we save to cram in more work in the vain hope of getting ahead — or, as the case may be, just trying to stay level. And so we see thunderfuckingly stupid products like this made available. In that sense, I can’t really blame people for feeling like they don’t have the time to make emails into an entertaining event. While myopic aesthetes are sniffling about our declining literary standards, a ravenous all-business-no-pleasure culture is devouring and excreting everything of value it gets its claws into.

One thing you can fairly say about our emails, texts, cell phones, Twitter accounts, etc. is that they’ve done away with what I would call the formality and ritual that formerly accompanied letter-writing. You used to have to set aside a certain amount of time and effort to do nothing else; you couldn’t exactly be writing a letter while cradling a kid under one arm and stirring dinner with your hand, all while balancing a corded phone on your shoulder. Now you can put on your Bluetooth headset and send quick messages on your iPhone, which is connected to the Internet and more powerful than the desktop computer you had ten years ago. Like I keep saying, it’s not impossible to sit down and concentrate on nothing else but typing a worthwhile email. It’s just that the ever-increasing pace of modern life makes it so that you have to dig in your heels to do it. Our gadgets have made it so that personal communication, something that used to require a little special time and focus, is now just another mindless chore to be done as quickly as possible so that we can chase the next shiny object. And even if you don’t want to be that way, the fact that everyone else does it means that you either grudgingly join in or find yourself getting left behind in various ways, some of them financially uncomfortable.

This is where we leave behind the nitpicking over technological minutiae and get into questions of human nature: why are we so easily bored, constantly seeking novelty and stimulation? Why is it so difficult to have a philosophical sense of when enough is enough? Why don’t we see that, despite all the rhetoric equating increased consumer choice with freedom, it ironically traps us in different types of anxieties and status games we can never win? Buddhist writers talk a lot about mindfulness, the need to cultivate a sense of how to just be, how to exist in this moment. Focus on what’s right in front of you right now, whatever that may be, no matter how mundane you think it is. Focus on the person you’re having a conversation with, pay attention to them like you’ve got nothing else to do, don’t spend your time craning your head to look over their shoulder, hoping to see something more interesting happening somewhere else. Carry that around with you, and you’ll be surprised how you can find profundity and meaning even in the midst of what you’ve been conditioned to see as a sterile wasteland.

The Curse of the Drinking Classes

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, work

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative. Our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariably pass through the gate of renumerative employment.

It was not always this way. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle defined an attitude that was to last more than two millennia when he referred to a structural incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position. For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals. The labour of the hands, as much as of the mercantile sides of the mind, would lead to psychological deformation.
[…] The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle’s formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes.
Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere, too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.
Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically – or perhaps realistically – confined, by the aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.
Well, at least it’s good to hear that Europeans have atoned for their mistake by accepting a more realistic worldview these days. Another good reason (besides my favorite national football team) for me to move to Spain!

Growing up and living most of my life in North America, it always seemed natural to ask people upon meeting them what they did for a living. Then I moved to Spain where people rarely ask that question. I’ve been here two years and still don’t know what some friends do to pay the bills.
This lack of interest in people’s professional lives at first confused me, like people didn’t care enough about their friends to bother finding out what they did eight or ten hours a day.
After a while, however, when the cultural shift started happening in my brain, I understood the reluctance to ask: Work life isn’t important.
For a majority of Spaniards, a job is what you do to pay for the fun you have outside of work. Coming from a culture obsessed with discovering your passion (and being a mentor who helps people do just that), this concept of unimportance blew me away.
There’s a generation in Spain that got the short end of the stick career-wise. Being the first generation to grow up in democracy a huge number of them went to university – it was what you did. Unfortunately there weren’t the jobs waiting for them on the other side, so they found what they could. Many of them were getting paid a very basic wage of 1000 Euros a month even into their late 30s and early 40s.
With their early dreams crushed and hope for change equally bleak, these mileuristas (1000 Euro earners) learned to find other passions in their lives and think of work as something to pay for these passions.
[…] In Spain, people accept the bleak situation and get on with the rest of their life, finding purpose and meaning outside of work.

This author, still shuddering from gazing into such a nihilistic abyss, managed to find his way back to the American belief in progress, novelty, personal growth, and constant upward trajectories. Those of us with different concepts of happiness, identity, time and meaning just sit back and smile. Again from Botton’s book:
After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited – long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms – what they should be properly doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true ‘calling’.
This curious and unfortunate term had first come into circulation in a Christian context during the medieval period, in reference to people’s abrupt encounter with an imperative to devote themselves to Jesus’ teachings. But Symons maintained that a secularised version of this notion had survived even into the modern age, where it was prone to torture us with an expectation that the meaning of our lives might at some point be revealed to us in a ready-made and decisive form, which would in turn render us permanently immune to feelings of confusion, envy and regret. Symons preferred a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, which he had pinned up above the toilet: ‘It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement’.

The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret

By in prying eyes, work, writing

For secrets are edged tools
And must be kept from children and from fools

— John Dryden

I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows

— John Clare

The gauntlet has been thrown down!

Some bloggers who post under their real names say that those who write under pseudonyms have something to hide or don’t want to be held accountable to their audiences.

Heather B. Armstrong, who was fired from her job after her employer discovered her blog, Dooce, where she posted under her real name, said there are few valid reasons a blogger should veil his or her identity.

“I think if you’re doing something anonymously you’ve got some issues going on,” she said. “There’s a reason that you’re hiding.”

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you so afraid of?” It really is a stupid argument no matter what the context, no? I would say that if you’re more obsessed with a writer’s name, address, or place of employment than whatever’s being written, you’re the one with the issues. How interesting that she doesn’t seem to feel that anyone, including herself, apparently, should be able to write anything unless they’re willing to lose their job over it. Hey, I wish we did live in a society where controversial opinions were accepted as a banal fact of life, and not something one should act ashamed of, only to be discussed with close friends behind closed doors lest they cause a fatal attack of the vapors in people unwittingly exposed to them, but given recent events, I’m not holding my breath.

I happen to be self-employed and a member of no particular standing in the community, so it’s no skin off my back if anyone knows who I am or not. No money or reputation on the line. Yet, I write pseudonymously for several reasons, not least of which being that it just doesn’t matter who I am or what I look like. Go gawk at celebrities if that’s your thing; but if you’re reading what I write, I would hope it’s because it somehow resonates with you or makes the time pass a little easier, not because you’re desperate to know where my house is or what I had for breakfast.

Largely, I wanted to have a space where I could focus on writing just for the fun of it, and possibly to even improve at it. A space where the words and ideas are everything, and the person behind them next to nothing. I’ve got the whole rest of the day to deal with my personal life; this is a place to escape all that for a while.

And also, to some extent, pseudonymity is my little protest against a fishbowl world where everything about everybody is a topic for discussion or a plot for a reality TV show. I’ve come to appreciate the value of sometimes seeing people as characters in an artistic sense, not specimens in a laboratory to be closely studied, poked and prodded under harsh lights. An element of mystery or surprise is important, too; knowing where not to look, what to leave unsaid. So, yes, this blog is somewhat of a project of that sort, a way to develop what’s interesting about me and leave the rest in the shadows.

Simplify, Sim–

By in art, foolosophy, technology, work

Am I the only one who finds that ironically amusing? Unnecessary repetition in a phrase being used to symbolize the need to strip away superfluous ornamentation and clutter? Perhaps Thoreau was just a student at the School of Redundancy School.

Anyway! I recently had an email correspondence with a former teacher in which she apologized a couple times for her “verbosity” – in this case, writing about three or four good-sized paragraphs per email. It wouldn’t have even been two pages of a book if printed out. I thought, what a shame it is that anyone should feel bad about expecting you to take a whopping several minutes of your day to read something they felt was important enough to share with you. It reminded me of something Susan Jacoby wrote:

E-mail, often cited as the savior of written communication and as a worthy successor to obsolete snail mail, has delivered the coup de grâce to the traditional letter.

…I know this because of the haste and inattentiveness with which my close friends and I approach the reading and writing of our own e-mail today. Neither I, nor anyone I know, turns to e-mail with anything like the sense of anticipation and pleasure that used to accompany my opening of the mailbox. How could we?

…When I receive an e-mail from someone dear to me, I am happy. But the contents usually amount to, “Hi, I was thinking about you when I read this article the other day,” followed by a link. And I answer in the same nondiscursive way. When I first went online, I was excited about e-mail because I thought it would replace the long letters I used to send and receive, but I soon found that lengthy e-mails elicited very brief responses – even when the person was someone who liked me or loved me. So I started replying in kind.

There undoubtedly are a few people who save their e-mail correspondence with good friends and who write e-mails as interesting as the letters many of us used to write during the snail-mail era. For the most part, though, e-mail as a medium really is the message – and the message is short.

I’ve always been one to put a lot of time and effort into my own emails, occasionally saying (and only partially joking) that I aim for them to be events. And I greatly prefer them to handwritten letters – my handwriting is terrible, for one thing, but also for the ability to easily choose aesthetic touches like color, font size and style, and especially for the ability to add hyperlinks, something that I think adds much more depth to an email that wouldn’t be possible in a traditional letter, unless you wanted to have endless footnotes and parenthetical asides, which I’ve always felt makes for a distracting reading experience. I have no problem with the medium at all; it’s just a question of how much effort you care to put into it. The majority of people I write to usually send back terse three-or-four line responses if they bother to respond at all, so I understand Jacoby’s frustration here, but it’s not a question of a monitor versus a piece of paper, or a keyboard versus a pen. My co-blogger Arthur and I have written some incredibly ostentatious emails just for the fun of writing and crafting them. The future may belong to the small mammals texting each other in their retarded lol-speak, but it’s still possible to be a big, plodding thesaurus-saurus and enjoy it. Just make the effort.

S.O.S. texted from a cell phone.
Please tell me I’m not the only one
that thinks we’re taking ourselves too seriously.
Just a little too enamored with inflated self-purpose.

Constant entertainment for our restless minds.
Constant stimulation for epic appetites.

Don’t lose touch.
— Against Me!

Of course, that raises the question of why no one ever makes the effort. Jacoby blames the “culture of distraction”, and I partially agree – the fun ‘n’ games aspect of our wired world certainly places a lot more demand on the attention of people with ever-shortening spans. Who wants to sit at the computer for forty-five minutes concentrating on communicating with one person when you could be instant-messaging several others rapid-fire while watching TV and listening to music in the background?

But the culture of work is where I would mostly look. She looks back fondly on her correspondence with her then-fiancé in the ’60s and is skeptical of the thought of a similar correspondence being possible today through email, but other, more important changes than the means by which we write to each other have occurred since then as well. It’s a cliché, but unfortunately no less true, that people are too busy working all the time to pay (with wages that have been stagnant since the early ’70s) for all the stuff they never have time to enjoy because they’re too busy working, and on and on in an Ourobouran frenzy. One of the greatest philosophers ever, Bill Watterson, noted this in a strip featuring Calvin’s dad, where he groused about how modern technology had only made people expect everything to get done instantaneously, and said that if we wanted more leisure time, we’d invent machines to do things less efficiently. With all the “labor-saving devices” we’ve invented in the last half-century or so, why are we all working longer hours for less money than ever before?

I would just suggest that it’s because few people take a reflective view on life, work and leisure. They never figure out a way to make time for those things, like good conversation and time to relax (not merely collapsing in a vegetative, catatonic state or an alcoholic stupor, but actually relaxing), and by the time they start to wonder how it could be done, they’ve probably got themselves stuck on the hamster wheel of working just a little longer to get a little extra money…only to realize that what was once just a temporary extra effort quickly becomes a required norm, especially once everyone else starts doing it too. Maybe Max Weber was on to something, and we’ve just thoughtlessly inherited a tradition of slaving away beyond all practical need to prevent idle hands from doing the devil’s work, or in the hopes of receiving some slight reassurance by means of material blessings that an insanely hateful, fickle God favored us for a trip to paradise. Maybe we just need to develop a stronger concept of art for art’s own sake in our notoriously practical, no-nonsense business-oriented culture, to do certain things just because they’re inherently fun and valuable, not as means to an end that never comes.

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