On Work and the Iniquities of Being Lazy

 

by Lael Ewy

Like most Americans, I have internalized the Puritanical notion that work equals virtue. I actually feel bad when my job serves up a few hours of unburdened time. This is odd for an academic: I should be dreaming of times like these, chances to explore and read the articles and books that have been backing up on my list, sometimes for decades. Reading these things, I know, makes me a better academic, not a worse one, one who is not only more knowledgeable but less stressed, one better able to respond to my students’ needs and to the massive expansion of my field of study.

Yet, the thought nags on me that these hours are ill-spent because they’re not what I wouldn’t otherwise be doing and therefore not “work” as such. Instead of embracing the old maxim that “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” I feel guilty for being lucky enough to live it.

What’s at work here (all puns intended) is more than just the absorption of Puritanical culture. The Puritans came by their ideas about the value of work honestly; in turn the same sickness had been visited upon Muslims and Jews. The source is the Fall of Man, expulsion from Eden, the story that resolves in humans being fated to till the soil for our sustenance instead of just plucking it from the trees. The latter state is to be without sin; to toil is to suffer in a manner fit for the human condition. Because of this, not suffering through labor seems like cheating. Beyond the binary of good and evil, not working is flouting the very word of God, the decree that makes us all who we know ourselves to be: united in the misery of work.

I grew up within Christianity, and so I believe this, but I also don’t believe this. The guilt I feel is as much a sense that if my bosses knew what I was up to, or worse yet, if the fiscal conservatives who run the state that pays my salary knew, I’d be fired. I have just as, or more, deeply internalized the expectation that work equals misery placed on the conditions of my employment by my employer as I have the cosmological fear that my laziness is a sin. In doing so, I have posited the recapitulation of the Great Chain of Being that puts in their respective places those who mete out misery and those who must suffer it.

Our sense of virtue in working hard and for long hours, then, also contains a certain pride in having borne a burden. It gives us the right to say “Your blues ain’t like mine,” bragging rights for having put up with more pain than the next guy.

We see extreme forms of this in cultures of overwork that have arisen in the financial industry, high-caliber law firms, in Korea and Japan. It isn’t healthy, of course: we’re trading our long-term physical health and mental/emotional wellbeing for short-term monetary gains and the twisted satisfaction of having beaten the competition. Heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and even various forms of cancer have all been linked to overwork, but that doesn’t stop us: the need to show that we are “achievers” is too compelling, the need to not be seen as lazy and no-account too acute.

As I write this, I’m down on sleep, and I’m feeling a little guilty, as I’m letting my students have a “work day,” where they work on their projects and I let myself be available for questions. They have a big assignment coming up, and they really do need time to work on it, but it also means I am not in front of the room, pontificating, managing discussions, showing off my brilliance as an experienced interpreter of text. I also know full well that I’ll still have to grade whatever they produce, so I’m really just deferring work, not eliminating it.

I also know that better work is quicker and easier to grade, so in some ways, I’m saving myself work while giving my over-extended students more of a chance to show me what they can do.

In business, this is what used to be called win-win, and there’s no reason I can’t laud it here. It’s been my experience that what’s good for me as a teacher is often good for students as well, that when I give them more of the work I used to do for them, they learn more about the process of writing and gain a deeper understanding of the subject.

But it feels weird. It feels too easy. It feels like I’ve become the “lazy” teacher we are all warned about becoming in pedagogy classes, the ones the educational professors warn us are ruining the field.

Looking back, though, it’s the teachers who never change their approach or the ones who fail to account for the latest trends who are seen as lazy. The former I am not; I get bored easily with what I have been doing and sometimes shake up my curricula for the sake of experimentation or fun. The latter bugs the hell out of me, as if spending precious time and energy on whatever hot new data-driven or purportedly evidence-based trend comes down the line will necessarily help students learn instead of just making me even more tired. Shouldn’t we be honing the skills we’re developing, focusing in on the materials we claim to be learning? Shouldn’t we be reading and writing and discussing instead of data-gathering an incessantly assessing?

Reading and writing and discussing, letting the ideas flow and take us where they want us to go, though, doesn’t seem too much like work. When it’s going well, we’re tired at the end—the good kind of tired, my dad would say, the kind of tired that says we’ve accomplished something. But we’re not exhausted and soul sick in the same way that work tends to make us, proud to have endured but also inwardly worried that we’ve wasted a bunch of our time.

So maybe it’s not about being lazy or not being lazy.

Maybe we should be trying to create the kinds of situations in which activity—for the sake of argument, I won’t call it work—has meaning and can be pursued for its own sake. Marx may have called this returning the person to her species-being, reversing the alienation that he pinned on capitalism. Capitalism’s retort to this is that we solve the problem with “freedom” and financial reward. They are both somewhat wrong: this alienation is exacerbated by capitalized industrialization, but it was already present under feudalism. Marx was right in that human activity alongside others and for larger purposes is rewarding, but we need to see ourselves as part of a community—real or imagined, temporal or eternal—for it to be meaningful. And, yes, some type of compensation is necessary: in primary cultures, that reward is food and shelter, comfort and security, but I suspect we’re all so used to market economies that we would need to involve money now.

If we can create such situations, though, we may move more toward resolving the conditions of our original sin, even if it does not, in fact, save us from its eternal clutches.

Organizing Principles

One way of thinking about the poor, the homeless, that nation’s welfare recipients, is as refugees, internally displaced people.

These are people displaced from their proper places in the workforce, in communities, in families.

Considered this way, the poor are not losers in life’s lottery, nor are they those declared meritless in a meritocracy. Rather, they are collateral damage in the in the violence inherent to consumer capitalism. They are those who happen to stand between the wealthy and their profits, and so, by this logic, poor people must be removed. Consequently, they wash up at social service agencies, on the rolls of the few benefits programs that still exist, on the street, surfing the couches of relatives and friends.

The anger and disdain heaped upon the poor by the Powers that Be is not because the powerful despise them for who they are; the powerful despise the poor because the poor are reminders of the fact that the system that keeps the rich powerful does not, in fact, provide endless opportunities and blessings for all.

In order for the rich to feel OK with themselves, the poor must be removed from sight, from state budgets, from both our minds and our hearts as well.

On Being Unhappy

by Lael Ewy


To look out over a barren backyard in the middle of winter, contemplating crows.

To grumble at the idiocy of workplace rules, the stupidity of traffic, the vapidity of the political status quo.

To despair at a planet polluted and melting, the indifference of those in charge, the greed of those in power.

To, considering these, wonder if going on is really worthwhile, if contributing to them through our labor and social compliance is more morally right than to just stop living.

To do these things is to be unhappy.

But they are both common and widely pathologized.

It’s no wonder that the rise of a psychiatry of depression—indeed, of psychiatry itself—tracks parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism. Certainly, unhappiness precedes these social phenomena, but its one-to-one association with a medicalized illness is a product of how we now live, and a reification of it. The Lord of the Manor cared little enough about his serfs that their states of mind were all but immaterial; it’s probable he considered the serfs incapable of the kinds of depths and nuances of thought and feeling of those of his own class. But it bothers the modern master that his employees are not both compliant to his dictates and also happy about it. As with all other things, “employee morale” has simply become a reflection of the ego of the CEO.

The economy of the US has moved toward services and retail, and the imperative for the worker to always be happy has only increased. Customer service representatives at a call center are judged not only by the speed with which they dispatch customer complaints and the adroitness with which they upsell, but by the attitude with which they go about their work.

To be sure, they “represent” the company; increasingly, they are not the company. They are contractors or other easily-eliminated classes of employee. The company is merely a set of legal parameters. Loyalty and pleasure in one’s work for its own sake are expectations of the company, not something in which they feel the need to actually invest.

Like the Lord of the Manor, they want something for nothing.

But even if they did want something for something, it would imply that emotions, just like anything else worthwhile in this system, are essentially transactional, that, like your labor and your time, I can buy your emotions as part of a package deal. And the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less your happiness is worth, and the more important it is to maintain if you are to be employable at all.

The policing of emotions, then, the sanctions against unhappiness, are matters of economic necessity: you can’t afford to be unhappy. The market demands it.

If you’re poor enough or a person of color, your unhappiness is a positive threat, and the displeasure it causes a literal policeman can be taken out on your body with little or no consequence of the cop.

Fortunately, industry has a solution to our problem in the marketing of antidepressant medications—a quick fix for a population that has as its basic mode of living a series of quick fixes.     

At this point, the prescription and monitoring of mood-altering chemicals has become the primary job a psychiatrist does. Insurance companies are happy to reinforce that model: 15 minute “med checks” are efficient uses of a psychiatrist’s time. If psychiatry is, indeed, the medicine of “the soul,” it seems what the soul needs nowadays is a pill, the strength of which is nudged this way and that every other month.

This is a system that, from the perspective of a consumer culture and a market-based economy, ought to make everyone happy.

Only it doesn’t.

We’re sicker, sadder, and more suicidal than we’ve ever been. And when the prescription drugs don’t work or don’t work well enough (statistically speaking, their effect sizes are fairly small), we’re turning more and more to street drugs—heroin and methamphetamine—to fight the depression and the inner pain that still wrack us day to day.

But perhaps my scope here is too narrow: Freud’s theories were built on the discontent of the Viennese middle classes of the 19th Century, mostly of their women, a class which expressed its values as a matter of how contented the household could be. Prior to that, in the US and England, Puritans had gone a long way toward waging war on emotions at large as signs of not being among the heaven-bound. The self-improvement we used to revere in the US was geared toward tamping down both sadness and joy. The former was once considered a sin; the latter a frivolity.

We’ve posited in the Declaration of Independence the right to “pursue” happiness. But now we’ll punish you if you achieve it in excess. And no concomitant right to be unhappy has been widely fought for. Indeed, our scientific community has no solid notion of what emotions are even for.

Sadness, like tears themselves, upwells within us, in unexpected places and unexpected ways. Sad songs, the blues and country, and sad images abound. Edward Hopper’s stark canvases have gained a massive following, and the crying emoji is just as popular as any other. People who would not be able to tell a Picasso from a pizza can easily identify a Hopper. And the same psychiatrist who makes his living waging chemical warfare on his patients’ emotions feels no compunction about indulging in the bluest of jazz.

As someone whose unhappiness has ranged from the merely sad to the existential crisis, I haven’t found unhappiness to be entirely bad. It is unpleasant, and it can be overwhelming. I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit that it has put my life and health at risk. But then, so can the drugs we take to combat it, the work we do that demands we deny it.

Moving through it, wrangling with it, and coming to terms with it can also be deeply satisfying.

If unhappiness exists for a reason, and its ubiquity would suggest that it must, it can help us to see that something needs our attention—something in the way we live, in our relationships with those we love, our orientation to the world we inhabit.

It only makes sense to be unhappy if we’re being abused or oppressed, if we’re dealing with trauma or constant pain. What doesn’t make sense is that we should blame the sadness for the sadness, that we should try to do away with the unhappiness itself instead of trying to change things if we can.

At the very least, the lassitude and disengagement that unhappiness can cause is able to lead us to deep reflection and taking stock, two things our productivity-obsessed culture considers wastes of time. It’s OK for you to express gratitude, of course, because you’re supposed to be grateful for your shitty lot in life, but purely and openly contemplative? Heck, no.

I’m getting upset again. I’m getting unhappy at the disdain in which our culture holds unhappiness.

And maybe that’s not an entirely bad thing. 

Beyond the Industrialization of Rationality

by Lael Ewy

A recent article in National Geographic noted that exposure to the natural world increases human health, reduces stress, and increases critical thinking skills. This is all fine and good; we need more appreciation of the ecosystem on the whole and our local environs in particular. But the major bent of the article was what nature can do for us and how it can make us better able to return to our soulless offices, shallow relationships, and consumerist ways of being. In other words, the article is about how exposure to the natural world can make us better equipped to perform the business of destroying the very natural world that has prepped us to the task.

The article points out a major philosophical problem in the western world, one that floods in from many different streams of thought. Rationalist thought insists on mechanistic explanations and direct means of causation. Using the rationalist ways of thinking that still dominate the sciences and all other “outcomes based” human activity, we insist that all things happen for a reason and that all things that happen therefore must have reasons for being allowed to happen.

Thus a means of inquiry becomes a method of being; a way of doing science drifts into a way of making value judgments about what humans ought to do.

By imposing this rationalistic value judgment on human activity, we lose the idea that anything we do has an inherent value: there always has to be a why, and that why always has to be justified within an interlocking system of causations.

The ultimate limit of this way of thinking appears when we start to ask questions about prime movers, ultimate causes, the first event in the great chain that leads the universe inevitably to us, at the present moment, contemplating how we got here, thinking about how the universe was gracious enough to lead up to us, a set of beings so smart as to contemplate how it was the universe’s duty to create beings who can think about how they got here.

Only recently, string theory, ideas contemplating multiple universes, and quantum mechanics have begun to dissolve some of these first mover quandaries, but they have yet to devolve into popular thought.

In the lives of those living in the United States, this problem is compounded by puritanism, which underscores the lockstep linearity of rationalism with a very specific goal: eternal salvation. By focusing only on those activities deemed holy, we both assure our places in heaven and avoid the temptations of those things we do for fun, because fun things lead us to inevitable perdition.

But neither science nor puritanism are quite as powerful in our lives as the free market business model. While it is true that organizations like The American Enterprise Institute, backed by laissez-faire billionaires such as Charles and David Koch, have done a lot to promote free market thought in the last 40 years, the ideas go back much farther than that. After all, Charles Dickens was already savagely critiquing the point of view that every human activity must be geared toward the bottom line in the 1840s through works such as “A Christmas Carol.” Dickens’s writing was informed by the conditions of early industrialism, and we’ve gone a long way toward denying those conditions are still with us, primarily by offshoring to other parts of the world the nasty work to be done by people of whom we don’t think much.

But the rationality of industrialism still dominates our new, supposedly more creative, and “knowledge-based” economy. Instead of being part of a literal machine, we use strict schedules, quality assurance measures, and monitoring technologies to make sure people are not goofing off at their desks. The Taylorist factory has given way to the open floor plan office. The 12-hour factory shift has given way to smartphones and laptops that assure constant contact with the people at work.

Pressure on lawmakers by business-backed groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council have turned what was supposed to be a government by, for, and of the people into one dominated by business interests and interested only in maintaining the bottom line. Changes to work rules, taxation, and even the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech have oriented the purpose of American society entirely toward the generation of profit. These changes have devolved social power ever more towards employers and financiers and away from those who actually do the work.

As the National Geographic article implies, all of this has been devastating to our health. Rates of stress-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension have skyrocketed. Rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality are also on the rise. At this point in history, nearly one in four American women are taking antidepressant medications, as they are asked to do all of the aforementioned work underlining the bottom line, plus clean the house, raise the kids, cook for the family, and put up with sexual harassment, all for 30% less money.

“Helpful” websites abound, full of techniques for busting stress and overcoming the blues, full of advice for simplifying life and streamlining our vanishing personal time. But few of these sites promote such things for their own sake; we meditate and do yoga, journal and run marathons not simply to do them but because doing them makes us better workers, more “highly effective” people,” “better” moms and dads. All of this desperate chilling out and throwing out, pumping up and efficiency creation exists against a backdrop of genuine existential threat: in the United States, in particular, one is only allowed to be fully human when gainfully employed or independently wealthy. Everyone else is sanctioned by legislation, internally displaced, forced to live in squalor, incarcerated. For those deemed “disabled,” a life of poverty and medication awaits. For those able-bodied folks who happen to be un or under employed, benefits are tied to a progression of increasingly demeaning and intrusive tasks and to standards of employability that only exist within the delusional and paranoid thoughts of the legislators who enstated the rules. And for too many there is homelessness, increasingly made illegal by laws ostensibly about “cleaning up” the civic landscape, as if the bodies of the unfortunate were so much misplaced refuse cluttering up the view of yet another Tuscan styled strip mall.

In other words, when our lives are bent entirely toward the cause and effect relationship posited by industrial capitalism that has as its end point greater profits and increased market value, most people suffer. It becomes not just immoral but impossible to think of anything worth doing for its own sake, and those things we do to “recharge” become distractions from our misery: mindless and violent video games, awful blockbuster movies, increasingly sensationalistic television, and any number of mind-numbing substances of varying degrees of legality (and lethality). These latter chemicals, when dispensed by physicians, are purchased through a system that is itself driven by market factors and not person care, no matter how well-intentioned the caregiver may be.

Environmentalists have long argued that industrialized capitalism is unsustainable. At some point, it will deplete the finite resources it relies on for its model of continual growth, if it doesn’t first so poison the ecosystem or so warm the planet that civilization becomes impossible to maintain. But there’s another, deeper reason it can’t go on like this: it demands that people devote themselves to nothing of inherent value; it demands that most of us devote most of our time and all of our usable energy to helping other men hoard wealth.

Another article comes to mind as I write this, this one from The Guardian, warning against a newfound interest in the western world in ancient, eastern meditative practices. Mindfulness, the article warned, is not always pleasant. It doesn’t always calm you down or chill you out. Bottom line, it’s not for everybody, so don’t throw out that bottle of Paxil quite yet.

But, of course, calming you down or chilling you out is not the point of mindfulness meditation; mindfulness is. If you’re looking to it to do those other things so that you can be a better worker, more well-adjusted to a crappy system, you’re doing it wrong. We have become so devoted to using such tools to become better worker bees that we have forgotten about the hard (and sometimes unpleasant) work we need to do to become better people. We have lost sight of becoming —and maybe even lost the ability to become—fully engaged in those things we do as fulfilling activities in and of themselves, of entering those places where judgments about being “better” employees or even “better” people tend to fall away.

So,

Meditate for the sake of meditation.

Work for the sake of work.

Create for the sake of art.

Rationalize for the sake of clarity.

All else falls unto the worship of false gods.