You don't have to go to work tomorrow.
I envision a future where rest is prioritized over productivity.
“When I was poor and complained about inequality, they said I was bitter. Now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality, they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.” - Russell Brand1
The uniquely American—and incompatible— relationship between Social Justice and Capitalism came into full view during the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder.
While the majority of companies went full swing into Black Lives Matter media blitzes and public announcements of massive donations, a small sliver of large companies—Shopify, Basecamp, Coinbase, to name a few—bucked the trend for its hypocrisy. They were obviously panned in the news.
The CEO of Shopify—one of the largest e-commerce websites—sent an email to employees reminding them of what should be obvious: it is a corporation, not a family.
Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can't un-family you. It should be massively obvious that Shopify is not a family. Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here. We can't take care of all your needs. We will try our best to take care of the ones that ensure you can support our mission. [Employees who particiapate] in endless Slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us-vs-them divisiveness, and zero sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are.
I commend him for his honesty, however cruel and out of touch. After all, the only thing worse than an outright asshole is a cowardly asshole who tries to hide that they’re an asshole by smiling and acting nice while doing asshole things. That’s why Trump never bothered me too much: he is the gross pustule of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy and is ballsy enough to say it all aloud. It was his saying it that so offended our Victorian attachment to politeness—a dusty, vestigial remnant from our past connections to the English monarchy. Our forefathers drank tea, bowed to one another, and discussed etiquette and class with one another while they colonized black and brown countries around the world and eventually disrupted the order of the natural world, for freedom of course. If you can’t tell, Democrats are still attached to this polite façade while Republicans have, for a while now, been removing their masks.
What’s particularly fun about the Shopify quote is if you can read it in the voice of a personified Capitalism rather than a single person, it is quite revealing. It is Capitalism itself admitting that it is not compatible with Social Justice because it considers Social Justice a ”threat.” And, while corporations affect and at times control every aspect of our lives from start to finish, in a classic sort of mass gaslighting, we’re still made to believe “Corporations are not the government. They cannot solve every societal problem here.” So Corporations can definitely be expected to cause problems, but they can’t be expected to solve them. Got it, sounds like a winning combination.
All I know is that all the bandwagon companies with their new Social Justice initiatives are analogous to the tea-drinking colonizers doing everything they can to appear polite and well-intentioned while perpetuating the same injustices which they are supposedly battling with their self-proclaimed refined sensibilities.
Arbeit Macht Frei
In the throes of a high-octane publishing job in New York City, I took some time away upstate at an Airbnb. In this little cabin on a farm, I found a book called How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. As the title might suggest, the book is about the importance of taking life slowly and perhaps doing nothing at all. It was the kick in the ass—or whatever the opposite of a kick in the ass is—I needed in order to understand why I was so unhappy at my job, which on the face seemed really amazing.
At one point in the book, author Tom Hodgkinson asserts that the most evil person in all of modern society is the one who put the clock and the alarm together into one device known as “the alarm clock.” The implications of this invention are in fact earth-shattering. Suddenly, a sound once reserved for fires, smoke detectors, incoming missiles, and danger, was now tied to time itself and then nefariously placed right next to our sleeping heads to remind us it’s time to start shoveling coal or the equivalent. Whoever thought this was a good idea was certainly afflicted, as we mostly all are, with the mental sickness that is the Protestant Work Ethic. Clocks, after all, used to only have hour hands, and then around the beginning of the industrial revolution, they added minute and then second hands so that our labor and our bodies could be controlled with more precision.
Even though it has been fully secularized and stripped of its religion, the Protestant Work Ethic is the foundation of American Capitalism, and it holds that work and labor is a surefire way to get into heaven. You can see this all around you; the zombie-like urge to “be productive.” This ethic is the foundation of that thing inside of you that tells you to get famous or get a great job or start a big company. If our economy is almost lovingly called “the rat race,” then freedom (heaven, wealth, fame, power) is the cheese. But of course, we don’t free rats when they get to the end of the maze; we just send them into a different maze for a new experiment and a different type of cheese.
The Nazis loved this way of thinking so much they positioned the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei—”work will set you free”—above the entryway to the concentration camps.
So, look at your friends and family, has work set many of them free?
Reach Your Potential
It’s not lost on me Rihanna is talking about sex in this song, but her words still ring true:
You need to get done, done, done, done at work, come over
We just need to slow the motion
Don't give that away to no one.
Long distance, I need you.
When I see potential, I just gotta see it through.
Rihanna’s idea of potential—that we have something to live up to and that it can only be found through work— is not just reminiscent of the Protestant Work Ethic, it is the Protestant Work Ethic. Much like original sin told us we must spend our whole lives repenting, the Protestant Work Ethic imbues us all with the mentality that we are actually worthless unless we are working on something and anxiously finding our potential. This isn’t to say that starting a business or getting a great job is innately bad, it all depends on your feelings about it, and your feelings about life in general. Capitalism is unique for its insatiability: people must get richer, companies must get bigger, with no point in which it’s okay to stop and just be content. If you’re working hard and don’t have a goal like this in mind, you’re probably just in a hamster wheel.
And, in the simple-minded version of the world we have created for ourselves, our potential has been boiled down to money and power. The dirty little secret that the Covid-19 pandemic exposed for many people was that our potential is found by just being alive and focussing on those nearest to us, and maybe making some bread. It turns out work isn’t needed to find your potential. I want to take that a bit further and say there may be no potential to find.
Drunken Lying Slobs!
The fathers of “productivity” and “industriousness” like Dale Carnegie and Benjamin Franklin were batshit crazy religious zealots, uniformly racist and misogynist, overweight, unhealthy in mind and body, and are yet still held up as some sort of leaders of our society simply because “they got a lot of stuff done.” We are told to think highly of them in part because they spent the latter part of their lives giving away the wealth they amassed in some sort of now routine, public, guilt-ridding ceremony for all to see (see: Bill Gates and Warren Buffet). Great, good for them.
How many rich, unhealthy, famous, idiotic, unhappy assholes do you have to see until you realize that work and money and fame will not actually set you free? I’m rich and I barely feel free. I can tell you from my very privileged vantage point, freedom ain’t here. No amount of money will set you free in the way you want to be free. Do you even know what freedom will feel like? Do you know what it will look like?
George Eastman started Kodak and changed the world with photography, and then was still depressed and shot himself in the heart. This story is told in a book I read many years ago called Stumbling on Happiness. In many ways, it’s the more science and psychology-based—and less radical—version of How to Be Idle. The moral of the story is: what you think will make you happy in the future is probably incorrect, just do what will make you truly happy and free in these immediate moments.
Rest is Resistance
In How to Be Idle, Hodgkinson stitches together a quirky but thoughtful and well-researched argument that productivity is a joke. Winston Churchill—that overweight, stroke-ridden old man whose hackneyed sayings and quotes still delight conservatives to this day—used to brag and lambast people about the fact that nobody ever needed to sleep or nap because he ran a country on only two hours of sleep a night. The implication being that if you napped you were lazy and would never amount to anything.
Of course, after his death, his secretaries admitted he took three two-hour naps a day. And that indeed is the real kicker. Not only is productivity and industriousness in service of someone else just a crap way to spend your life—resulting in heart issues, depression, delusions of grandeur, and a warped family life—but it’s a sham through and through! It turns out that resting is just as important as working.
Why don’t factory workers get nap time? They get coffee breaks because it makes them more productive at work. I envision a world where rest is prioritized over work.
Slowly—much thanks to Black Justice movements that prioritize rest over work— this is integrating into American culture, but again, the basic incompatibility is often ignored. If you’re resting just so you can be better at work, you are missing the point of resting.
You are not your job.
Hodgkinson asserts that sure, you can work at the same job for 40 years and will maybe retire and have enough money to live the rest of your life relatively comfortably. But you could also die or get fired at year 38 and end up relatively penniless, having not paid off your house or college debt yet and having junk relationships with your family—even though you spent years begrudgingly working for your family.
He advises that if your true passion is perhaps to build little statues out of popsicle sticks, then you should do that. The reason being, if you truly love it and dedicate years of your life and spirit to it—the way you do with a career—you’ll probably find a way to make a living at it, and if you don’t, then you’ll end up penniless and old but at least you’ll feel your last forty years have been spent doing something meaningful rather than wasted away.
I’m proud of myself and those of you who found a way to make money doing something they more or less love—or at the very least don’t find soul-sucking or demeaning—but always be aware that anything can be soul-sucking if you identify with it too closely. Identifying with your work, while it’s what our culture tells us we should do, is dangerous because work is almost always in service of other people (and corporations). If those people—our clients, our customers, the audience—are not serving us back in a way beyond the money and dopamine they generate, then we are headed toward a future where we are identified with a job that might turn on us. It is not a healthy relationship.
In a recent interview, David Cronenburg stated, “If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care. The cinema is not my life.”
While film-bros around the world were quick to disparage him as a pretentious weirdo—as if he crossed them or abandoned their cult—the truth remains that everything dies or changes, and if you hold on too closely, or identify too closely with anything, you’re set up for disappointment.
Reassess Your Ambition
Did you know there has not yet been a whole generation to retire on their 401(k)? We don’t even know if that retirement plan works, it’s just been sold to us as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This fantasy supposedly justifies the first half of your life being dedicated to people and things that barely have anything to do with you. Sound familiar? (Hint: Christianity.)
While billionaires like Peter Thiel use their 401(k)s as billion-dollar tax-free savings accounts, the majority of Americans have just $25k or so saved, and yet somehow feel like they are saving for retirement even though they’re really one small car crash away from $0. In my view, 401(k)s are just a new cheese sliver placed into the rat race maze at a time when people started questioning whether life on the cubicle farm (a literal maze) was worth it. The truth is, most Americans are scraping by and can’t even begin to think about contributing to their 401(k) in any serious way. The government and corporations do not care about your future, that’s up to you.
My Advantaged Vantage Point
I was raised by two very industrious parents. My father is a CEO, entrepreneur, physicist, artist, and inventor and my mom is a nurse, Ph.D, author, and poet. Both of my sisters started and run their own e-commerce businesses, and for 5 years in my 20s, I too ran a company and had big dreams of growing it large. Lately, though, I’ve done a lot of work to be less ambitious.
It’s not lost on me my privilege is due to the fact that my dad worked his ass off and continues to do so. Most of the time, it feels real with my parents—meaning, they are living their lives for the right reasons, for reasons that enrich them in multiple dimensions, and in a way which spreads that wealth in multiple dimensions to those around them. I’m incredibly lucky that what enriches them in all dimensions enriches me in all dimensions as well. Neither of them have ever used their work as an excuse to be neglectful or held it against the kids, as I hear many parents do.
As far as my own work, I now run a small book publishing company, and I could grow it much faster than it is growing already, but it would be at the cost of spending time with my 10-month-old son and his hot mom. So I work hard MWF and trust that if I’m just patient, things will snowball naturally and I’ll have a wildly successful business. I think this is why universal basic income will work for society. Less immediate pressure for survival means sustained energy and inspiration over a lifetime.
It’s no secret that being an entrepreneur allows you more freedom than an average employee, but it depends on what freedom looks like to you. Do you know? Do you have a number in mind where you can stop worrying about money? Or a date in mind where you will stop slaving away at a job you’re unsure of? Why exactly are you doing what you do every day? If your reasons excite the hell out of you, keep going! If your reasons feel icky or like you’re trapped in some sort of maze, abort!
What does productivity mean to you?
My parents never explicitly put any pressure on me to start a company or find “success” but the implication was there by example. They were and continue to be highly prolific, productive, and busy people. My receiving financial support from them was and continues to be predicated on the idea that I’m “staying productive.” This pre-condition was to stop me from totally taking the trust fund kid route of complete meaninglessness and hedonism, hanging out in Mykonos and burning away my parent’s hard-earned money. I’m grateful not only to be wealthy but to have parents who have always done their best to show me that wealth is not the same thing as freedom or happiness. Without my parents teaching me that money will never buy happiness, I might have fallen victim to the American self-fulfilling fantasy that money can make all of your problems disappear. 2
I have started to see life itself as my art and my job. Organizing my friends and my relationships and my hobbies in a way that works for me rather than works for other people, companies, or grand missions about changing the world. Maybe I’m growing older, maybe I’m just becoming a dad and learning to prioritize my family, but I think this is something bigger. As a country, I see our relationship to money and work changing all around. I’m so excited about what that means for the future.
If there is a pot of gold at this rainbow, we are sitting in it. Through wars and industrial revolutions and the toil of millions of people, we have arrived at a place where there is excess food and excess homes and excess energy because science and robots and yes, corporations, have developed society to an advanced state. But to advance from here, we have got to, as a society, retire. It’s time to live on our pension.
I envision a world where rest is prioritized over work. Andrew Yang’s platform of $1000 per month for every family was a sign that the end of work is coming. If Jeff Bezos wants to work day in and day out away to make Amazon the biggest company in the world and overnight deliver me all my bullshit trinkets, the more power to him— I love using Amazon. But he should lay everyone off, give their jobs to robots, and pay for their universal basic income. Same goes for McDonald’s and investment bankers and any other jobs that could be given to robots if companies weren’t afraid of being criticized for it. And those people who choose to live on this basic income can just make popsicle sticks sculptures at home, or do psychedelics all day, or play with their children, and they will not be seen as leeches on society: they are society, they are beautiful, they are productive by just being alive, and they have reached their potential.
I love you, good luck.
I end every post with a picture of my breakfast and a picture of my son:
As a trust fund kid, my views on wealth are necessarily bourgeois. I think my vantage point on work and wealth—however privileged and detached from most peoples’ experiences—is not without merit just because it’s from a rarefied perspective. We all know rich unhappy people and poor happy people. We all know of people who seem like they have great jobs but hate it and people who have bad jobs that seem happy with them. As such, I’m writing about the relationship between the external reality and the internal reality—and how important it is to find harmony there.
I’m obviously not talking to people who are struggling to put food on the table, I think most of my statements/advice here only truly make sense with free healthcare and universal basic income. Which is not our world. But the truth is, I see many people in privileged positions, in no fear of being on the street, still fall victim to a scarcity mindset which limits their thinking about their abilities and options.