Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit

By Janelle Quibuyen

Two years ago, I quit my full-time, salaried with benefits job to pursue self-employment as an independent freelance graphic designer. (This is maybe the most cliche statement to read online these days.)

I am no more brave than the migrant worker picking your strawberries to send remittances to family in their home country. I am no more courageous than the recently-graduated millennial who works in a cubicle 9 hours a day to pay off massive student loans. I am no more of a boss than the working class mother with three jobs who feeds her children. 

Quitting your job to pursue your passion is bullshit. This messaging is only beneficial for privileged people and very dangerous for working class people.

Since then, the reactions I’ve received have all been pretty similar. People marveled at the fact that I took this big, life-changing leap. I’ve gotten messages like “Wow you’re so brave and courageous” and “That’s so great you’re pursuing your passion” and “I wish I could be my own boss”.

At first I didn’t know what to think of it. There were other personal things going on at the time that impacted me enough to quit my full-time job. But after getting the same reaction plenty of times, and reading the same “I-quit-my-job-and-started-my-own-business!” overnight success stories online everywhere — I started to accept it. Believe it for myself. It became a part of my story.

It became easy to identify with a lot of things young entrepreneurial people were saying. I hustle my ass off to work enough contracts in a month to make ends meet. I deal with fear and anxiety of the instability every day. I battle constant future-tripping, wondering how long I can realistically sustain myself on this route. But I also get paid to do something I love (which is supposed to outshine anything else apparently). Not gonna front, it's been fun and fulfilling. I was proud to be pursuing my passion and I pat myself on the back for making it work. But then another part of me couldn’t disagree more with the sentiment. Being your own boss is tough as shit. You have no one to blame but yourself if things go awry. It's not always what it's cracked up to be. But what bothers me most is how we prop up the entrepreneurial class to be inherently brave and courageous. Let's set the record straight.

Nowadays we are bombarded with messages that life could only be meaningful if we do what we love (which is subjective anyway). Quitting full-time jobs to travel the world. Giving up everything to be your own boss. Leaving routine to build something from scratch. We are offered online classes, webinars, books and podcasts of advice from professionals. We are marketed to with apps that promise the ease of starting your own business. We are told that the sacrifice will be hard but it will all be worth it. You just have to quit your job, give it your all, buy my e-book of advice for $20, and have the passion to persevere.

We praise people that are “courageous” enough to quit their 9-to-5 and dive into the deep end of the exciting unknown. We idealize and romanticize the idea of being our own boss and being in charge of our own schedule. To take a risk and reap the bountiful benefits. Yet no one talks about the real sustainability or self-sufficiency of this formula when the playing field is never even.

The statement alone reeks of privilege. It confirms you had a full-time job to begin with. It confirms you had time to develop a passion (that you can capitalize off of, enough to meet your cost of living). It confirms you had the option to pursue something different because you feel like it. There are more challenges to being self-employed than just mental perseverance and grit. We are predatorily luring working class people into an entrepreneur lifestyle as the answer to living a meaningful life and loads of money. It’s the new American Dream...

---

Read this essay in its entirety at Janelle Quibuyen's blog HERE.

Meaningful work: an appeal to the young

By Scott Nappolos

An article about choosing meaning in employment. 

From the time I was a child, I was told to follow my dreams and do something I truly loved. Granted I rarely met an adult who was passionate about their work, but they seemed sincere in their desire for others to take that path. The advice of course usually had a piece of bitterness attached to it. As I came of age, the terrain didn’t look pretty. Most of my personal passions were deserts for employment. Nor did I really know anyone who was living the dream, so to speak, at work. My path began from leaving that advice behind.

Society is littered with talk of meaningful work. The creative class, jobs that means something, doing something with one’s life, work that matters, helping people; we’re inundated with phrases, words, and images that describe our poverty and the future that we are supposed to aspire to.

It’s actually worse for people who commit themselves to making radical change in society. A confluence of pressures pushes down on them year after year through family wondering when they will grow up, friends perpetually moving on to something better, and a gnawing sense of wasted potential. Why bother with the endless meetings, the mindless work, and for what?

Unless you’re born into a situation where work is unnecessary, nearly everyone experiences the modern workplace. Service work in particular serves as a stark reminder of reality and alternatives. The unending drudgery of task after task slinging fatty coffee that literally poisons people’s health, selling useless items created on the backs of abused workers elsewhere, cardboard boxes rolling down the line that just keep coming and coming, forcing a smile when we are cursed at or harassed; Nearly everyone has been forced to participate in the bitterness of having our time stolen. It’s perhaps harder to bare for those who know the widest extent of the misery of humanity and understand how preventable it all is.

The sense of meaninglessness in jobs is a strong current in society. Tv shows, films, music, and other forms of pop culture repeat the comedy, frustration, and depression of spending one’s time on tasks that seem pointless. This isn’t to say that people’s jobs don’t make a difference. Many things we do keep society running and contributes to the social good. The meaninglessness of work in today’s society arises out of the reflection of workers that their time is not really benefiting the people they serve or advancing them as people. As a healthcare worker I can see both sides of this. Obviously healthcare is crucial for societies. At the same time any hospital worker can recognize how it is that the healthcare system not only harms people, but also in general contributes to people staying sick. Meaning is something deeper than just keeping the gears moving and helping our fellow human beings. Meaning is about where we are headed and who we are. This is where youth get squeezed and falter.

Modern capitalism with its base of debt makes everything seem possible. The compulsion to put food on the table is softened by easy credit. We can go back to school, live on credit cards, travel to cheap places, and find means to delay work enough to get by. Young people accumulate useless degrees and insane debts while deferring the future and often slipping into the delusions of jobs that simply do not exist. Choosing what to do with our lives takes on the characteristic of other more banal decisions. We are shopping for an ethical product. Validation stands at the core of this, and plays off the fear of a wasted life, idle efforts, and ending up trapped chasing false ideals. What to tell worried parents who watched their child squander what chances they had for material success? It is better to say that one is employed fighting poverty, educating the youth, or some other remix of Mother Theresa, Gandhi, or perhaps Bono.

The problem is that there is no escape. Professors spend decades moving town to town as itinerant adjuncts teaching the most bland classes, writing mechanical essays in desperation to stay published, and constantly struggling for something more stable. Even at it’s best, University life leaves less time for liberatory thought and action than the part time service worker. Union organizers spend seventy or eighty hour weeks at the service of hostile bureaucracies, and too often find themselves in the position of pimping the Democratic party and selling backroom deals with management to disillusioned workers. NGO staff share the same fate, bending to the will of the funders and forced to represent the interests of the powerful under false flags of social change. Self-employment and cooperatives turn activist efforts into business efforts, and consume more time than any capitalist could ever demand from a job. Good people find themselves lost there, tired of all the worn appearances that hide a rotten structure, yearning to escape too their work and get back to something more authentic.

We need to question and even condemn the pressure on youth to find meaningful work. As long as we live in capitalism, its deep wells will poison all the streams flowing into our cities. With capitalist work, even the most holy pursuit will end up in mindlessness, subservience to stupid management, and in fighting the current trying to make some good out of a hostile situation that constantly tries to undo our efforts. This isn’t to say that some don’t enjoy their jobs. Some do. Yet on the balance, the vast majority can’t find employment that will engage them, and those who do generally must sacrifice the rest of their lives for the privilege. The real question to be raised isn’t whether you should enjoy your job or not, but whether you should dedicate your life to work. Or better, what is the relation of living to working?

This logic should be turned on its head. It’s not what we’re employed doing that should define, validate, or give meaning to our lives; it’s our life itself that does. How much brighter does the future look to liberate oneself from the oppressive concept of boundless sacrifice to meaningful jobs? Why shouldn’t youth seek to maximize their lives against this work? There are other roads open to us. We can work, as we must, but can struggle to find the most time for ourselves and our causes. Better we write, protest, organize, and gather in our workplaces on time off, than to cement that relationship into employment or worse into our identities.

Our lives are defined by what we do, not who writes our paychecks. A political life is an attempt to regain a meaningful life. It is a task for all of society, and not monopolized by a special class employed as professional politicians, bureaucrats, and humanitarians. Meaning is not at work, but in the beauty of daily living, in struggling for a better world, and whatever path your desires take you towards. Our joy is not found in simply imposing our will onto the world, but in the happiness that can only be found in fighting for a more just and beautiful world around us. Dedicating oneself to the struggles of others changes you. Within, we must fight to constantly overcome ourselves against the current, a process that can be deeply enriching. The commitment and work of liberation makes all of society our classroom, our workplaces gymnasiums, and our neighborhoods galleries...

* * *

Originally published on Libcom,org. Read the article in its entirety HERE.

In the Name of Love

“Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker. Why should we assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs, there’s no such thing as work? 

by Miya Tokumitsu 

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers. Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not? By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace... 
--- 
Excerpted from The Jacobin Magazine

Anarchic Ethics

By Cindy Milstein

One of my sisters, who is also a good and insightful friend to me, asked me this evening, “What’s standing in your way of writing?” Her paid job is helping folks who are labeled “mentally ill” to figure out their own aims and then support them in achieving those aspirations; her question to me is the crux of what she does for others, although the “writing” is particular to me (I’m having trouble doing it, especially in the way I want to). I also know that my sister isn’t doing this for money, although she — like me and everyone else under capitalism — must do something for money, to then purportedly exchange that money for our lives. She really cares; she really values that process of self-discovery, even when it’s ever so slow or painful.

It would be easy to answer, as I did in my head when she asked me: “capitalism.” While she was reminding me of all the other unpaid things I’m doing besides writing that are good for myself and others, that are about giving back to the world — from innumerable hours put in voluntarily, joyfully, at Interference Archive or the Institute for Anarchist Studies, along the spectrum over the past few months to the untold hours put in voluntarily, stressfully, for my two seriously ill parents — I kept repeating silently in my mind, “but where does all my time go?” I heard her say something like “just stop doing whatever you’re doing at 3:00 p.m. each day and write for a half hour or maybe an hour,” yet I only half heard it, and soon I almost wasn’t hearing anything she was offering as comforting advice. “Capitalism.” I apologized to her that I was drifting into anxiety, and that the multitasking mess of “to-dos” dancing jigs in my now-mushy brain seemed to be hindering my ability to take sound in. “Capitalism.”

Yes, there is all the time that capitalism steals from me, giving me so much less of it to fill with what I love and care about. What I really want to do. That’s almost too easy an answer, though clearly a monstrous part of it.

It has less to do with time, even though time constantly escapes me, or my wagework to-do lists, sitting cozily by my unpaid to-do lists. I haven’t been able to write recently because I haven’t been able to think — think clearly. Emotional overload has sat like a damper on me. I am physically here in the world, but what’s inside me is a different self than usual, not my self, and yet I’m not sure whose self either. A seeming fog-without-end is standing in my way, surrounding me in a space of immobilizing aloneness and loss, trepidation and terror — immobilizing, that is, in terms of doing anything that isn’t sort of auto-pilot activities. It’s exceedingly difficult to create.

That’s the more nuanced portion of my “capitalism” mantra when my sister was trying to be a good friend. Capitalism steals our imagination, our ability to envision — partially, poorly, but snapshots nonetheless — life outside and beyond it.
---
Read this essay in its entirety at Cindy Milstein wonderful blog: Outside the Circle.

Less Work, More Living

Working fewer hours could save our economy, save our sanity, and help save our planet.

By Juliet Schor

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That's the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis—while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident.

Today, driven both by necessity and the deliberate choice to live simply, more Americans are shifting toward fewer work hours. It’s a trend that, if done correctly, could get us out of our current economic crisis and away from unsustainable economic growth.
---
From the Fall 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Read the rest of the article at yesmagazine.org

Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of the national bestseller The Overspent American.

The Big Life Challenges Facing the 20-Something Generation

People in their 20s are taking longer to start careers and get married. What's going on?

By Aliza Bartfield


People in their 20s are taking a perplexingly long time to grow up these days -- at least that's the story we're hearing in the media. According to this narrative, young people are stuck in a phase of arrested development, moving in with their parents more often and committing to jobs and marriages later. Most recently, the notion that young people refuse to grow up is the premise for a widely discussed New York Times magazine cover story, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”

The title alone is enough to put a 20-something-year-old on the defensive. In the piece, "growing up" is defined by five goals: finishing school, leaving home, financial independence, getting married and having kids. Apparently, we're taking much longer than the previous generation to fulfill these goals, and therefore are failing to enter true adulthood.

While author Robin Marantz Henig concedes in the piece that these milestones can be fulfilled out of order and some never fulfilled at all, she nevertheless insists that 20-somethings are taking too long to grow up. We are “slouching toward adulthood at an uneven pace,” she claims, and this seems to be cause for concern.

The article explores a theory put forth by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor who believes that those of us in our 20s are forming a new stage of life. He chooses the term “Emerging Adulthood” for the fickle time between student life and independent adulthood. It’s a unique stage, according to Arnett, that requires careful examination. For 10 years, he has been advocating for Emerging Adulthood to be recognized as an official developmental stage.

Henig explains this would necessitate new social accommodations; attitude shifts and programs to prevent what might otherwise devolve into years of aimless meandering. Proposed solutions include expanding post-graduate options like the Peace Corps or City Year. (Although a year or two of service work may leave one rich in experience, the meager education award of under $6,000 is barely enough to pay for one semester of college. This doesn’t seem like an optimal step toward financial freedom in our 20s.)

The classification of these years as a stage suggests we are less evolved on an emotional level, and maybe even in our mental abilities, than those who are older or went through this time in prior generations. Even if that's true, doesn’t everyone progress emotionally over time? If, instead, we see the odd behavior young people exhibit as the result of economic, cultural and social changes we may have a better shot at some pragmatic solutions.
--
Read the rest of the article on Alternet.org

Recession Diaries

Tales of Philly's young, educated and underemployed.

By Daniel Denvir

[Excerpted from the Philadelphia Weekly...]
Twenty- and 30-somethings are heading back to the basement in droves. According to a recent AFL-CIO report, about one in three workers under the age of 35 has been forced to move back in with their parents. Wall Street boosters and politicians may herald an economic recovery (despite the unemployment rate creeping past 10 percent or 17.5 percent if you include the underemployed and those who just gave up looking for work), but it’s more than clear that the so-called comeback has not trickled down to young people, who are more unemployed than at any time since the government started to keep track in 1948.
While people of color and the less educated are getting hit the hardest— 17.1 percent of black males are unemployed—things are quickly deteriorating for the college-educated work force. Experts say that one in five college graduates say they’re overqualified for their current jobs. It’s no surprise that I myself haven’t had the easiest time cobbling together a paycheck given that I’m somewhat blithely walking into a collapsing news industry. Many of my friends, however, young people with bachelors and graduate degrees and more reasonable goals, are struggling, too. Here in Philly, where the unemployment rate is just above the national average (11 percent in September), many of my peers—knocked way off their career paths—are joining countless others working in so-called survival jobs.
---

Daniel Denvir is a freelance writer independent journalist based in West Philly. He is a contributing writer at the Philadelphia Weekly and more can be found at http://www.danieldenvir.com/
Read the article in its entirety at: philadelphiaweekly.com

Whittled Down Inspiration

I was delighted and honored to discover a really insightful post on my friend Libby Reinish's blog today. As you'll see below, she articulates her struggles (and recent breakthrough) with the dilemma that I have described here over the years, and graciously cites my old radio show and this project as an inspiration for her thoughts.

Libby was an early pioneer in the creation of Valley Free Radio before I joined the station's board of directors. She left the area to be the Prometheus Radio Project's full power-FM coordinator, guiding social justice organizations through the FCC bureaucracy to start their own radio stations. Now that I live 2 blocks down the street from Prometheus' office in West Philadelphia, Libby is Santa Fe, NM where she founded her own nonprofit, Santa Fe Community Gardens empowering local folks with the education and resources for growing their own food.

This self-described "community media activist turned urban homesteader" has also spent the last couple years, "[d]ocumenting my attempts at reducing the amount of trash I accumulate, the energy I waste, and the money I spend, while improving the food that I eat, honing some new skills, and learning to have fun without consuming so goddamn much," on her fantastic blog Whittled Down.

It's funny how inspiration works. After a few months of dormancy I have something to share with you all here, and an urgency to share more soon about my own experiences and observations. For now, here's Libby's...
-Matt Dineen
---
Passions and Survival

My friend Matt Dineen used to have a wonderful radio show on our local station, Valley Free Radio, called Passions and Survival. He still maintains a blog by the same name, which you should check out. His show explored what has been a central question in my life; how do we manage to follow our passions in life while managing to meet our needs for survival? I have struggled with this problem particularly since relocating to Santa Fe, where the job market was tight even before the recession and interesting organizations were hard to come by.

My initial solution was to separate passion and survival completely. I got a regular job so that I could make money to survive, and I endeavored to maintain my passions (which are outlined in detail on this blog) in my "spare time". As it turns out, this is a terrible plan. Being stuck in a chair in an office under the watchful eye of your boss, doing pointless work and getting treated like crap, is, as many of you are keenly aware, unbearable. It becomes more and more difficult to tend to your responsibilities at work because all you want to do is go home and plant things or play music or organize a gardening workshop or what have you.

My unhappiness at work was becoming so extreme and my desperation to escape so intense that I could barely stand it. What I did is probably a lot easier than for some people than it was for me. I quit. Without a plan (I really like plans). I had some savings that were supposed to go towards purchasing land, but I knew that if I didn't make this break now that before I knew it I would be a 30-year-old receptionist with a useless BA and no soul left in her body. I had no idea how much of this fund for my future would be exhausted as I held out for a job that meant something to me, but I was prepared to go the long haul.

As it turned out, I got lucky. Or the universe rewarded me for being brave. I found a wonderful new job that allows me to use my passions for history, media production, organizing, and even sustainable living. The position is part-time, and though that's a challenge financially, there are several benefits to working less than 40 hours a week. After a few months on the job, I can tell you that for me, running low on cash at the end of every pay period is much less stressful than feeling constantly drained at home and bored at work.

Working part time means that I always have enthusiasm and energy to bring to my job, because I don't feel overworked. When I need to put in extra hours to get something done, I don't think twice about it. Most days though, when 2 o'clock rolls around I breeze out of the office and find myself ready to get to work around the homestead by 3. Having more time and energy for projects at home means spending less money on stuff I can make for less, like bread, cheese, veggies, and household stuff like the bicycle wheel pot rack. Oh yeah, and there's more time for the nonprofit I run on the side. Are my savings growing faster than radishes, like they were when I worked 40 hours a week at a law firm? Hell no. Do I care? Yeah, it bugs me sometimes. But I think that I can find a way to save for my future without sacrificing my well-being in the present. With all this extra time on my hands, I just might be able to find ways to make a little extra cash without having to work for someone else. Now wouldn't that be nice.
---
Originally posted on Libby's blog Whittled Down which you can read here.

Solidarity in Slowmotion

By Charles Hale

Between sips of Miller High Life I glance down the length of the bar: there is a twenty-six year old PHD candidate in mathematics; the assistant to the dean of the graduate school in her early thirties; a girl with more tattoos than fingers; our 53 year old elder statesmen, and me a window cleaner.

It is Monday evening and after we finish this round of drinks at The Jubilee we will begin our weekly shuffleboard tournament. More than likely these same people will be in the same bar at least three more nights this week. None of us are married, only one of us has ever been, and none of us seem to feel any pressure to do so.

Outside observers may accuse us of living a prolonged college existence or wallowing in some kind of slacker lifestyle. Yet these people have serious work ethics, spending our energy on personal progress instead of professional goals. This is a choice we have made and continue to make despite sacrificing things like financial security and health insurance. Throughout this night and other nights the people that come by and say hello, are people who have, like I have, chosen this life of quiet autonomy and solidarity over doing what we have been told for a lifetime we ought to do.

To really understand how this life that I and so many around me here live is so different than what the American public thinks life ought to be, I only have to look at my brother. He graduated college a year after I did; during his sophomore year an older friend from church suggested he get a summer job with his company. My brother took him up on the offer and by the time he graduated they had offered him a professional position. He’s been promoted and transferred several times. He’s married to the girl he dated in college, they own a house, and in August they had their first child. Most of their college friends are married and have ‘real’ jobs. The ones that don’t are whispered about when they all get together. My brother has a good life and is happy.

His social network is small and doesn’t really grow. He probably has a couple of Bud Light’s in the fridge but he couldn’t tell you when he last had more than three in one night. His life is as normal to him as mine is to me. These are the choices he has made and most days he is pleased with them.

This essay is not about how much someone in this town can drink and on how many consecutive nights without being ostracized. This is not an essay about the ability to work below your qualification level without whispers of a life wasted. And this essay isn’t about me saying that my life is superior to someone else’s. There aren’t any bras being burned in front of the courthouse here, and no one is sticking flowers in the barrel of a gun, but this doesn’t mean the way people are living isn’t revolutionary. Slowly, significantly transformative.

Like the clothes I tend to wear and my general approach to life, this is a casual revolution. One without organization or manifesto and certainly without membership dues, or listservs. One’s position isn’t changed by the quality of their employment or any external factors. Actually there are no positions whatsoever. No one at the weekly shuffleboard tournament wants to live differently, and these lifestyle choices that have been made are made based on the only criteria that matter: their own pleasure, their own affiliation and affinity.

Some Mondays there are as few as six players in the tournament and some nights there are as many as 16, but the number of participants doesn’t much matter. Neither does winning, as I am often a loser, but hate to miss a week. This doesn’t mean that I’m a terrible shuffleboard player; if there is a beer or tequila shots on the line I can take out most anyone in the room. But the point of the shuffleboard tournament is a good time, is friendship, which always extends longer than the actual matches.

Winning doesn’t necessarily mean I advance to the next round of the tournament, winning is a condition of fulfilling the standards and expectations I place on myself. This is how the shuffleboard tournament and life in this town intersect. The people around here that I associate with are winning because they are fulfilling the standards and expectations they place on themselves. We have chosen to place personal progress above societal standards. We are living here; in the manner that we are because we have found what we are looking for. Of course there are some living here that are living lives nearly identical to mine because they haven’t found what they are looking for yet, and the difference in the two is merely in attitude.

There are people around here that leave, marry and have children, or get ‘real’ jobs and don’t get out as much. In the same breath we envy and pity them. The only standard on which we base our judgment of their decision is their contentment.

As a window cleaner my status falls somewhere between glorified housecleaner and unskilled construction worker. But it is the job I have chosen and the job I continue to show up for. I could wax nostalgic about the Zen qualities of the window cleaning profession, because they are there, but there are more significant reasons why I like my job. Almost everyday is different and I am able to see inside of people’s homes and lives without feeling like a stalker or voyeur. It is a job that allows me to be outside and away from a cubicle, and it is a job that I can leave at the job site. I could tell you that I take pride in clearing the view to the outside for my wealthy customers; that I hope giving them clean windows will change the way they view the world.

These things are more or less true, but they are not the reason I go to work everyday. I go because I see a pane of glass differently than anyone else in this town. I go because I’m good at it, because it is something I do as opposed to who I am. I go because I know what a worse job feels like; one that strangles the life out of you and replenishes you with nothing more than a meager paycheck. I go because it allows me to enjoy the more important things in life; like Monday evening shuffleboard tournaments.
---
This essay is anti-copyright but republished here by permission from the latest issue of Fifth Estate. More info at FifthEstate.org

Home of the Brave?

A Vision of the U.S. Beyond Money

By John Steinsvold

Economists concede that economics is an inexact science. What does that mean? Perhaps it means their economic forecast is better than yours or mine. Recently, economic indicators have been rising and people have their fingers crossed. Economists have given us reason to hope that the job market will improve and that the stock market will continue on a steady climb. Yet, the newspapers continue to report more layoffs and more jobs going overseas.

Meanwhile, our economy is getting more and more complex. We associate complexity with progress for some ungodly reason. The following problems, however, have become inherent in our economy. What does that mean? It means they will be around for a while:

Needless poverty, unemployment, inflation, the threat of depression, taxes, crimes related to profit (sale of illicit drugs, stolen IDs, muggings, bribery, con artists, etc.), conflict of interest, endless red tape, a staggering national debt plus a widening budget deficit, 48 out of 50 states in debt, cities in debt, counties in debt, skyrocketing personal debts, 50% of Americans unhappy at their work, saving for retirement and our children's education, health being a matter of wealth, competing in the "rat race", the need for insurance, being a nation of litigation, being subject to the tremors on Wall Street, fear of downsizing and automation, fear of more Enrons, outsourcing, bankruptcies, crippling strikes, materialism, corruption, welfare, social security, sacrificing quality and safety in our products for the sake of profit, the social problem of the "haves" vs. the "havenots" and the inevitable family quarrels over money.

Have we become gluttons for punishment? My college professor once said, "You can get used to hanging if you live long enough!"

We Americans love our freedom; yet, we have allowed the use of money to completely dominate our way of life. Indeed, we are no longer a free people. We are 7.4 trillion dollars in debt. We live in fear of depression, inflation, inadequate medical coverage and losing our jobs. Our freedom is at stake if not our very survival. Yet, we put our collective heads in the sand.

Yes, there is something we can do. We can look into ourselves for an answer. We may find that we have the strength to carry out our internal economic affairs without the need to use money. Yes, we will still need to use money when dealing with other countries.

There is no question that a way of life without money will alleviate if not completely eliminate all of the previously mentioned problems. Yet, we scoff at the idea. We are totally convinced that money is a necessity. We cannot imagine life without money. Perhaps the time has come to think otherwise. It is completely obvious our present economy no longer satisfies our present day needs. As individuals, we will gain complete economic freedom. In return, a way of life without money demands only that we, as individuals, do the work we love to do. It is a win/win situation. Let us consider the following arguments:

Can we learn to distribute our goods and services according to need (on an ongoing basis) rather than by the ability to pay? Why not? Poverty and materialism will be eliminated! Our sense of value will change. Wealth will no longer be a status symbol. A man will be judged by what he is; not by what he has. He will be judged by his achievements, leadership, ideas, artistic endeavours or athletic prowess; not by the size of his wallet. Yes, everything will be free according to need. All the necessities and common luxuries will be available on a help yourself basis at the local store. Surely, this country is capable of supplying the necessities and common luxuries for everyone in this country many times over.

The more "expensive" items, such as housing, cars, boats, etc. would be provided for on a priority basis. For example, the homeless would provided housing ahead of those living in crowded quarters. How will this priority be established? Perhaps a local board elected by the people in the neighborhood such as a school board. Or perhaps the school boards could absorb this responsibility in addition to their present duties.

Since cooperation will replace competition, can government, industry and the people learn to work together as a team to meet the economic needs of our nation as well as each individual? Again, why not? Yes, competition is great; but cooperation is even better. Cooperation avoids duplication of effort. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have everybody freely working together, sharing ideas, thoughts and technical knowledge? Patents and industrial secrets would be a thing of the past. Competition, however, will still be around. Individuals will still compete with their co-workers in ideas, achievements, leadership and getting promotions.

For example, Ford, Chrysler & GM would work together to build automobiles that are truly safe and efficient and environmentally friendly. Perhaps, with everyone working together, we can invent a car engine that would eliminate the need to import oil from the Middle East. (Note: Ford, Chrysler & GM would gradually become one entity.)

Unfortunately, what immediately jumps into the minds of most people is: "It simply won't work!" The idea of a way of life without money is then dismissed without further thought. After all, what motivation is there for people to work if there is no paycheck? How can we possibly satisfy the labor needs of our nation? The following reasons are offered why people would be completely happy working in a way of life without money: Today, only 50% of Americans enjoy their work. That will change. In a way of life without money, we will all be free to do the work we want to do or even love to do without any economic fear. We will be free to pursue our passion or as Joseph Campbell suggests we "follow our bliss".

Cooperation will replace wasteful competition. We will all work together as a team. Work will become a way to help people, to meet people or to be part of something meaningful. It is a proven fact that people like to help one another. An esprit de corps will naturally build up and make work more enjoyable. Even the most menial task becomes easier when people work together. Yes, work will become more of a "togetherness" thing.

The profit motive will no longer be a hindrance to efficiency. There will be no need to sacrifice quality and safety in our products for the sake of profit. We will, like in the olden days, take pride in our work. Yes, there is very likely to be a shortage of people volunteering to do the more menial tasks. One option is to offer "perks". A perk can be of various forms such as front row season tickets to the opera or to his or her favorite sports team. Can you imagine an NBA basketball game where the celebrities are sitting in the back rows while the dishwashers and janitors are at courtside? (My apologies to Spike Lee & Jack Nicholson!) Or the perk could be the latest model boat or sports car which would not be immediately available to the public. Another option is to draft everyone once in their lifetime, to do a half year or so stint at a menial task. Perhaps a humbling experience is in order for all of us. It might serve us well in the area of character building.

Also, consider the fact that perhaps millions of people will be freed from jobs associated with the use of money. Millions more that are now unemployed or on welfare will also be available to help fill the labor needs of our country. Thus, we will have the work force necessary to do the work which is not economically feasible in our present economy such as cleaning our environment (land, sea & air), conservation, recycling, humanitarian work, research in medicine, education, science & space and now we can include national security.

Perhaps the most difficult problem is in the administration of a way of life without money. Can we learn to determine our economic needs, allocate our resources from the federal on down to the neighborhood levels? Perhaps some sort of economic bodies must be created to coordinate, monitor and carryout our economic needs. These economic bodies would exist similar to our governments, one for the federal, one for each state and one for each local level.Yes, in order to administrate a way of life without money, economic bodies, boards or councils or whatever you wish to call them would be created to absorb economic responsibility from our various governments. They will interact and cooperate with one another to meet the economic needs of our country and of each individual. They will be empowered by Congress to tend to the economic needs of its constituents. Thus, a balance of power will be safely maintained.

Our federal needs, which would be similar to the federal budget we have today, will be resolved by an economic body comprised of representatives of the various branches of government, our industrial & labor resources, research (in medicine, education, science & space), our environment, conservation, importing & exporting, and now, national security and whatever facet of our way of life should be represented. This economic body will arrange for the labor and material resources necessary to meet the economic needs of our nation.

Similarly, the same will occur at the state and local levels. The economic body at the local levels will be responsible for providing services to the people in the neighborhood. If the labor needs cannot be met with volunteer workers, "perks" must be offered. Also, the economic body at the local levels will be responsible for keeping the stores stocked with food, clothing and the common luxuries which will be available free. Thus, the economic needs of the nation right on down to the neighborhood levels would be determined and satisfied by these economic bodies.

How much economic responsibility will these new bodies absorb from our federal, state and local governments? How much will be shared? Can a balance of power be maintained? At any rate, our federal, state and local governments will be relieved of considerable amount of economic responsibility. Thus, our various governments will be free to catch up on all the other domestic and foreign issues that face us.

Yes, we will still import and export goods with foreign countries as our needs dictate; but what money will be used in place of the almighty dollar? Would the dollar have any value if everything is free in the USA? Would that be a problem? We would, however, still be able to use the currency of the country we are doing business with. For example, if we export goods to Germany, we would accept marks or euros in payment. The euros would then be deposited in our national treasury for future use. The money could then be used to import goods or perhaps send Americans overseas on vacation.

Yes, a way of life without money could be compared to the kibbutz which now exist in Israel. Can you picture the USA as one big kibbutz? However, ownership of property will remain the same as it is today. Our government will remain the same. Our free enterprise system will remain in place as it is today. There will be no need for money or any substitute for money since everything will be free.

The advantages of a way of life without money stagger the imagination; but they are real and cannot be disputed. Perhaps it is time for us to grab the brass ring.

"The Human Race has improved everything except the Human Race." -Adlai Stevenson
---
Article republished from The American Daily.

There is a Difference Between Life and Survival

Whatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between Life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we will have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have more to do with what we actually feel.

As it stands, how much living do we have in our lives? How many mornings do you wake up feeling truly free, thrilled to be alive, breathlessly anticipating the experiences of a new day? How many nights do you fall asleep feeling fulfilled, going over the events of the past day with satisfaction? Most of us feel as though everything has already been decided without us, as if living is not a creative activity but rather something that happens to us. That's not being alive, that's just surviving: being undead. We have undertakers, but their services are not usually required; we have morgues, but we spend most of our time in office cubicles and video arcades, in shopping malls, in front of televisions. Of course suburban housewives and petty executives are terrified of risk and change; they can't imagine that there is anything more valuable than physical safety. Their hearts may be beating, but they no longer believe in their dreams, let alone chase after them.

But this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love (and in the process discovering what we hate), daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Others see us doing this, see people daring to be more creative and more adventurous, more generous and more ambitious than they had imagined possible, and join us one by one. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true.

So do what you want with your life, whatever it is! But to be sure you do get what you want, think carefully about what it really is, first, and how to go about getting it. Analyze the world around you, so you'll know which people and forces are working against your desires, and which ones are on your side... and how you can work together with us. We're out here, living life to the fullest, waiting for you-hopping trains across the United States, organizing political protests in French public schools, writing beautiful letters at sunrise in Bangkok. We just finished making love in the corporate washroom a minute before you walked in on your half hour lunchbreak. And Life is waiting for you with us, on the peaks of unclimbed mountains, in the smoke of campfires and burning buildings, in the arms of lovers who will turn your world upside down. Come join us!
---
Reprinted from Crimethinc.com.

On Passion and Jobs

...If you are part of the corporate world, theres a constant refrain that is heard "I don't love my job" or "I would rather be doing something else". The corollary is "My job doesn't pay me enough" or "I am in this job for money" or "I wish I could sing/dance/teach for a living but it does not pay me as much as my job does."

Sitting in a cubicle trapped by three moulded walls and a boss, it is easy to take a judgement call on ones job. But the fact is that it really is your bread and butter (or chappati or idli). Most of us view our passion as an escapist route to get out of our routine mundane jobs. The sentences start with, It would be great if I could...

There are many who love their job - research, project management, accountancy, central excise (one of our old profs said central excise is his hobby), software maintenance, traffic policeman or even printing invoices day in and day out. For them their job is their passion. Every ounce of their energy they put in their work counts for them as an achievement. I have met people who can rave about the latest flexfield in Oracle apps or those who can look at a new software program and work spellbound until they crack the ultimate details of it. Look around you. There are quite a few of them. This is not to say that they are dull outside work. Usually they are not. They have interests outside of work and they cultivate it too.

There is a second set of people who have a great passion for something. Writing or music or driving or cooking or quizzing. They are the ones who quit their day jobs to be their own boss. Remember it is tough for someone who is passionate about, say, music to work for someone else. Because passion for music is an outlet of ones own creativity, it is difficult to alter some notes because your boss doesn't like it. Likewise, if I write something, I don't want an editor to come and prune my prose to a bonsai - I write it because thats how I want it to be, warts and all. These are the people who take the path less trodden and work on their own, for their passion. They work because they love it - the money is a byproduct and it usually happens. The road can be long or hard or both and many do make it - the gains in satisfaction are immense. Needless to say, this road is not easy and it involves a steep climb till you make it.

The majority of people see their jobs and passion as distinct. Out of these are people who do their jobs sincerely - accept it for what it is and do a sincere job of it. "My job brings me the money and I will do justice to it". If they do work on a passion or an art and craft, it is separate from their work. Some of them continue to work on their passion, while for a lot many it is lost along the way - while some expect their children to work on their own unfulfilled passion!

The last set of people are those who want someone else to infuse passion into their jobs. That, unfortunately, will never happen. Either you are passionate about your job or you seek your passion outside of work or you yourself go out and convert your passion into your work. There is no fourth option. No Robinhood or talent scout is ever going to discover you if you don't do anything. If you are a writer, you better write. If you are a singer, you better keep singing. Out of the mountains of paragraphs (or songs), one (or a few) could be diamonds (out of the mountains of coal) - the rest is just a process of discovery. As in cricket, you gotta keep scoring the boring singles, wait for the chances to hit the sixes and all of it totals to the magic figure of a century. All those boring singles and the big hits create a career.So what is the point of this post? Keep doing what you like, regardless of your job and as Raamdeo Aggarwal once told me, "If you are a star, keep working and you will be discovered" and I must add, if not by someone else, you will surely discover yourself.
--
Originally posted by Neelakantan on Interim Thoughts.

Who Stole My Time?

By Lilly Moss

Never enough time.

I spend two hours commuting each day and eight and a half hours daily at work. Consider how much additional time most people spend on shopping, watching television, and other passive entertainments. It's no wonder that life seems to pass us quickly by.

In prehistoric times, it's estimated that the daily chores, including food acquisition and preparation and other necessities, used about four hours daily, and those four hours were also social time.

When I was a kid in the late 50s and 60s, there was talk of the coming era of leisure time, of four day work weeks and extended vacations, of hobbies and do it yourselfing.

Our contemporary spiritually-ill culture demands that we move faster all the time, valuing speed for its own sake; that we spend the best hours of our day working for others for pay, often in personally meaningless tasks; that we see time doing nothing as lazy time and that we fill every unworking moment with passive entertainments.

In despair for time, I carefully apportion my weekends: this much time for art. This much time for loving play. This much for baking a cake or wandering along the frozen creek.

Who stole my time? I worked and drove my car and shopped and worried and did what I had to what I had to what I had to for 53 years and now I look back and mourn for the book I didn't write and the sunny days I was stuck inside at a job and the art school I never attended and the sledding expeditions with the kids I put off until the free time that never came.

Who stole my life?

Every day's pay I put away for the time when I will have enough to buy back my life from the Dominators.

Love,
Lilly
--
Reposted from Lilly's blog The Good Earth.

Adult Liberation: Unschooling Meets the Workforce

A conversation with Michael Fogler

By Peter Kowalke

As a lifelong unschooler, I've grown up with the luxury of studying what interests me. Supposedly I should be able to make a living by following my interests, too. But what if my passion is writing well-researched stories about everyday people, something that isn't very lucrative? To answer my question, I visited Michael Fogler in his Lexington, Kentucky, home. Michael is a homeschooling father and author of the book, Un-jobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook, which asserts that it isn't necessary to give up an interest in order to make a living without a job. His secret, it seems, is just using common sense.

Unschooling is to learn without going to school. Is un-jobbing to earn without having a job? Could you explain what it means to "un-job"?
In a sense, Yes, if we define job as an activity we do for money which we really wouldn't be doing if it weren't for the money. That is what I see as so wasteful in our society: millions of people spending the bulk of their able-bodied lives in activities that they wouldn't be doing if they didn't need the money attached to it. Can we not do only activities which are in alignment with our values and sense of purpose, with some of these activities also bringing in income? I say yes.

So, I see a life of un-jobbing as a life in which all of the activities that a person does are activities that the person really wants to do, whether they are income-producing or not. This person is doing what he/she truly wants to do, period. "Work" and "play" become blurred, virtually one and the same. They blend together into, simply, Life. John Holt once proclaimed that learning is not the product of teaching (something I have come to agree with). Similarly, living is not the product of "making a living" (i.e. the job) in our culture. So, my thing is to encourage (conscious) living in every moment and to change "making a living" (which should be more accurately called "making a dying") into "making a life."

The recent advertising campaign for the job site, Monster.com, points out that no one grows up wanting a bad job; we all want to earn money by doing what we love. But even career guides admit that we can't always do what we love without some sacrifice. Besides having a marketable interest, such as computers, how does one "make a life" by doing what he or she enjoys?

First, we might not grow up wanting a bad job, but we do grow up with the "realistic" expectation that you have described. So it doesn't matter what we want , we're "realistic." I believe that it's helpful to step out of the box of "realism" and into a more intangible world view. This takes faith and trust (ultimately, those things may be all that are truly real).

One of my major recommendations is to do a thorough self-inventory. This means answering , completely honestly , such questions as: Why am I here on Earth? What do I value? What do I find to be essential in my life? What are my talents and gifts? What activities do I find to be truly joyful (ones that I literally en-joy)? Getting clear about the answers to those questions is very important. This is a constant process that is not done just once, but continually , or at least periodically. It's important to note that there are no "right" or "wrong" answers to these questions , just personal truth. A good way to do this is to do it with a group of people who are also interested in moving in the direction of un-jobbing , to have a meeting and then, one by one, go around the circle and answer those questions out loud to the others. The people, besides the speaker, merely listen and do not judge; they just give their ears and hearts as receptors.

I have done this in workshops and found that amazing things happen when people get together in groups and speak their heart-felt answers out loud to others who respectfully listen to them. People are often surprised by what they say when said in a more public way than just silently thinking to themselves. The latter can often keep a personal truth buried. If a person speaks his/her truth in public, then there is a stronger likelihood that this person will begin to act upon it.

Once questions like that are answered, the next step is to answer the question: What is my ideal life , without regard to money? Again, answering this question out loud in front of a group of respectful, listening others will have more empowerment. Along with doing a program of what I call "conscious personal economics," working on the above questions can move a person in the direction of his/her ideal life. (One may never get there. Life is a journey, not a destination.)

There are ways of earning money that I have done since un-jobbing that I never would have predicted before I started. The major one is, of course, my book Un-jobbing! I didn't un-job with the idea of writing a book about un-jobbing. One day the book Un-jobbing will fade away and I will continue to be an un-jobber who is making ends meet. Don't ask me how , I have no idea! The point here is that we can't know how everything is going to work out. Do some good "homework"; keep taking some baby steps which feel good and make sense, and see what happens and where things lead.

You can read this interview in its entirety at Home Education Magazine. Read more about Michael Fogler's book Unjobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook at Why Work?
© Peter Kowalke

Do You Wanna Work or Do You Wanna Job?

By Patrick McGaugh

The story, of unknown origin, goes something like this: An American investment banker, visiting a small village in Mexico, encounters a Mexican fisherman. The fisherman describes his life: "I sleep late, fish a little, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffs at the fisherman’s lack of ambition and goes into great detail about how he could expand his small business and make millions. "Then what?" asks the fisherman.

"Then you would retire," replies the American. "Move to a small village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos."

Increasingly, the American ideal of success is being questioned, propelling at least two streams of thought about jobs and work. One is a critique of "busyness" itself — summed up most succinctly by Bertrand Russell’s 1931 essay "In Praise of Idleness" and given some cachet by the growing voluntary simplicity movement.

It’s a point of view starkly portrayed by Mike Judge’s screen satire "Office Space." In a workplace where his bosses clothe cynical micromanagement in phony politeness and "teamwork," antihero Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) makes a decision to drop out of the rat race — on the job, that is. As he assumes a surprisingly invulnerable chutzpah, a friend asks him what he would prefer to do with his time. "I would do nothing," he asserts.

Yet not everyone who hates jobs also hates work. A second emerging trend is one in which some would say, "I would do everything." These are folks who demand work they can genuinely get excited about and doesn’t conflict with their values. Broadly speaking, this might be called the "right livelihood" movement, although the social import of individual choices is open to different interpretations. "Erin Brockovich" is one example of following one’s activist passions; "Billy Elliot" — the story of a boy pursuing his dream of dancing — quite another. One’s right livelihood may also be a product of time freed up for nonpaying pursuits, as opposed to jobs per se.

I swim in the streams of both "nothing" and "everything." For the past 18-years I’ve had one of those Rodney Dangerfield jobs, substitute teaching ("I get no respect..."). I’ve spent many years beating myself up over my failure to get and keep a "real" job. However, lately my research and reflection have led me to turn common conceptions of "success" and "failure" on their heads. I’ve come to see that time often means more to me than money, as a low-pressure work situation has allowed me to pursue political activism, spiritual practice, a healthier lifestyle (knock on wood), and the life of an insane media junkie (I must know everything). Another part of me is a real romantic about work, provided it’s something I genuinely want to do. Still, money wouldn’t hurt.

These tensions are hardly unique to me. And as technology alters the pace and face of work in the infancy of this new century, "love work" and "hate work" each bid to remake labor — and by extension, remaking society — as each point of view both competes with and informs the other.
--
To read this article in its entirety check out: Conscious Choice.

The Psychopathology of Work

by Penelope Rosemont

"Work, now? Never, never. I'm on strike."
-Arthur Rimbaud

Depersonalization and alienation from our deepest desires is implanted during childhood via school, church, movies, and TV, and soon reaches the point where an individual's desire is not only a net of contradictions, but also a commodity like all the others. "True life" always seems to be just a bit beyond what a weekly paycheck and credit card can afford, and is thus indefinitely postponed. And each postponement contributes to the reproduction of a social system that practically everyone who is not a multimillionaire or a masochist has come to loathe.

That is the problem facing us all: How to break the pattern of work - of week-to-week slavery, that habit of habits, that addiction of addictions; how to detach ourselves from the grip of Self-Defeating Illusions For Sale, Inc., a.k.a, the corporate consumer State.

Especially ingrained is that pattern of working for someone else: making someone else's "goods", producing the wealth that someone else enjoys, thinking someone else's thoughts (sometimes actually believing them one's own), and even dreaming someone else's dreams - in short, living someone else's life, for one's own life, and one's own dream of life, have long since been lost in the shuffle.

The systematic suppression of a person's real desires - and that is largely what work consists of - is exacerbated by capitalism's incessant manipulation of artificial desires, "as advertised." This gives daily life the character of mass neurosis, with increasingly frequent psychotic episodes. To relieve the all-embracing boredom of daily life, society offers an endless array of distractions and stupefactions, most of them "available at a store near you". The trouble is, these distractions and stupefactions, legal or illegal, soon become part of the boredom, for they satisfy no authentic desire.

When the news reports horrible crimes committed by children or teenagers trying to be satanists, or superheroes, or terrorists, or just "bad guys", we can be sure that these kids lived lives of intolerable dullness, that they were so isolated from their own desires and from the larger society that they didn't even know how or where to look for something different, or how to rebel in such a way that it might actually make a difference. Instead, they picked up some trashy notions from bible school, Hollywood and TV which promised a few minutes of meaningless "excitement" followed by lots of publicity - also meaningless. Each time something like this happens we hear cries to "monitor" films more closely, and to ban "violence" on TV. Rarely, however, does anyone criticize the Bible or the Christian churches, despite the fact that Christianity - by far the bloodiest of the "world's great religions" - is far more to be blamed. Similarly, one rarely hears criticism of the armed forces - a gang of professional killers whose influence on children cannot be anything other than baleful.

And even less often does one encounter criticism of another intrinsically violent institution: the nuclear family. Indeed, at this late date in human history, this relic of patriarchy is still held up as some sort of ideal. Replacing the extended family as we know it today is an invention of the nineteenth century. Constructed by white bourgeois Europeans to meet the needs of expanding industrialization, it reflects capitalism's model of the "chain of command". It continues the sanction of male supremacy as a time-honored tradition dating back to a mandate of God, no less. In the nuclear family, he works at a job, and she works in the home (and increasingly also at a job). As for the children, they are the family's private property, and remain so for years after they reach bilogical maturity.

Children too learn to work, or at least how to suffer boredom. From the earliest age they are taught to obey orders. School and church teach them the necessity of going to and staying at a particular place for a prolonged period, even when they would rather be anywhere else. All the classic parental admonitions - "Sit still!", "Do what I tell you!", "Don't talk back!", "Stop behaving like a bunch of wild Indians!" - are part of the education of the well-behaved, uncomplaining wage-slave...

The world today is confronted by greater, more earth-shaking, more life-threatening problems than ever before: wars all over, massive pollution, global warming, the return of slavery, white supremacy, oppression of women, ecological disaster, neocolonialism, state terrorism, the prison industry, genocide, cancer, AIDS, the traffic death-toll, xenophobia, pesticides, genetic engineering - the list goes on and on. Ceaselessly bombarded by news reports and sound bytes of one catastrophe after another, most people have no idea what to do, and laps into paralysis. On the ideological front, this widespread passivity, itself a major social problem, is maintained by Andre Breton called miserabilism, the cynical rationalization of misery, suffering and corruption - the dominant ideology of Power in our time.

Every hour, moreover, countless billions are spent on propaganda, advertising and other mystifications to sustain the delusion that the crisis-strewn society we live in today is the best and only one possible.

What is most important to grasp is that work is at the center of all these problems. It is work that keeps the whole miserabilist system going. Without work, the death-dealing juggernaut that proclaims itself the "free market" would grind to a halt. "Free market" means freedom for Capital, and unfreedom for those who work. Until the problem of work is solved - that is, until work is abolished - all other problems will not only remain, but will keep getting worse...In a world too busy to live, work itself has become toxic, a form of "digging your own grave".

Renewed scarcities and engineered economic crises notwithstanding, society today ahs the capacity to reduce work to a tiny fraction of what it is now, while continuing to meet all human needs. It is obvious that if people really want paradise on Earth, they can have it - practically overnight. Of course, they will have to overcome the immense and multinational "false consciousness" industry, which works very hard to make sure that very few working people know what they really want...

Work kills the spirit, damages the body, insults the mind, keeps everyone confused and demoralized, distracts its victims from all the things that really matter in life...Our struggle calls for labor organizers of a new kind...To bring about the meltdown of miserabilism, we need awakeners of latent desires, fomentors of marvelous humour, stimulators of ardent dreams, provokers of the deepest possible yearning for a life of poetic adventure.

(From "A Brief Rant Against Work", in Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights (2000))

Free Time! Ludicity and the Anti-work Ethic

By Laura Martz

To sustain itself, consumer capitalism relies on (1) the maintenance of an outdated survival imperative and work ethic, and (2) a totalizing commodification and consumerism, which necessitates work beyond perceived survival needs. Play has been diametrically opposed to work (defined as wage labor), coded as decadent within the sphere of rationality and radically excised. One's time off the clock is allegedly the proper realm of play. Yet under consumer capitalism this time is cleverly commandeered for other means as intrinsic to keeping the machine running as the activities engaged in under the watchful eye of the clock.

Play will be defined here only loosely, as all that which is diametrically opposed to and excluded by work (its elements of delight, surprise and affect will be preserved). Bataille conceives of a general economy of global energy flows which inevitably generates a surplus of energy which must be expended. Under capitalism, excess (human energy not necessary to survival) is diverted into accumulation and endlessly-climbing profits for the ruling class. Yet for Bataille the proper object of the expenditure of this energy is dissipation, "nonproductive expenditure": "into the effervescence of life." Play is a fitting expediture; put another way, this nonproductive expenditure defines another aspect of play crucial to the following argument. Play is the refusal of regimentation, supervision and clocks. In this sense, play is a precondition for resistance, which demands time and energy for spontaneity, contemplation, communication, and unity. Play must be recovered.

Reintroducing play into adult life would necessitate the rupture of what Debord called the spectacle (so as to open the way for other species of meaning besides exchange value) and the recovery of some unity for life against the separateness of present conditions, especially the effacement of the boundary between art and life (in order to despecialize and render accessible more forms of activity). Both of these aims were part of the project of the Situationist International. I will attempt to reexamine the ideology which keeps time divided between producing and consuming in a situationist light, chipping away at it in the process, and begin to suggest some possibilities for reclaiming time from work.

"Never Work!"

The survival imperative in the technologized world as a rationale for wage labor is an alibi used to legitimate capitalist profit and thus domination and alienation. That the worker does excess work (more than demanded by her own, or anyone's, necessity, and more than she is paid for) is a law of capitalism. Capitalist profit is the reification of this excess labor, which is either channelled into the reinforcement of the status of the ruling class or redirected into capital accumulation. The worker will never be paid more than she or he needs to survive and remain fit to work. This axiom was altered slightly with the need to metamorphose the worker-producer into a consumer when off the clock. Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day in the recognition that with the surplus being produced as a result of increased efficiency under industrialization and Taylorization, the consumer market needed to be "vertically expanded": workers, most of the population and thus putatively the predominant buyers of products, needed excess income with which to absorb the system's waste output. (Workers also needed incentive to stick with Ford at first, when other employers did not yet enforce his scientific management principles, which the workers found demeaning and tiresome. They were forced into step, nevertheless, as scientific management rapidly took hold everywhere.) The purpose of the "consumer wage" is thus to keep the machinery of capitalist overproduction in motion.

The consumer must be conditioned from birth to hand over the "excess" wage in exchange for the excesses of capitalist production. In the early twentieth century the new requirement of capitalism became the total cultural control of workers outside the workplace (when their role changed to that of consumers), through the new advertising industry, as well as in it. Advertising is perhaps the most obvious mode of spectacular ideology. The spectacle holds workers in thrall, teaching them in what is called their "free" time that their desires can be satisfied through consumption. The upkeep of the capitalist economic system thus finally encroaches on all our waking hours.

Half a century after the development of advertising and consumerist ideology, the situationists held that the "society of the spectacle" (commodities, art-as-commodity, the mass media, the entertainment industry) alienates its "spectators," who are condemned to do nothing more than watch themselves, experiencing satisfaction (but not really) only through the mediation of the commodity. The spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied: via this mechanism we support the machine of endless consumption over and over.

Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle. As observed by the Bureau of Control (pamphleteers from Houston, Texas), in the realm of "art" behavior is tolerated that would not be in the "real world." Play in the "working world" is diverted, channeled off as "art," contained as decadent behavior in the mainstream of life. Children are punished in school for playing except at scheduled break time, as training for the radical split between what one is ordered to do and what one might like to do.

Furthermore, to play professionally today and live off it, one must be able to command a mass audience and license the spectacle-commodity to a hierarchy of managers and owners, each of whom creams off an ascending percentage of profit from the "work" (for that is what this "play" has been converted or inverted into). "Performance" is now also always subject to endless monitoring and control by the professional judges and censors.

According to the situationists, the desire for experience is "continually commodified and in turn wrenched free from spectacular relations in a perpetual struggle for its realisation." This axiom is beautifully manifest in the US in 1993 in a Nike commercial. A young, white actor boasts, "My name is Fletcher and I work as little as possible." The company slogan "Just Do It" appears on the screen in wavy acid-green letters on a hot-pink background. We have here the co-option and price-tagging by the spectacle of the anti-work, pro-play ethic of the situationists' American brethren, the hippies; presented simultaneously with the suggestive phrase: just do it! (Just try LSD! Just blow up that military installation!) But in this case, "just do it" is only supposed to mean "just buy this hundred-dollar pair of shoes."

The supreme irony of capitalism might be that an anti-production and anti-capitalist ethic can be used to promote capitalist interests, by inducing people to consume through teasing them with oppositional desires. In the operation of the Nike ad, giving in to anticapitalist desires ("working as little as possible") is OK, and what's more, it's achievable through consumption (which is to say, not at all, except through a commodity fantasy). But someone who understands how advertising works will be able to separate the commodity from the impulse the ad attempts to link with it and examine that impulse for the symptom it is.

Only those who do work can afford to buy products like this. Nike obviously perceives a grain of dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and channels it into support of that system. But we can be sure dissatisfaction with the status quo is alive and well when the status quo has to commandeer it. I see this ad as targeting that US media-generated grouping called "Generation X" or "slackers." They are constructed as an un- or under-employed, downwardly-mobile group of recent college graduates. As the mass media have it, the state of the economy, US politics in the 1980s, the condition of the ecosystem, and growing up in suburbia have made them skeptical of capitalism's lures and promises, its ideology of bourgeois ambition. Made aware of their status as a demographic category through advertising and its supporting media, they have been co-opted by the spectacle and used to sell upscale goods like cars, though it is unclear to whom--those more ambivalent "cynics" of the same age and class grouping, one suspects.

These people are would-have-been-desirable consumers (and employees) gone bad. They're not suitably ambitious (sometimes they almost resemble their European counterparts, the "unemployed generation"--who, because they could, founded autonomist scenes) to make capitalism comfortable, and allegedly cannot get and/or do not want the lucrative jobs that are their inheritance. They are interesting because they seem so skeptical about capitalism as the promised road to happiness, so uninvested in the ideology that keeps it going.
--

Laura Martz is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Literary and Cultural Theory. You can read this article in its entirety at Cultronix.

How Ethical Is The Work 'Ethic'?

Reconsidering work and 'leisure time'

Did you ever wonder why your parents act so disoriented when it comes to 'leisure' activities? Why they start one little hobby, and either fail to follow through with it or become pathologically obsessed with it...even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with their lives? Maybe they seek to lose themselves in gardening or following the exploits of some basketball team. Maybe your father buys all sorts of fancy tools (the kind of tools many men his age have), but only uses them for a few days before setting them aside--and then buys a lot of skiing equipment the next month. Or perhaps they just spend their time trying figure out how to pay off the debt they owe for that wide screen television they spend the rest of their time watching.

And--have they ever been honest with you about their jobs? Do they enjoy them? Is their work the most fulfilling thing they could be doing, are they able to achieve every goal they always wanted to? Do they feel heroic or proud every day as they return home--or are they exhausted? Do they turn that wide screen television on as soon as they come in the door? Do they have the energy to do anything else?

Did you ever wonder if there might be a better way for them, for you?

WHAT IS 'WORK' LIKE?

Because of the 'division of labor', most jobs today consist of doing very specific tasks, over and over, with very little variety. If you are a dishwasher, you wash dishes: you don't get to interact with people or solve complicated problems very often, and you never get to leave the dishroom to run around in the sunlight. If you are a real estate agent, you never use your hands to make anything, and you spend most of your time thinking about market value and selling points. Even jobs that include a certain amount of variety can only remain interesting and challenging up to a point: for we work forty hours a week on average, and at least five out of the seven days. That's a lot of our lives to spend working. Work is the first thing we do on most of the days of our lives, and we don't get to do anything else until we've been at work for quite a while. When we spend most of our time and energy working on one task, or even ten different tasks, eventually we will feel bored and desperate for variety... even if we are conditioned not to realize this.

On top of this, because of the spread of large businesses and the consequent decrease in self-employment and small businesses, most of us do not have much voice in what our responsibilities at work will be. It is hard to start your own business or even find a friend or neighbor to work for. We often must get a job to survive in which we follow the instructions of a manager who probably doesn't have much more control over his job than we have over ours. Since we don't get to decide what we are doing, chances are that we will feel alienated from our work, disinterested in the quality of our labor; we may even feel that the projects we are working upon are unimportant.

Indeed it is easy to feel that most of the jobs available today are unimportant--for in a certain sense, many of them are. In a purely capitalist economy, the jobs that are available will be determined by which products are in the most demand; and often the products that are in demand (military technology, fast food, Pepsi, fashionable clothes) are not products that really make people happy. It's easy to feel like all your labor is wasted when the products you work so hard to sell just to survive seem to do nothing for the people you sell them to. How many people really are cheered up by the soggy french fries at McDonalds? Would they perhaps be happier eating a meal prepared by a friend of theirs or a chef they knew who owned his own cafe?

In short, 'work' as we know it tends to make us unhappy because we do so much of it, because it is so repetitive, because we don't get to choose what we do, and because what we are doing is often not in the best interest of our fellow human beings.

WHAT IS 'LEISURE TIME' LIKE?

We come home from these jobs exhausted from having invested all our time and energy in a project we may not have even been free to choose, and what we need most is to recover. We are emotionally and physically worn out, and nothing seems more natural than to sit down quietly for a while and watch television or read the daily paper, while we try to gather our strength for the next day's labor. Perhaps we try to leave behind our exhaustion and frustration by concentrating on some hobby or another; but as we are not very used to directing ourselves in the workplace during the day, we often don't know what we really want to do when we are free at home.

Certainly some company or another will have some suggestions for us, whether we receive them from advertising or watching our neighbors; but chances are that this company has their profits in mind at least as much as our satisfaction, and we may discover that playing miniature golf is strangely unfulfilling.

Similarly, of course, we don't have much time or energy left over from work to consider our situation or participate in any rewarding activity which requires much time and energy. We don't like to think too much about whether we enjoy our jobs or our lives--besides, that might be depressing, and what can we do if we don't enjoy them, anyway? We don't have the energy left to enjoy art or music or books that are really challenging; we need our music to be soothing, our art nonthreatening, our books merely entertaining.

In fact, we come to associate having to expend effort and do things with our work, and associate relaxing and not doing anything with leisure time. So, because many of us don't like our jobs, we tend to associate having to do things with being unhappy, while happiness, as far as we ever know it, means... not doing anything. We never act for ourselves, because we spend our whole days acting for other people, and we think that acting and working hard always leads to unhappiness; our idea of happiness is not having to act, being on permanent vacation.

And this is ultimately why so many of us are so unhappy: because happiness is not doing nothing, happiness is acting creatively, doing things, working hard on things you care about. Happiness is becoming an excellent long-distance runner, falling in love, cooking an original recipe for people you care about, building a bookshelf, writing a song. There is no happiness to be found in merely lying on a couch--happiness is something that we must pursue. We are not unhappy because we have to do things, we are unhappy because all the things we do are things we don't care about. And because our jobs exhaust us and mislead us about what we want, they are the source of much of our unhappiness.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

You don't have to work at those jobs, you know. It is possible to get by without all the Pepsi, all the expensive clothes, the wide screen television and the expensive interior decorating that all those paychecks go to pay for. You can try to start your own business doing something you care about (although this still involves the danger of having too little variety in your work), or you can try to find a job in today's marketplace (good luck!) that you actually enjoy... and that leaves you enough time and energy to do other things in your life that you also enjoy. The most important thing is to arrange your life so that you are doing things because you want to do them, not because they are profitable--otherwise, no matter how much money you make, you will be selling your happiness for money. Remember that the less money you spend, the less you will have to worry about getting money in the first place... and the less you will have to work at those dehumanizing jobs. Learn to use all your 'free' time, not to vegetate or spend money on entertainment, but to create things and accomplish things--things that no one would pay you to make or do, but that make your life (and perhaps the lives of others) better anyway.

Some will argue that the system we live within would break down if we all were to walk away from our jobs--so much the better. Haven't we built enough automobiles, enough shopping malls, enough televisions and golf clubs, enough fucking nuclear weapons already? Wouldn't we all be better off if there was a shortage of fast food and a surplus of unique home-cooked meals? If playing music is more rewarding than working in an assembly line, why do we have so few good bands and so many transistor radios? Of course a 'work-free' world is a dream we will probably never see come true; but as always, the challenge is to make this dream a part of your world, as much as you can--to liberate yourself from the chains of mindless consumerism and mind-melting employment and live a more meaningful life.
---
This piece originally appeared in the book "Days of War Nights of Love," published by CrimethInc.