Willful Unemployment

If my memory serves well, I performed my first job with the same dispassion, disgust, and anomie that I've brought to every job since, including the one through which I currently plod and from which will shortly escape. I'm not one to psychologize, but I certainly did not inherit my parents' faith in industry, so if I were pressed to point to an experience, rather, an epiphany respons ble for what some madmen might diagnose as a recurring malaise, it would have to be when I was fifteen years old, working at T-Bones grocery store, taking people's money, putting it in the cash register, giving customers less money than the amount they gave me, throwing sundries in bags, smiling, and meditating on the two 15- and one 30-minute breaks my eight hour shifts afforded me. Because those intervals of non-work time punctuating the stretches of work time were the preservers of my receding sanity, it became easy for me to distinguish two types of time: time spent working was monotonous, stupefying, painful. Time spent not working was blissful, ambrosiac, Life. The contrast was clear, between working and non-working time. Non-working time was clearly more preferable, so there must have been a perfectly rational explanation as to why I willfully traded a significant chunk, say, 0ne-third, of non-working time for working time: money.

Money had to be properly understood if I were to go on with such self-torture. It was particularly easy because I was playing with the stuff constantly. A woman puts a few frozen dinners, a bag of apples, six snack-packs, one pound of sliced turkey, another of sliced cheese, and a loaf of bread on the conveyor belt. I scan the goods. She gives me $35. I take it and give her $4.67. I take stock of the situation. The woman spent $30.33 on what could very well be her family's dinner for the evening and her child's lunch for the week, or $30.33 towards the (albeit immediate and temporary) sustenance of her family and perhaps an excuse (dinnertime) for that family to congregate, socialize, share. Generalizing backwards, these Nice Things were made possible by stuff like food (for the sustenance of those bodies), non-working time (temporal space for the occasion of dinnertime), working time (for the accumulation of money), and money (for the exchange of Nice Things, like food). So we can see money like this: money is traded for enjoying Nice Things. Working time is what you sacrifice so you can get money, so you can enjoy the Nice Things during non-working time. By algebralogical extension, we can juxtapose non-working time with money; the money you make is how much non-working time, or Life, you relinquish. Furthermore, the Nice Things you can afford with money equals that time you could have spent not working working, i.e., I buy a turkey sandwich for $5.25 and I give up one hour working to earn $5.25; the turkey sandwich cost me one hour of Life (maybe it would only cost you five minutes). Two tickets to a movie, popcorn, sodas, and two hours of unsupervised making out with highschool girlfriend in parents' car equals six and a half hours, which is totally worth it.

Therefore, currency is: the non-working time (Life) one gives up so one can hypothetically afford and enjoy (or so one hopes) Nice Things, however subjectively defined, during the non-working time one has not yet given up for the purpose of affording and enjoying Nice Things. In other words, one trades some of their Life(a) for Life(b) so that the quality of the latter is--in whatever scope or magnitude--better. The problem is that Life(b) is always smaller in quantity than Life(a), and yields a asymptotically decreasing sums of fulfillment at higher ends of currency accumulation. One cannot value the time given up not working for work just in terms of the money earned because that in and of itself is not Nice Things. This is a conclusion that Marxists and Capitalists can agree upon: Money is time, and currency is the physical medium that reifies the latter into the former, however crudely. One fundamental difference between the two, though I have no interest in exploring that chasm here, is that one camp values money more than non-working time--a group, I would venture to guess, that has an undernourished, ultimately frightful valuation of Life, too.

As such, my view of working-time, work, is fairly bleak, regardless of the work. Maybe it's because the Nice Things I enjoy most do not cost me a lot of money (in no particular order: reading, writing, playing music, eating, having sex), that when I think about how much non-working time I give up to working time, I feel confused or just stupid. Although the content of one's job might distract one from staring directly into the eyes of such a miserable situation (if your job, for example, is taking photos of beautiful, maybe naked, women), for most people, all jobs are work and work sucks.

For stupid virtues, like duty or gratitude or something, I maintain my +54 hour/week post at meager wage; I get my daily bowl of chow, but no time to taste it. As I wrote once in my inconsequential editor's column for my inconsequential magazine, I only enjoy coffee insofar as it is an aid to more interesting pursuits, like reading, writing, whatever. So what I get is a shit load of coffee, but to no meaningful end. Rocket fuel, engine, no destination. Daily, I acquire more rocket fuel. If it weren't for the opportunity I steal back from my working time to burn the fuel here, writing, the stuff would surely explode, and my sanity with it.

Fortunately, this is my last week, or last issue, working for the magazine. When I finish this, I will have demoted myself to copyeditor where I will enjoy minimal work and pay, but much, much more Life.