A Meditative Spiral on Work Ethic™
My mind is in a jamble and here it is on the page!
I’ve been thinking a lot about work ethic lately.
Particularly because I started this substack as a way to share my ideas in an essay-illustration format, but as it turns out, I haven’t posted in almost year.
(Very “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” vibes)
RECOMMENDED SOUNDTRACK:
I didn’t post anything because, for one, I didn’t feel like it. Well, I did desire to write an essay, share it. Feel “productive” as an artist. Feel I am contributing to the art I care about. Feel all this so I can feel like an artist and not a fraud. Aha! The unconscious drives of creating under capitalism. I loathe how it feels impossible to escape that truth: capitalism has dirtied our concept of productivity.
And whenever I found myself in this loop of questioning, I always decided that in my grand experiment of how to be “anti-capitalist” while living in “capitalist society,” I chose not to finish writing or publishing anything because I was challenging myself to find self-definition outside of career-related productivity. I, like many of my peers, often fall under the guise that career productivity could make me feel better. When in reality, that is a symptom of post-capital brainwashing.
Holy shit, millennial problems! Are you still with me, bruv?
THE LIMINALITY OF QUESTIONING TOO MUCH SHIT
My friend told me at another friend’s outdoor birthday brunch recently that I think too much. Well, as an Aries Stellium in the 3rd house with an Aquarius rising and mars in Gemini, I was built this way bitch!!! I can’t think any less.
I’ve been wondering for a long time, what came first? The desire to make something of the self or the exploitation of productivity by capitalism. This question has had me in a stealthy hold for a long time – I’ve been lingering in the liminal space trying to figure it all out. I’ve been lingering so long, I made myself sick to the stomach a bit. Alas!
Wondering what productivity is all the time has made it increasingly hard to be productive. Productivity is how our worth is measured in modern society. And thus: anxious spirals ensue!
To move forward, I break it down. (Mercury in the final degree of Aries: God, please forgive me).
And, yes, my head hurts!
WHAT IS PRODUCTIVITY? IMMIGRANT EDITION
I’ve only been alive since 1989 (shout out to the fall of the Berlin wall, baby!) so I can only speak from my limited experience. As an immigrant kid who grew up with two working parents in the (random) suburbs of South Carolina and Virginia, I was taught that Productivity is Life™.
If you weren’t being productive, you were being lazy. Being lazy is bad. And, if you really think about it, then why did our family bust ass to move to America for you to be lazy? And, hello! Mushtaq and Seema Khan had a lot less than you have now – so you should be grateful. And so on, and so forth. (I can hear all the aunties shaking their heads now in unison.)
So the Immigrant Work Ethic™ was drilled into me from a young age.
The American dream is that through relentless productivity you can become Successful™. The goal is always to be Successful™. Without Successful ™, existence is in question.
In the words of a sage Immigrant Work Ethic™ veteran I deeply respect, Cathy Park Hong:
“My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country's gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”
via Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)
WHAT IS PRODUCTIVITY? PURITAN EDITION
Work ethic in America was arguably shaped most fundamentally by the Puritans who jostled over here after the original Pilgrims decimated millions of native indigenous tribes to dodge the church or whatever it was. The phrase “Puritan Work Ethic” was originally coined by German sociologist Max Weber in his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The name itself gives me chills down my spine, 118 years later.
The Puritans believed that if they constantly worked, they would be in higher favor to God, and thus would achieve Heaven™.
As lovely an idea as that may be, it is so ripe to be taken advantage of by free-market capitalism where exploiting human labor has made fat cats rich since Karl Benz invented the first Benz™. The more we can get people to work and tie it to their worthiness as a person, the more money a guy can make off that.
MISERY
Here are some miscellaneous related facts that are a result of hundreds of years of exploited labor to make others rich:
We live in the richest country in the world, and yet we have the highest wealth gap compared to any other developing country, which is only growing. The wealth is concentrated for very few who don’t pay any taxes nor do they give a shit that your kid’s school has no paper.
Success in our economy only isolates the successful from the communal, which leads to higher rates of depression. We have the third highest rate of anti-depressant prescriptions in the world, and currently almost 30% of the population identifies as depressed.
Consumerism is destroying the planet, and yet we’re addicted. Amazon, owned by one of the richest men in the world who pays $0 in taxes, has a carbon footprint that increased by 36% in a two year period, despite pledging to fight climate change.
100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the idea of them decreasing seems unlikely given our reliance on fossil fuels
The Kardashians is Hulu’s most watched premiere and Pete Davidson got to go to space with Jeff Bezos (eye roll)
REDEFINING SUCCESS
I have to believe that the desire for success as a human being pre-existed capitalism.
Cave people wanted to feel useful because that meant they got to live another day. That is coded into our DNA. A desire to belong, to achieve something for the tribe. When the tribe felt impressed, that must’ve felt good. Imagine the first guy who ate psychedelic mushrooms? That’s so cool that tripping his balls off led to discovering language, which led to moving civilization forward.
If capitalism exploits our own desire to succeed, how do we know the difference between fulfilling our souls versus falling pray to the rat race of Ever-Expanding Success™, knowing that the latter causes harm to each other and the environment?
I think the answer is the landscape is murkier than ever. There’s so much fog, it’s hard to see straight. We have to allow ourselves time and stumbling around in the dark to find the answers. I’m not sure we’ll solve these issues in time, before more harm is done to our communities, to our earth. But I guess…what the hell? We are merely human. We can’t be perfect.
Here are some questions I’m pondering lately: How can we hold this desire in our hearts without causing harm? What does a non-harmful version of success look like? Are we creating art just to create, just to see our names flashing in lights? Or are we creating art because this gives us purpose and purpose is a means of thriving as human beings?
I don’t know the answers yet, but like a sexy bohemian-Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke said in a letter to a young poet in 1800something:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
via Letters to a Young Poet (1929)