To be honest, I've been increasingly cold towards work. Because all the jobs I have are essentially work that can be automated. So I make sure my coldness autonomises me from notions of loyalty, extra mile, team, family, career, socializing - every hour is a case of getting by so I get paid. People actually learn to see that and just let you be.
I need to get a job at the moment - it is hard. You just have to perform the absurdities so you can perform absurdities and get paid. I remember applying for a job that required a high attention to detail and good written and verbal skills. They wanted to interview me, then after a 2 week silence they came back and apologised explaining they needed the candidate to be a fluent mandarin speaker. Hohoho - they really do need someone, anyone, with even just a low to moderate attention to detail.
Also, you are not at a disadvantage. You just don't have cash. But somethings don't require great wealth. Start projects, write, play, exercise. These should be your motivation in the non-work period.
Yeah... I mean, work is only important in as much as you need it. I guess I always try to keep that in sight. I presume you, like me, are looking for some work for cash but not some life defining career. I feel this is the right way to approach work.
Death-gages and property are obviously a massive factor alongside the private landlords who crush and house their serfs - true. But I see so many unhappy people who endlessly enter into the soft middle of control (it helps that I live in Reading, home to the big 3 accounting forms and many IT companies - none of which actually require warm bodies...) .. People like buying shit and checking emails in bed, people like struggling through a large company engaging in some absurd performance of engagement and investment - not because it's rewarding but because it's the easiest thing to do.
i want to agree but what happens when you can't physically work anymore (depends on the kind of work of course). i dont know if i want to just be working until i drop.
The idea of 'career' fills me with loathing, but I guess I'm keen to do something that strikes me as as meaningful as possible within the boundaries imposed by the need to get cash, without getting too hung up on that.
Yeah, it's impossible to think past the predictions of - was it Keynes? - that mechanisation would lead to decreased working hours. Unfortunately he radically underestimated the self-hating sickness of humans. And the idea that people should only specialise (jobs-wise) in one thing has never really gone away, despite what we are told about 'transferable skills' etc. It's so anti-life.
Agree, but sadly the death drive (misusing the term maybe, but it seems to fit) and sheer lack of imagination of these people means that all the rest of us have to suffer too.
As Winnicott brilliantly said in relation to the clients he took in psychoanalysis, the clearest sign of their being in tremendous emotional distress was that when they spoke they bored the shit out of him (paraphrase). This applies to these people.
death-gages
It's a common concept that people have 3 major careers. Even the inner party know that. The concept of career is long lasting in the face of capitalism moving too quick for any semblance of career to be maintained because C required a massive blurring of private and public. There are no shifts any more. You reply to your line manager whilst conducting foreplay to manage your career relationship...
So there is this awful paradox of being told you life is your work, take it home, lets have a drink, and at the same time your work cannot become your life because you will have 3 careers! This is reflected best in the void between property financing (death-gages based on a 40 year single career progression) and working reality: multiple careers, precarity etc etc...
The problem of sheer lack of imagination points us right back to a bunch of guys who know whatsup. "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." We see this played out in the compulsive buying of shite coffee, the success of fast fashion, the hype interest in album releases: more of the same is the antidote for no imagination or hope. Ernst, quit throwing that bloody ball!
Which collapses one into a sense of total meaninglessness vis-a-vis work?
I'm not getting the Ernst reference!
But I couldn't agree more with the rest. There is always something "new" to consume, some new promise of fulfilment through things (or 'experiences', conceived of in the most vapid way possible, as non-transformative events to consume).