It’s been a journey to open this new document. I started my day the worst way I know how— on my phone, scrolling through dozens of other people’s ideas, combing through their wants and asks, seeking “inspiration” in other people’s writing that is buried under a desperate need to generate content and contains lists of “round ups” which more often than not contain a link to a life changing product or at least lead me to want something I didn’t want before. I’ve been noodling on a couple of topics for this week and I’m going to go with one that may surprise some readers given my appreciation for anti-capitalist TikTok and my disdain of corporate greed.
Because the conversation is so intense and extreme, I feel the need to make a few disclaimers before I get into it:
I have personally struggled with finding work/life balance especially in creative industries where there is an undercurrent of “you’re lucky to be here” and I have come to learn that no project is cool enough that it should result in a loss of quality of life or ask you to do something that is unsafe.
I believe the system of capitalism that we live in was built by and for the people at the top and is therefore inherently corrupt.
I support labor unions.
I hate all of the bad guys who are benefitting from the system by exploiting people, animals and the earth.
While meaningful dialogue has emerged and there have been many positive changes in regards to how we view work over the past few years, the nuance of the conversation has all but disappeared. Like so many other charged topics are wont to do in this age of the internet, the discourse has become black or white. Either you’re anti-work or you’re a greedy capitalist. Actually, there is a vast spectrum that plays out in between those two things.
To begin with the positive, the most exciting realization for me of the past few years is that I can create outside of a productivity based, profit driven model. A mistake I made in my 20s was being hellbent on marrying the two things, which is an unreasonable goalpost to achieve before 30— that one can support oneself by making their art. The freedom that comes from embodying this idea of creating for the sake of creating is wonderful. While I’ve taken a step back from my filmmaking practice I had the first kernel of an idea the other day that I felt genuinely excited about in years (?) and my brain didn’t immediately go straight to my Sundance premiere and subsequent offers for representation. Instead, it is something that I’m going to let marinate on the back burner and possibly shoot on an iPhone at a location that’s available to me with people I know. It likely won’t be a tour de force that puts me on the map as a filmmaker and it’s liberating to finally be free of that pressure. I am grateful to this cultural moment for giving me the space to dismantle some of my beliefs that quality and value can only be determined by critical or commercial success.
Lately I have been surprised by my own interest in business. Until recently, in my vocabulary, business was a boring word for something I had previously relegated to things that non creative and uninspired people do. People who don’t notice the difference between shades of white or seem not to be effected by a fluorescent ceiling light… they are the ones doing all the business. It would have been really useful to take a couple of business school classes that were available to me at Tulane, but instead I filled up my schedule with heady film theory courses that I can no longer remember what we even watched. It wasn’t a waste of time by any means, but I could have used a dose of practicality. I would even go so far as to say that I felt like some of these business oriented people, at their very core, weren’t connected to life in the way that I feel many artists are. There was no romance in business for me and there still probably isn’t romance, but there is genuine engagement now and that feels like a substantial development.
What I think people forget in taking an extreme stance against all labor, is that they might be really bored and probably depressed if they literally did nothing all day. I know this isn’t what every anti-capitalist wants but it feels to me like the cultural conversation has basically become a binary of: all work is bad, all business owners are greedy and don’t care about their employees and the only remedy is to quit work all together and have a life with zero accountability or responsibility. The meme (that I can’t find) is something like I was meant to spend my time eating fruit in the Italian countryside (which usually features an angelic subject in a beautiful and impractical dress with expensive looking hair). I agree this sounds really nice but I want more. I like to be working towards something and collaborating with other people whether it be cooking dinner at home or building a brand. The only other option isn’t a 90 hour work week with no benefits and a mean boss.
After witnessing the behavior of some younger staff it’s clear that this anti-work rhetoric is having a real effect on workplace performance. A young server said to a new staff member, “don't put the hot sauce out because then people ask for it.” That is literally one of five bullet points in the job description for FOH staff at our restaurants— help guests get what they need in a friendly way. If you are hiding the hot sauce and avoiding guests then I’m not sure what value you are adding to the operation and ethically it seems wrong to then feel entitled to a paycheck.
To make a projection, I think what many proponents of “anti-work” discourse want is actually the ability to live without having to do something they hate in order to make ends meet. They don’t want to give their lives to something that doesn’t give them a life. I get that and I feel the same way. We want the ability to have enough time to create something without the pressure of turning it into an enterprise, to be able to grow a garden and then to have even more time to pick the blueberries we’ve grown and to eat them for breakfast that morning. Life is moving too fast and we’re missing so many of the good moments. We want to knit a scarf and not have to create a brand around it. We want to shoot a roll of dreamy film photography without the intention of posting the images to socials and becoming an influencer overnight who then gets a sponsorship from Delta airlines and travels the world for free.
Sidebar: The reported increase in youthful aspirations to become an influencer as a career choice is fascinating and perhaps a topic to dive deeper into another day. While it is a lot of work to always be camera ready and create content and manage your pages, being an influencer as a job is basically a way to get paid to just live your life and document it.
I think what a lot of people want in terms of a job are stability and clear boundaries around work and personal life. If you’re an entrepreneur embarking on your own endeavor, then all bets of work/life balance are out the window and that’s a choice you have to make if you want your idea to work. But for people who are employed by a company, like I was for several years, I don’t think the goal should be to do as little possible. I think the goal should be to find and enter into a reasonable work agreement (which is hard work in and of itself to find this type of opportunity) that works for your needs and lifestyle and perform the tasks as agreed to and arrive at a place of mutual respect. The employee respects that the employer has created a place of work that is safe, stable and can support their lifestyle. In turn the employer respects the employee by honoring boundaries around that person’s time and making asks that are appropriate and always keeping the wellbeing of the team in mind when making business decisions.
I personally don’t do well with idle time and I like to be busy. Idle time feels different than intentional rest. Idle is directionless and meandering and there have been seasons when I’ve had too much of it that I’ve been grateful to go to a job that I didn’t even like, just to provide some structure and to get me out of my head.
My question is: do people really not want to work at all or is this more of a reckoning around purpose? For the first time in my life I see all of my skills coming together (crystallizing around work) to create a cohesive picture and I am enjoying it. I’m settling into the idea of being a generalist and not a specialist. I don’t think most people are inherently lazy. If you took money out of the equation what is something that you would like to do? If it’s growing a garden, that’s still work. If it’s lying on the couch all day watching TV, that could be depression. My point is I think we’re wired to want to do things, to create things, I just think we’ve gone too far in either direction and it’s worth asking ourselves what do we really want to spend our time doing?