It’s the New Year. In the past, I’ve had a stronger sense of resolve around this moment. This sense of purpose never resulted in me joining a gym or buying sports gear which was destined to gather dust in the cupboard. It was already too apparent that such endeavours would result in a brief but ultimately futile effort at a ‘better’ life. My commitments, at least in recent years, were always more sentimental. Make more of an effort with the people in my life. Never say ‘no’ to an invitation from someone I care about. Any success with fitness or eating healthier that I’ve had in recent times came outside the rhythm of the calendar year. But with hindsight now, I’ve come to think that my emphasis on time and people was really a statement about work, and more specifically, how my sense of self was connected to what I did, how I made money, how I spent my time, and a desire to break the psychic pull it had on me.
A slew of books published over recent years has offered a critique of the relationship between contemporary culture and productivity, calling out a perverse collision of neoliberal notions of work and wellbeing as ‘work won’t love you back’ became a kind of generational mantra. The disruption to life and work posed by precarity of the gig economy, deeply felt as a rupture to the security and stability of ‘standard employment’, is in many ways a return to a much more long standing norm. As Katrina Forrester writes:
‘Historically speaking, standard employment has been the norm only briefly, and only in certain places. Until the ‘industrious revolution’ of the 18th century, work was piecemeal. People worked where they lived, on the farm or at home: in the ‘putting-out system’ – which still exists in cloth production in parts of the global South – manufacturers delivered work to workers, mostly women, who had machinery at home and organised their work alongside their family life. Then work moved out of the home.’
Home, of course, takes on a different connotation as many white collar workers shift from the office to desks in their bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms. Work changes over time. It describes the relationship between people, and creates categories defined by social hierarchies, technical competencies and ever-evolving products and services. Work, in the global north, was previously conducted within the family home, divided along gender lines between a husband and wife, aided by the much-needed labour of children, too. Today, a common complaint-as-meme is when a business describes themselves as a ‘family’. That is to say, the space in which the activities of work are readily adopted as metaphors for an underlying political and technological context of work itself. The home, the cafe, the liminality of a digital call are taken as synonymous for the contemporary. It’s up to you if either option is dystopian: choice is ever present.
It might be more accurate to say that the direction of travel is inwards. (“We’re a long way from Keynes’s 1930 prediction that automation would leave people needing to work only a couple of hours a day,” Glen Newey has observed.) More than blurring the line between paid and ‘free’ time, undoing the ease of distinction from Robert Owen’s “Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest”, the promise of a certain kind of middle class, creative job is to collapse the self into work. We become our job. Work completes us. Our purpose is found through how we pay the rent. A critique of this begins by revealing the uneasy power relationships hidden below a promise of fulfilment, but it also can’t end there. I like obsession and focus, and work, if not other kinds of serious pursuits, is a ready vessel to channel this. I also wonder if more of the critique of ‘collapsing work into the self’ could challenge and upend our thinking about the ‘self’ as much as it does ‘work’.
It took me a while to realise this fully, but the longer I’ve spent writing the more I am interested in the ways it holds the “I” with a certain kind of suspicion. A text might contain a first person perspective, and it might even adopt a tone of confession, of honesty and vulnerability, but this is always something constructed. The self arrives at a distance in words. We can turn our attention to the forces that structure our lives and the rhythms which animate us. For me, writing is not about expression – how boring! – but something closer to interrogation, or better yet, erasure. My writing has always been about people and objects and events, and what makes it ‘mine’ is the quiet part that is behind any subject, sentence and argument; yet what draws me to this activity is about filing myself up with other people and ideas.
The work of writing, then, is similarly all consuming. Write what you know, perhaps one of the familiar mantras of fiction and journalism, is a neat description of what a writer might do: dip deep into experience and perspective. Every experience, every book read and every encounter with another person, becomes material. If taken too literally, this is an easy way to become a terrible kind of writer, but it’s also a much worse way to live, for yourself and those around you; like a parasite always searching for a host, you can only gorge for so long until you burst. (Perhaps this could be interesting after the fact, like an extreme piece of performance art that’s interesting to talk about but uncomfortable to actually experience).
My instincts have often driven me into the other direction of everything else associated with life. I retreat into books, into the words and stories of others; this means time alone; it happens in quiet, empty rooms. Time is the essential, but most elusive factor. Thousands of words might flow in an hour or two. Days might tick by with little to nothing to show for it. I chase information about the impacts of vitamins and energy levels in the hope to boost my productivity; I run, stretch and adopt various forms of exercise to shake brain fog, to sharpen my mind. It does and doesn’t work. Resolutions don’t yield to the calendar just as the body has its own rhythm.