Olympia folks! I will be signing books at Barnes and Noble on April 18th from noon-4. Say hi ✨👋

This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

• The Work of Art Part 5: The Myth of Pure Action

• The Work of Art Part 6: The Artist and Instagram, a Love Story

I consider myself an adult child, which means I am part of a twelve-step recovery program for the Adult Children of Alcoholics. You know how, when your friend joins AA, and then they can’t stop talking about it, and it’s almost like a cult has abducted them? I’m that friend with ACA, so bear with me #sorrynotsorry. Being an adult child means that I can fall prey to addictive tendencies—codependence being one, Instagram being another. I didn’t quite understand that I was addicted to Instagram or social media (and the compulsions it incited, like compulsive spending) for a long time. I knew that there was something very unhealthy in my dynamic with Instagram, but it took reading Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, a book my partner recommended, and listening to this interview with Andrew Huberman and Anna Lembke for me to actually categorize that relationship as an addiction.

Let’s consider what addiction is. To oversimplify it, your brain is filled with neurons, and they communicate through electric signals and neurotransmitters. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. Dopamine is connected to how we process rewards, which, if you think about our caveman selves, was very important for survival. Hunting was dangerous. It could get you killed. So you needed motivation to get up off the cave floor and go hunt. This is why dopamine is perhaps more powerful when it comes to the motivation for a reward rather than the reward itself. Dopamine powers the want.

Contrary to popular belief, getting high doesn’t actually produce dopamine; it triggers it. You generate the high yourself. Substances that are more addictive trigger the release of more dopamine, which is what makes them more addictive.

Another important thing to know about our brains is that pleasure and pain coexist. Read any Greek poet or any play throughout the centuries, and you’ll see lyrical illusions to this scientific fact. Thousands of lines of poetry can be summed up in one sentence: “I want you so bad it hurts.”

Dr. Lembke writes:

”Imagine our brains contain a balance—a scale with a fulcrum in the center. When nothing is on the balance, it’s level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway, and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. The more our balance tips, and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel.

But here’s the important thing about the balance: It wants to remain level, that is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long to one side or another. Hence, every time the balance tips toward pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will. They just happen, like a reflex…We’ve all experienced craving in the aftermath of pleasure. Whether it’s reaching for a second potato chip or clicking the link for another round of video games, it’s natural to want to re-create those good feelings or try not to let them fade away. The simple solution is to keep eating, or playing, or watching, or reading. But there’s a problem with that. With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer, a process scientists call neuroadaptation. That is, with repetition, our gremlins get bigger, faster, and more numerous, and we need more of our drug of choice to get the same effect.”

It is human nature to seek pleasure, but we are biologically programmed to seek balance. Our drive for constant and never-ending pleasure, then, is also a drive towards pain, the very thing we’re trying to avoid.

So let me put all of this together with a little hunting analogy!

Your little caveman ancestor went hunting one day and brought down a mamoth with her buddies. They ate a lot of really good food and felt REALLY REALLY GOOD. Her brain learned that if she goes hunting, she gets food, and therefor experiences pleasure. But all that really good food, resulted in her getting hungry again and she started to feel pain. So she needed more food and needed to go hunting again. The dopamine gets triggered not when she actually kills the mammoth, but when she grabs her spear. It doesn’t wait for the meat that’s been roasting on the fire, it’s what gets her out the cave door and out on the hunt. It’s the drive. It’s the wanting.

The prevailing image in popular culture is that addicts are all hedons, running around like Greek gods seeking wine-soaked orgies. “Addict” evokes imagery of gluttony, excess, and grotesque consumption. And given the science, this makes sense. After you get hooked on the dopamine release triggered by a good thing, you need more and more of it to get the same high. But I don’t think that what we’re seeking when we go to our substances of choice is an uncontrollable urge for pleasure.

Instead, I think we’re desperate to avoid pain. And pain and pleasure live together. They’re an ouroboros, each ending where the other begins.

Anna Lembke says in her interview with Andrew Huberman:

“When I talk to people about their addiction, sometimes their initial foray into using a drug is to get pleasure, but very often it’s a way to escape their suffering…” She goes on to say in her book, “Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained. As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World Revisited, ‘the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant . . . failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”

But why would we be trying to distract ourselves from the present moment? The present moment for most people in the developed world is pretty great. We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, and we have generally enough disposable income that we can go to dinner with a friend occasionally. In America, you can drink water straight from a faucet pretty much everywhere (except Detroit or Native American Reservations), and sure, our health care system is cost-prohibitive and broken, but a hospital is not allowed to turn you away. I am not trying to dismiss the massive inequality rampant in our country, only to point out that, relative to our ancestors, we live a life of relative comfort. So why are we all behaving as if we’re in extreme suffering?

I think it’s because we’re not distracted with the work of survival, and we can now turn our attention to our deeper, more existential wounds. Or rather, run headlong in the other direction.

Life Is Maintenance

(I know this song is about AIDS, but it might as well be about all of us who are existentially lonely and use drugs - social media, weed, alcohol, shopping, porn - to escape the prison of our aloneness)

In Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz, the main character, Margo, leaves her husband, who is portrayed as a really good guy. They’ve been together for a decade or so, but she’s young! She’s curious! And her husband is old news. Their life is just life. There’s no real drama or problems, but it doesn’t have any mystery. So when she runs into a charming, handsome bike messenger, she develops a fascination with him, then a longing, and finally a full-blown affair. She leaves her husband for the new guy, and then a year later, you see in a montage that her new life mirrors her previous one. They’re not having as much sex, and they both seem a little bored. Gone are the sexy days of sneaking around! Life has a way of sneaking its way back in. Then, Margo gets a call saying that her ex-sister in-law, Geraldine, a recovering alcoholic, has gone on a bender, and her ex-niece has asked for her. When Margo returns to her old house, her old family, Geraldine, in her drunk wisdom, says, “In the big picture, life just has a gap, it just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it.”

Last year, I traveled with my partner and friends Henry and Kaisa and their two-year-old daughter to Portugal. I was really struggling with work and the fact that we’re expected to have these jobs that take up our whole lives! We were sitting around drinking wine, and I complained that in the time we have left after work, we must do our laundry, go grocery shopping, or get the oil changed. Was this life? Had I been duped? Where was the glorious adventure I was promised?

These friends of mine are humans and deal with the facts of being a human in the world: sorrow, grief, love, frustration, but they are, on the whole, pretty content people, and I admire that about them. So I asked my friend Henry how he handled having a job and the daily duties of being a husband and a father. How did he find meaning? How did he manage to live?

He said that he’d been watching the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith show, and there was a line that struck him.

“Life is maintenance,” he said.

This hit me like a punch to the gut. I want life to be a thrill! A tremendous explosion of light. But in the end, Henry is right: a lot of it is maintenance. To survive, we must maintain our health by eating well and cooking; we must move our bodies so they don’t fail us in old age; we must keep our friendships so we remain in community; and we must maintain our jobs so we can navigate our capitalist society. It’s a lot of fucking maintenance.

Anna Lembke says in her book:

“My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.

In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.

She looked at me both incredulous and afraid.

“Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.

“Well,” I ventured, “it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself. Of letting your experience unfold without trying to control it or run away from it. All that distracting yourself with devices may be contributing to your depression and anxiety. It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time. I wonder if experiencing yourself in a different way might give you access to new thoughts and feelings, and help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and to the world.”

She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said.

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”

Addicted to Fear

In ACA, there’s a list of traits the adult child has acquired because of their history. Number 8 is that we’ve become addicted to excitement. Initially, it said “We’ve become addicted to fear,” but the words have since been changed. This always makes me think about my dad and how I think he, too, was addicted to fear.

How many times have you heard someone say that a person is unhoused because they are lazy? Probably a lot. But anyone who thinks our houseless population is lazy is very misinformed. My dad probably worked harder during the twenty years he spent houseless than he ever did in his cubicle in the Denver Tech Center. But it was a different kind of work. He was working to feed himself. For survival. He had to walk miles in all types of weather for food, a bed, a computer, and his mail. Simple things like getting a driver’s license were a months long endeavor. You can’t get a driver’s license without an address. It might have changed, but one of the few places to get a mailing address if you were houseless in Denver was the St. Francis Center, and you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get your mail there and keep getting it.

Daily tasks that, for you and me, are an annoyance, were a herculean effort for him. In a weird way, I think that was what he wanted. I think it was comforting for him. He had to work so hard for everything you and I take for granted that he had no time to worry about anything else. No time to feel empty or to consider the existential questions that plague me: what if I love the wrong person, what if I will never be forgiven, what happens when I die here, who’ll be my role model after my role model is gone? There was no time! There was only the next thing. He experienced fear-induced presence. A kind of avoidant enlightenment. An addiction to fear (and addictions to other things). Which is just another way of saying: terror of emptiness. Because it was when he felt empty that my father often used. It’s when I feel empty that I use, too. Scrolling the internet in mindless fear and insecurity is not all that different in essence from what he did. It just doesn’t hurt other people so much.

In Dopamine Nation, Lembke states, “Thirty-four percent of Americans said they felt pain ‘often’ or ‘very often…The question is: Why, in a time of unprecedented wealth, freedom, technological progress, and medical advancement, do we appear to be unhappier and in more pain than ever? The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”

What is it about the present moment that’s so miserable? And why do we fight it so much?

Don’t let me be lonely!

I know I’ve already talked about Erich Fromm before, but honestly, his book The Art of Loving so perfectly describes everything I’ve felt in my life that I can’t stop evangelizing him. In his book, he argues that we’re all so miserable because we’re alone.

We are distraught because we’re existentially separate and there’s nothing we can do to bridge the gap.

We’re alone because I have a body and you have a body, and there is no way for me to belong to your body or you to mine. We can get close, but we will never inhabit each other’s souls.

Fromm states:

“The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness…The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence, to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety.”

Fromm believes that we seek union in either a passive or an active way: through masochism or sadism. Fromm writes, “The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him; who is his life and his oxygen, as it were. I am nothing, except inasmuch as I am part of him.” I’d argue that the vast majority of us fall into the masochism camp, and we attempt to seek union through sex, drugs, capitalism, or the desire to fit into the dominant culture.

While writing this, I am on a plane. I like to watch action movies on planes because I don’t want to do a disservice to a cinematographer or the director by watching a highly crafted film. Marvel movies are inelegant and made to make money, so it’s okay if I am only half paying attention. I randomly decided to watch Thunderbolts because I think Florence Pugh is a goddess and her character is fun.

I kid you not, these are the opening lines of the film:

There’s something wrong with me.

An emptiness.

I thought it started when my sister died, but now it feels like something bigger.

Just a void.

Or maybe I’m just bored.

They send me a job. I clock in, clock out…

I thought throwing myself into work was the answer.

But I’m not focused and I’m not happy, and I don’t have purpose.

And without purpose, I’m just drifting like a river.

Say what you want about Marvel movies, but they are both a product and a symptom of our time. They speak to the anxiety we feel and cater to our changing brains. The scenes cut every ninety seconds because that’s how long we can focus. This movie is creating the malaise that Pugh’s character complains about. We need constant change and stimulation. We need action and distraction; otherwise, we succumb to boredom or the void. And the void is suffering.

We seek to ease our suffering through pleasure, which only increases our pain and drives us to despair.

Lembke attests to this. She writes,

“Global deaths from addiction have risen in all age groups between 1990 and 2017, with more than half the deaths occurring in people younger than fifty years of age. The poor and undereducated, especially those living in rich nations, are most susceptible to the problem of compulsive overconsumption. They have easy access to high-reward, high-potency, high-novelty drugs at the same time that they lack access to meaningful work, safe housing, quality education, affordable health care, and race and class equality before the law. This creates a dangerous nexus of addiction risk. Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown that middle-aged white Americans without a college degree are dying younger than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The top three leading causes of death in this group are drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicides. Case and Deaton have aptly called this phenomenon ‘deaths of despair.’”

Social media exacerbates our despair. Humans have always sought belonging in order to survive. When we’re born, we’re not fully cooked. The first three months of an infant’s life are often described as the “fourth trimester.” We deeply depend on our community for survival. Some of our first smiles are really just attempts to please and appease. Love me and feed me, don’t leave me! But historically, our drive for belonging was mitigated to the realm of the material. We had to physically enter society to gauge whether or not we belonged to it. Now we can measure our sense of belonging in likes and follows without leaving our house.

Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts states,

“When we are afraid that we might not be considered cool, attractive, or high-status, we don’t feel good. That fear is a profound emotion. It hurts. Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment.”

And now, thousands of very smart, very capable people from all over the world are paid a lot of money to learn precisely how to measure your responses to certain stimuli, and ensure that you’re delivered a curated set of inputs designed to trigger the desired response. And the desired response is something that makes Meta, TikTok, or Google money. This could be something more benign, like buying a Procter and Gamble product, or it could be more insidious, like supporting a specific politician. And, more often than not, the stimuli that create the best response are things that trigger a negative emotion.

Lanier explains:

“The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. …If someone gets a reward—whether it’s positive social regard or a piece of candy—whenever they do a particular thing, then they’ll tend to do more of that thing. When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society… It’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback. If you get a piece of candy immediately every time you say please as a child, you’ll probably start saying please more often. But suppose once in a while the candy doesn’t come. You might guess that you’d start saying please less often. After all, it’s not generating the reward as reliably as it used to. But sometimes the opposite thing happens. It’s as if your brain, a born pattern finder, can’t resist the challenge. ‘There must be some additional trick to it,’ murmurs your obsessive brain. You keep on pleasing, hoping that a deeper pattern will reveal itself, even though there’s nothing but bottomless randomness.”

Similarly, Lembke says that gamblers have increased levels of dopamine when they lose. “My patients with gambling addiction have told me that while playing, a part of them wants to lose. The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win—a phenomenon described as ‘loss chasing.’ I suspect something similar is going on with social media apps, where the response of others is so capricious and unpredictable that the uncertainty of getting a ‘like’ or some equivalent is as reinforcing as the ‘like’ itself.”

Social media plays on our natural response: uncertainty. And the likelihood that we might lose, lose money, lose friends, lose social status, keeps us playing the game. And it’s not just the uncertainty and the randomness, it’s also fear, sadness, rage.

Lanier says:

“Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement. Yet, the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones. If it turns out that certain kinds of posts make you sad, and an algorithm is trying to make you sad, then there will be more such posts. No one will necessarily ever know why those particular posts had an effect on you, and you will probably not even notice that a particular post made you a little sad, or that you were being manipulated. The effect is subtle, but cumulative. While scientists sometimes dive in to try to glean insights, for the most part the process takes place in darkness, running on automatic; it’s a new kind of sinister shadow cosmos.”

But we’re hooked! We can’t stop. I said this last week but it bears repeating: the average young person will spend 25 years of their life on screens. In the words of Thom Yorke, we’re not living, we’re just wasting time.

So, what’s happening is doubly dark.

TL:DR:

1. When we’re scrolling through social media, we are manipulated into seeing posts that negatively impact us.

2. The uncertainty and randomness of rewards keep us coming back. “Maybe this time my post will acquire x number of likes!” Or, “Maybe this time I will see something that makes me laugh!”

3. The uncertainty and randomness of rewards trigger both pleasure and pain.

4. Each time we reach for our phone to check social media, we get a hit of dopamine. But the more we use social media, the higher our dopamine baseline rises, meaning we need to use more to get the same high.

5. When we’re not using social media, we’re in withdrawal, meaning we’re experiencing pain. This makes us anxious and discontent. Which then triggers us to relieve that pain by seeking pleasure, and we return to the apps.

6. White, cis, male, billionaire bros with hair implants actively invest in keeping us trapped in this cycle.

7. If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying (images of planes crashing, people with different political opinions destroying our earth, or potentially making it unsafe to be “us,” is what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means amplifying bad actors.

8. If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change.

This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

• The Work of Art Part 6: The Myth of Pure Action

The Work of Art Part 6: The Artist and Instagram, a love story, i.e., an unrequited co-dependent relationship that ends with you on the bathroom floor, a husk of a human, having given all of yourself to be loved, respected, or seen, and Mark Zuckerberg, happy, satisfied, gorging on the fat profits he made from your obsessive desire.

In 2026, the world would have you believe that if you want to promote your art, there is only one way. New poem published? Link to it in a story! We’re told that if you post a photo of your face, Instagram’s mysterious algorithms will pick it up and show it more on people’s feeds. Let that word sink in: feeds. It’s funny, that’s the word my dad, who was houseless for nearly twenty years, used to describe the meals served at churches for the unhoused population. He’d say, “I run into so and so sometimes, at the feeds,” or “I can’t be late for the feed.” Feed is also what we call the food we give to livestock. Chicken feed. There’s something in that term that implies excessive starvation finally satiated. To feed another human is primal and nurturing. What does a mother do for her crying child? She feeds him with her body. What do you do when you seek absolution at church? You are fed with the body and blood of Christ.

But what does it mean to offer your body, your art, to a feed? And what does it mean to manically seek a feed compulsively, in the bathroom, at the table, on the couch with your lover as you watch a movie, before you go to bed, until your eyes glow blue long after they’ve closed? It’s like that scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro’s parents see a buffet of free food and start gorging themselves on it, not realizing that as they stuff their faces, they’re transformed into pigs until they forget their own names.

To help offset the upfront costs of When Darcy Met Lizzy, I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign. With Kickstarters, you must meet the entire fundraising goal or you don’t get any money. My first Kickstarter failed. I wanted to raise eight thousand dollars (which was less than the book ended up costing, more on that later), but it didn’t get enough supporters. So, I created another Kickstarter with a much more modest goal of $3,000. I promoted my Kickstarter on Instagram relentlessly. I even made a TikTok! I also paid Instagram and TikTok to promote my book posts. Not much, but in the end, I spent around 200 dollars on ads. According to TikTok, my promoted videos were getting thousands of views.

Because I was constantly posting, commenting, responding, and sharing, I was on my phone all the time. When I had alone time at the house, I was trying to record videos that I thought might be funny, or, because I am not very funny, at least a little informative. The more time I spent on my phone, the more I couldn’t put it down. My girlfriend and I were moving at the time, and I spent so much of that month on my phone, and we got into more than one scuffle about my inattention to our move and my devotion to my phone.

Queue the Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s Hut “never his mind on where he was, what he was doing.”

The more time I spent on Instagram, the more I started to compare myself to other writers who were more talented, more successful, prettier, and cooler. And the worse I felt, the more I started to get sucked into strange compulsive purchases. I bought a Pura air diffuser because I wanted our house to smell like you were actually in a mystical cedar forest and not a cul-de-sac in Olympia! I bought art on various cheap sites to make our house feel like “home,” and in the end, they weren’t that cheap, but they looked cheap. I bought a lot of books by people I thought I was supposed to read. The more time I spent on Instagram to raise money, the more money I mindlessly spent.

In the end, my Kickstarter raised $4,500 dollars, more than my goal. I sold over 100 copies of my book. This is not a jaw-dropping amount, but it felt good. At least my project hadn’t failed a second time!

At the end of the campaign, I checked the stats that Kickstarter provided and was astonished to discover that fewer than 15 of the people who bought the book were people I personally knew or am connected to through Instagram. At first, I was devastated. Aside from a few distant acquaintances, the only people I knew who bought my book were my closest family members and a tiny number of my dearest, lifelong friends. This means that not even good friends bought the book. Like people I saw daily during different times in my life. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. All that posting on Instagram and people who I knew from my hometown of Denver, from my new home in Olympia, friends from Portland, friends I thought would support me, hadn’t. In the end, posting every few days on Instagram hadn’t resulted in real friends, let alone my Instagram “friends” buying my book. All that time, energy, and effort had resulted in absolutely nothing.

So how had I made so much money and sold so many books? Kickstarter chose this project as a Project We Love, and it was featured in a newsletter sent to its subscribers (I didn’t realize it at the time). This newsletter generated a lot of sales. Of the 104 backers, 2 came from Instagram, 2 from Substack, a few from a direct link, and the rest from a combination of the Kickstarter App, the Kickstarter homepage, the Kickstarter discovery tool, and the newsletter. So basically, Kickstarter saved the day.

When I complained to my friend about this, she said I should be flattered that it was complete strangers who supported me because it meant that people didn’t buy the book out of obligation. But I still had this sensation that I was standing in front of an audience without clothes, butt naked. I couldn’t shake the feeling of shame.

Posting on Instagram is a humiliating endeavor. Some people manage to remain authentic, and more power to them, but I definitely didn’t. I was 100% performative; recording videos when I felt I looked particularly pretty, or when I liked my outfit, or the light through the window. The Kickstarter stats made me feel like all my stories and selfies were not only vain but ineffective. It’s like a bad ’80s movie where the girl gets all dressed up, but nobody shows up to take her to the prom. I also had this intense feeling that I’d sacrificed something to Instagram, that I’d given something of myself to a digital beast, and I’d been devoured, marrow and all, and I was less of a person now because of the exchange.

This sensation of powerlessness and shame I felt is not dissimilar to what an addict feels. The first step in any twelve-step program is “We admitted we were powerless over the effects of (insert addiction here) and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

And that’s precisely what I felt, that my life had become unmanageable. That I was powerless. And this is no accident.

Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, said:

“We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

p.s. I wrote this last October, but since then, there have been more and more interviews, books, and research that agree.

Here’s one of many:

It’s not an anomaly that we feel anxious and unsettled and can’t be in a different room than our phone, or that our homes are filled with stuff we’re not entirely sure why we bought in the first place. It’s no coincidence that when I sit down for dinner with some of my best friends, they check their phones every 3 to 5 minutes, as if there’s an Amber Alert. It’s compulsive and distracting. This is not an accident. They did this on purpose. We’ve been the subjects of mass behavior modification.

My Kickstarter is a microscopic case study and not nearly extensive enough to be considered applicable to the general masses. I’m sure there are people out there, famous people, who post on Instagram and see a dramatic uptick in sales, or podcasts downloads, or spotify pre-sales, but if you’re just a regular, everyday person like me, I think my experience will probably apply. I doubt anything you do on social media makes much difference in how many people actually engage with your art. Of course, there are exceptions. But sometimes those exceptions aren’t very fun either.

So why does it feel wrong not to be on Instagram sharing your latest Substack with the world? How will anybody hear your voice?! If a tree falls in the woods, will anyone listen?

I’d argue that:

1. Even if people are standing in the woods with you, not very many people listen anyway, even if you’re famous.

2. Promoting your work on Instagram actively detracts from what you’re trying to gain from the promotion in the first place, like time and attention.

3. We’ve become a world of addicts who shame and judge fentanyl addicts on the street corner, but partake in our own drug with witless abandon, to our own undoing. We have created a shame cycle of judgment and lack of personal accountability that feeds into a system that is oppressing us.

The War for Your Attention

My sister recently started dating someone, and she’s super excited about them, and I am super happy for her. She sent me a YouTube interview with her sweetie and asked me to watch. If you know me, you know that there is probably one person on planet earth that I would do literally anything for, and that’s my baby sister. Also, I am super nosy and judgmental, so of course, I couldn’t wait to see if her sweetie was deserving of my sister. And yet, days went by. Weeks went by. Over a month and a half elapsed between when my sister sent me the interview and when I actually watched it. To be clear, this interview had the secret sauce for attention:

• Motivation: I wanted to see if my sister was dating someone worthy of her.

• Devotion: I love my sister and want her to feel supported.

• Interest: the subject matter of the interview was something I studied in school, so I was actually super intrigued.

So why did I only watch the video after months of procrastination and only out of a deep sense of moral obligation?

I’ll give you another example. I subscribe to the literary magazine Brick. I think it’s a cool magazine. I love the work they publish. They published an essay by the writer Anne de Marcken. She lives in Olympia, and I did a reading with her in Port Townsend a while ago. I think she’s amazing. I was intrigued by the subject matter. Again, this piece has all the magic to garner my attention—access, desire, and interest. And yet, it took me 7 months, yes, you read that right, 7 months, to read that essay.

BRICK MAGAZINE

The point of all this is: I don’t even give my attention to the work that most interests me and that I have the strongest motivation to observe.

So where the fuck is my attention going?

As someone who works in tech, I straddle two worlds, so I am fortunate enough to at least understand the massive forces designed to steal our attention.

To sum up Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now (written by someone much smarter than me about work I personally know a lot about):

• Meta and Google, and Amazon (not AWS, although, yes, AWS indirectly if you think about the fact that it’s where a lot of these apps are built, but I digress) make money from YOU.

• They make their profits from your attention.

• YOUR TIME is making Mark Zuckerberg rich.
  

Let me break it down for you:

Whenever you use Instagram, the app logs your attention. It’s trying to keep you engaged long enough for you to view advertisements, because it’s those companies that pay Meta for your time. Meta gets rich off Babaa, who keeps promoting you that super cute sweater. Ideally, Meta wants you to see an advertisement 7 times because that’s when you’re most likely to pull the trigger and buy the product. So, how does Meta keep you on Instagram so that the company that purchased the ad gets a conversion (a conversion means that a view is converted to a purchase)? Meta appeals to your dopamine. I’ll get into this more next week, but the things that tend to keep you engaged longer are the ones that make you feel bad. But not bad all the time. Just bad enough. And sporadically bad, so you never know what to expect. The key is that they must keep you laughing with those silly reels about golden retrievers, and then bam! Post something that gets under your skin when you least expect it. And then, you don’t want that bad feeling in your body anymore, so you keep scrolling, hoping for more dog reels.

If I went up to you and said, “In exchange for approximately 5–6 hours a day feeling shitty, you will spend $50,” would anyone in their right mind take that deal? No one would. Because it’s not a deal. It’s a loss.

According to James Marriott, a recent article in The Times found that, on average, modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens. 25 years! That’s almost as much time as Andy Dufresne spent in Shawshank! But we’re doing this to ourselves!

I am already giving at least 40 hours a week of my attention to a boss; why in the world would I willingly give my spare attention to companies that are going to steal that attention and try to get me to waste my hard-earned labor time?

Lanier says it more strongly than I:

“Yes, being able to quit is a privilege; many genuinely can’t. But if you have the latitude to quit and don’t, you are not supporting the less fortunate; you are only reinforcing the system in which many people are trapped. I am living proof that you can have a public life in media without social media accounts. Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical. Business follows money, so we who have options have power and responsibility. You, you, you have the affirmative responsibility to invent and demonstrate ways to live without the crap that is destroying society. Quitting is the only way, for now, to learn what can replace our grand mistake.”

How we need to remake the internet | Jaron Lanier

And if Lanier didn’t persuade you, let me put it another way.

As artists, we are told we must go to Instagram to promote our pride and joy, our creation, our little art baby. We want to promote our art for either money or attention. But money is really nothing; it’s just a piece of paper or an imaginary number in your bank account. Money’s true self is time. The more money you have, the more time you have. And isn’t that why we’re promoting our work in the first place? So that we can exchange the piece of work we loved making, that took so much fucking time and energy, for more time, and the possibility to continue giving our energy and attention to what we love?

So why trade your time, your attention, these precious and limited treasures, away in a gamble for something that will ultimately rob you of both?

TL:DR :

1. Time is, for the working class, our economic power.

2. Corporations are trying to buy our “leisure time” and our attention so we enrich them.

3. Time spent on Instagram bankrupts us of our real time in the present, our working time (our labor), and the love that is available for us in our attention.

p.s. I haven’t read Cody Cook-Parrot’s book, The Practice of Attention, yet, but I am sure it says everything you need to know about art and attention and more!

The Practice of Attention

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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

As I mentioned in a previous essay, I’m Holding Out for a Hero, in capitalism, everything is connected, and there’s really no pure action we can take. If you’re not interested in reading that essay, totally fine! Grace Blakely says it really well in her book Vulture Capitalism. This is an extended excerpt, so feel free to skim, but I think it’s worthwhile:

“When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you probably do is pick up your phone. That phone is made of rare earth metals, which were likely extracted from a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebel groups use the revenues from mining these minerals to purchase weapons. But that fact will be far from your mind as you check social media, eking out a little ‘you time’ before the day begins. In doing so, you are surrendering information about the most intimate parts of your life to companies like Facebook, which has been accused of promoting far-right extremism, facilitating child sexual exploitation and interfering with the outcomes of democratic elections, or Twitter (now X), which was recently purchased by an egomaniacal, union-busting billionaire who fires the platform’s employees when his tweets don’t receive enough likes.

You roll out of bed, and pull on some clothes manufactured by a multinational corporation that outsources production to Bangladesh. After thousands of their peers were crushed to death when a garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, the workers who made those clothes organised themselves into a union, but they’re still paid poverty wages. You see an old piece of clothing on the floor that doesn’t spark joy, so you remind yourself to take it to a charity recycling bin. The item of clothing may then continue its journey to a huge dump in Kenya, where impoverished children pick through the waste to find a few items of re-saleable quality. You rush out into the brisk cold air, which is mercifully slightly warmer than the air in your house. Just as they have utterly failed to deal with the housing crisis that forces you to pay two-thirds of your income in rent, your government has failed to insulate people from rising energy costs too.

You jump guiltily into your car, knowing that your decision to drive yourself to work is part of a problem that’s causing global temperatures to rise at an unprecedented rate. But you might console yourself with the knowledge that your car runs on petrol, given Volkswagen’s record of lying to the world about the impact of its diesel engines on the environment and your lungs. By the time the day ends, you’re exhausted – physically and emotionally. You open a food delivery app and, when the delivery driver arrives, you give him a small tip. He’s very grateful for the extra cash because his motorcycle is on its last legs and he’s been faced with a choice between taking out a high-interest payday loan to fix it, or using his bicycle instead, which will mean more work and far fewer deliveries. As you drift off to sleep, you plug in that mobile phone, which was manufactured in a warehouse in China where nets have been installed to catch workers who have tried to throw themselves out of the window.

This may or may not be an accurate depiction of your life. Perhaps you’re reading this book in a home that is now entirely your own, having left your days of drudgery and toil behind you. But you may also be aware that your children seem pathologically incapable of saving the amount of money required to purchase their own homes, let alone enough to retire as comfortably as you have. Or perhaps you are one of those lucky people who really, genuinely enjoys their job, loves their co-workers and believes they’re really contributing something to society. But maybe you also struggle to escape the sense that something isn’t quite right in the world around you, even though you feel entirely unable to do anything about it – other than purchase products marketed to you as ‘green’ and ‘ethical’. Elements of this story will resonate with everyone because it describes what it is like to interact with the systems that govern the societies in which we all live and over which most of us have little control. The luckiest among us might be able to insulate ourselves from some of them, but no one can extricate themselves from the webs of labour, production and consumption that underpin modern capitalism entirely. And, as a result, most of us at some point in our lives will feel a little powerless. Many people will spend nearly every waking moment being controlled by these systems. And for some, that feeling of alienation drives them into a deep sense of despair.”

As I explored earlier, there is something really appealing in thinking that if you’re an artist, if you’re working for a non-profit, if you’re doing paid labor that you love, then you’re somehow above the system. There’s a slight moral superiority there. Like, “I don’t work a 9–5, or I’m not devoted to the man, I am an artist.” And this individualist line of thinking (thank you, existentialists, for this emphasis on the individual and our personal choices) further divorces us from collective progress. At least I’m not one of the bad guys, is not the same as, We’re all in this together.

But, even if you’re getting paid the big bucks as a writer and getting really juicy advances, is it really possible to avoid the man? And is it really possible in this system to “sell out”?

In Jessica Knoll’s op-ed for The New York Times, she says:

“I decided I could not consider myself successful unless I was somebody powerful, somebody nobody could hurt. Success became a means to wrest back control, literally to increase my value.

There is a metonym for that: money.

Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting comp to boot.

To accomplish this, I spent months researching the publishing marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to be the one to adapt it for the studio. Now I am working toward producing, directing or running my own show. TV is where the money is, and to be perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich.”

As much as it feels kind of icky to hear a writer talk about wanting to get rich, she’s at least being honest about her goals of aiming for financial independence (or in terms of my argument, more time) through her writing. (I just want to note that Jessica Knoll is a blonde, white woman. See Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blonde.)

But how possible is it for most of us to reach Knoll’s goal of being rich? In his Substack “Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire,” Erik Hoel says:

“The economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild, and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.

To truly understand the bleak reality requires a comparison. The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).”

Then he does a bunch of math that you should read. But he’s able to conclude that 585 non-celebrity authors are making a living from their books. A living he defines as starting around $50,000 a year (with most people hovering around this mark). Think back to what I said about the minimum living wage for a city like Denver and Olympia, and see how $50,000 before taxes measures up.

Hoel concludes:

“[This is] roughly in line with the semi-annual surveys from the Author’s Guild, which finds statistics like:

When looking at full-time authors whose books are in commercial markets (i.e., excluding academic, scholarly, and educational books), the median book income was $15,000...

This reveals that even among authors who identify as “full-time,” they are mostly supported by parents or spouses and bring in only supplemental or partial income. Overall, I think we can indeed conclude that the group size of self-made billionaires and non-celebrity authors making a living (enough to decently support their family or at least themselves) are surprisingly close in number; basically, each looks like a pool of just hundreds of people across the nation.”

This means that even if you are INCREDIBLY LUCKY and you’re able to sell a book with a $250,000 advance every 5 years, you will still only make around $50,000 a year, and this doesn’t incorporate taxes into the equation. And these are the best of the best! These are the ones who have made it. And, whether you like it or not, if you’re not going the indie publishing route, to get one of those fat advances, you must play into the market.

I subscribe to a great Substack called Sub Club, and they often give workshops about finding an agent. In one workshop about why comps matter (comps are books that are similar to your book that you include in a query letter that you send to agents), the host, Kailey Brennan Dellorusso, says:

“[Comps] show agents that you understand the market. Unfortunately, we’re writers, we want to just love our art and care about that, but if you want to be traditionally published, you have to think about your book as a product and you have to understand your product’s market.”

Caro Claire Burke, author of the forthcoming book Yesteryear, who got a big advance for her book and screen rights (who, I should note, until very recently, was blonde), says in her podcast Diabolical Lies with Katie Gattie Tassin (also blonde):

But I think the important thing to note in this conversation is that anyone who is a musician or a podcaster or a writer or a director... You have to be so nakedly ambitious to succeed in these industries. Every single day, all of the momentum is taking you in the opposite direction to not continue to do what you want to do. To become a staff writer at The New Yorker, or to sell a book that allows you to write more books, or to run a financial platform, or to write and direct your own movie that appears in Cannes, that is so hard. It is so competitive. And you have to make decisions constantly that set you up for financial viability. And so you are always opting in. And I think the game is that part of opting in is that most people have to also pretend or feel they have to pretend that that is not a part of it. And that there is like a sort of purity at play. And I think that that is part of the performance of being an artist in the same way that politicians get into the game and go... ‘I never thought I’d be president or like, I’m just in it to change people’s lives. I never thought that I would be in this position.’ It’s like, dude, you’ve been positioning yourself for three decades. What are we talking about? But it’s part of the contract because people don’t actually like when you are honest. I should add that. Like Jessica Knoll’s op-ed was not received well by writers. People don’t like being honest about what’s taking place here, even if they’re also a part of it. And I think that those are just like the point-counterpoint rough waters of trying to be heard is that you have to be unbelievably cutthroat and frank about what it means. And then you have to kind of like sweep up the path behind you and pretend that it was effortless.”

I think Caro is spot on. We shouldn’t impose on artists this belief that you’re only a real artist if your work and your work alone pays the bills, and you’re a failure if you haven’t traditionally succeeded and make your money doing taxes for H&R Block.

Because doesn’t it kind of play into the system to internalize the belief that you can’t save for retirement and have a comfortable life and be an artist at the same time?

Self-publishing as Guerrilla Warfare

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, if you get a book deal, you are considered a “real writer,” but if you self-publish, you are often ostracized by the cultural literary elite. It’s considered taboo to self-publish, and if you’re a serious writer, self-publishing can come with an element of shame, like “I guess I just couldn’t hack it, I guess I am not good enough.” But if we consider traditional publishing through the lens of labor-time, if you get published by a big publishing house, you’re given special, fancy privileges like book launches and cool parties, but based on how much money you’re actually making in exchange for your time, you’re still a member of the working class.

If you self-publish, even if you have to use one of the dreaded platform industry tools (looking at you, KDP), you won’t fully be a member of the capitalist class because you still don’t own the means of production, but at least you own your own labor.

Self-publishing is one of the most powerful things you can do as an artist in a capitalist system. It’s also pretty badass.

Not only are you not being exploited for anyone else’s financial gain, but you’re not exploiting anyone else’s labor—Queue Princess Leia #rebel.

Obviously, you still have to face issues with the platform industry, and it would take A LOT to actually generate any meaningful income, but at least you’re a little more free. Also, you can make different choices, like your distributor and the cost, for example.

When I published When Darcy Met Lizzy, I chose Ingram Sparks because I didn’t want to be a part of the Amazon hellscape, and I wanted to make sure my book could be sold in indie stores, and most indie bookstores won’t sell your book if it’s not available on Ingram.

I thought self-publishing would make me feel like a sellout, but instead it’s been one of the most powerful and self-affirming experiences of my life because:

• I believe in what I wrote.

• I like what I wrote, and I genuinely think it’s good.

• I worked with super-talented people who are way smarter than I am to edit the book (thanks again to Evelyn Hampton! And Alyse Knorr, you are a gift to humanity).

• Even though I have made negative money off of it, I have been able to interact with readers more directly through this book than The Family. I’ve done readings at local bookstores in both Denver and Olympia, and I managed a Kickstarter, which allowed me to connect with people all over the world.

• I get to decide the price; I can give my book away for free to little free libraries if I want to, or donate it to queer organizations. I have the power of what I created.
  

Given everything I said about the publishing market and the list I provided above, is it any wonder then that the capitalist class tries to discourage self-publishing through cultural expectations of what makes a real writer?

But don’t get me wrong, I am still seeking a traditional publisher for my memoir. I still want a fancy hotel room on a book tour in Paris like the one Miranda July describes in All Fours. I recognize the extreme hypocrisy in this desire.

But I no longer feel that traditional publishing is the only viable option or that self-publishing makes someone a failure. I feel empowered and in control of what I create, and I know I can choose which avenue I want to pursue for each project.

I know that all my choices are valid and all I have to do is decide what is important to me.

I feel free and I hope you do too.

I want to have my cake and eat it too

When I was younger and I got my first job in tech, I met the writer Jerry McGill. He and I had similar jobs and we often took afternoon tea and coffee breaks together. He drank English Breakfast tea and I drank coffee. From the moment I met Jerry I admired him. Not only is he funny and playful and always caught me off guard with his candor, he is a Writer. Writer with a capital W. Like a real writer.

In his life, Jerry’s written three novels and published two; he’s also written and published a beautiful memoir. When I found out he was a writer I quickly bought and read his memoir. His writing moved me with its vulnerability and ability to be both beautiful and sharp.

Jerry’s worked in tech now for twelve years. He writes every weekend. He’s now working on trying to get his screenplay turned into a film. He’s devoted to his craft and he doesn’t let his day job get in the way. Working a 9–5 has never made him less of a writer. If anything, it’s shown that he is absolute and unshakable in his devotion to his craft.

The truth is, I am not sure anyone ever thought I wasn’t an artist because I don’t make money as a writer. This dichotomy between artist and sellout that I’ve spent the last few weeks discussing is most likely self-imposed.

I was the one who was afraid that admitting I wanted to be good in my career, that I wanted to take pride in my work, be promoted, and make more money, made me less of an artist.

But the result of this insecurity was that I was living a sham of a life. I didn’t want to own up to my actual real-life choices: to take a well-paying job with benefits, to write in my non-work hours and not try to make my creative life pay the bills. I wanted to pretend I didn’t want the really nice things capitalism has to offer, like European vacations, or facials.

The pressure I put on myself to be a ‘real’ writer in the eyes of others degraded my integrity and my sense of self. I allowed my insecurities to overtake my daily decisions. I am writing now from a place of clarity, but it has taken years for me to come to this understanding and, for those closest to me, it hasn’t been an easy road. When we don’t have faith in ourselves or our choices, we can inadvertently harm the people we love the most.

The truth is, like Jessica Knoll, I care about making money. I want to live a comfortable life. I don’t want to die the way my father did, vulnerable to a system that does not care about us. I want to do well at my tech job because my job has given me stability and security like I have never known, and I am so grateful for the opportunities it has provided.

But the choice, sellout or artist, was a false choice. I never had to choose between being an artist and taking pride in my day job. Just because I don’t like the system we’re subjugated to, just because I know that capitalism is an unfair and dirty game, doesn’t mean that I can’t do my very best because it makes me feel good to do work I am proud of.

Still, even with a strong understanding of capitalism and art and how generating content just to feed the beast is a lose-lose situation, it’s still easy to fall prey to the trance of the platform industry. In the next three newsletters, we will talk about social media and the artist. Stay tuned!

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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

This series isn’t necessarily anti-trying to make money as an artist. It’s about investigating why we want to make money as artists and why we care so much. Obviously, if you wanna make money as an artist, more power to you. I fully support it. Go do it. Well done! But if you’re kind of disturbed by having to make that choice, if there’s something that feels icky to you about it, if you feel confused about relating to money and art and value, this is the podcast for you.

But! If you want an alternative perspective, and if you want the hero to my anti-hero, I would recommend two podcasts or two newsletters:

• Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum.

• The Bleeders: About book writing and publishing by Courtney Kosack.

And, they’re both really good and they actually both came together for a really thought-provoking, episode on February 17th. I think it’s just important to hear people realistically talking about what it means to be a writer in this day and age and what it means to try to make money from it.

If you asked me why I wanted to get published by one of the big publishing houses (and I was being honest), a huge reason is that I want to go on a book tour. I love the idea of going to different places around the country, or perhaps the world, and talking about art. I love the idea of going to dinner with other famous writers and drinking fancy wine and eating fancy food, all paid for by Simon and Schuster. I want to have a fancy book launch in New York where very fancy people are in attendance, and I can wear a really cute pant suit. I’m not as interested in the distribution or the audience and the reach (which, of course, would be great) but rather the cultural experience of being able to call myself “a real writer.” What I am looking for is social capital.

In an interview, Sally Rooney, one of my favorite writers and a Marxist, says,

“There’s a scene in the novel where Connell, one of the protagonists, goes to a literary reading, and he feels incredibly alienated from what he sees. He feels that writers turn up to events full of people from a particular class, from a particular educational background, and essentially the writer sells them the product of cultured existence in the form of a commodity, and the commodity is a book, and people can purchase this book and purchase their way into a seemingly cultured class. And all the money that is exchanged in the book industry is just people paying to belong to a class of people who read books. And that is something that I definitely worry about and feel implicated in. Because I do think a huge amount of the cultural world, first of all, there’s a large extent that it involves sealing off the appointed cultural producers from life by festivals and events, like dinner parties and book launches. That this world, the economic and cultural backing of this world, is a way of taking writers from their background, whatever it might be, and making them part of a special class. And I am very skeptical of that process. And I am very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities. Almost like accessories that people can fill their homes with, like beautiful items.”

A few years ago, I attended a party at the home of the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. Everyone at the party was either an editor at a publishing house or literary magazine, published by a big publishing house, or employed by a prestigious university. Their home was a rowhouse in Queens (I think? Honestly can’t totally remember if it was Brooklyn or Queens) and it was surprisingly normal. I thought it would look like something out of a Bridgerton set with leather sofas, cognac decanters, and wall-to-wall bookshelves. Instead, it felt like the home a friend of mine might have. I genuinely liked everyone in attendance except the people close to my own age. Nearly everyone I talked to was unassuming, thoughtful, a good listener, interesting! I met another writer who I have kept in touch with who is kind, sweet, genuine, and I hope to be real friends with one day.

At the party, the two people closer to my own age got too drunk and one of them, a young blonde woman from Colorado in grad school, kept trying to tell me how poor she was and how she’d grown up in poverty and she did it all on her own. She was very fashionable, about the age of my younger sister, and in what appeared to be a tumultuous relationship with a man who was kind of having a “literary moment.” The way she brandished stories of her poverty felt like a combination of insecurity and superiority. I wanted to shake her and tell her—who cares how poor you are or where you grew up, look at where you are now! Look at all the smart, creative people who want to get to know you! I am sure she irritated me because she probably reminded me of me, who was also a young blonde woman from Colorado, or I was worried in some subterranean part of myself that I came across the way she did—waving my traumatic childhood like a flag for attention and reverence.

Despite my annoyance, I hypocritically went with the young couple to another party at the editor of a well-known small press. Another male party-goer in his mid-to-early fifties went with us. Before long I was sitting on the couch with this fairly well-known writer telling me how beautiful I was and that I had a beauty that was “of the mountains, of the wild!” It wouldn’t be a party with the literarti if an older man didn’t hit on a younger woman, am I right?

I am painting a funny picture of it, but it truly wasn’t something from the beatnik era or even the 70s. It was pretty tame and lovely, and I would like to tell you that I embraced this experience with grace and kindness. But in reality, this whole night made me feel incredibly insecure. The way I handled this experience is still a source of shame. What I did after meeting the literati was tear them down and build myself up with my rhetoric. When I described the night to friends, I said things like, “I realized that everyone is just insecure and unhappy, no matter their credentials,” and “I realized I really like my life! I am so glad I didn’t get an MFA, I think it would have ruined me.”

I was envious of the writers and professors. I wanted their lives, or the fantasy I had of their lives. I wanted their New York brownstones, their days spent thinking and reading and discussing. It felt so much richer and more powerful than my life. The one where I spend at least 40 hours a week, sometimes more, in front of a computer trying to understand complex technical concepts that hurt my brain, trying to ingest and then translate that information into something legible for an engineer, and then writing it all in a (very basic) programming language and publishing it on the internet. At times, my life feels joyless. It feels rote.

And so, I left this party not only feeling dissatisfied with my own life, but also feeling less than. So I tried to stem the pain of this feeling by belittling the choices and lives of others. By making myself superior.

I’m not trying to defend such behavior, and I’d like to think that now I have a stronger sense of self and confidence in my life direction, but I want to make it clear that it’s not just me who tries to bolster my identity by tearing down others. It’s common to want to improve our status by trying to be better than.

But better than who?

Better than somebody! Anybody!

Many of us have a small, bitter, rotten gremlin in the corner of our hearts that is crying out, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: ‘I could have been a contender! I could have been somebody!’

In an interview, Andrew Hartman, author of Karl Marx in America, discusses. W.E.B. Du Bois’s assessment of capitalism and race in America. He says,

“So when W.E.B Du Bois, who’s one of my favorite thinkers in the 20th century, wrote this book, Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, to my mind, still one of the greatest books about U.S. history ever written, he analyzes the Civil War and reconstruction through a very Marxist lens, but sort of extends the Marxism to include the experience of racism in the American South at the time, and why it was that white workers came to be more concerned with staying above black workers than challenging the ruling class in the South.

And that’s when he uses the term the psychological wages of whiteness. It felt better to them to at least be above somebody than to think about them as aligned with the working class as a whole against this ruling class.”

Obviously, W.E.B. Du Bois is talking about whiteness in particular. Still, I think he’s touching on something distinctly American—the desire to be above somebody rather than accept you’re a member of the working class. I believe this is what’s happening with the war against immigrants in the United States. A white member of the working class doesn’t want to feel the pain and despair of her exploitation, so instead she targets another group. At least she’s not a lazy, criminal immigrant, she tells herself. She has a right to be here; she has a right to seek the status and value that was promised to her! This way of thinking and living is an attempt to gain social value and capital by aligning oneself with the ruling (billionaire) class. Not only is this thinking anti-community and prevents collective change, but this othering to protect our own fears and vulnerability is also bad for our souls.

The same principle can be applied to artists. Like my friend who quit a job she’d trained for months to get and said to me, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art. As if some of us were born for the soul-sucking exchange of our time for value, and there are those of us, in her words, artists, who are somehow above this drudgery. Implicit in this statement is a kind of superiority.

Not to mention that the perceived status of making it as a writer often goes hand-in-hand with a check signed by Knopf or Simon and Schuster, and publishing has been, and remains, a white space. The financial and social legitimacy granted by a fancy publication is the same as acceptance into a historic club. But it’s important to remember that the club has maintained its elite status, its exclusivity, by excluding writers of color, and, for a long time, women, not to mention queer folk. The word covet comes to mind. We covet what feels exclusive, the special and the rare. It’s why Nike only sells a certain amount of their special shoes—by preventing everyone from having the shiny thing, makes the thing more shiny. The word covet came to be in the mid-13th century. It meant, “to desire or wish for inordinately or without regard for the rights of others,” and it has its roots in the Latin word cupiditas “passionate desire, eagerness, ambition.” When I say I want a book deal, or when I walk in a room and want everyone to say—look, there she goes, a real writer! I am displaying an ambition, a passion, to possess something specifically at the cost of others. It’s the exclusivity of making it as a writer that creates its value.

In her book, Salvage, Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand discusses the fact that the literary canon, a group of “great” books written by writers who have made it over the long haul, is damaging on two levels: writers of color were not published, and they were only ever represented from a colonial and violent perspective. Brand says of books like Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, “Mine is not an argument about being ‘absent’ from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text…” She continues, “I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic—that its pleasures, tastes, manners, consist of this juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is beautiful is the violence.”

I want literary recognition because it makes me feel special and eases my social paranoia, but that feeling of specialness stems from the genuine and real violence against other voices. And that truth certainly erodes the joy of attaining recognition.

Beyond the social capital granted by a byline in The New Yorker, what makes you a “real” musician, or a “real” writer, is not the act of making music or writing, but the exchange of cultural value, which is money, for your labor.

Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses this in her book Thick. While pursuing her PhD, she got pushback from another academic for the attention she was getting from writing. Other academics were upset that she was getting so much notoriety because that’s not what you’re supposed to do in grad school. You’re not a person she says, you’re a unit of labor. You’re there to serve your mentors and the institution and not your own ends. Since then, Cottom says:

“I have come very far. I had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts. I was writing, and I was doing so without express permission from gatekeepers… I am now an academic, an official one. I have the title and the letters after my name that black people are fond of calling our educational credentials.”

The point McMillan Cottom is making is that only an anointed few are allowed to speak in society. You are considered an intellectual only if you have paid for the title through either tuition or your labor for an institution. You are considered a real writer only if you’ve been anointed by the capitalist institution that owns the means of production. If Penguin wants your book, you are real.

This is because what has value, or what is made real, must be funneled through the system that grants legitimacy.

As James Baldwin states, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” Writers help make the interior lives of readers real, but society hasn’t deemed that labor as worthy of reward. It’s taken for granted.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that more and more people are choosing to get MFAs and that it’s in those programs that you’re more likely to get an agent or a book deal. It’s a pay-to-play type of system. Programs like The Iowa Writers’ Workshop grant your work legitimacy not only because money has been exchanged, but because a system of exclusivity bolsters its perceived status, so you become legitimate in the eyes of the system if you are permitted to partake. And, as we become lonelier and more disembodied as a culture, MFA programs become some of the only places where we can gain connection and intimacy with other writers.

So, even though I am intensely critical of the MFA industrial complex, I just applied to a program because I am so fucking lonely. I am starving for artist conversation and connection, and I will do anything, even go $40000 into debt, to get it.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that leading a creative life is one of the things that makes us most human and most real. I don’t think there is anything wrong with calling yourself an artist. I believe life is art, and therefore every human is an artist. But I also think there are those of us drawn to creative expression with a particular fervor, and we have a deep desire to be seen as creative.

But clinging to the title artist or intellectual as some sort of performative identity is kind of classist and snobby.

It bolsters the systems that make it so hard to be an artist in the first place.

The person you’re harming the most with anointing a special distinction to the identity of an artist is you.

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Without further ado….

The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make you Notice

A reminder that this is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

• The Work of Art: An Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

As I said in the Work of Art Part 1: I think there are two main reasons a writer seeks publication:

• Financial gain

• Validation/attention

We’ve already talked about money. Now let’s talk about validation and/or attention. This is a pretty negative way to talk about this desire. I could use more optimistic and favorable language to suggest that there is a more altruistic reason for wanting to expand the world with your art: the desire to connect with people through your stories in a way that benefits and deepens our understanding of this life we live. But altruistic reasons will probably always contain shades of self-interest.

I can only speak for myself, but for me, I want to publish for attention and validation. I wrote When Darcy Met Lizzy as a fun project, something I wrote for my partner, because I wanted her to relate to a book that I deeply admired and loved. As a queer, Brazilian woman, 19th-century British literature felt completely beyond her frame of reference, and so I made it into a kind of game. Could I make Darcy and Lizzy transcend the confines of a novel of manners and speak to modern fears and desires? Could I make Regency England fun for a woman who thinks monarchy and colonialism should stay a thing of the past (rightly so)?

It could have been a private book I shared only with my partner and a few friends. Instead, not even a few months after finishing the book, I was already seeking agents and publishers for the book. I quickly came to my senses and realized that such a close retelling of Pride and Prejudice would never find a home at any traditional publishing house. So I decided to self-publish the book.

What made me want to publish something that I’d created for fun in the first place? Why turn something private into something public?

Because writing is a lot of work. It’s enjoyable sometimes, yes, but it takes hours, months, years of your life to create a finished product. And while you’re working, there are countless hours of self-doubt, frustration, and struggle. And the time I spent writing was time I was not going on hikes, not sailing, not seeing friends, not spending time with my partner or our dog. There’s an opportunity cost to writing. When you are devoted to writing you miss out on a lot of life.

Once, someone tried to tell me that they had worked harder in their life than I had because they spent more time working at their day job and had devoted their life to their work, while I hadn’t been as dedicated to my career. The implication was that because I have had an inconsistent job history and have worked in lodges and restaurants longer than most of my peers in tech, I am lazy or less hardworking. I bristled at the statement. I felt deeply unseen.

Because I love to write and because it feels like a calling from a higher power (be it art itself, the universe, God, who knows?), I think there’s a tendency for people on the outside looking in to view it as a hobby, as something I do on the side, the way people watch birds or fly fish on the weekends. On a flight to Greece this summer, I sat next to a woman who asked me why I was traveling. I told her I was going for an artist residency. She asked me what art I practiced, and I said writing.

“Oh!” she said, excited. “What have you written? Where can I buy your book?”

Eventually, we got around to the truth that my art does not generate money; in fact, it has only generated debt.

This well-intentioned woman sipped her prosecco and said, “Well, it’s nice that you have a hobby.”

Work, Value, and Time

Why do we reserve the term artist for people who make money from their work? Why is a musician only entitled to call themselves a musician if they make their money from concerts and album sales? Why is a writer only a writer if they have a job teaching at an MFA program or cobble together an income from freelance articles and book sales?

This is because of the Labor Theory of Value, which can be boiled down to the sentiment that time is money. And if we spend our time working on something that does not generate money, it inherently lacks value. We value lawyers and doctors who work long hours, but our culture does not value individuals who dedicate their time to unpaid work. This comes up a lot with mothers. Our capitalist system would not run without the unpaid labor of women. And yet mothers who stay at home to care for their children, performing an essential element of the capitalist system, often struggle with feeling invisible, worthless, or like they’ve lost their identity. Because, even though their work is essential, it’s invisible and, more importantly, unpaid. Their time is not exchanged for value. (For more in-depth discussion of this, read Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe or Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici).

Not to get all Malcom Gladwell on you, but I have definitely put 10,000 hours of effort into my writing. When I was in the first grade, I did a little project on how I wanted to be an author when I grew up. For middle and high school, I attended an arts magnet school in Denver, where I spent an hour and a half each day surrounded by other young writers. I wrote in college, where I was a creative writing major, and I have taken numerous workshops over the last fifteen years since graduating, not to mention the countless hours I spent writing alone in coffee shops, on my mother’s couch, and alone in my apartment.

This probably all comes across as a little defensive and bitter to you. It should! I am being defensive and bitter!

If I were truly secure in my own worth, I don’t think it would have bothered me so much to hear someone else claim that they worked harder in their life than I did. I cannot deny that this person worked harder at their paid job than I did, but when it comes to writing, the work of my life, I know I have given it, if not my all, quite a lot.

But what happens when all that work is invisible? What happens when, every day, people dismiss something that you strive to be the very best at as insignificant, or as a way to pass free time or to stave off boredom? As I said, if I were a confident, self-assured person, it wouldn’t bother me so much! I would be able to write and be satisfied with my own progress. I can look at the short stories I wrote ten years ago and compare them to my writing now, and see significant improvements in craft, so why should I care if anyone else notices it too?

I care for a few reasons. One reason is I want to feel loved and safe. I think Chloe Zhao, director of Nomadland and Hamnet, says it best in her interview with David Marchese:

So many of us started telling stories because we didn’t have the easiest childhood. So when your work, which is the only way that you can seek connection and validation since you were a child, is being compared and judged, you could go as far as feeling that a rejection of that work is a rejection of who you are and your ability to be safe or loved.

The other reason I care is because we live in a society where what we produce, and how much, determines not only our financial value, but something else just as important. By day, I work in the tech industry, and in tech, working 15 hours a day and not having work-life balance is not only encouraged, but glorified. If you’re only getting five hours of sleep at night but still producing features, code, products, etc… you’re a hero. But it’s not just tech–it’s the way our capitalist system is designed.

• You are your time.

• Your time is what you give to work. This labor time is exchanged for money.

• This money generates value.

So what to do with all this work of writing? Does it have any value?

Writing When Darcy Met Lizzy, I spent hours every night working. It was a solitary endeavour. It was for me and me alone. But if I didn’t share my writing, all that work, all that effort, it had no value in society. And we are programmed to think that our effort is only worthwhile if it has value.

I wanted to put the book out there to prove to anyone who might listen that I am a hard worker, I am devoted, I am masochistic in the service of labor. You might not see me, reader, but here I am, a workaholic, just like the rest of you! I have worked my whole life to get better at one thing! Validate me! The more people who bought or read my book, the more value I would accrue. The more people would see me for who I really am.

I wasn’t looking for financial value but social value.

Status, Identity, and Value

Once, I asked a Canadian artist friend if she ever felt it was hard to be in relationships with people who didn’t share her views on capitalism. She laughed as if I were absurd. She said, “I think that is a distinctly American problem.”

“We must consider a rather serious paradox: though American society is more mobile than Europe’s, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, after all, that one has. It seems inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what status is.

But Europeans have lived with the idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and, in neither case, feel threatened. And this means that the actor and the waiter can have a freer and more genuinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here. The waiter does not feel, with obscure resentment, that the actor has ‘made-it,’ and the actor is not tormented by the fear that he may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter.

This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel, almost certainly for the first time in his life, that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value.”

Because we live in a society predicated on the idea that any man can “pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself,” we live, as Baldwin suggests, in a state of social paranoia.

To be continued next week…

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Previously in The Work of Art:

• Beyond validation or attention, writers seek publication for more time. The true desire is to exchange creative work for the financial freedom to live, read, and think.

• Using Marx’s theory of Socially Necessary Labor Time, art’s market value is determined not by how long you spent on it, or how much of your heart you poured into it, but by the average time it takes to produce a similar product.

• In 2026, the value of art is dictated by the platform industry. To remain relevant to the algorithm, producing work fast and releasing often is the only way you can survive

• Because platforms like Amazon and Netflix spend billions of dollars trying to keep you consuming content, art is now content generation.

• Even with a publishing deal, most artists don’t own the means of production.

• Even if you sell your novel, you are STILL right where you started: exchanging your labor time for survival.

  

In his book What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy describes a world that is so foreign to us it’s hard to believe it was only around 170 years ago. He says:

"For the support of art in Russia, where only one-hundredth part of what is necessary for furnishing instruction to the whole people is expended on public education, the government offers millions as subsidies to academies, conservatories, and theatres. In France, eight millions are set aside for the arts; the same is true of Germany and of England. In every large city, they build enormous structures for museums, academies, conservatories, dramatic schools, for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen — carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paper-hangers, tailors, wigmakers, jewellers, bronzers, compositors — pass their whole lives at hard work for the satisfaction of the demands of art, so that there is hardly any other human activity, except the military, which absorbs so many forces as this.”

Tolstoy is talking about a massive social investment in the arts. He claims that the arts are second only to the military.

Can you imagine?! He goes on to say,

It would be well if the artists did all their work themselves, but as it is, they need the aid of workmen, not only for the production of the art, but also for their for the most part luxurious existence, and in one way or another they receive it either in the form of pay from rich people, or in the form of subsidies from the government, which are given them by the million for theatres, conservatories, academies. This money is collected from the masses, whose cows are sold for this purpose and who never enjoy these Esthetic pleasures which art gives them.

Tolstoy is being pretty salty here, and his whole argument is that artists are depraved hedonists and must get a little more Christian, but I was stuck on the phrase luxurious existence. Tolstoy is painting a picture of a world where one could be an artist and live a luxurious existence because the world was showing up for art—they were building opera houses, buying books, and adorning their salons with really nice paintings.

Harpers recently published a letter from Richard Wagner to Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, who had paid off the composer’s debts, in which Wagner basically says that the king saved art itself. He says: My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me!”

This would be like Trump deciding to fund an independent movie and paying off the filmmaker’s debts. Or like Jeff Bezos deciding he wanted to fund a visual artist for a few years while she completed her Magnum Opus. To be fair, The Atlantic, one of the few places writers can still publish essays and make money, is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But that feels more like a tax write off and not like patronage.

So, since we don’t live in Germany or Russia in the 1860s, how do we solve a problem like money? (Read that last bit in the sing-songy voice of nuns in The Sound of Music.) I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the culture of MFAs is almost exclusively American. Some of the most innovative writers today do not have MFAs. But, more often than not, they’re international. Samantha Schweblin is from Argentina but lives in Berlin. Sheila Heti is Canadian. Roberto Bolano is Chilean. Olga Tokarczuk is Polish. Miriam Toews is Canadian. None of these writers has an MFA.

Canada has a universal, publicly funded healthcare system. Instead of 401ks, they have a pension plan. Is it any wonder that there are so many wonderful artists coming out of Canada right now?

But, in America, where there is no universal healthcare and very limited social services, little to no affordable housing, and a dependence on the stock market if you’re privileged enough to have a 401k, time is not only money; it is the key to health and safety. Where are you going to get the time to write if you must devote your time to safety?

Higher education allows you to get student loans, offering what’s essentially the ability to buy time now and pay later. Because, let’s face it, even at a fully-funded MFA, you’re not going to get enough money to survive so you’re going to either take out loans, which you eventually must pay back (or like my neighbor, who is living under the weight of two PhDs, know you can never pay back and will have thousands of dollars of debt looming over you for the rest of your life, which can be a major boner killer), or work a job in addition to the program, thereby defeating the whole point, which is to garner extra time.

But let’s say you’re fully funded. You can spend three years in a program like the one at Syracuse and earn $24,000 a year (which is a lot, actually, for an MFA). For context, according to the MIT minimum living wage calculator (using conservative estimates), a single person in Onondaga County needs $47,150 before taxes. Where I live in Olympia, Washington, the living wage is $51,720. In my hometown of Denver, Colorado, the living wage is $54,490. Even the highest-paying MFAs offer only a fraction of the cost of living. And while the plight of the starving artist sounds really romantic on paper, it’s a lot less glamorous in real life.

I was humbled by Alice Notley’s interview in The Paris Review. She’s what I’d describe as a voice of a generation, a true genius, a gift to our world. But she and her husband, Ted Barrigan, spent much of their life in abject poverty, and he died an agonizing death from hepatitis C in their apartment. Notley says:

He was, in a way, always sick during [his last] years. The illness went untreated, because there was no treatment really; we couldn’t afford doctors anyway, he didn’t want to change his lifestyle that much, and he didn’t want his illness named and charted by doctors.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids is an empowering story that makes you feel like if only you were braver, stronger, and more creative, you too could have suffered the way she did and become a world-famous musician and writer. But, in reality, you’re reading a memoir that says much more about luck than it does about talent (although I am not disregarding her talent).

These stories of the starving artist who made it present us with a pretty terrible and aggressive dichotomy: art and physical death and suffering, or selling out and existential death and suffering. I think this is a false choice.

I once ran into someone who’d just gotten a 9–5 job that she’d spent months training for. I asked her how the job was, and she said, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art.

I found myself getting angry. I don’t think any human being was built for a desk job. I think desk jobs are anti-human. I just think there are those of us who are better at squashing our desires for freedom and autonomy in exchange for the security of healthcare and a steady paycheck. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this friend is someone who, while she is self-sufficient, comes from a stable family that contributed to her housing. I also probably took this extra personally because I am one of those people who has a desk job. I make my money sitting at my desk all day Monday-Friday working for a tech company even though I, too, would rather make art. So I am sure I heard her comment with a chip on my shoulder and reacted defensively as a result.

But, even if your parents didn’t help you with the down payment for your house like this friend, it is undeniable that not having someone to call on to bail you out in America will change your relationship to work. If you’re someone who can’t call your dad if your car is towed and you only have $5 in your checking account, you can feel like a failure. But if you’re someone who can’t call your aunt to help you with rent, so you decide to get a job with good healthcare and high pay, you can feel like a traitor to art. It’s a lose-lose situation. Either way, you can get to feeling like all your other artist friends are somehow better than you, that somehow there’s a big game being played, and you’re losing.

(Careful, my dear, that savors strongly of bitterness)

A piece in New York Magazine speaks to this feeling of failure. “How Many New Yorkers Are Secretly Subsidized By Their Parents?” discusses the flood of baby-boomer money that’s changing the social fabric of New York:

When the job is nonprofit and the trips European, when the work is too freelance and their kids’ school too private, when they close on a co-op before they finish their dissertation, sure, it could be crypto. It could be sex work. Maybe you missed that time they were hit by a city bus. But if you know someone under 50 who’s living like it’s the ’90s — who owns their apartment, who’s out every night, or who sends their kid to private nursery school and still has money left for vacation — it’s safe to assume there’s a baby-boomer behind them.

One of my dad’s favorite lines was from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. After George Bailey jumps into the water to save his guardian angel, Clarence, he asks him if he has eight thousand bucks. Clarence responds, We don’t use money in heaven. To which George Bailey responds, It comes in pretty handy down here, bub.

That’s how I feel about money; it comes in pretty handy down here, bub. And if you’re not one of the lucky ones in the article above, or even one of the regular privileged people whose parents can help subsidize a trip back home for Thanksgiving or give you an extra hundred dollars here and there when you’re behind on your phone bill, you must make that money somehow because the world is not a friendly place for the poor; in fact, it’s more expensive. So having a 9-5 job when you’d rather be making art shouldn’t make you feel like a traitor to art, it shouldn’t carry any sort of extra emotional weight. It’s literally just doing what you have to do to be safe.

My father, who was unhoused for twenty years, died with only what he had in his pockets. Throughout his life, I saw firsthand how awful it is to get sick and die if you don’t have any money. It’s not glamorous. It’s painful and dehumanizing. And if you get sick without health insurance, there are some options for postponing the debt with things like payment plans or predatory credit cards with 0% APR that you must pay within a select timeframe. In 2024, 36% of U.S. households had medical debt, 21% had a past-due medical bill, and 23% were paying a medical bill over time to a provider. I myself had a surgery in 2021 that would have cost over $60,000 if I didn’t have health insurance.

If you live in America and you don’t have a safety net, this should scare the shit out of you. So, if you’re like me, and not willing to make like Alice Notley and literally almost die for your art, how is an artist to get this money then? How are you going to generate, at a minimum, the $54,000 in Denver, Colorado, or the $51k in Olympia, Washington?

You have to go about it the way everyone else does. You must exchange your time for money.

So, let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in.

It’s very taboo to talk about money and art but I think it’s important because we live in a real world that costs real money. And I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like a failure working in tech and not finding a way to make my art pay the bills. I used to google famous writers and try to figure out if they were a) married and b) what their spouses did for a living. So many writers, if you dig into their lives enough, have lawyer/doctor partners, inheritance, or parents who invested in property and let them live for cheap. I definitely had a secret fantasy that I would have a sugar mama who would let me write in the attic into the wee hours of the morning. Because I wanted to figure out how everyone was making their lives work, I did a ton of research, and realized that the system is so rigged we should all just be proud of ourselves for getting by and no one is a failure. That probably seems obvious to y’all but this was a hard won reality check for me!

Also, on a personal note, while I have been interested in the economy and capitalism for a few years and have been conducting research for fun and as an intellectual thought exercise, I didn’t begin to think about the real world implications in earnest until two years ago when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She spent a few years as a school librarian and then, due to budget cuts in Denver Public Schools, lost her position as a librarian and became a 3rd grade teacher. had to retire early and even though she’s lucky enough to have a pension, her economic reality is sobering. Watching my mom retire was like being thrown into an alpine lake. I woke the fuck up. I didn’t have a pension. And I hadn’t really saved for retirement because of a combination of delusion and a belief that I might die before then anyway. I realized that no one is going to take care of me but me. And the likelihood of selling a book that becomes a bestseller is very unlikely at this point (and, as you will see in part 8, really doesn’t guarantee financial stability anyway, and as you will see in the conclusion, defies the whole point of art, but I digress) so I need to make money to live a dignified life as an older person in some way! Because, money comes in handy down here, bub.

So, on to the real heart of the essay: if you are alive in America, you need money. And let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in. So let’s explore some options for how you’re gonna get that money.

1. You could be a teacher, educating the next generation and reading literature with high school students, and living out the fantasy of Dead Poets Society. In Colorado, the average teacher’s salary is mid-to-low $60,000s. So you’re barely scraping by the minimum living wage. But, at least you’ll have a pension, which is not truly enough to retire on, but at least you won’t have absolutely nothing when you’re 65.

2. Let’s say you want to work for a lit mag and get exposed to new voices and help shepherd the new generation? You could be a full-time managing editor at N+1 and make 59-64,000 dollars! And in case you’re wondering, the minimum living wage for Brooklyn is $60,833. So sure, it’s doable, like you won’t die. But you won’t thrive. And you certainly won’t be able to save for a healthy future as an older adult in the United States.

3. You could be a professor, but to do so, you must obtain a PhD, which can lead to significant debt, and higher education is under immense pressure right now due to declining population and shifting demographics, resulting in enrollment drops and closures. In other words, there’s a lot of risk with little reward. And humanities professors don’t make very much until they get tenure, which is a very cutthroat process. A humanities professor at DU, my local school growing up, probably only makes $60,000 dollars a year.

To be clear, these aren’t unlivable wages. But do they provide a life of dignity? I don’t think so. You could be one of those naysayers who is thinking to themselves, “These Millennials and Gen Z think they can have it all! Who do they think they are?”

Yes, it’s true that back in the day, my grandma owned three dresses that she wore to the law office where she worked, which meant she wore the same dress twice a week. The concept that one day her granddaughter would own enough clothes to fill two closets and go out to buy coffee multiple times a week would have astounded her. Family vacations were taken once or twice during my mom’s entire childhood, and they traveled to places like Nebraska, where the rest of my family lived. And my grandma was one of the privileged ones who had a college education.

In the age of Instagram, we see so many of our friends on trips to Europe (I myself have contributed to this with my recent trips to Greece), with really lovely nails, in new cars or houses with gorgeous decorations. It can be easy to want those things. It can be easy to feel like you deserve those things. Why should you be denied the beautiful life of your dreams when everyone else seems to have it all? Especially when, for women, especially Black women, beauty can be the only means for gaining respectability, promotions, and wealth. And who are we kidding? Even in the publishing industry, it pays off big to be white, blonde, and “hot.” I spend a lot of money to dye my hair blonde so I can reap the benefits in the workplace and among my peers.

I think the reality is that people are either getting support from invisible places, are in a lot of debt, or are among the few who make $54,000 a year and live lives that accurately reflect that income. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make you one of the 38 million Americans living below the poverty line, but it does mean that you will be one of the many Americans who will retire in poverty (studies say that you must make at least $150,000 a year if you’re under 50 to not retire in abject poverty).

It also means we won’t have access to the many luxuries Instagram peddles, encouraging us to indulge in self-care. And if you can’t afford that massage when your neck is killing you from a double shift at the restaurant where you work, that Instagram is telling you that you need to feel grounded and embodied and deal with the trauma stored in your body; or if you can’t afford the out-of-pocket cost for a therapist that will help you navigate the turmoil that is American life, you can start to feel resentful.

Michael Green, who is for sure one of those capitalist folks (Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager), wrote a viral piece suggesting that the minimum living wage an American with a family of 4 needs to just participate in the system is $140,000 a year. As economist Kathryn Edwards says, our lives aren’t becoming unmanageable because we’re in a recession; it’s because social policies over the last fifty years have left us without the foundation to live dignified lives.

Dear reader, you might be thinking, “Why do you need a job that provides you with meaning and satisfaction? Life is pain; anyone who says otherwise is selling something! Nobody was guaranteed a happy life or even a safe one; we were just given the right to pursue it. You get weekends and holidays! You only must work 40 hours a week, so buckle up crybaby! Pull up your bootstraps! Make like Octavia Butler and wake up at 2 am before your shitty day job! Or like Toni Morrison before your work at a publishing house.”

Or you could be saying, “Yes, it is hell to work a job I don’t enjoy. Yes, it feels like death to trade my precious time to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week. No way do I want to do this for the rest of my life, let alone until the end of the week!”

In an interview, Andrew Hartman, the author of Karl Marx in America, describes the anxiety of exchanging our time for money well when he says, of the switch from a feudal system to a capitalist one:

“[I] was trying to convey… how radically foreign it was to have to go into a factory every day and work in very regimented conditions, not only foreign but miserable, right? And so it’s, again, to repeat myself, it’s not as if like being a peasant in Sicily in the 19th century was like some utopian existence but when these people were sort of pushed off the land and immigrated to the United States and were thrown into factories, it seemed much worse to them. Same for example, with like these people who had moved out west in search of, you know, whether they were immigrants or not, in search of just independence of the ability, they would hope to sort of have a little chunk of land and grow their own food and maybe make a little profit on the side when that was increasingly foreclosed upon in the late 19th century as increasingly corporations and the rich monopolized the land and people were, again, in order to survive, they had to sell their labor, which often meant going into some sort of factory-like conditions that was an extremely foreign existence for them, an unpleasant existence for them…”

We’re taught that with the advent of capitalism and industrialism, we acquired more freedom and autonomy, and everyone was happy about it. Still, the truth is, this transition was met with intense resistance. It is a very unnatural and inhuman way to spend our days, being “yoked to the time clock,” and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to fight back or at least be unhappy about it. Our modern understanding of time is very new. Like 200 years new.

As Oliver Burkeman describes in his book Four Thousand Weeks:

“On balance, you should definitely be grateful you weren’t born a peasant in early medieval England. For one thing, you’d have been much less likely to make it to adulthood; but even if you had, the life that stretched ahead of you would have been one definition by servitude. You’d have spent your backbreaking days farming the land on which the local lord permitted you to live, in exchange for giving him a crippling proportion of what you produced for the income you could generate from it…. But there’s one set of problems you most certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had “too much to do,” that you needed to hurry, or that your life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short more frequently than they are today, time wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to ‘save’ it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during ‘work time.’”

So yes, it’s very true, it is possible to write even when you’re working multiple jobs to support yourself, or freelance enough to cobble together an income, but does it help facilitate a safe and prosperous future? For many who don’t achieve commercial success, it doesn’t.

Finally, what if you’re someone like me, someone who doesn’t want to live in Brooklyn on $64,000 a year, because you’re either not brave enough (I really don’t have the grit to be broke anymore, it really stresses me out and it terrifies me to relinquish security) or, also like me, you could have a mixture of bougie tastes (I love an expensive candle and a good facial, blame it on my Virgo sun sign) combined with a childhood history of economic insecurity? If you’re this type of artist, you could just abandon values and passion and get a job you hate that at least pays you the money you need without requiring too much time.

Does this make you/me a sellout? Does this mean I have relinquished the true soul of art for security?

But since when have security and art become mutually exclusive?

Continued next week….

When I decided to self-publish When Darcy Met Lizzy last December, I believed I wanted to accomplish two things:

1. Avoid debt from the high costs of self-publishing.

2. Find an audience.

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But, if I were being honest with myself, the reasons were a little more complicated.

There are many reasons why writers write. Some writers write to answer questions that consume them; some write for joy; others write for therapy (I disagree with Alice Notley’s statement that writing is not therapy), or as a release or spiritual practice. But, while I am not prepared to make any universal, grand statements about what motivates people to write, I feel confident in claiming that there are only a few reasons writers seek publication:

1. Financial gain

2. Validation/attention

This is not to say that writers are sitting around at home submitting to agents and editors so they can get rich and buy New York penthouses (although this may be the case for some). Instead, I think writers engage in the masochistic shitshow that is the submission process because they want more time. More time to write, more time to read, and ultimately more time to live and thereby acquire the depth of experience required for writing.

For example, I spend a lot of time daydreaming about different concepts and stories, and researching random and niche pieces of history, like 19th-century British naval warfare. Wouldn’t it be so much more pleasurable to exchange this creative work, this beautiful and transcendent time of thinking and dreaming, for money? Because if I did exchange this work for money, it would mean that the time I give to work is also the time I give my soul and desire.

A short (I promise!) explanation of capitalism:

It took me a long time to understand how capitalism works. I intuitively knew it was behind most (but not all) of my existential depression, but I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it because the only class I dropped out of in college was Economics. Also, I was tired of getting into arguments with capitalists and socialists without truly understanding the subject matter. After years of reading and discussing economics with my partner, I genuinely have my own opinion about capitalism. An opinion I am about to share with you all.

So, what follows is “the brief guide to capitalism for artists who want to understand why work makes them want to kill themselves”:

1. First, you must understand value. Everything–from this newsletter (if I charged for it) to the laptop I am using–has a value based on the time it took to produce it. Marx referred to this as Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT).

2. SNLT is the average amount of time required to create a product.

3. Let’s pretend I get super into building computers and decide to make my own. It takes me 400 hours to build a computer myself. Is my homemade computer worth 400 hours of labor time? No, because Apple can make a MacBook in three hours. If I tried to sell my computer based on my 400 hours, no one would buy it because they can just go out and buy a MacBook for much cheaper.

4. Money is how we measure and trade time across companies and borders.

5. So, in a capitalist society, we’re not selling our physical and intellectual labor; we’re selling our labor time. This means we’re selling our ability to work for a set amount of time. In the U.S., if you’re privileged enough to work a 9–5, this is 8 hours a day, five days a week. This is your labor time.

6. This creates a class divide:

   1. Working class: You must sell your time to survive.

   2. Capitalist class: You own the means of production (like the tools or the office), which allows you to buy other people’s time.

7. If the capitalist class directly paid for your time, there would be a direct exchange of value, and there would be no profit. So, if it takes you 3 hours to build a computer, and the company sells the laptop for the cost of paying you for your 3 hours, it would be an even trade from the consumer to the capitalist to the worker.

8. Companies make their profits in the gap between two types of time:

   1. Necessary Labor Time: The hours you work to produce enough value to cover your own wage (the 3 hours to make the computer)

   2. Surplus Labor Time: Every hour you work after you’ve paid for yourself (the remaining 5 hours of the workday)

9. To sum up, if a computer has a value of 3 hours, a capitalist will only make money if you, the worker, can build the computer in 3 hours and then continue to work for free for five more hours.

In a world of declining literacy rates, where the average book sells only 12 copies (more on this coming in a few weeks), the only books that are really making money right now are romances and mysteries. Consider HBO’s latest queer project, Heated Rivalry.

It’s based on a book by Rachel Reid in a series that has sold 650,000 copies since 2018. While publishing houses rarely publish data on how much literary fiction sells, the romance market is growing. According to Publishers Marketplace, “year-to-date print sales [are] up 24 percent from the same period last year. A total of 51 million units have been sold in the past 12 months, nearly doubling sales from four years ago. While some of this growth can be attributed to Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, which sold 1,288,300 hardcovers across deluxe and standard editions in its first week, the category shows double-digit growth even excluding the Yarros.”

I am not going to dis romance writers because I myself wrote a romance novel and I fucking loved it! But was writing When Darcy Met Lizzy remotely as hard as writing my first book, The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs? No way. And yes, part of what made it easier was that I copied Jane Austen’s plot. But I’d argue that doesn’t make much of a difference because romance novels, like all of genre fiction, rely heavily on beats. These are things you’re expected to do at a specific page count. As Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, says of her addiction to romance novels, “I am now sadly in possession of the knowledge that if you open any romance novel to approximately three-quarters of the way through, you can get right to the point.”

There’s comfort and safety in a formula. It doesn’t make it less inventive; it doesn’t mean you have less talent or that you’re less creative, but it does mean that writing takes a lot less time. Especially if you’re a professional like Rachel Reid, who clearly possesses both the habits and talent to churn out a book a year (to be fair, her work did take a long time to generate massive sales and a lot of it had to do with her work being recommended on social media. Later on I will try to make the point that social media won’t make a huge difference to your career and I recognize that Rachel Reid is an exception to that point.)

There’s a reason people are hungry for romance right now. Our attention span is nominal, we’re exhausted, and we just want to feel good. So the beats of a romance novel act like a consistent delivery of dopamine to your brain. You know precisely when you’re going to feel good and how, and you begin to crave it, just like you would any other kind of drug. And, Amazon wants to keep you on your Kindle just like Netflix wants to keep you on your TV. As Netflix’s CEO has publicly stated, he’s not worried about Disney or Apple. His biggest competitor is sleep.

Reading literary fiction is hard work. Reading poetry is hard work. It doesn’t deliver dopamine at a consistent and steady pace. And so how can the consumer (reader or film connoisseur) fight literal billion-dollar industries invested in building media and technology designed to keep you gorging yourself on content? You’re at war right now, and you probably don’t even know it. You’re at war for your time, for your rest! Let alone your intellectual or spiritual growth.

So, how does all of this equate to Socially Necessary Labor Time? If people aren’t buying books, but they are buying romance, and (based on the minimal publishing pace of a single author) a romance novel can be written in a year, then the SNLT of a book is a year.

So what if you spend 10 years writing your hybrid lyrical novella about Proust? The value of that book will still just be 1 year. Not only that, your publisher (should you have a publisher) won’t want you spending those nine extra years on the book because they’re a waste, because they go beyond the SNLT. There’s no profit in it. They want you churning out books at least once every three years, if not faster. (Take a look at all the indie bestsellers, and most, if not all, match this cadence. Think Brandon Taylor or C. Pam Zhang. Message me if you think I am wrong.)

But! It gets even worse! If your book can be published in 2018, like Heated Rivalry, and still be relevant in 2025, you’ve got yourself, and more realistically, your publisher (who owns the means of production), a true hit. So, the SNLT of a book is not just the time it took to write the book, but also the time the book remains present in the consumer’s mind. And, unless your book wins a Pulitzer, like Martyr!, your lyrical, hybrid work of fiction is likely not to remain relevant in the consumer’s mind for long. And how do you stay relevant in the mind of a consumer?

The landscape of publishing, journalism, and film has changed dramatically in the past twenty-years. Newspapers, movie theaters, and books have been replaced by platforms for digital delivery of content. Like news apps, Instagram, Netflix, and Kindle. We’re living in the age of the platform industry, which is essentially where the majority of reading either begins (people are more likely to buy print books on Amazon) or takes place on an eBook (where you can impulse buy anything you want) or through audio (the fastest growing area of books by far), how you stay relevant in the consumer’s mind is by feeding the algorithm. And feeding the algorithm with more posts or reels isn’t enough. You need to create more art to be sold and promoted again. So, the more you’re in people’s feeds, the more the algorithm promotes your work, the more people buy your product, etc.…

What does this mean?

The market has standardized the speed of creativity. And you will literally break your neck trying to maintain that speed. And when has speed ever truly been conducive to creativity?

If the market has standardized the speed of creativity, then that means that the SNLT, or socially necessary labor time, i.e. how much your art will be worth in the eyes of the market, is going to match the fastest product with the most returns. For example, your indie film about the existential experience of childbirth is going to be worth the same as a made-for-Netflix movie like Nonna’s, that’s very cheap to make and can be released quickly to keep users engaged and always watching TV. So, it will be harder to get the funding for your film because it’s competing against the standard of Nonna’s.

Also, in true Marxist theory, art used to fall into a different category called “unproductive labor.” This means that it doesn’t produce surplus value for the capitalist class. But, if you sell your book to Penguin or Netflix and they take a cut of your work and then heavily market it for increased gains, they’ve turned your art into “productive labor.”

I believe that in 2026, the algorithm is the new Socially Necessary Labor Time. In 2026, a book’s value is no longer the time it takes to write, but the frequency with which it must be ‘fed’ to the platform to stay relevant.

Writing and craft have been replaced with content generation.

TLDR:

So you might have started this essay thinking that it is theoretically possible to sell your work (your labor time) to a publisher and generate enough money to buy yourself some more time, but, in reality, unless you are one of the lucky few (and I mean 50 out of hundreds of thousands), your work will either:

1. Have no value to the market, or

2. Be valuable to the market, but to remain valuable, you will have to continue delivering content at a steady pace to the capitalist beast that is the platform industry.

And most importantly, when you sell your work, you might get an advance, and if you’re lucky, a share of the profits, but you won’t get ownership. Which means you still don’t own the means of production. Which means that, even after all of this, you still must exchange your labor time for money. You are still exactly where you started.

To be continued next week.

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Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing a series of essays that delve into the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

I wrote this to better understand my own life choices and struggles. If you know me, it’s no secret that I hate working. Like I hate the fact that we have to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week selling our time to the highest bidder. I have resisted this at every turn (to my own detriment), and I pretended I lived in a fantasy world where I didn’t have to work and kind of act like I didn’t have a full-time job, only to have to pay the piper, as my mom says

Not only did this pretending not to need to work while simultaneously really needing work cause extreme anxiety and instability, but it turns out, it’s also really bad for your self-esteem! Because as much as I might not like to work, any sort of disconnect between my commitments and my actions degrades my integrity. Which meant that while I pretended I lived in a fantasy non-work world, I still felt like shit about myself for avoiding work.

Over the past few years, I’ve had many revelations about work and my relationship to it. I never really understood that my relationship to work and my feelings about it came from a very privileged place. Then I met my partner, who is an immigrant, and her perspective on work revealed my own assumptions.

Until I met Caro, I never realized that I felt entitled to a comfortable and easy life. I’d always prided myself on being self-sufficient. I worked at a sports bar in high school, in the school cafeteria in college, and I cleaned toilets at a resort. I had grit, I reassured myself; I can “get the job done.” I grew up with my mother and my sister in my grandmother’s house after my parents got divorced. My grandmother was a teacher and mother was a teacher. I didn’t grow up wealthy, so I didn’t, deep down, expect to be rich. But through my conversations with my partner and my research into capitalism, I have begun to understand that the vision for my life that I had in my mind—a life spent reading books and writing all day and taking walks in the woods—is the life of an independently wealthy person. I didn’t want to face the reality that I am a member of the working class. It came as a shock when I discovered that I was exactly like those white Trump supporters who secretly believe that they’re about to be billionaires when really they’re living paycheck to paycheck. And I avoided facing up to reality because the thought of working a 9-5 for 50 years was too depressing for me to bear. It was depressing, because deep down, I believed that something better had been promised to me, that I was entitled to more. Without acknowledging it, I had embodied the beliefs of a white American—that I was born for, and owed, a good life, a happy life, a safe life.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe all human beings deserve a safe and happy life. But no one is entitled to a beautiful life based on their position in the world. And the truth is that the vast majority of us have to work to sustain our lives. There is nothing special about me that makes me exempt from this universal truth in the age of capitalism.

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Toni Morrison has a beautiful piece about work in the New York Times. She wrote:

All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.

I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.

Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike….

Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.

Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

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My partner and Toni Morisson helped me see that you can’t change your reality if you deny reality. I can’t organize for workers if I don’t acknowledge that I am one.

Then I read All About Love by bell hooks and had another lightbulb moment. Before I read her words, it had never occurred to me that my capacity to love myself was affected by my inability to commit to paid labor. Working was the opposite of self-love. I am an artist! To work is to be chained to the man! But me? I am a free spirit! A wild child like an Enya song or Strider in The Lord of the Rings!

But, in reality, I was pretty miserable daily because I was both avoiding work and dependent on my paycheck. I felt really rotten inside. Like one of those little slugs from Stranger Things was rooting around in my esophagus, just dying to get out.

I am sharing the section on work from All About Love in its entirety because it’s the foundation upon which these essays were built, and it will serve as a touchstone for us as we go on this journey together. There are, of course, copyright issues at play here, so I’d ask that, if her words move you as much as they moved me, you buy her book. It’s one of my top ten books of all time.

In the words of bell hooks:

Work occupies much of our time. Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence. Yet most workers cannot do the work they love. But we can all enhance our capacity to live purposely by learning how to experience satisfaction in whatever work we do. We find that satisfaction by giving any job total commitment. When I had a teaching job I hated (the kind of job where you long to be sick so you have an excuse for not going to work), the only way I could ease the severity of my pain was to give my absolute best. This strategy enabled me to live purposely. Doing a job well, even if we do not enjoy what we are doing, means that we leave it with a feeling of well-being, our self-esteem intact. That self-esteem aids us when we go in search of a job that can be more fulfilling….

Marsha Sinetar writes about this concept in her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow as a way to encourage readers to take the risk of choosing work they care about and therefore learning through experience the meaning of right livelihood.

While there are many meaningful insights in Sinetar’s book, it is equally true that we can do what we love and money will not always follow. Although this is utterly disappointing, it can also offer us the experiential awareness that doing what you love may be more important than making money. Sometimes, as has been the case in my life, I have had to work at a job that is less than enjoyable in order to have the means to do the work I love. At one point in a very mixed job career I worked as a cook in a club. I hated the noise and the smoke. But working nights left me free to write in the day, to do the work I truly wanted to do. Each experience enhanced the value of the other. My nighttime work helped me relish the quiet serenity of my day and enjoy the alone time so essential to writing.

Whenever possible, it is best to seek work we love and to avoid work we hate. But sometimes we learn what we need to avoid by doing it. Individuals who are able to be economically self-sufficient doing what they love are blessed. Their experience serves as a beacon to all of us, showing us the ways right livelihood can strengthen self-love, ensuring peace and contentment in the lives we lead beyond work.

Often, workers believe that if their home life is good, it does not matter if they feel dehumanized and exploited on the job. Many jobs undermine self-love because they require that workers constantly prove their worth. Individuals who are dissatisfied and miserable on the job bring this negative energy home. Clearly, much of the violence in domestic life, both physical and verbal abuse, is linked to job misery. We can encourage friends and loved ones to move toward greater self-love by supporting them in any effort to leave work that assaults their well-being.

Folks who are out of the paid workforce, women and men who do unpaid work in the home, as well as all other happily unemployed people, are often doing what they want to do. While they are not rewarded by an income, their day-to-day life often provides more satisfaction than it would if they worked at a high-paying job in a stressful and dehumanizing environment. Satisfied homemakers, both women and the rare men who have chosen to stay home, have a lot to teach us all about the joy that comes from self-determination. They are their own bosses, setting the terms of their labor and the measure of their reward. More than any of us, they have the freedom to develop right livelihood.

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being. No wonder then that we have become a nation where so many workers feel bad. Jobs depress the spirit. Rather than enhancing self-esteem, work is perceived as a drag, a negative necessity. Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves. When we work with love, we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It’s not what you do but how you do it.”

God, bell hooks. What a beautiful human.

Thank you thank you thank you.

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What follows over the next few weeks is an exploration into what it means to be an artist in America in the age of capitalism.

Together, we’ll discover what it means to value our work for ourselves and without playing into the market.

I hope you will come out at the end feeling that, while the reality is that most of us are working class in a capitalist world, there is still a way to do this labor and maintain artistic integrity.

Love to you all,

Sammie