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.
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.
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.
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
