Back in 2013, Karl Taro Greenfield wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the overwhelming weight of his teenage daughter’s homework. It seemed excessive, he felt:
Imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?
What can one say to this but laugh? Obviously, the 21st century job, the one that capital and management want us to have, requires evenings and weekends. I mean, you want a career, not just a job, right? If you’re not working til ten on a Friday night, how will the boss know you’re worth keeping around? If the big meeting doesn’t make you vomit with anxiety, are you really taking it seriously enough? This is an at-will economy, jagoff. You can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, so you better not give anyone an excuse. Perfect, every time, or else. (Recall, also, that Americans in general don’t have any savings. One bad break, and penury looms).
And of course you need your “lifelong learning.” Rachel Paige King’s recent essay on career guidance literature, “Is Your Job Lynchian, or More Kafkaesque?” notes that “Today, to be successful in the workplace, one must not simply find one’s vocation or ‘calling.’ One is expected to engage in a program of constant self-reinvention in accordance with the latest trends, contorting oneself to fit whatever job is trendy these days … while continuing to gather ever more degrees and professional certificates.”
It’s true: some employers will actively discount or invalidate your old-fashioned 20th century degrees these days, so you better keep those continuing education certificates coming. You may or may not learn anything, but it’s most important to have a piece of paper saying you’ve paid $3,000 for a course about it. And of course if you picked something to specialize in that turns out to be out of date a few years later, well, that’s your fault.
While you’re at it, you obviously need a side hustle. Maybe it’s sporadic, selling crafts and art on Etsy, or a sideline that you could ramp up in a pinch if you needed more work. Maybe it’s regular, like a weekend retail gig or dog walking or tutoring or stripping. I mean, you’re not going to pay off those masters degrees just working as a teacher or librarian.
King notes:
The perverse question that [What Color Is Your Parachute? author] Bolles, who appeared to believe in the logic of the system and in the fundamental decency of most workplaces, never seems to consider is: What if today’s world of work is not incidentally or accidentally cruel, but in fact intentionally designed to ensure that workers’ self-esteem is crushed and their sense of self-worth eroded? In today’s professional climate, is the dream job Bolles urges us to look for available? Is finding even a bearable one likely?
If school means endless homework, staying up past midnight crying, stumbling through days like a zombie, certain that you’re falling behind in a lifelong struggle for adequacy, well, that sounds like great preparation for adulthood. Best to teach them young that pointless tasks trickle down from on high through layer after layer of management until they land on our desks with rubrics and worksheets. Best to teach them young that they better start grinding. As above, so below.
Campus political correctness is out of control
George Mason University has insisted for years that its Mercatus Center is a fully independent policy group. Surprise, the libertarian-leaning think-tank is basically controlled by the Koch Foundation. And yes, they’ll fire professors who aren’t libertarian enough.
Mike Pence watch
Mike Pence says Joe Arpaio defends “the rule of law.” (It’s easy to understand if you realize that “the law” for this crew means “white men.”
He also headlined an event at a PAC headed by Carl Higbie, whom you may recall as someone who lost his job with the Trump administration for being so unambiguously racist even the GOP couldn’t stomach it.
Quiz: Mike Pence or Jack D. Ripper?
Contrition watch
Former Obamacare opponent Tom Price admits that the individual mandate he helped kill was actually a good idea, now that it’s too late to do any good.
Marco Rubio admits that the Trump tax plan hasn’t helped regular people, now that it’s too late to do any good.
Welfare chauvinism
One of the principles of contemporary Republican politics is that Our People deserve help but Those People don’t. So it’s only natural that Michigan’s latest legislation would impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, but exempt people in counties with high unemployment. Not cities, though. So mostly white rural Michiganders can keep getting Medicaid even if they can’t find work, but not Those People in Detroit.
The only good David Brooks take on Twitter:
So APPARENTLY my New York Times column “Something Like Shirley Jackson’s Lottery, But for Sex, and That’s Really The Only Reasonable Way to Keep Men From Doing Violence” wasn’t received well by the Wags on twitter dot com
michael f (@bunkosquad) May 2, 2018
Worthy causes
My friend Heather is doing a fundraiser for Bikes Not Bombs
Selections from the Smithsonian’s hip-hop photography collection
Cultivating joy
Hedgehog
Capybaras
Literate dog
Secretly Ironic 