Month: December 2024

I’m Trying

Today’s song is Trying by Bully, which has a sort of a fin de siècle riot-grrl aesthetic. You can almost feel the band tapping through their iPhones looking for the right filter to mimic a badly calibrated Super 8 camera, trying to figure out which vibes of the past to throw into the pastiche, which ones to discard.

Also about trying and also with 1990s vibes, a Slate piece that epitomizes the genre I have come to think of as “Gen-X career disillusionment personal essay.” Obviously this is a generalization so broad as to be nearly meaningless, but these pieces all do seem to follow a pattern, and represent a specific strain of thought and style from people who are roughly my age. The authors are mostly (but not entirely) white men, and they’ve all obviously read Denis Johnson and Douglas Coupland at a formative age. The pieces generally run to a few thousand words: too long for print, too long for 21st century attention spans, perfect for what the authors probably feel was the best era of internet writing.

A typical example is heavy on cynical participation in corporate life. It’s almost always got some vague reference to bad behavior and low places that somehow still manages to provide too much embarrassing information. In this case we find it in the first paragraph: “…in the Johnson County, Iowa, jail, where I spent July 4 and 5 some years ago for reasons I’d rather not go into…”

In the past five or ten years, the Gen-X personal essay has also added a mandatory acknowledgement that its cynicism is passé. It pauses to note that nobody says “sellout” anymore, to remind contemporary readers that the author’s quaint career-related ambivalence and inner turmoil are coming from the era of the payphone and the rented VHS tape.

Critically, such an essay builds up to a conclusion that is well-styled, evocative, and, if you think about it, somewhere between obvious and pointless. Oh, the author has definitely done a great deal of introspection, and I’m sure there’s some personal growth in the writing of this essay, or in the therapy that made the introspection possible, but at the end of it, has the reader gained any insights? Is the reader any richer after what is, in essence, a short description of the sales and persuasion business in three of its least prestigious forms: jailhouse raconteur, telemarketer, and panhandler?

Gosh, are you telling me that sales is a dirty business? That people doing white collar jobs aren’t actually any better than people doing blue-collar work? That seamy and depressing soul-sucking labor and dead-end jobs can happen at any point on the economic spectrum? A truly novel insight. Arthur Miller couldn’t have done better with a smile and a shoeshine and a dead dream.

The narrator of all of these essays is almost always an example of elite overproduction, or at least someone with a degree working a job that they feel is beneath their dignity. It helps if they’re self-aware enough to realize that they’re being both pretentious and classist to look down upon their job rather than just find it irritating. Was the first of these groundbreaking, or was it already a cliche when it was printed?

And yet, as much as I mock them, these sorts of essays hit me right in the gut, because how do you persuade yourself to care enough about something to do it well, without caring so much that you tear yourself apart when things go wrong, or when you have to admit that it’s not, in the grand scheme of things, very important?

To really fall right into it: sometimes this genre feels especially relevant to my work life right now, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Yes, we all know that being an adult in the working world is occasionally alienating. It’s a job. I get up every day and do it. It’s fine. I don’t want to discount the fact that it’s actually a good job, and many parts of it are also important, and helpful, and worthy. I’m proud to have written a flyer about addiction treatment that can be read and understood by someone who is too ashamed to even pick it up. I’m proud to have been able to explain antiretroviral HIV medications in a way that’s legible to people with only marginal English skills. That’s pretty good work. And I work with kind and thoughtful and collaborative people.

But some of my days could easily be the fodder for any number of these depressing cliches about corporate life. For example, I’ve been working on a project to change a corporate tagline from “funded in part” to “brought to you” in the footers of approximately 2,000 health insurance documents. It’s frustrating, and tedious, and it’s a reminder that I’m just a cog in a giant machine. Especially haunting this month are the constant reminders that the particular machine I’m working for is so widely reviled that a lot of folks were pretty happy to see one of its leaders gunned down in the street. (Following the murder, the headline insurers limit coverage of prosthetic limbs, questioning their necessity is a little too on the nose, you know?)

But as I said, cynicism about one’s career is mostly an outdated and embarrassing cliché at this point. So what if I work for an industry everyone hates? It’s a job. It’s fine.

Nailed It

Did I get that formula right? Let’s play that song back and run the checklist:

  • Contains one or two very specific details that don’t quite make up for how vague the rest is.
  • Acknowledges that nobody’s really too good for any job; still oozes pretentious disdain for this particular job in question.
  • Notes that generalizations are inaccurate; still makes broad generalizations.
  • Admits that it’s coming from an outdated worldview; does nothing to actually change said view.
  • Throws in something heavy or shocking at the close to distract from the fact that the entire piece can be summarized as “having a job can be a grind sometimes.”

Yep.

News

Good news: BBC roundup of some climate & nature breakthroughs in the past year.

Bad news: Guardian profile of Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, a neoreactionary influencer whose ideas form most of the intellectual framework (such as it is) of contemporary fascism.

Joy

New favorite subreddit: /r/meow_IRL, featuring cats with expressions that match how you feel when you don’t exactly feel your best. It’s got some great ones.

Whatever the hell this dog is doing.

Negativity in the Time of Poptimism

I’ve been mulling over the rise of respect for pop and popular genres for some time now. Citation needed, but roll with me here: romance fiction always had plenty of readership, but now dedicated romance bookstores are popping up, sales are booming even more than they used to, and the genre has respect it didn’t have before. Critics used to deride pop music and bands used to hate the idea of selling out, but now a “just let people enjoy things” sort of vibe is dominant in most media sectors.

Instead of the grim-dark themes of prestige cable TV like The Sopranos and The Wire we’ve got well-made, well-written family-friendly entertainment like Abbott Elementary, shows that treat the 22-minute situation comedy as a legitimate format and produce things that are, frankly, nice. And of course there’s reality TV, once the domain of mean judges crushing dreams and today the domain of Bakeoff. Even the profanity-filled Netflix rap contest Rhythm & Flow features judges Latto, DJ Khaled, and Ludacris reassuring the losing contestants they’ve got what it takes, and to keep working on their craft.

Feel-good feels good.

But there are exceptions, and worthy ones. One I ran into recently is from Christopher Buehlman, a horror novelist who dipped his toe into the fun side of the pool with The Blacktongue Thief, a frankly hilarious tale that could have been nothing but cliche (a mage, a knight, and a rogue walk into a tavern, seeking adventure…) and managed to be brilliant. The title character has a sense of humor that reminds you why they call a rogue “roguish,” and once I finished that book I went and read some of Buehlman’s other books.

They were not funny, although there were moments of laughter in the one about the necromancer with a drinking problem. And for a follow-up to Thief, Buehlman narrates the tale of the knight in his latest book, The Daughters’ War. This one is a sort of return to form for him: she’s grave where the thief was funny. In fact, she’s deadpan even when all the other soldiers are laughing or joking or whoring.

Buehlman manages to write the narrator as someone who speaks excellent English, but whose first language is not English; she’s betrayed only by a handful of uniquely slanted phrases, like “it is not for laughing.” But the phrasing doesn’t detract from the tale she tells, of a kingdom that’s lost its knights to invaders, then its farmers, and will now send its daughters off to be mowed down in war as well. He manages to bring us a fully realized narrator who has loved and lost, and lost badly. As someone traumatized, haunted by what she’s seen and done. Someone who will do whatever it takes to do the right thing.

It isn’t funny. It will not get called “rollicking” like the prior book did. But it’s brilliant, too.

And Also

There’s room for cruelty and disdain in literary criticism as well. I do not miss the days of the guilty-pleasure hatchet jobs from the likes of Dale Peck. But there’s still room for a burn in today’s literary environment, like this well-deserved, scathing review of the latest from Jordan Peterson:

The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as “bonkers”) appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad, We Who Wrestle with God repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word.

Or perhaps this one:

The aesthetics of intellectualism, unaccompanied by the rigors of actual thinking, are on display on every page of “We Who Wrestle With God.” … At the level of the sentence, “We Who Wrestle With God” is probably the most unendurable book I have ever suffered through. But its unreadability is the point: Density passes for sophistication, and verbosity conceals vapidity.

Aaaah, that’s the stuff.

And Elsewhere

Utah is an epicenter for crooked adoption agencies. Truly bleak.

Brief introduction to the new right, a sort of glossary of the different factions of horrible people gloating about their ascendant power in the next four years.

52 Things I Learned in 2024.

Is it actually worse?

Declinism is a generalized tendency to believe that things are getting worse over time.

For example, in July 2023, The Atlantic published a short piece about how America’s obsession with long hours is destroying churchgoing, which frays interpersonal ties, which disrupts communities, which, give-a-mouse-a-cookie style, will probably destroy America or something. But we’ve heard that song before (remember Bowling Alone?) We’ve been hearing it since 1929 at least. We’ve been hearing that Boston isn’t what it used to be since Ben Franklin complained that the taverns were better before independence. We’ve been hearing that Kids These Days Are Lazy since ancient Greeks lamented youth were just writing things down instead of memorizing the great epics. But of course, while churchgoing is on the downswing, other forms of involvement are up. We’re not bowling in formal leagues anymore, but Strava users know each other well enough.

But as much as that pessimism was misplaced last time, we always worry. We ask ourselves, well, are things getting worse this time? Are we working too much? Is the latest social media or structural change or trend fraying our communities?

The latest buzzwords in my feeds are polyworking and overemployment, and although the you must work very hard all the time doing as many things as possible theme isn’t new, it’s certainly showing its face in a new style.

Some people, of course, love the whole thing, laughing all the way to the dual-income-one-person bank. There are anecdotes of clever software engineers pulling in two or even three six-figure salaries at once. And why shouldn’t they? Your bosses pay you as little as possible for the most work they can squeeze out of you. Why shouldn’t you work as little as possible for the most money you can squeeze out of them?

When the Teamsters do it, it’s a punchline, but that punchline is basically just clever PR by Pinkertons and their ilk. “Labor unions = lazy workers” is one of the most successful, most malevolent memes in America, even more than auto companies inventing the concept of jaywalking to reserve public streets for their customers rather than the general public.

Substacker Kyle Fitzpatrick sketches out the trend as he sees it today:

In the 2000s, when I first started working, you could just have one job and survive. In the 2010s, you could have one job and a fun, goal-related little something on the side that you hoped became the thing. Now? You have a job and a side-hustle but also another job and none of those ladder into your goals so you still have to keep doing them all despite none of them really being fulfilling. Did I mention you’re doing this while freelance, without set health care or other corporate amenities like holidays?

Anyone in this position knows this isn’t anything new, just that the noise… is getting louder.

The concern here is that creative workers in particular find themselves needing to both do their jobs and spend a great deal of time and energy becoming, essentially, professional influencers selling themselves. It’s not merely enough to be good at something, in other words, you also have to be good at marketing yourself for it.

And to a certain extent I feel that thrum of anxiety myself. I’ve got my main freelance assignment (no benefits, no PTO, but flexible) plus my two or three side hustles, plus my volunteering and my unpaid writing. All of that is both work and a sort of meta-work: marketing and managing my reputation for being good at this sort of intellectual work. And there’s an awful lot of it. An overwhelming amount of it, sometimes.

On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that mandatory polywork may be a new trend for white-collar workers like Kyle and me, but it isn’t at all new for others. And more importantly, being good at something, whether that’s being a village blacksmith or a leading subject matter expert, has always been subtly different from being known to be good at it, and successful people have always had to be both. It’s always been necessary be both good and known to be good, to be both just and seen to be just.

I catch myself doom-mongering about this a lot, I’m afraid, and have to force myself to take a step back. I have to remember I’ve got it way easier than most people in America today, that most people in America today have it way easier than the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world has it way easier than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. I don’t risk being maimed by my job, I don’t get forced to do unpaid overtime, I don’t even commute. I’ve been unemployed and under-employed, and the situation I’m in is far, far better. Hell, it’s far better than certain full-employee I’m-a-real-boy jobs I’ve had. I chose this. I continue to choose it.

I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that everyone choose this multiple-hustles life, and making it mandatory for everyone would be truly horrific. But it’s working for me, for now. I know I’ve got it pretty good, is what I’m saying.

Or at least, it could always get worse.

Joy