It’s getting to the end of 2021, which is a good time to return to this article I read in 2014 that dramatically shifted my attitude about work. I was riveted by this article at the time - it seemed to reveal a terrible conspiracy put forth by “neoliberal ideology” (a handy term that I deployed in those days to critique everything and nothing at the same time), whereby we are tricked into devalue ourselves. I was riveted partly because I felt personally condemned; I was, and probably still am, enthralled by moral shaming.

The article offered a robust critique of the phrase “Do What You Love,” but didn’t offer much in the way of an alternative. If you don’t do what you love, what do you do? I spent much of my 20s cultivating and reeling from a sense of betrayal; I absorbed the language and attitude of critique and resistance. The exploitative mechanisms of capitalism could be found everywhere I looked--in the creative industries, in the care industries, in the nonprofit sector. I began to form the nihilistic view that if pursuing my dreams was the expression of privilege that devalued others & propped up exploitation, and if I was going to get screwed no matter what, then I might as well sell out.

Seven years later, the punch of the article doesn’t hold up for me. I recognize the “hot take” mechanism at work in this article; it’s designed to castigate and vilify, to produce outrage and shame. The distorting and exploitative mechanisms of capitalism can be found in Jacobin too: publications need readers, and moral outrage is a reliable way of drawing socially conscious readers to your countercultural publication like a moth to a flame.

Consider this excerpt:

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, [“Do What You Love”] distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

Outside of this excerpt, I think the article makes the correct point that plenty of desirable jobs take advantage of their desirability to lower compensation for the labor of performing them. The rise of unpaid (or even reverse-paid) internships, the worsening working conditions for journalists, are well-illustrated. And it also makes the highly believable point that “Do What You Love” is used by people who won at capitalism to aggrandize themselves - the example the article uses include Steve Jobs and academics.

But for the vast majority of workers who attempt to do what they love--who attempt to do something that expresses some of their best intents--are operating under the intuitive (and correct) idea that what you do professionally has a profound effect on your physical and psychological well-being as well as a larger social impact. 

I think there’s another critique of “Do What You Love” that the article doesn’t touch upon, because it’s not a political economy critique, but a spiritual one--what is the “love” expressed in that phrase? 

I was born into a family. As a child I was happy, sensitive and emotional and perceptive, beautiful and talented. Now, my family ties are thin, I am domestically isolated, and I am desperately angry. I am still sensitive and perceptive, still beautiful and talented. But I have been exiled from my body and soul. I am ashamed of my desire. I have retreated into an intractable state of shame and apology and self-censure.

Life is senseless. Misfortune can strike and there is no delivery from it through mythology, only through somatization. There is no narrative that you are unfolding with your own agency; to the extent that your life has an arc, it is the effect of technology, in its most broad definition. (Digitization is technology. Statecraft is technology. Language is technology. Bureaucracy is technology.) You cannot save anyone; you cannot save even yourself. The great delusion of our times, a delusion bestowed upon the elite, is that we steward our individuality. The delusion is enough to convince us to chisel at a legacy; the effort of this chiseling is co-opted for capital growth. The arc of history bends towards the immateriality of humankind. I bustle about like a busy mouse, killing myself, and none of it matters one bit. I do not believe in the inevitability of political progress. I do not believe that the new identity productions of younger generations are radical or revolutionary, although the social reconfigurations are, the orientations to new communities founded upon these identities, may exert an effect, being as they are a kind of technology. I do not believe the social reconfigurations can guarantee safety or protection for individuals; that was never the interest of any community. I return to transcendental art, to relieve me from the suffocating embrace of the political and the social. Some art can tunnel me into a place where I am beyond loneliness.

I believe, intellectually, that there is nothing wrong with my desires. I must believe this, because the intellect, as flimsy as it is, serves my deepest desire, which is to live. In the intellect, I can create liberation for myself. I house the "I" somewhere in my intellect, where there is freedom because there is infinite possibility, infinite imaginaries. But I live in utter and abject fear. My desires can only be satisfied by others; I cannot draw any real nourishment from my dreams. In my dreams, I have nourishment without having to pay for it; in the corporeal anthropocene, the satisfaction of my needs comes at a price.

Mothers pay the price. Fathers eat for free.

Everything that has happened between birth, and now, to tear me away from joy--I attribute to the anthropocene. It's a world from which there is no escape.

[from the drafts - late 2023]

having an emotional meltdown at work, which, as much as i rail against it, is a bulwark against falling totally into an abyss. the cognitive dissonance of being comforted by the double-edged complacency of corporate america is, well, the banality of modern evil. mother's love is not self-actualization, not the unfettered expression of childlike impulse and creativity and emotion. it's incarcerating yourself within security, and being fed treats through the bars.

[from the drafts - unsure when, 2023]

narrowing, narrowing, narrowing. she was disappointed to see that her concerns had narrowed. all of her prior schooling, where they smeared her with worldliness and intellectual puzzles, well, it didn't seem to matter, because she hadn't figured out that most basic thing, which was how to experience joy. she knew about joy. she fastened joy to a string and then tie the string to a stick and put the end of the stick in her backpack and lived with it dangling just barely out of reach. but that wasn't really joy, they'd say, that was the illusion of joy, joy would be the grass she was trampling underneath her, the dew on the grass, if she'd only trip and fall and bury her nose in it. it was like lucid dreaming; if she could snap to awareness, there she had to start from the very beginning: the sexual urge.

self loathing [from the drafts, 2023]

I feel so stupid these days. So stupid. I want to create but the moment I try to write anything, I want to spew out anguish. That's not art! That's just

[from the drafts - 2023]

I just want to spend time with someone who makes me feel I am enough, and not have to pay for it.

attention [from the drafts, likely oct 2023]

It's been so hard to take my eyes off the screen this week. I have, like many people I know, been disaster scrolling. I feel almost an obligation to; is it thanks to the attention economy that I imagine my immediate attention to be of some real value? I feel enslaved by the platforms, which is at the very moment de-platforming perspectives that matter, as I launch silly little heart-reacts to try to - to what? Train the algorithm?

despair

I've come to accept this narrative that I don't know what to do with my life - I'll never make up my mind, I'll live in a sloshing pail of indecision forever, looking for the solution in all the wrong places - like love, which is a trauma, because we don't know how to love, and we wield the term recklessly. We confuse praise for supportiveness, avoidance for peace, . I've only known love from people and institutions that confused praise for supportiveness. Talent and beauty and self-possession are praised to the skies,

a pit of emotional need that drives away lovers who are attracted to my magnetic and charismatic energy which is the burning of all this repressed creative and spiritual energy inside of me. Everybody wants a sip of it.

I acquired a particular sensitivity to counterfactuals. […] Of the uncountably many axes on which fate might hinge, why give preference to any impossibility over another, eliding the simple, gaping wound of his absence? Often, I uncharitably thought, people who did so needlessly milked the situation for tragedy. Is all this not sad enough? Thus alienated from the ordinary patterns of social engagement and private thought, I began to think of my old life as having ended as well, and of the present as an airless waiting room in which logic and grammar would need to be reconstituted from scratch.

Oh, my rats!

/made to order/

"The class division between the rich and the poor transforms into a line separating the wider population from its political and economic representation—similar to the line that divides a person from their image in the mirror. Crooked mirrors are unsatisfying because they distort the proportions of our face and body. However, when we are confronted with a non-crooked, correct mirror that reflects these proportions “as they really are,” we are satisfied with the mirror. Thus, world history begins to look like a search for an upper class that is the non-crooked mirror of the low classes. And the vehicle of this search is identity politics."

"In poetry, perhaps innovation should be gauged not merely in formal terms—it can be also measured by how much a poet builds out from academic institutions towards more radical socialities."

bleak

It's really fucking bleak these days. It's bleak out in the world, and it's bleak in my head and soul. A highly visible genocide, and witnessing the start of an intense cultural war, has thrown me into existential and ethical disarray at the same time that voices from the front of this (online) culture war bitterly denounce anything other than immediate and maximally provocative action. This level of in-fighting is new to me; I've seen it go as far as criticizing early organizers of some of the most well-run and truly disruptive protests I can remember. Maybe I am merely too online; what's one raving Twitter account? I'm likely just feeling the effects of tuning into what's happening in the spare minutes I have between all the humiliating things I do to hold up a rickety semblance of normalcy in my own bourgeois life (working, socializing, keeping myself fed and housed, searching for meaning, etc). If you only have minutes, then you only have Twitter. What if I gave hours instead? Could I then connect, in-person, to entities that have a longer track record of organizing responsibly and democratically for political change? But then, I also run up against my own preference to not be among people like this:

I have dated socialist men, I have lived with socialist men, I have worked with socialist men, I have been raped by socialist men, I have been emotionally blackmailed and financially gouged by socialist men, and I am deeply loath to be in a room with them. There must be something else; there must be something else. Suffice it to say, in the gap between the kind of life I want to lead and the ways I actually spend my days, I am plunged into a state of deep abjection. I'm in a box inscribed on three sides by what others expect of me and on one side by my own bitternesses, resentments, and fears. I have a hopelessness so entrenched that it sometimes it looks like faith; it's the black mirror of faith, faith that everything is going to shit and there is no force that can counteract it.

I made an endeavor in the last two years to push myself into the social sphere, and the results have been very surprising to me. I've learned that people are endlessly fascinating and impressive and ambitious and in possession of great range. The corollary to that learning is that I am not God's chosen; I am deeply unremarkable. This is easy to admit, but I can't overstate how fried my ego is by this realization; we're all conditioned to think we only have value through distinction, and that conditioning sits deep. (A deeply abusive and self-critical voice has been developing in my head in the last year, in part because of some really unsatisfying relationships.) But I've also learned that people naturally yearn to connect. The corollary to this learning is that the only thing holding me back from the social sphere is myself; I am not as alone as I thought I was, but any isolation that I feel is entirely my own responsibility. This yearning for connection deepens as the relationships become more digital and/or mediated by platforms. I've come a long way in learning how to spot the defense mechanisms of the ego and to not take them personally, and similarly not to be so horrified by the intrusions of my own ego. I was never that sure whether I was an introvert or an extrovert or what those terms really meant; I knew that I was shy, and yet I craved the company and attention of other people. But now I am developing the characteristics of an introvert: I deplete myself around others and need to be alone. I have a version of myself that is "on" and I need to go home and be "off." It's hard for me to say whether I've developed this mask as a stepping stone towards a sociality that won't require it; or if it's symptomatic of a turn towards a permanent artifice that grows out from a more entrenched digital social sphere. Obviously, I hope it's the former, and I try not to judge the masking behavior because it's an adaptation that I have learned from the high pressure environments I came up in; but there are days that I despair that this meritocracy-dystopia-mask is going to simply transmute into a digital-dystopia-mask.

I feel that New York City is one of the few places in which I am able to experiment on my own persona, because it has such a high concentration of subcultures, each varyingly tolerant of strangeness and idiosyncrasy. I've encountered brilliant and ambitious and complicated and contradictory people. I want to keep encountering more.

I do sometimes have a sense of feeling stifled and overwhelmed by the anthropocene. I don't run in moneyed circles, but I do see rampant speculation of social currency. This speculation is as antagonistic to societal and individual well-being as financial speculation.

I had a dream last night that I angered a Vietnamese American writer influential in the literary world, and she and her cohort turned against me. (She was imaginary, not a surrogate for someone in my life.) I remember that she was beautiful and feminine and popular. I asked to talk to her so that we could understand one another and restore peace between us. But talking to her did not restore anything. She used the opportunity to condemn and not to listen. She spoke sweetly and turned on her heel as I began to speak my piece. And all her friends took after her. I was ostracized.

Then I woke up and the question, obviously, was whether I could stand this. Because in my dream I couldn’t stand the rejection and the silencing. It was making me cold, it was dissolving me. This was a person using their power. I’d experienced this before. But was I stronger now?

For many years I didn't write, even though I thought of myself as a writer. Instead, I worked jobs and wrung my hands over them, I moved cities, I moved apartments, I spent countless hours looking for furniture, acquiring furniture, and moving furniture, I cooked meals, I took care of a dog and my ex-partner, I quarreled bitterly with that ex, I took care of plants, I washed and folded laundry, I sometimes read books (but not that often), I read a lot of the internet, I peered at my friends' lives and the lives of people I didn't know but longed to know, I learned how to fix steam radiators and wire up to knob-and-tube wiring, I fixed steam radiators and wired lights, I gardened, I let my garden go to the aphids, I created aquariums, I took walks in my neighborhood, I took walks in other neighborhoods, I taught myself the complicated rules of financial literacy, I entertained escapist fantasies of a nicely furnished bungalow out west, I painted, I made wheel-thrown pottery, I entertained fantasies of making art for a living, I danced alone in my apartment, I went to meetings, I organized book clubs, I had meals with friends, I traveled to other places and did touristy things, I traveled to other places and visited friends and family, I experimented with drugs and nightlife, I danced zouk, I wrestled with class guilt, I slept, I napped, I wrestled with insomnia, I did yoga, I sprained and tweaked various body parts, I got sick, I performed acts of service to try to impress mothers with high expectations, I showed up in support of my ex's career milestones and family emergencies, I showed up for my sister's career milestones and life changes, I visited my mother who lived alone, I made new and incredible friends, I phased out shitty friends, I talked to therapists, I observed movements for liberation from the sidelines, I hesitantly participated in politics, I changed jobs, I learned to live alone, I learned about film, I learned about my shame, I developed a torturous unrequited crush, I talked on the phone, I wept in my room, I acted out fantasy scenarios in my room, I switched jobs, I went to events alone and talked to strangers, I went on dates, I had bad sex and very occasionally good sex, I wrote in my diary, I wrote text messages, I learned that a collection of likeminded people does not a community make. And for many of those years, I blamed myself for not writing. I told myself I was undisciplined, and because I was undisciplined, I would never sit down at the empty page and materialize a book, the book that would affirm my status as a writer, that would earn me recognition as a talented and thoughtful person with a unique perspective. Not the nobody-person who did all those other things, those crassly domestic things that are the lot of women, dilettantes, addicts. The lot of the indecisive, the un-visionary, the unfocused, the ordinary: people who surrendered their power to anyone who asked or who even intimated, whether it be their partner, or their employer, or their mother. Rather than gather their power to themselves to shoot their own potential like a comet through the sky. That was the goal: to maximize potential, to ensure that life was not wasted. And that's why I needed the approval, admiration, and respect: only those things would tell me that my potential was being met, that it hadn't been a waste, that I'd fulfilled who I was meant to be.

Sometimes, in a quiet, arbitrary moment, I would think about the act of writing, and remember myself at different times in my life when I was doing that thing I kept telling myself I ought to do but couldn't. I had done it in the past. I hadn't lacked the patience and fortitude and stamina to do it then. On the contrary, I was full of focus and energy. I'd be in the grip of what was happening. I could work on a story to the exclusion of other responsibilities. Clearly something had changed: now, I'd work on anything except writing, if anything else was available. What had happened? Well, a number of things: I'd studied writing in school. I took writing workshops. In those workshops I learned to use writing as a way of measuring myself against others. I used writing to compete for coveted places in funded graduate programs to continue writing. In those graduate programs I saw how writing could further be used to get people to speak admirably about your brilliance and singularity, and how it could serve as an excuse for toxic and abusive behavior, and how it could win you coveted spots in residency programs in picturesque, cliff-studded, ocean-sprayed cottages where someone would drop a picnic basket of food in front of your door at mealtimes. The first story I wrote in graduate school came spilling onto the page with full conviction--rapidly, and in the course of a single, focused week. A second one came, more haltingly but still it came, and then I never wrote a story easily again. At a loss for what else to do in that post-industrial midwestern city (since it was unthinkable me to drop out), and lacking basic life skills, I set about cooking, furnishing my apartment, inventing endless complications to the task of furnishing my apartment (mostly out of a sincere belief that my pennilessness was fundamental and sure to be be long-lasting). I would journey hours to pick up shabby Craigslist furniture and painstakingly (and inexpertly, and at great hazard to my health) refinish them. I'd spend the rest of time on the phone with my then-boyfriend who lived in what seemed like paradise (New York City), often arguing with him about politics, to our mutual distress.

And in those quiet moments I would wonder, did that experience rob me of the ability to complete a story? I wouldn't sit with this thought. The implications were too heavy. The heaviest being that my ability to narrate, which was more precious to me than life (because life without articulation was unbearable to me), was something that I could lose. It was easier to think that I was lazy.

I used to think that this guilt I carried around with me--a guilt for not achieving success through writing--was interfering with my ability to live a happy life. It was hard to enjoy life. I'd see traveling as frivolous. I'd think watching movies or TV were distractions from my more serious literary ambitions. Every activity that was not advancing my literary development, I judged and did not take seriously. (Which I thought was every activity.) My inability to exhibit uncomplicated contentment became an issue in my relationship. Despite enjoying the fruit of my sacrifices and making no effort to shoulder any of my burden, he could not understand why I wasn’t happy—I felt resentful, like I was being asked to complete the final step in what was already more domestic enslavement than I ever thought I would ever have to shoulder.

The breakup was traumatic. My heart and home and deep family and community ties were suddenly broken, and with it came pain beyond my wildest imagination. I dissolved into cold blue fire.

I was right, of course. The guilt for not achieving through writing was interfering with other aspects of my life, just as other aspects of my life interfered with my writing. Sentiments like guilt easily reproduced themselves: I was guilty about guilt, ashamed of my shame, angry about my anger, happy to be happy, sad to be sad. (And guilty about happiness, ashamed of sadness, etc.) The sentiment lacked any ability to answer itself. Easily they could whip around in a storm, and the fearful subject imagines that they must either control and transmute the emotion into reason, or medicate the emotion through hits of validation or distraction.

There were parts of me that simmered with teachings that I was not in a position to engage. I lacked the preparation, I lacked the environment, I lacked the support. This is not unique to me, it's a feature of our times. It's exacerbated by my social identities. I am grateful that in the tiny corner of the world I inhabit now, this is becoming clear to more and more people. We realize that in being alone, we are not alone.

I still feel, at times, that perhaps I have lost writing. I don't know what I mean by it--what is "writing"? I see: fear has articulated this thought, because fear uses words like "lost" or "slipping away" or "waste." More specifically I feel that a set of skills and learned behaviors are slipping away from me, skills that earned me top marks and social status and even some money, at one point in time. I fear what I lose when I lose these skills, which I built for the purpose of performance, to satisfy someone else's gaze.

Now I know why I got into films in New York City. Because it is an inherently exhibitionary art form, and this city does exhibition well. In fact it sometimes feels as though this city does nothing but exhibition. It does not care, it does not nurture.

But that sentiment is chicken and egg. I got into an exhibitionary art form, so now I pay attention to exhibition.

"This strategy is so effective, and the hatchet job so central a cultural force, that it has shaped a correlative form of contemporary writing: the literature of painful self-awareness."