Alienation Nation
Every time the airplane tilts, I worry we won’t stop, that it will keep tilting until we’ve flipped upside down. Every time I drive past my high school girlfriend’s house, I look to see if the lights are on, by habit. It still makes me smile when they are. I still love to take a route that goes past my old college girlfriend’s house, so I can look to see if any of their cars are in the driveway, even though she and her roommates moved out years ago.
Point is, old habits die hard, but sometimes that can be a nice thing.
Of course, there’s always the flip side. A habit of mine I wish I could bury six feet under? My inability to get work done without a deadline, or even more than a day before the deadline.
As you can imagine, that doesn’t serve me so well. It becomes very hard to self-motivate, or take full advantage of opportunities. I’ve been working at Ms. Magazine for almost a year now and I’ve only written maybe half a dozen articles for them. Hell, when Crash put me in touch with Busby, it took me almost a year to finally write my first column here.
Now, I can bitch and moan all I want about my own shortcomings, and how I wish I was x instead of z, but I do that every other month anyways. Or you can send me an e-mail — I’m happy to bitch and moan there, too. But I wanted to talk about this catch-22 that workers seem to be stuck in right now. (A very brief tangent: my parents are visiting this weekend, picking up some barn kittens from my buddy, and were joking about naming them Scylla and Charybdis. If you have some time to spare, go down the rabbit hole of how many addages come from that one myth.)
So I can’t do work without a deadline, which eliminates a lot of freelance and self-driven career paths. But it’s not that I don’t want to work. For the most part, we all want to work. We need structure and purpose. But we also need fulfillment. We need to understand and, to at least some extent, believe in the work we are doing. But for so many of us, we have very little control over that.
Here’s what Marx has to say: the prolitariat, or the working class, own only their labor, which they must sell to survive. And because of the nature of capitalism, they will never be paid the full worth of their labor. When the proletariat does not control the means of production, labor is exterior to them. And when “labour is exterior to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his essence,” Marx wrote, “he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. Thus the worker feels only a stranger.”
This is the alienation of the worker from their work, and with this separation from their physical world, they also become separated in their mental world. When someone is alienated from their work, and actively alienates themself in “acts of production,” their activity and “essence” are merely a means to their continued existence.
I often think of Marx as talking only about poor factory workers, but of course we can apply this same logic to office workers, retail workers, what-have-you. Let’s throw another couple twists in here: a college education isn’t the guarantee it used to be. My girlfriend just graduated and she’s applying for food service jobs, and not even getting all of those. That’s true of tons of college graduates. Probably, at some point, their degree will help them gain employment, but often not right away, and it isn’t always worth the time and money anymore, from a purely economic outlook. Jobs just don’t pay as well as they used to. The cost of living is way up. Cities are attractive to young people, but, by and large, unaffordable. And to top that all off, the future is rather bleak. Hell, it’s been 30 degress most of January down here in Western Mass. One in four birds have vanished over the past 50 years!
So, what’re we all supposed to do? Keep on trucking? I’m not sure. Personally, I like routine. I like a steady job, a steady schedule. I need it. But it seems like it shouldn’t take up the majority of our life. It seems like we should have some flexibility for impulsivity, for sickness and joy. And it seems like we should be able to enjoy and take pride in what we devote our time to.
