Work Sucks, I Know

Say it ain't so, I will not go

When I was sixteen, I got my first-ever job at a place called the Cheese Haus. Tucked into a strip mall designed to look like an old-timey Main Street, the Cheese Haus was run by two disgruntled but kindly European lesbians who had somehow found themselves on the wrong side of the Atlantic, and who survived their fate by selling Emmental and Gruyere alongside fancy jams and crackers. The environment was a vibe pastiche: candles on the counters; the Hope Floats soundtrack playing on repeat; and a whole army of gothy cheese-slingers that the two lesbians had found in the cracks of Salt Lake society, all of whom looked like they would be more comfortable in an Edward Gorey storybook—or selling cheese in hell.   

I should have been comfortable here: I was a fan of Hope Floats; I liked stinky cheeses; and I was charmed—if intimidated—by practitioners of the Dark Arts. But I wasn't comfortable. Every day I drove to work, I engaged in a fantasy: Passing through an intersection, I would be T-boned by someone who, for their own personal reasons, had run the red light. The accident would not be fatal, or even terrible, but it would send me to the hospital, where I would receive friends and balloons and well-wishes. I imagined calling the Cheese Haus on a phone the nurse handed to me. I would tell them I could not make it in tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, and they would coo and tell me that they understood. It was not my fault I'd been hit by a reckless driver. It was not my fault at all. I would be free of work, and also blameless. This, to me, was heaven.

I was never T-boned by my dream car. Instead, I have worked continuously since the day I got that job at the Cheese Haus, and have hated every minute of it. It's not that I'm particularly lazy—although I love a dash of sloth. And I'm not half-assed. Rest assured that—car crash fantasy unrealized—I will always use my entire ass to do the best job I can do, whether I am sleeving Yellow Pages directories in plastic and delivering them to your door or acting as an untrained national spokesperson for a presidential candidate, both of which I have done, and both with the same degree of neurotic perfectionism. It's more—as a tote bag I saw once said—that work is humiliating. It is humiliating to sell your labor, and more humiliating what you are expected to sell it for. 

I am, of course, part of a class bracket that experiences much less humiliation than others—a person who, due to no talent or effort on my part, has inherited a vast panoply of white collar work options, which makes me both guilty and grateful. Nevertheless, I spent four hours of my recent time ghost writing a blog written by a man who reviews different ways companies use super fun things like quizzes and personality tests and games to collect data on their customers. The man tells me the tone should be peppy, excited—because this is exciting stuff. So I write a peppy, excited post about a coffee company who excels at collecting data in a post-cookies landscape, and with each word I write, I die a little. 

I am supposed to feel productive when I am finished with this task. I am supposed to feel grateful to have been given the opportunity. I am supposed to feel, like the sales people I am writing about, as if I am disrupting something, revolutionizing something. I am supposed to feel absolutely critical to the continued spinning of our collective planet. But I don't. I feel, instead, a strong desire to take a shower. I wish, in these moments, for some Gen X camaraderie—for an Empire-Records-meets-Reality-Bites-meets-Mall-Rats certainty that this is all a sick joke. On my breaks, I watch Kurt Cobain do interviews. I watch him drag on his cigarette and say that he will never sell out to big record companies. I watch him believe in the purity of music and I want to stretch my hand back through time and drag on his cigarette, too—inhale some of his anger and confidence. Instead, I am cursed with all the trappings of an aging millennial. We know the world is toast. We see the yawning wealth gap. But we are by and large chipper, ready to work. We will walk your dogs and make your coffees and change the world in our spare time, through volunteerism.

For fun, here are a few humiliating jobs I have done.

• For several months during my pregnancy, I alternate between throwing up seven times a day and working for the early-2010s chat service, ChaCha. This is in the sweet spot before smartphones exist but laptops are ascendant, allowing students who are failing math to text me test questions about binomials and other students to text me questions about different sex positions—all of which I answer from the comfort of my couch. I Google the answers to these questions as fast as I can—dipping, at times, into my own stores of experience—because I am only paid 4 cents an answer. Sometimes I tell them that a Reverse Cowgirl is a Three-Legged Puppy, because I have a baby on the way and I need the four cents more than they need accuracy.  

• After breaking off an engagement with the love of my college life, I land the only job I can find at a local "experience-based restaurant" run by the owner of the Utah Jazz. The restaurant is called The Mayan, and is designed to look like a giant tropical treehouse (but totally not the Rainforest Cafe, totally separate, no copycatting). There are animatronic birds everywhere and people dressed in toucan suits who make balloon animals for patrons and a giant swimming pool with cliffs surrounding it, and every half hour the whole restaurant rumbles to life with the Voice of the Forest, who tells the history of the Mayan people to a crowd of white Utah Mormons while cliff jumpers execute gainers and reverse somersault pikes into the waters below. At the orientation for the job, we are forced to watch a movie called Fishing Fer Fun (actual spelling), about how workers at the Pike's Place fish market injected joy and revenue into the failing company through song. The managers haul out hula hoops and ask us to sing the Mayan motto (there is a motto) while hooping. This is called team building. I quit the gig when our mascot, Toucy the Toucan, takes her head off to tell me she recognizes me from high school.

To be fair, I've had some good jobs, too. Jobs that felt collaborative and actually meaningful, jobs where I was in charge of coming up with the counselor prank at a ranch where we taught teens to build straw bale houses and do community service; jobs where I created campaigns to stop tar sands mines or corporate malfeasance and won; jobs where I drove a giant art car around the country and spoke to crowds of people about getting money out of politics; jobs where I reported on things that interested me and got paid for it. So it's not exactly that all work is humiliating. It's more that—on Planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 2022—you have to work or die. 

This is particularly bad news for me, since my grief about work is not that it's humiliating or exploitative or endless—though it is—but that I wake up, most days, with depression so complete and total that often I can't work at all. Mostly it is that—every time I look for a job or land a job—I am terrified that one day or week or month or entire year in the future, the Nothing will come for me, and I will be its thrall, and there will be no imaginable way to work, but I will have to do it anyway, lessening the quality of my work and the punctuality of it and the originality of it and, eventually, the it of it at all. I will fail to work and I will be fired. I will lose the ability to make money, which is the ability to take care of myself.

Over the years, this pattern has led to a dread of work that is so fundamental that it feels like an Iron Truth. Work is hell. Work is a trap. But it is also an inevitability.

Even with my 16-year-old car crash fantasies, I didn't think that my biggest issue as an adult would be about work. I thought I would fall apart in some more fanciful way: losing my mind and becoming an outsider artist who makes giant tin-foil sculptures of my naked body; losing my mind and marrying an eccentric old woman who wants only one thing from me, which is to reorganize her library of Classics. I did not think I would be awake at 40, a panic attack just getting fizzing, scrolling through Craigslist temp jobs, convincing myself that—despite having a modicum of talent and skill—I was not fit to apply even for the dog walking gig, or the nude model opportunity, or the extra-in-a-diuretic-commercial job. I didn't think my most meaningful relationship would be with my bank account, the dollars and cents of it all, or that to fill the account I would do things like text teenagers the definition of various sex positions. I didn't think that I would live with a daily sense that I was capable of doing interesting or important things alongside an equally ferocious daily sense that I was incapable of doing anything, cuing regularly and unbearable cascades of shame. I didn't think that I wouldn't be able to trust my body enough to do the one thing everyone has to do to live, and I didn’t realize that this would affect how I trusted my mind, too: how I would become, over time, scared of doing anything at all.

I took comfort in a few things: first, a psychedelic support group in which everyone, to a person, did drugs and then quit their jobs, making me feel with increasing certainty that the Great Truth of the Universe had no room for capitalism. Second, in Reddit's anti-work thread, which was full of people who—after multiple financial crashes and years of mounting student debt and an entire global pandemic—were encouraging everyone to fuck off and quit the grind. Quit into what? I wondered as I scrolled, but took heart anyway. But the thing that gave me the most comfort was far and away Johanna Hedva's essay, Sick Woman Theory, which discusses chronic illness and capitalist work with a clarity and critique that I have found nowhere else. Hedva, a chronically ill person herself, spends the first part of the essay addressing the costs of being mentally or physically ill: the practical costs of medication and doctor's visits; the very real and constant threat (or reality) of unemployment; the loneliness of the sickbed; the inability to join the protests that critique the conditions that make sickness so unbearable. But at the end, she shifts to speak of illness as an opportunity. Illness, she seems to suggest, is a way of seeing the world and a feminized way of resisting. The sick person is forced to see that the world is not organized around meaning or care, and are often forced by their selfsame sickness to leave the workforce—to subtract themselves from the logic and machinery of capitalism. And that—despite feeling precarious and terrifying and lonesome and disappointing and painful and shitty—is also a superpower, or hex:     

"Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt."

The solution, for Hedva, is not to make sick people well. It is to recognize that all of us are sick, or could be. That we are all precarious, or about to be. The possibility is that we could organize work around this fact, around the practice of caring for our own and other's bodies. This is the opposite of exploitation—a work I could believe in, a work I could be sick inside of and still survive. I'm not sure what this sort of work looks like, but I take comfort in the fact that people are making it, little by little, everywhere, with every sick day, every strike, every slowdown and quiet quit, every time we hold the body above money and allow it to perform, or not perform, as it wishes.