👔✨The Nexialist #0059
The Age of Anti-Ambition | An Economy of Suffering | Rituals of Suffering | 9 to 5 | Office Aesthetics | I left | If You’re So Successful… | Profession ≠ Personality | Levels
Welcome to my cubicle, full of post-its, random postcards, posters and links, The Nexialist
This week I decided to talk about work because the subject is all around us and because I’m doing some work I’m actually enjoying. I have been thinking how since the pandemic started, something started to change inside me. Then since the paralysis hit my face (which is recovering and I can smile already!), I got the chance to reprioritize some things and learn about me, my style of work and most importantly, my style of rest.
Also, as I was listening Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us Podcast, her guest, Ashley C. Ford, author of Hungry Hearts, said something that I had never heard of before: The pandemic had given her time to listen to herself and be more of a Human Being than a Human Doing. I found a few articles and TED-Talks about this term, but it matched some of the content I had lined up for today’s issue. Lucky you, I guess! I hope you enjoy!
👔The Age of Anti-Ambition
I saw this popping up in a few different circles and I couldn’t resist but clicking with such a title. Noreen Malone mixes data, pop culture and qualitative social listening to give us more color and nuance into the complexity of the Great Resignation movement (by the way, the illustrations are so good, by @mariajesuscontreras). I selected a part that made me laugh.
It’s not in just the data where the words “job satisfaction” seem to have become a paradox. It’s also present in the cultural mood about work. Not long ago, a young editor I follow on Instagram posted a response to a question someone posed to her: What’s your dream job? Her reply, a snappy internet-screwball comeback, was that she did not “dream of labor.” I suspect that she is ambitious. I know that she is excellent at understanding the zeitgeist.
It is in the air, this anti-ambition. These days, it’s easy to go viral by appealing to a generally presumed lethargy, especially if you can come up with the kind of languorous, wry aphorisms that have become this generation’s answer to the printer-smashing scene in “Office Space.” (The film was released in 1999, in the middle of another hot labor market, when the unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in 30 years.) “Sex is great, but have you ever quit a job that was ruining your mental health?” went one tweet, which has more than 300,000 likes. Or: “I hope this email doesn’t find you. I hope you’ve escaped, that you’re free.” (168,000 likes.) If the tight labor market is giving low-wage workers a taste of upward mobility, a lot of office workers (or “office,” these days) seem to be thinking about our jobs more like the way many working-class people have forever. As just a job, a paycheck to take care of the bills! Not the sum total of us, not an identity.
Read: The Age of Anti-Ambition - Noreen Malone | The New York Times Magazine
🤖An Economy of Suffering
Thomas Klaffke’s newsletter, Creative Destruction, has been on point since it came out. This week, he analysed Noreen Malone’s piece mentioned above. Thomas brings other sources that show how The Great Resignation is actually more of a global movement, of course, layered with inequality and disparity. The inspiration of the title comes from @americanbaron’s TikTok, which also made me giggle (and question the meaning of life)
Read: An Economy Of Suffering - by Thomas Klaffke
😱Rituals of Suffering
I’ve mentioned Rita von Hunty here before, one of my favorite Brazilian Drag Queens, one who does deathdrops and splits with my brain. The synchronicity is that I watched this video this week, titled Ritual of Suffering, before finding Thomas’ post about An Economy of Suffering. You don’t need to watch it if you don’t speak Portuguese, BUT, since the official subtitles are added to each of her videos, the “translate automatically” button works pretty well for English (95% I would say).
Rita goes from Saw (that superviolent horror movie franchise), to Big Brother (in Brazil people were complaining there was not enough drama in this year’s edition), to São Paulo’s record homeless population in the Americas, to Foucault and Byung-Chul Han, to other contemporary philosophers. Below, I highlight the end of the video. It’s long but I hope you also find it worth it.
Pedro [Rocha de Oliveira]'s explanation, which is terrific, is this: "In order to reach Z, a subject X must perform Y, where Y, in practice, is almost always something unpleasant and unhappy that X would not perform if he hadn't been devoid of Z, which he needs."
And if that seems commonplace to you it's because our imaginations were already engulfed by this suffering culture and the spectacularization of suffering. Any regime that seeks domination of a mass of people, right?
"Alas, life after death… suffer a lot here for God to choose you to go to heaven. Or the meritocracy... There’s no university for everyone. You'll have to stay up all night, you will have to compete with your classmates, you will have to be stressed for the finals. No, there is no food for everyone. Some people will have to die of hunger. There is no jobs for everyone. Some people will have to live in the street." And we share of this culture that since childhood tells us: "life is made of hard choices."
My wish is that we can look at this and try to set ourselves apart from this, trying to cultivate another point of culture, boycotting this idea knowing that culture is part of the superstructure of a society. If we have a culture of enjoyment for suffering, of the spectacularization of suffering, it's because we have an infrastructure that generates and manages psychic sufferings. But not only: material, physical, [suffering] etc.
I leave this video here for you so that you can also think which modalities of enjoyment anchored in the suffering of others are ingrained in you and how you can reprogram yourself in this scenario, and how we can reprogram the scenario.
☕️9 to 5
Recently, Juan and I got tired of browsing through the infinity of Netflix’s collection and decided to go for “an oldie” which none of us had seen: 9 to 5. I had known the song and heard an interview with her in the Dollitics episode of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, but I still hadn’t watched it. The iconic movie from 1980 starred Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda (so my little gay heart felt cuddled to watch this) and criticized many problems from the office jobs of that time: sexism, workplace harassment, a**hole bosses, inflexibility, inequality… Isn’t it uncanny that we are still talking about the same issues, more than 40 years later? I could not stop thinking about it after watching the film. I was going to call it timeless, but I hope in the future we can laugh at it.
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely gettin' by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me
🖇Office Aesthetics
Just an excuse to add an office video that came to mind with a fun song. A bit weird to see such a cheerful and diverse cast in this environment, but I guess that was the purpose.
👋I left
FKA Twigs latest mixtape, Caprisongs, got me hooked as soon I heard it. I remember rewinding this song to make sure I heard the lyrics correctly. Well, turns out it is quite accurate with the zeitgeist.
I had a good job and I left
I left because I thought it was right
Left right left right
Which way to go
…
Listen: FKA Twigs - Caprisongs
🧗If You’re So Successful…
This article by Laura Epsom has been in waiting for weeks in my “drawer” and now it feels like the perfect opportunity to share it with you: If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?
Summary: In the old days, if you were a white-collar worker, the deal was that you worked as hard as you could at the start of your career to earn the right to be rewarded later on, with security of tenure and a series of increasingly senior positions. This is no longer true. Today, many senior leaders work longer and harder than ever. At the heart of it is insecurity, and indeed, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers.” Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet are driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. If this sounds familiar, you should try to work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to — but do it consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.
Read: If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? - Laura Empson - HBR
🫀Profession ≠ Personality
This article by Arthur C. Brooks is so necessary. Another one I was saving for this moment: A Profession Is Not a Personality. Take a look at the conclusion:
Maybe challenging your own self-objectification makes you feel uneasy. Honestly, it freaks me out. The reason is simple: We all want to stand out in some way, and working harder than others and being better at our jobs seems a straightforward way to do so. This is a normal human drive, but it can nonetheless lead to destructive ends. Many of my students have confessed to me that they would rather be special than happy, and I have often felt this way as well.
The great irony is that by trying to be special, we end up reducing ourselves to a single quality, and turning ourselves into cogs in a machine of our own making. In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” He noted that in the famous Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love not with himself, but with the image of himself. And so it is when we professionally self-objectify: Our work is our medium, and it becomes our message. We learn to love the image of our successful selves, not ourselves as we truly are in life.
Don’t make this mistake. You are not your job, and I am not mine. Take your eyes off the distorted reflection, and have the courage to experience your full life and true self.
Read: A Profession Is Not a Personality - Arthur C. Brooks | The Atlantic
🏔Levels
Thinking about office aesthetics Avicii’s video came to mind. I was laughing watching it, but also wondering about the symbology of it. I was also shocked to learn it’s more than 10 years old already😱
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