Being Happy vs. Being Successful
Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldnât it?
Maybeâbut maybe not. It might well be the story of someone whose never-ending quest for more and more success leaves them perpetually unsatisfied and incapable of happiness.
Hmm. I’d really and truly love to read a book called The Relentless Pursuit of Booze. I’m reading a history of absinthe at the moment which is frustratingly boring and humourless. I mean, how can you fuck that up?
But that aside, I agree with the thrust of this Atlantic article about “success addicts.” And thanks to reader Graeme for sending it in. It offers more than a glimpse into the psychology of workaholism. Dopamine hits aside, what they’re really seeking is distinction, and damn everything else.
The author of the piece confesses:
I once found myself confessing to a close friend, “I would prefer to be special than happy.” He asked why. “Anyone can do the things it takes to be happyâgoing on vacation with family, relaxing with friends ⌠but not everyone can accomplish great things.” My friend scoffed at this, but I started asking other people in my circles and found that I wasnât unusual. Many of them had made the success addictâs choice of specialness over happiness. They (and sometimes I) would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally it would be time to rest. But, of course, that day never seemed to arrive.
To this, I say: you’re already special, don’t worry about it. And if you really want to strive for something, it’s important that you define your own form of success instead of comparing yourself unimaginatively to others and thinking in terms of money or power. If nothing else, you’ll be better prepared should you ever need to make quickfire genie wishes.
Look for a quieter, private sort of success that won’t damage you or the people around you or the world, one that won’t violently slurp up resources like a tornado.
And remember this: the real horror of the pursuit of the conventional idea of success would be to actually achieve it. Nobody likes the dirt bags at the top. Imagine living at the top of the High Rise tower. I mean, what a loser. Imagine having a framed photograph of yourself shaking hands with Donald Trump. Even with politics aside, that’s really gross.
David Graeber: 1961-2020
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.
Where Millions of Dreams are Crammed Together
From Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi:
Now that it is clear we can work anywhere, why would you live in a dirty, expensive city?
But, of course, people donât come to cities for jobs alone; people come to places such as New York and London to be around other people. They come for the addictive energy that you get only in places where millions of dreams are crammed together. And many of us â misfits and minorities â stay in cities because they are the only places we feel we can be ourselves.
I must admit to similar thoughts. I love cities and I want to continue to live in one. I don’t like the spooky suburbs and the countryside, though I confess to a fondness for barn owls, just isn’t my bag. Efficient, well-run cities (high-density living) are probably the only way to accommodate our blossoming population numbers and the most important things in the world to me are culture and a sense that intelligent, kind, cosmopolitan people are nearby.
I have been wondering what to do, however, if culture never comes back. COVID-19 containment measures shutting everything down and stopping non-streamable cultural production combined with high rents pushing creative people out presents a problem. If I can’t go to art shows or small cinemas or jazz nights or coming-out parties or book launches, what’s the point of paying such a high rent?
What’s the point of lining our lungs with carcinogenic fumes if we don’t also get the advantages of being able to hobnob with other culture vultures or go for a midnight urban stroll or see a fringe play or visit a comedy club or see a big dinosaur skeleton in a Victorian public building or eat kimchi?
Dare I ask: is it time to escape the city and just get a tiny home and be done with rent forever?
I don’t think that time has come yet. I’m holding out hope that true city life will come back. Mahdawi’s column offers a ray of hope at least. If the super-rich would only bugger off (shite flight?) with their empty cashbox apartments and their obsessive condo-building and their tacky-ass musicals and their Silicon Valley-assisted grooming of a precariat, I think we natural city slickers would all be better off. Back, moneyed devil! Get ye back to yon superyacht!
I have a new book out. The Good Life for Wage Slaves. Available now in deluxe paperback and ebook.
Multimillion-Pound Sandwich Chain Needs Your Help!
This from Hettie O’Brien today is excellent. Absolutely first-rate. She rightly draws the connection between a right-wing message that we “get back to work” in city centre office blocks and the money that can be extracted from commuters and businesses alike:
The service economy in financialised city centres depends on the consumption patterns of office workers: commuting every day involves not just buying a sandwich or a coffee from Pret, but helping to prop up an entire system.
and
The people who seem most concerned about going back to work arenât workers, or managers, but rentiers â a category that applies to many retiree readers of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, a demographic that is likely to have paid off mortgages, receives generous pensions and contains a higher proportion of private landlords, and to the rentiers.
The quotes she pulls from those right-wing media outlets are quick shocking too. Read it up.
When newspapers shriek that workers must return to the office, despite the reality that many donât want to, theyâre voicing what the sociologist Luc Boltanski called a âsystem of confirmationâ â an utterance that is neither truth nor fact, but rather a way of reinforcing the status quo. But nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 62. Hole.
Escape Towers is on the top floor of a very old building, and water drips into our spare room whenever there’s serious rain. We reported the problem to the landlord some time ago, but no repairs were forthcoming. Since it was only our spare room and wasn’t a constant problem, we didn’t put any pressure on him to get it fixed. Bohemia!
Read the rest of this entry »
Cube City
Reader Antonia draws our attention to this news item in the Guardian:
Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube.
Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work that he is converting 20 newly constructed office buildings in east London into 2,000 of the individual cube offices.
Urgh.
Still, as I hinted before, three-metre by three-metre is a far bigger cube than I ever had when I worked in an office. I started out with a desk that was perhaps 1.5m wide; I would not have been able to touch the shoulder of a co-worker but we would have been able to touch fingertips with ease. Management then moved us to a tighter working area in which the desktop was a meter wide at most (perhaps 85cm) and we would have been able to touch each other’s shoulders with ease. So in a way, Cube City would have been preferable to Concrete Island (the name I give to my old workplace in The Good Life for Wage Slaves).
For all the ingenuity and spacial generosity of Xu Weiping’s human battery farm, the thought remains: why bother? Why go to the effort to put shoes on and squelch yourself onto a packed Tube carriage to reach a place in the isolated docklands that boasts such fabulous features as “a kettle, fridge, microwave, videoscreen and fold-down bed as well as a chair and desk.” I mean, just stay at home. Got distracting kids or dogs or something? Even some really swanky noise-cancelling headphones won’t set you back as much as cube tenancy and a commuter pass.
I’m writing this from our dining table in case you’re wondering. I’m wearing slippers. Freak Zone plays quietly on the radio while my partner draws in pencils on her ÂŁ20 LED drawing board. It’s lovely.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is out now in deluxe paperback format and e-book.
UBI Improves Everything
New Scientist (one of the namesakes of New Escapologist!) reports that:
the world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment.
That is can improve mental wellbeing should almost be a foregone conclusion, though obviously these things need to be tested (which is what has just happened in Finland) if we ever want to roll it out and base a society on it. It shouldn’t seem far removed from reality that some forms of depression and anxiety can be salved by having an economic safety net; that not being able to sell enough units or to clock enough hours could result in destitution.
What is interesting is how employment rates slightly improve under conditions of UBI. It demonstrates the hunch that generous-minded (rather than conservative) people have that humans still want to do things once their basic needs are met. No longer being economically bullied into work doesn’t necessarily lead to stagnancy.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is out now in deluxe paperback format and e-book.
The Most Toys
I found myself thinking today about the saying, “he who dies with the most toys wins.”
It can’t ever have been anything other than a joke, can it? That the word is “toys” rather than “treasures” suggests a wry sentiment.
Imagine believing in it at face value though. To die with the most toys! The most junk. To finish one’s life with the largest possible number of complicated material things with moving parts that had to be made under duress by other people using finite materials torn from the living Earth.
To die in a state in which your relatives will need to spend months or longer poring over it all, assessing each “toy” and arguing over it all, when they could be living their lives.
And then I remembered that I’ve written about all this before, albeit without quoting “the most toys.” As you were.
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What is Freedom Today?
The highest form of freedom is love. Here, I’m a pathetic old romantic.
What is freedom today? Or more specifically: what was freedom in 2014?
Here’s professional cleverclogs Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek answer to the question.
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A Cubier Cube
Against all odds, working from home [has been] more successful than anyone would have predicted, with many people reporting their productivity [levels] increased during the first two months of lockdown.
“Against all odds” indeed. Bloody hell. As if the mandatory attendance of an open-plan Hell is the only conceivable way of getting things done on the road to fulfillment and is not, as the case may be, its single biggest obstruction.
The article is admirably about the quest for other ways of working though, and how offices might be redesigned in the future to be happier and more pleasant places.
It goes into the story of Bob Probst, whom I mentioned in Escape Everything! as the de-facto inventor of the office cubicle. He invented it as modular “systems furniture” and now sees the classic “veal fattening pen” as an abuse of his system.
What I wanted to mention though, is how the photograph used to illustrate the piece (a) looks sort-of like a miniature rather than a real place, or is that my imagination?; and (b) looks oddly preferable to the offices I have known even though it’s clearly supposed to illustrate the worst excesses of dystopian workplace architecture.
Weirdly, what I like about it are those privacy dividers (splash boards?) between work spaces: actual cubicle walls. We didn’t have those in our office, so we just had to dwell in each other’s personal head space all day, trying not to read each other’s minds and unable to pick our noses. It was exhausting. Yes, I might have actually preferred a cubier cube to the one I had. Weird!
Obviously, I’d rather be at home though. Or in a library. Or on a beach. Or just impaled on a spike.
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