An Aspiring Man of Leisure
Essay: Considering the Conundrum of Work (Topic: Work)
This an essay written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “work”.
“We need one more volunteer” boomed the MC, ‘Draven Crane’.
“Jack, pick someone to represent section three.”
“I know just who to choose, Draven,” drawled Jack, the ghoul roaming the audience in search of victims. And I already knew, somehow, that Jack was coming for me.
Our friends had invited us to the live Halloween ghost stories show called The Haunted Tavern: A Dark Pop-Up Cocktail Experience. This was one of those shows where middle aged people, such as myself, are served brightly colored mixed vodka drinks and encouraged to “get rowdy.” “Draven Crane”, our host, seemed to be attempting to stoke us, an audience full of GenXers, into a frenzy, encouraging us to relive our 1980’s spring break behavior. Interspersed between the ghost stories, the cast provided more drinks and forcibly chose "volunteers" from the audience to participate in various onstage antics while the audience cheered and downed their alcohol.
As a middle aged man with hair far too long for his age, I had a feeling they'd pick me, and they did.
“I choose, Hawaiian Jesus!” (I was wearing a Tommy Bahama type shirt and my hair was down), the ghoul, Jack, yelled as he escorted me to the stage.
I sighed and resolved myself to play the role they expected. I walked to the stage with my arms outstretched and plastered a benevolent, hopefully Jesus-like, smile on my face as the speakers played godly miracle music. I was joined on the stage by "Toby Keith" (a cowboy, who had walked up to country music) and "Santa Clause" (an old man with a white beard, whose ‘theme’ was a Christmas song). I gave Toby and Santa a derisive look, it was a competition after all, and then grinned back at section three and gave them a thumbs up. They cheered wildly and chugged their drinks. ‘Draven’ was pretending to be some kind of hell-spawn, or maybe Satan himself, so as he walked by me I said, “By the way, Dad likes me better.”
“Well”, he rolled his eyes. “At least I don’t have daddy issues!” he yelled into the microphone.
Draven started on the far end of the stage, with Santa Clause and asked him his name, and what he did for a living. And I wondered, as I usually do, how I would answer the question. What I actually do seems sort of complicated to explain, especially in such a setting. Saying I’m a “software developer” or “writer” doesn’t really quite capture what I “do”. I guess I could cop out and say I’m an “entrepreneur".” But that never feels right either, so when Draven got to me, I decided to just say what I actually wanted for a change:
“I'm Clint. I’m an aspiring man of leisure," I replied.
Draven looked confused. It was the only time during the entire two hour show where the smart-ass MC seemed at a loss for words for (just) a moment, the only time he didn’t have a witty response. So, instead, he just shook his head, slightly derisively, seemed to assume I was out of work and said, “okaaaay then.” He quickly moved on to explain the challenge in front of the three of us. (We had to hold a heavy urn full of “ashes” of the bodies of the departed ghosts straight out with one hand while Rob Zombie’s Dragula blared. Whoever lasted the longest without dropping their arm won. Santa Clause won, but I took pride that I lasted longer than Toby Keith since his arms looked about twice as big as mine.)
At the time, I made the comment about being a man of leisure, flippantly, off the cuff. But as I reflect on it now, I meant it. And that’s what I want to explore in this essay about “work.”
Society
Increasingly, I find myself rebelling against an idea that modern society takes for granted, that one is what one does for work, even when one doesn’t even much like what one does.
We’ve put “work” on some sort of altar and we worship it, so much so, that we identify our very selves by what we do. If you watch the news (and I recommend you don’t), you’ll see that when a reporter interviews a man at the scene of the crime, they’ll include his profession. “Joe Blow, local landscaper, says he saw the assailant clearly before he got into his car…..” As if knowing that Joe was a landscaper has any relevance to his credibility as a witness, as a human. How we earn our money causes us to label ourselves, and it’s right up there with labels such as “republican”, “democrat”, “Christian”, “Hindu” and all the other labels we (probably shouldn’t) absorb into our identities.
Why do we label ourselves as what we do, when the label itself often refers to something that we don’t even like?
Most people I know use the word work to refer to those activities they do to earn a paycheck. It's something we have to do to earn money. Most people hate it, or at least hate some aspect of it. Just listen to the people around you: they complain about their hours, they complain about their commute, they complain that they are “too busy”, they complain, often most vehemently, about their bosses.
But what is one to do? They chuckle as they take another sip of that happy hour beer, appletini, or whiskey, gotta pay the bills somehow, right? “I wish I had time to workout. I wish I had time to take a vacation. I don’t have time for my music anymore,” they lament. They commiserate with each other. This is just how life is, isn't it?
“What do you expect?” Society replies. “Of course, you don’t like work, you’ve all been cursed by God (if your labels also include “Christian” anyway) to spend your days toiling: through painful toil you will eat…all the days of your life.” Ahh, oh well, If I enjoyed it, it wouldn't be called ‘work.’ heh. Heh. <sips whiskey>.
It seems, according to that line of thought, that we all have to suffer under asshole bosses because some idiot ate an apple that he wasn't supposed to eat… to impress a woman. We suffer meetings and commutes because Adam wanted to get laid. If you accept this line of thinking about work, then it’s no wonder that ‘Draven Crane and crew’ had us all drinking vodka shots like teenagers at a rave, trying to forget the desperation of our reality. (“Be careful girl” slurred the middle-aged judge behind us to my wife as she downed another vodka-laden drink in her own attempt to forget her reality, “I don’t want to see you in my court for DUI.” It seemed strange to me that she shared that thought since she was the drunk one and we had taken Uber.)
When we lay it bare on the page, in black and white, it sounds crazy doesn’t it? The belief that one must spend their lives being defined by something that they hate, just to acquire pieces of paper that the world values, once you step out of that insane paradigm, will make one realize, as I have come to lately, that quite a bit of what society programs into us is “insane.” You must unlearn what you have learned.
The audience may have assumed that I was irresponsible, or, at least, weird, when I replied, “I’m an aspiring man of leisure.” But, from my perspective, I was the sane person standing in front of a room full of odd ducks. They all still had some unlearning to do.
Leisure
However, hope exists, because work, in its modern incarnation, can have other meanings. It can refer to a job which many people hate or to creative endeavors which most people love. The word “work” isn’t granular enough to explain these two opposite concepts because, in general, we don’t like doing the former and we mostly love doing the later.
Perhaps the dichotomy becomes more clear if I refer to the version of work that we hate as labor and the version we like as life’s work.
In the context of your life’s work, the word work becomes almost the polar opposite of "this thing I hate but spend most of my life doing to get money."
If you've ever read a novel set in Victorian England, perhaps something like The Picture of Dorian Gray. Or, even if you’ve watched Bridgerton, then you’ve had a glimpse into the way the upper class lived. I’m certainly not condoning the exploitative nature of such a caste-based society but, for the moment, let's look at how they spent their days.
The members of le bon ton as English high society was known, actually looked down upon labor (work in the first sense). If I understand correctly, it was actually considered quite scandalous among “the ton” if a member of the upper class had to resort to actual labor to support themselves. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins delights maliciously as he imagines Eliza “Marrying Freddy and running a flower shop.” The upper class usually tried to solve money problems through marriage and alliances, never labor.
So did these people just sit around lazily doing nothing at all? Of course not. Then, what did they do?
They occupied their time with what we might refer to today as leisure.
But leisure doesn't mean "do nothing."
Leisure means that one has the time and freedom to pursue one's interests; time to pursue, well, pun intended, nobler pursuits.
What pursuits did the men and women of the ton engage in (besides collecting rents from their vassals, of course)? Some wrote novels. Some learned to play music. Some worked with animals. Some studied with artists and practiced oil painting. Some devoted themselves to the study of military strategy or politics. Some became equestrians. Most pursued education. Some excelled in mathematics. Some devoted themselves to learning how the physical world works. Many of our scientific discoveries came from men and women who were part of the leisure class. Precisely because, and this is important to anyone who wants to do good work: leisure gives one time and space to reflect. Time to think. And when you move beyond labor, great work requires great thought. And just like great ideas in typography require white space, great ideas in humans require mind space: time to turn things over mentally. Time and space to ruminate. Time to ponder.
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is remembered for her contributions to the fields of mathematics, algorithms and computing. In fact, she worked together with Charles Babbage to design an “Analytical Engine.” It wasn't built in her lifetime. But, from their plans, in modern times, people have built the Analytical Engine and have proven that the Babbage/Lovelace designs were correct. They actually work. Of course we don’t call them “analytical engines.” Today, we call them computers. The computer revolution could have possibly started a century earlier, if only they had built that prototype! Combine “Analytical Engines” with telegraphs, and England could have enjoyed a sort of steampunk prototypical internet in the 1800s!
What Ada and Charles achieved was remarkable, but they likely didn't consider it labor: They were simply following their obsessions, their interests, because they had the leisure time, the mental space, and the resources to do so.
Obsession
And that’s a key point: as we move up the work continuum from labor to your life’s work, you will find obsession. If you aren’t obsessed, then it’s probably not your life’s work. Leisure draws you to what you want to do. To the things you long to do. To the things you probably can’t easily stop yourself from doing, even if you try.
And the irony is, regarding my previous point about labels, is that labor is something you do. But work, real work, as in your life’s work, is actually something you are. When it’s something you are obsessed with, it does become part of your identity. But it happens organically. Not because society expects it.
So, perhaps it is from this second definition of “work” (involving obsession) that we started to identify with our work. And we somehow kept that practice even when we are forced to do the first, labor kind of work. If you asked Stephen King what he does, who he is, he'd almost assuredly say he was a writer, and he would pursue it, even if he wasn't rich or famous. But your average insurance salesman wouldn't sell insurance, and certainly wouldn’t identify with the practice, if he wasn’t paid to do it. Your average writer would. That is the difference between doing, and being. You aren’t an insurance salesman, but Stephen King is a writer. And he had no choice but to be.
Creation
It is the obsessive work, peoples’ life's work, that changes the world. That’s because the work people are obsessed with, generally involves creation. Artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, mathematicians, even builders of families - they all create.
And what they create, the output of their endeavors, is the real work. Work is a noun, not a verb.
What do we call a writer's books? Works.
What do we call an artist's paintings? Works.
What do we call musical compositions? Works.
We say things like, “The collected works of Oscar Wilde”.
Unlike Victorian England, it’s increasingly possible today, in the 21st century for almost anyone to pursue the second type of work and it is becoming less and less required to pursue the first kind. I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing the need to labor for money. I did that myself for decades, and I still do it. But let’s stop pretending that that’s who we are.
Artists with a day job are at least being honest with themselves and society. Let’s glorify the day job and honor it for what it actually is. It’s what an artist does for money. That’s it. And that’s fine. They are still artists, even if the day job is how they pay the bills.
Today, more than ever, we have the opportunities to truly be ourselves. We can move “up” from our labor to let out the real works that are inside of us. We can let them out and share them with the technology that is now available to all of us.
That’s what the whole “creator economy” craze is all about. That’s what the Soaring Twenties Social Club celebrates: that for the first time in history, it is, with enough, pardon the pun, “work”, possible to reach a point of having enough leisure time, enough space to pursue your real passions. To do your true work. I foresee a day, perhaps still far in the future, (if our leaders don’t blow up the world first) where technology is able to perform nearly all of the labor in the world and humanity will be free to unlock its potential due to the extreme amount of leisure time available to everyone. Imagine if every human were free to pursue their creative obsessions.
Consider what Paul Graham wrote in his essay, You Weren’t Meant To Have a Boss:
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
And that’s my daily quest, to increasingly spend more time on obsessions. To spend more on creative endeavors. To spend more time living the life that humans were designed for. To be a lion in the wild. To escape the zoo.
So I’ll end by saying, “I’m Clint, I’m an aspiring man of leisure.”
Who are you? And what do you do?
Hear, hear, Clint. In keeping with the roots of "leisure", may we all one day allow ourselves, and aspire to, a life of works.