A day off from work is a day of life.
Sergei Dovlatov
Is there a worse way to spend life than staying in the same place for forty-five to fifty years, all the good years of your life, to be compensated with enough wages not to go crazy but to still continuously worry about bills and rent all towards an end goal of receiving gift vouchers for a place you don’t like (or, insert other “gold watch” symbol here) alongside a pension which gets you nowhere? Well, yes. You could work somewhere which gives you asbestosis and you die of lung cancer before reaching fifty. Or, what about the classic death by a thousand cuts induced by working alongside numbskulls where the only culture discussed is what was binge-watched on Netflix over the precious, union fought-for, weekend while also hearing the same people bash unions. There’s plenty of places you can go and spend your life in the continuation of crumbling your mind to docile servitude which begun in school and took centre-stage in the family. And what do all of these sacrifices to jobs have in common? A removal of freedom. You can be many things in a job, but you’re not free. And this results not in passivity but what I think is a more common problem than not: people hate their jobs. By embracing hatred for their job they at least feel something, which continues on into sniping and snapping at their fellow workers where an everyday maelstrom of stress and disappointment leads to the disintegration of many a person’s dreams. Perhaps this is why so many people gravitate to writing - large patches of daily life are given up for someone else. In writing we can be free.
This is not an attack on work. For the most part, the difference between work and a job is work is voluntarily done while a job is done for economic necessity. I’ve been writing for over a decade and a half. If I was writing to eat, I would’ve died of malnutrition a long time ago. Hard work on something you love doing, coupled with something which contributes to the world, is a cure to the multitude annoyances of life. As Hemingway wrote in A Movable Feast, “Work could cure almost anything, I believed then and I believe now.” That piece of wisdom has proved invaluable through the years: distilling something inviolable into a sentence was Hemingway’s gift for having worked so hard on his writing.
Some things are unavoidable whether for a short or long time, and a job for those without safety nets will be ever thus. And in many ways, despite so many misgivings, one should be grateful for any job at all in contrast to their work giving numerous sanity-saving benefits albeit none that are financially recuperable (see previous mention of malnutrition). With that in place, it would be useful now to look at the work to be done to save a mind from crumbling into despair/boredom/anger/abuse while being in jobs which are robbing of time and sensibilities if you’re of the disposition to make progress under your own steam which, I believe, most people are whether they readily admit it or not. In Hinduism and Buddhism we find the Niyamas: positive duties or observances which are designed to give you a better/more balanced life. For those who write and have jobs, we need something similar. Below I present the Fuck Offs: things you need to fuck off so you writing doesn’t turn into another job.
TV. It’s not so much that TV is bad, or that it’s evil, or designed to rob you of life (although, The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy were more right than wrong) but it will rob you of time. It was no surprise when Reed Hastings (co-founder of Netflix) said that Netflix’s biggest competitor was sleep. When your time has been swamped down with things you’d rather not be doing, is it best to come home and give your time over to images you didn’t create, had no original call for, and can, at best, merely pacify your dreams and anger? Boomers were said to be the TV generation but since its introduction every generation is now the TV generation whether that viewing is done in front of a multi-inch TV screen, or the computer screen, or the phone - it’s all the same nonsense regardless of the occasional outlier of clear thought, expression and heart (Our Friends In The North and Breaking Bad are the only two ones that come to mind). The best way to think of TV is to think of it as alcohol (insert own drug of choice here): a beer or two is pleasant and, certainly, pleasantly nullifying but its power is destructive if it becomes a daily binge-fest and something engaged for four hours a day. For TV, I could have easily said the phone or the internet but today TV is seen as something as sophisticated as being in a parlour with conversation before a fire and the sounds of a piano being played. It’s not. Mostly, it’s fucking shit.
Negative Talk. Many, many people are addicted to having unhappy lives. Well, each to their own. But when their talk impedes into your life you have to, with grace and tact, tell them to fuck off. Sure, sometimes you have a bad day, a bad week, a bad fucking year, but if you know someone who’s always complaining, always asking why you’re writing, says that what you’re doing with your time is a waste - well, the middle finger always helped Johnny Cash and it’ll help you.
Negative Self-Talk. While you’ve got that middle finger raised, keep it there for your own destructive thoughts too. By it’s nature, this is a subjective lesson so do what’s good for you. For this writer, when negative self-talk comes in there is no reasoning with it. There’s no bargaining with it. There’s no niceness with it. You do one thing, and one thing only: tell it to get tae fuck! Anything less is to let it slip in through the backdoor like a shady lover you can’t quit.
Being Good Over Being Yourself. In the world of the job if you’re good at what you do you will not progress. The myth is the opposite: be really good at your job and you’ll progress. The problem is though, while you’re being good at your job your boss is extremely comfortable to keep you in that position where the years will pass and other people will get those positions you have eyed for so long. In writing this happens too. You can be a very serviceable writer, one who knows how to keep the reader’s attention, who can place characters (worn and true) through one obstacle then another and another. You can write a good cover letter, a synopsis which crackles (although, one familiar enough) and still not get picked up/published/sold. I believe this is due to the writer while being good is not being themselves. The writers who publish book after book, who have success (readers, praise or monetarily) tend to produce work which has their style all over it. In terms of being heard it is the singer not the song. Fuck good over being true.
Writing, like so many good things in life, is battled through into daily life over what needs to be done, what has to be done and what you would like to do. It is a battle with no end, with yourself and others (mostly it’s with yourself in the early stages and seemingly with life later on). Figuring out what you need to cut out, and cutting it out on a regular basis, you can win and supply yourself with an honest day of enriching work.
If you like what you’ve read, you can support me by going here. Feel free to leave comments, reading of my other posts is highly encouraged, sharing is too, and you can always reach me here. May you all have a creative and inspiring week.
All the best,
All the time,
Chris