I Want a Different Relationship With Work

I’m listening to the latest Ezra Klein podcast right now. The interview is with James Suzman and it involves a deep look at why in an era of such surplus we work so much. I also want to be clear that this surplus does not mean that everyone has what they need. It does mean that our problems are related much more to distribution than to scarcity.
I grew up with a dad who was a work-for-someone-else-a-holic. He wasn’t a busy body around the house always tinkering with something and had to keep on doing projects. But if there was work he could do for his employer (Williams College) or his academic reputation (Economics) that came first. Travel, reviewing papers, meeting with students. My brother and I spent a lot of our weekends playing in a weird cement tunnel about 200 feet from Fernald House while my dad worked away on whatever Economics professors work away on. You ask my dad what the most important thing to him in life is and he’ll say his kids. No pause, no stumble. And I think that’s true. He’s a great dad and a great grandfather. But I’m finding that especially in the grandparent department, the love from men, although earnest, is dull and hard to observe. A grandmother loves children—she can attend to those children, converse with the children, engage with the children, deescalate during a mood with the children. The grandfathers in my life, you love them, they love your kids, but their love primarily involves wanting them around and then continuing to attend to their phones, their papers, their devices, their grown up children. (I’m thinking that my experience is not 100% unique, but I recognize there are huge exceptions to this rule).

I can already feel myself slipping the same way into an abstract love for family and things not work. I’m sure my wife can too. You grade me on a curve I’m more involved with the care of my children than my father was with his. But that’s a hell of a curve. My wife doesn’t make a secret to me or to anyone who will listen that she feels like a single parent much of the time. I have a job that I work on weekends, I own a company that operates exclusively on nights and weekends. All I need to do is find a tunnel near MPR for Sadie and Naomi to play in and I’ve completed the cycle. I live in a world where I feel hesitant to ask to hold somebody else’s baby in a way that I don’t see from my women neighbors. I also think almost immediately about turning anything I love into a money making venture. To some extent that is why this missive right here is on a blog as opposed to a massive, annoying facebook post. That means that if I play ping pong I think about hosting a ping pong night at a bar. If I enjoy basketball I think about producing a podcast with people who actually know about the sport to talk. This might seem like complete dumb pointless ambition, but basically my career has been monetizing what I love, I play bass in a hip-hop band, I talk on the radio, I own a trivia company. But we don’t monetize our kids for the most part, and that’s a wonderful thing. I turn my eye at the blogs that feel like they do monetize their kids existence. But if it’s not monetized I look away, I schedule over it, I hold it a lower priority.

But there’s a status quo upheaval in process right now and I want to be a part of it. COVID taught me a different relationship with work. The presidency of Trump taught me a different relationship government. The unearthing of police murders being covered up taught me a different relationship with white supremacy and the professionalization of white supremacy. I use the word taught there because I don’t believe I’ve learned it, digested it and know it. I know my previous relationship with work was wrong. I know my Dad’s was wrong. I know the government is corrupt and faulty to a degree I wasn’t ready to confront. Every stone unturned in the history of policing in this country makes the official story about a death like Sandra Bland’s completely unbelievable. I am reading The New Jim Crow right now and it is pushing my brain to confront a level of opportunistic weaponization of white supremacy in my lifetime that I had not faced before. After reading the lengthy foreword I read about 2/3 of the first chapter, tried to fall asleep and when my youngest started screaming at the top of her lungs in my sleep I imagined that her body was discovering the trauma it carried. It’s the only pain I can imagine eliciting the howls I heard. I think spending your life throwing yourself into the work at the cost of changing your relationship with family, with government, with white supremacy. . .it’s not a defensible position. This is not a time to pinch your nose and take the paycheck. This is not a time to wave off family engagements in order to be fully present at work. This is not a time to hope that someone else is thinking about how to end white supremacy. I want to recalibrate what is essential to me in life, I want to find a more ambitious path for how I live my life. Work is so central to my life that I feel like it starts there, I want a different relationship with work.