How We Spend Our Lives

Annie Dillard | Roxane Gay Reflects | Fast Food Industry Lying | Factoids | Elsewhere

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

| Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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Roxane Gay Reflects

Roxane Gay is stepping down after four years of writing the Work Friend column at the New York Times. She wrote a farewell piece that tries to mirror what her readers shared with her over the years, a mix of wanting and fretting:

To work, for so many of us, is to want, want, want. To want to be happy at work. To feel useful and respected. To grow professionally and fulfill your ambitions. To be recognized as leaders. To be able to share what you believe with the people you’re around for eight or more hours a day. To be loyal and hope your employers will reciprocate. To be compensated fairly. To take time off to recharge and enjoy the fruits of your labor. To conquer the world. To do a good enough job and coast through middle age to retirement.

You worry it’s too late to pursue your passions or make a drastic career change. You have found your dream job and hope you can stay in your position for the rest of your working life if only you could get rid of one terrible colleague. You want a job that is easy and mindless so you can leave it in the office at the end of the day, or you want work that is meaningful and all-encompassing.

I am not an idealist or much of an optimist, but being your Work Friend pushed me in that direction. I want, too. I want a world where we can all live our best professional lives. I want everyone to make a living wage and have excellent health care and the means to retire at a reasonable age. I want all of us to want this very simple thing for one another.

And, frankly, a fulfilling and equitable professional life should not be the stuff of utopia. This should be our reality. It is astonishing to see how many people are so deeply unhappy at work, so trapped by circumstances beyond their control, so vulnerable to toxic workplaces and toxic cultural expectations around work. As I read your letters I mostly thought: “It shouldn’t be this way. It shouldn’t be this hard.”

We shouldn’t have to suffer or work several jobs or tolerate intolerable conditions just to eke out a living, but a great many of us do just that. We feel trapped and helpless and sometimes desperate. We tolerate the intolerable because there is no choice. We ask questions for which we already know the answers because change is terrifying and we can’t really afford to risk the loss of income when rent is due and health insurance is tied to employment and someday we will have to stop working and will still have financial obligations.

I was mindful of these realities as I answered your Work Friend questions. Still, in my heart of hearts, I always wanted to tell you to quit your job. Negotiate for the salary you deserve. Stand up for yourself. Challenge authority. Tell your rude co-worker to shut up. Report your boss to everyone and anyone who will listen. Consult a lawyer. Did I mention quit your job? Go back to graduate school. Leave some deodorant and mouthwash on your smelly co-worker’s desk. Send that angry email to your undermining colleague. Call out your boss when he makes a wildly inappropriate comment. No, your boss should not force you to work out of her kitchen. Mind your own business about your colleague’s weird hobby. Mind your own business, in general. Blow the damn whistle on your employer’s cutting corners and putting people’s lives in danger. Tell the irresponsible dog owner to learn how to properly care for the dog. No, you don’t owe your employer anything beyond doing your job well in exchange for compensation. No, your company is not your family. No, the job will never, ever love you.

Just wonderful.

Gay captures the way that work is a hyperobject, something too large to be apprehended all at once, a complexity of personal, interpersonal, and impersonal forces, trends, and threads, where pulling any single one radiates outward, contorting the whole.

We are pinioned by work, even if we are one of the lucky ones who thrive and grow through working. Work always seems to take more than it gives, which both inescapable economics and a Manichean struggle of light versus the darkness. Gay captures all of that, and more.

She will be missed.

I owe the Annie Dillard quote above to this farewell column, as well.

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Fast Food Industry Lying

In How the fast-food industry uses deceptive employment numbers, Michael Hiltzik lays out how fast food lobbyists and right-wing institutions are intentionally misleading about minimum wage increases in California leading to fast food jobs losses. The seasonally adjusted and Y-to-Y numbers show the opposite is true.

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Factoids

A Fungus

As many as 95 percent of the planet’s fungal species have yet to be described, according to a 2023 report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. | Veronique Greenwood

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Construction and Housing

[The U.S. construction] worker shortages are bound to get worse. The median age of a construction worker is 42, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | Francesca Mari

While nearly every other industry has become more productive since 1968, productivity in home-building — the amount of work done by one worker in one hour, essentially — has declined by half. | Francesca Mari

The United Nations estimates 96,000 affordable units should be built a day to house the three billion people who will need them by 2030. | Philip Oldfield

We need to move to factory-made housing, ASAP.

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European Precarity

The EU is a wealthy bloc but even in the richest countries, one fifth of the population are precarious and in the poorest countries the share is as a high as a third. | Adam Tooze, citing the Financial Times

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Elsewhere

Word of the Day: Quiet Vacationing | Stowe Boyd

Because taking explicit time off makes you look less hard-working.

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Herbert Lui on The Note-Taking Bullshit Industrial Complex | Stowe Boyd

Lui debunks the purveyors of note-taking courses and a lot of other bullshit about note-taking.

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