Things Aren't What They Seem
Things aren't what they seem
John Divola, from the series Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996-1998, h/t Roberto Greco on Are.na
At the beginning of May in 2025, I finally officially registered as unemployed. It had been basically impossible for me to sustain myself and it continues to be, at least until I receive unemployment benefits. I’m probably one of these strange cases, I work part-time but don’t make nearly enough. After one too many crises in the last half year and months of being incredibly paralyzed, I understood I had to do something different.
When I saw a former colleague again recently, I complained about all the hoops I was made to jump through and the volume of documents I needed to assemble and stay on top off. ‘It could be worse’ was the response, spoken dismissively. He tried to brute-force a weird form of gratitude from me for being spared a hellish hypothetical — and with that also successfully ended the conversation then and there. Fair enough, certain bonds can’t sustain complaints. They break under the featherweight of an honest response to the question ‘How are you?’. Maybe it’s a touchy subject for him.
I know so many who have had gnarly experiences with the regional employment center and the unemployment insurance fund. In fact, I don’t know of a single person who’s had a positive experience with either of these institutions. When I was told these overwhelmingly negative stories, sometimes, as an aside, people would say they understood that the unemployment benefits had to accrue only to those truly deserving, that they, too, believed there were freeloaders and lazy people out there who sought to scam the rest of us. I grew up with various welfare institutions being a relevant and constant presence, so purely based on personal experience this idea that there is a class of people undeserving of a life with dignity based on how unproductive and ill-adjusted they allegedly are is nothing new. Lately it’s been making me especially sad though. I’d like to explain.
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In anti-therapy and many other essays featured in the K-Punk anthology, Mark Fisher writes about the ideology of negative solidarity, coined so by Alex Williams, and the race to the bottom it puts and keeps in motion. He explains, “If others are perceived to be in receipt of resources or benefits that they ‘haven’t earned’, they should not only be denied those resources, they should be publicly shamed for claiming them. Everyone should ‘stand on their own two feet’”. Quoting research by Jennifer M. Silva, Fisher argues it’s no wonder a society marked by economic fear and insecurity, which is by definition a society whose political institutions fail to provide a meaningful safety net, breeds adoration of false self-reliance and concomitant disdain for those who fall back on whatever hollowed-out institutions are left. The ground is fertile for a vicious cycle of neglect/abandonment and societal fragmentation and decline in the US, where the ethos of the American Dream combines with the neoliberal idea of hyperindividualism to provide the soil. Ethel Cain had the following to say about the US in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s re-election in January of this year, basically an account of the damage that negative solidarity does:
Continental Western Europe has never embraced neoliberal ideas to the extent that the old Anglo-Saxons have, giving rise to welfare states that are more generous, even though they aren’t all committed to reducing inequalities. Switzerland’s welfare state is comparatively expansive, but negative solidarity and welfare chauvinism are strong forces in this country. The former is tied to a peculiar obsession with labor, likely influenced by the reformation and the protestant work ethic. The latter is an interesting beast, a chimera that assembles itself from racism and the seeds of negative solidarity, among them a desire for a dominance society. In one dimension, welfare chauvinism substitutes the bogeymen of negative solidarity, the lazy and parasitic, with the non-white. Actually, it’s less of a substitution than drawing a complete equivalence: non-white people are inherently lazy and parasitic according to welfare chauvinists. I’m not describing an abstract ideology floating around in the ether, it’s the espoused and touted belief of the single strongest party in Switzerland. It‘s part of the recipe that makes their electoral success.
Welfare chauvinists and negative solidarity worshippers agree on one thing: you must work. And not in a open sense of the word, where caring for loved ones counts as much as work as gardening or self-publishing an art book of your photographs: you must be employed in wage labor. I find this distinction vital, because one interpretation of the concept of work is conducive to our mental health, while the other has been making me and I suspect many others sick.
It’s a distinction that is also frequently lost on people. As part of workshops on strengthening mental health for middle school students I occasionally co-lead, we explain to the participants the WHO definition of mental health. One of the components of a mentally well state of being according to the WHO is that you can work well. A teacher who sat in on the very first such workshop I’d given proclaimed that this meant humans as a species needed to be employed and added that research showed tanning on a beach in Thailand one’s whole life doesn’t make one happy. Now this was objectionable for at least two reasons: The teachers, in particular, aren’t supposed to be prescriptive and didactic in the context of the workshop. Instead, we want them to model for the students and speak from their own subjective experience. But more importantly, my colleague had just stressed that work in this context didn’t mean wage labor, but rather the act of intending to do something and then doing it. It was about choice, self-efficiency, and agency.
I urge you to pause and ask yourself for a second to what extent your employment makes you feel self-efficient and like you have a choice in your life. Then ponder to what extent this might be true for people in other professions. Why anyone would promote having a job and negate luxuriously tanning on the beach as a means to achieve mental well-being baffles me. But we do it again and again.
In Overtime: Why We Need A Shorter Working Week, Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge use a term by David Frayne to name what the above teacher expressed: the employment dogma. In it, employment is held as something morally good and as prerequisite for living a good life. When you’re out of employment or otherwise perceived to be acting against the dogma, it exacts social and material payments. The general attitude of society towards you shifts towards being punitive, where the threat of impoverishment, and with that ill health and social isolation, hang over your head like the sword of Damocles. That’s on top of judgment from external sources, be it your teachers, the job center, or your family. If by any chance you’ve managed to surround yourself exclusively with loving people, then there’s always the inner voices of judgment, cultivated within a society that’s particularly fond of self-disciplining and self-surveillance, making us shockingly good at obeying dogmas like the employment dogma in advance. Any dogma, by definition, leaves little room for choice, self-efficiency, or agency.
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I’m Roman Catholic but have never really believed. I liked attending church classes anyways, because I was an insufferable know-it-all and was praised for performing Christianity well through remembering and understanding bible passages. There was also quite a bit of free food and I was able to hang out with a different crowd than at school. My cohort’s confirmation is one of the first larger occasions I remember having a hand in organizing, whether the other teens going through confirmation liked it or not — it would be a pattern for the rest of my life. What’s important is that to this day my father is proud of me helping out and approvingly mentions it every so often. But I suspect, nay I’m pretty sure, that my father isn’t very religious either. When he was laid off from his job many, many years ago, though, that’s one of the few occasions of praying I vividly remember. In my disturbingly patchy memories, I even seem to recall us both praying for him to get a new job soon. That’s what unemployment will do to a MFer, I could joke, and I would be half-serious. Because yes: unemployment is a bitch. If there is a God, He would know it.
Funnily enough, my current experience with the employment center and the fund have on the whole been unremarkable. I haven’t been insulted, nobody has been directly condescending to me. To be honest, signing up at the job center and requesting unemployment insurance money has given me a push to write applications. Turns out it’s true that the more you write applications, the easier they become. It’s also true that the more you apply, the less a rejection will sting, even if I have received more of them in the last week than in the five months prior. I’m still waiting for my unemployment benefits to be calculated, so things might change, but at the moment I might even dare describe my experience as smooth sailing.
There it is! What Lewis and Stronge dub a collective lack of political imagination for other ways of working. Even worse, there my mind is, going, ‘it could be worse, be grateful they’re nice to you’. I’m the naturalization of the employment dogma in the flesh, its sad proof. I haven’t been insulted and condescended to — isn’t it insane that the bar is that low in the first place? If I’ve been spared the bureaucrat’s fangs, if I’ve so far been able to apply to jobs that seem suitable, if I’ve been able to scrounge together the required paperwork, it’s despite and not due to these institutions. It’s because I’ve come to accept the sword of Damocles hanging over me. And at the point at which it fells me because I mess up, it’ll be much harder to mount any sort of protest, of course. The sailing is smooth because I’m well-adjusted to fulfilling the demands the sword makes of me. The question is: should I be? Intuitively, I’d much rather be well-adjusted to Roman Catholic religious dogma, there at least hell comes after life. Then again I’d like to try other things before having to endure impostor syndrome at the convent.
So I’m trying to read and watch a lot, to look outside of myself. Given that I don’t work full-time, I actually do have some time on my hands. When I managed to escape feeling bitter or sorry for myself or disappointed or just executive-function-challenged last month, I stumbled on just the right stuff at the right time.
In the sixth chapter of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell mentions a documentary about Marilyn Waring, former Aotearoa New Zealand MP and one of the founders of feminist economics. In it, audience members of Waring’s public lectures were interviewed, attracted to the lectures by what Odell describes as a “sly, questioning feeling.” They were people who professed to having “suspicions… that things are not what they seem.” I, too, have my suspicions. At worst, they begin obsessively circling my ego, morphing into feeling beleaguered, as if the world was out to get me. Even though I just don’t matter that much to the world as to warrant a personal vendetta, my suspicions, tinged with sadness and disorientation, are pointing somewhere, somewhere outside of myself.
At best, they point me towards books like Saving Time, which has itself been like a map for me. It asks of me to rethink the dominant clockwork, linear notion of time, and shows me how that notion’s determinism shapes me and the world. My finishing Saving Time coincides with my reading more of Mark Fisher’s work. In Time Wars and many other essays, Mark Fisher’s thinking very much resembles Odell’s. What Fisher dubs experimental time and shadow time, for example, is similar to what Odell calls halving time to hold the past and future at bay, to dwell and swell in the gap between them. Theirs are impassioned appeals to resist being crushed between the deadness and certainty of the past (like nostalgia and ressentiment) and the determined decline of the future (like declinism and apathy). They’re impassioned appeals to seek aliveness instead.
Dwelling in that gap, letting the shadows develop and the doubts fester (non-derogatory): both authors believe this is the only way anything different, anything new can develop. Fisher, basing his argument on better times for culture in the UK, defines shadow time as a time “in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being”. In a similar vein, Odell quotes Kathi Weeks specifying exactly what kind of time an universal basic income could buy us: “it might allow us to consider and experiment with different kinds of lives, with wanting, doing, and being otherwise.”
My case worker at the employment center told me it would be a pity if I weren’t able to find a job related to my field of study. She reassured me it wasn’t too late yet to get some return on my educational investment, but cautioned that the longer I waited, the more difficult it would become. Three years down the line, she warned, I would likely be locked out of professions where my degree was required or welcomed. Without malicious intention, her handling of my case makes me feel like I’m in one of these dungeon trap rooms, the walls closing in on me from two sides. My past choice in study subject comes back to haunt me and the scary prospect of being a career-less and ambition-less drifter materializes in the distance, inching closer. I’m always already halfway through the door into that trap room anyways.
I have no cushy or stable income, little real job security, no sufficient means to safeguard my health should push come to shove. A well-adjusted person would argue my timing for waxing philosophically about anything, really, couldn’t be worse (it’s me, I’m arguing that in my head). But I have come to believe that there is in fact no better time for me to harbor serious doubts about equally serious, fundamental things, such as how we view time and the pathological ways of working (and being) it gives birth to. It’s either that or reintegrating into something I deeply disagree with.
I don’t want to be the labor market’s bitch. I don’t want others to have to write 10 to 12 applications a month or be financially sanctioned. I don’t want someone to have to take a job that requires 4 hours of commuting or be financially sanctioned. I don’t want people to have to justify why they quit a job and need support with a doctor’s notice or be financially sanctioned. This is madness! Turns out I neither want to live nor die by the proverbial sword. And I especially don’t want to ‘get it over with’ to then forget about how mad this is, because I will be able to distract myself with a trip to Japan and smash burgers and matcha lattes — a fundamental issue of our times suddenly, conveniently relegated to talk with my friends about our awful experiences with being unemployed or insufficiently employed, thank god it’s over, done, in the past. But what about all those whose present and future it might be at that point?
It sounds woo-woo, but I’m listening to myself, indulging myself, following the suspicions and the tears. It’s either that or what Odell quotes in her book, borrowed from Processed World: the march in lockstep towards the abyss.
And the tears are quite insistent and plentiful these days. They flow when a man in a legal thriller realizes he’s done evil and decides to go deliciously off-script, to embrace doubt and uncertainty, and with that, life, the line between delusion and clairvoyance becoming so blurry you understand that it’s often only society that draws it in the first place. They flow when he’s cut down for it all, which is par for the course1. They flow when I watch an anime with an elf mage who’s like, insanely old, has already saved the world, and understands not why she retraces her steps and where she’s ultimately going. But go she must: she still understands so little about the world and the creatures who inhabit it, including herself, and she wants to. In the process, like magic, in the mundane and extraordinary moments of her journey she shares with others, things are revealed2.
Things are not what they seem. I see time everywhere now. As in, I try to shift my perspective to take in that everything is full of time; not a marker of time, but time itself, making everything alive and ripe with potential and change that no one can truly ‘steal’ from us. As in, I see what Jenny Odell, Mark Fisher, and many others write and theorize about everywhere, all the time. I think that seeing is a choice for which the right moment has come for me. I hope I will always choose this way. In my saddest and worst moments, I make everything about myself and stop there, buried deep inside of me. The tears are hot and sting, and as I look like I partied too hard (not if you know me) or have the worst pollen allergy in the world the next day, I respond ‘it could be worse’ when someone asks me how I am.
In my saddest and best moments, I read the following passage by Odell (formatting my own)
(…) there are many forms of frustration beyond what is trivially referred to as burnout. Some of those frustrations, whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, include the following; having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing in another, having to build yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, and having to ignore everything and everyone whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore. There is wanting more for yourself, and then there is simply wanting more.
and I cry bittersweet tears. I still look like shit the next day, but I write you this letter instead.
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