Photo by Fakhri Baghirov.
The city is covered in snow. So much snow that officials say it may take about three weeks to dig us out. Keen observers will point out that three weeks from now, it will be March. Cynical observers will point out what a punt it is to make a municipal snow-clearing strategy that relies on the arrival of spring.
This isn’t so much snow. Yes, it’s about waist high and you have to climb over the plow piles to reach the sidewalk. And sure, nearly every street is now a bidirectional, single lane where right-of-way is determined by size of vehicle and furrowed brow. Those things may be true, but Canadians will tell you that they’ve seen worse.
Once you internalize that it could be worse, there’s no reason to waste an already booked reservation or the opportunity for a child-free evening. So while the snow continued to dump, we slid our way toward dinner at a restaurant we’d been meaning to try.
We did the requisite stomping of snow boots before we went in. Followed by the removal of hats and gloves and coats once inside. Followed by more stomping of snow boots. It was only as we made our way to the table, that we stopped to look up.
Back where you started
We had been there before. Not to this restaurant. This restaurant didn’t exist back then. But we had stood in that exact spot.
In late 2017, we held a book launch party after we published our first book. We didn’t want to host a party. We’re not anti-party. But publishing a book costs money. And we took on several thousand dollars of debt to put it out into the world. The idea of adding more zeroes to the pile seemed irresponsible.
But our editor and our book designer insisted. Only one first book, after all. By the time we gave in and called the venue, the book was already an indie and international best seller. If that’s not cause for a party, what is? While we didn’t know it then, the book would go on to earn back the publishing costs and then some. Scary at the time, less so eight years on.
We still get questions about our first book. Why is it so angry? What’s with all the swearing? Do you stand behind what you wrote? None of these were questions we got from our editor. Stephanie had one question for us. One that showed up at least a zillion times in her marked up copy of our manuscript.
What is it?
You keep saying “it.” The word shows up dozens of times without an initial reference. What do you mean? Are you talking about the same thing each time or something different?
It’s hard. What’s hard?
It’s a lot of work. What’s a lot of work?
Is it worth your time to be excellent. Is what worth your time?
Stephanie was right, of course. May every stream-of-consciousness writer some day be confronted with their own imprecision. The hard part was that the core ideas in HFUIYM were a bit nebulous. We knew that work wasn’t working for a lot of people. And in many ways, the “it” was a stand-in for change and what might be possible. That work could be more than just awful or endurable.
This may not sound like such a radical idea, but please know that people read this book and quit their jobs. They bought copies and stealthily left it on their bosses’ desks. The book snuck into startup bookshelves and manager book clubs. Artists will tell you, you can be hated or loved. But either of those is better than eliciting no reaction at all.
The heart of it
The thing about work is how much time it takes. It’s like, if work were some trivial thing that you did once a year, for an hour or two, then whatever. It wouldn’t need to be that deep. People can generally go to the dentist, or check their tire pressure, and not need to write a whole book of reflections on the experience.
But work takes more than that. Work is five days a week or more for a lot of people. Work is 32, or 40, or 60 hours a week on paper, and sometimes still more for a lot of people. There’s only 168 hours in a week and you’ve gotta spend at least a bit of that sleeping. Of what remains, work takes a big piece. Maybe the biggest single piece.
The heart of so much of what we wrote then and what we still write now is that work needs to be worthy of that time. Anything that takes that big a piece of you should earn and honour it. The “it” that Stephanie pushed us to define is a whole mass of related ideas. Ideas that we still grapple with, to articulate them as plainly and simply as we feel them. But one of them, maybe the first of them, is this: To be worthy of your time, work needs to have dignity, meaning, and impact.
That’s not frivolous or over-sensitive or a weakness of the younger generation. If your work doesn’t have these things, it’s fair to fight for them, to demand them, or to walk. You are entitled to them. Not as a matter of legal advice, but as a statement of principle about what constitutes a fair exchange for your time and talents.
This feels to us like a pretty straightforward thing to say. But remember, the artists say you can be hated or loved. So it’s worth mentioning how angry it makes some people. We’ve been yelled at and whispered about and blackballed for saying things that bottom out at this. Sometimes by people who don’t want to reckon with what this would mean for their workforce. And sometimes by people who don’t want to reckon with what this would mean for themselves.
Why you mad, bro?
The people who get angry have a couple things they want to tell you.
First of all they want you to know that you’re a wuss for wanting those things, or for believing that you should have them. Try it some time if you don’t believe us. Post somewhere about looking for that meaning in your work. See how long it is before some muppet with 12,000 posts and 12 followers lurches into your replies to call you naïve. Post about some place where you or a colleague have been denied that dignity, and watch how fast you get a, “welp, that’s capitalism for ya! What did you expect?”
They also want you to know that you shouldn’t care about the impact of the work you do. You shouldn’t think too hard about where that work ends up, or who it benefits. They want work to be a politics-free zone. Unless it matches their own politics. Because if you do start to care about that, then what? Then you might refuse some projects. You might want to pick and choose whether your work powers weapons, or surveillance, or a merch store that treats the Holocaust like a punch line. And if you are able to choose not to spend your time on those things, well then what does it say about them, who still choose to?
It seems obvious that their anger is cope. They need you not to have meaning because they don’t. They need to justify someone taking away your dignity because someone took away theirs. They want you to look away from your impact, because they are desperate to avoid their own. But it’s an intellectual and empathetic dead-end. Telling other people to give up on meaningful work isn’t edgy, it’s poison. And people with substantive critiques of capitalism aren’t usually the ones scoffing at someone else’s pain.
The good news is that the facts are on our side. Work not only should have dignity, meaning, and impact; it often does. Work can be really good. And if yours isn’t today, we have more good news. See, the thing about an activity that consumes thousands of hours of your life is that any change you make will matter a lot. And yeah, not everyone can change everything all at once. But any changes you make to how you work, who you work with, what you work on — they get multiplied by, say, 2,000 hours a year. That can change everything.
— Melissa & Johnathan
