Wasting Time

A long time ago, I was officially unemployed, meaning that nobody was paying me for my work. I used to look for ads in newspapers, go down the Job Centre and look at the cards, take them to the desk, you know the drill, but there was a major problem with that last bit: only very rarely was it possible to know which employer was advertising. And to me, this was vitally important, and I presume it was to others, because if you don’t know who you might be working for, you’re unlikely to know the ethical consequences of taking the job. For instance, if there was an ad for a short-order cook, it might be for McDonalds or for a vegan takeaway, and the two are polar opposites.

On another occasion, after I’d got my MA, I remember a discussion with an employee at the Job Centre who said I wouldn’t want to waste my degree by doing something or other, I can’t remember what. I replied that I didn’t do the Masters to increase my income, and he was completely flabbergasted and speechless. But I didn’t, and in fact it seems to me that the best candidate for a job is not primarily motivated by how high their income would be, but by how much of a positive difference they could make to the world by doing the work required for the post.

I needn’t have worried in fact because it turned out that for whatever reason, regardless of how much effort and thought I threw at the problem of finding paid work with an employer, it just never happened, so in the end I decided to become self-employed. This worked a little better. I’d say that the fundamental difference between being self-employed (and freelance as opposed to getting most of your work from the same source) and an employee is that in the latter case you have to persuade an expert at recruitment and HR that you’re worth paying, but you only have to do it once, and in the former case you have to persuade an amateur potential employer, but you have to do it over and over again, or at least come up with a way that amateur potential employers become persuaded to do so.

However, that wasn’t the end of my troubles by any means. There could be said to be two types of paid work: useful and useless. That’s not actually strictly true, but I need to simplify things to explain this. Useful work may even be essential, for instance sanitation is vital in an urban society of our kind because otherwise everyone dies of dysentery and other nasties. It’s been said that only a slave has no right to withhold their labour, and I agree with this but this isn’t about withholding labour so much as the dynamic that goes on between a freelance provider of goods or services and their potential client. If the client needs your service, you are in a sense holding them to ransom by not doing it for free. This may not be a problem if everyone has their own turf and protects it, and everyone needs everyone else’s skills, but this isn’t so. They also don’t necessarily have the money. It’s also in your immediate interests not to educate the client so she can acquire the skills for herself and to reduce her confidence in her own ability to do it for herself. There are other ways of looking at this. For instance, someone may simply not have the time to do the housework, so you could get paid to do it instead, but the problem does exist where people often perceive value in skill, training and experience. At the opposite pole, there’s “useless” work, by which I mean art and entertainment, which however isn’t literally useless. However, it can be interchangeable in a way “useful” work isn’t. For instance, it could be said that the utility of reading a novel is that it increases empathy, and presumably different novels or genres encourage different aspects of this. However, if you prefer work by one novelist over another, it is still going to develop your empathy, though maybe in a different way. Hence there’s an interchangeability which doesn’t apply to “useful” work because the skill and experience involved is very variable. Therefore, when people buy a novel, pay to watch a concert and so forth, they may find it useful but that’s not the main point and it doesn’t mean anyone gets held to ransom if the artist concerned doesn’t do it. For this reason, “useless” work is better than “useful”.

There is a problem with this though. It assumes that there is no art or skill involved in apparently useful work, and this is by no means so. Medicine, for example, is a creative and artistic activity, and so I imagine is working down a sewer. But there seems to be a balance between the essential side of paid work and the artistic side. However, much of this could be circumvented by universal basic income, although whether that will ever happen is another question. There is another problem though: the System.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the situation is like Nazi Germany, where almost any kind of paid work would be a way of supporting the Third Reich and was therefore wrong, but there are problems with participating in a system which is doing so much damage to the biosphere, planet and human race, and it is almost impossible for many people to find jobs which don’t do more harm than good. Even if you find one, you then have the problem that you’re spending money in an exploitative system. Given this, “wasting time” can be seen as subversive because it means you aren’t contributing to that system. In particular, then, wasting time is a kind of oxymoron. It often applies to situations where if you were doing something “productive” instead you’d be hastening the apocalyptic destruction of the human race and encouraging the suffering of others.

At this point, I should probably inject a note of caution. It’s very easy to pontificate from the outside without wanting to get your hands dirty and be all self-righteous, and what I’ve just written probably does at least sound like that even if it isn’t actually that. Here’s a remarkably vague statement for you to consider: doing things tends to have an effect on the world. Often in fact it doesn’t, but sometimes it does, particularly when you’re surrounded by somewhat organised, concerted and focussed effort. And here’s the thing. If you do a lot of stuff, some of it is likely to have a negative effect. Obviously multinational corporations are a great evil, but one of the reasons for this is not that they are bent on profit and growth at all costs, although of course they are, but that they are very active and large. The sheer number of things they do is bound to result in some of them being bad. The same applies to governments, particularly of large countries. And if the alternative is doing nothing, that doesn’t stop the doers from messing things up. I can’t think of a large political party with substantial representation in parliament or local government which hasn’t done terrible things, and this, I think, is inevitable simply due to large scale activism or activity. One solution might be to scale things down, but that then allows sociopathic and psychopathic individuals to dominate activity in “small ponds”. There also seems to be another issue with large organisations. Once the situation arises where people within an organisation lack contact with its public face and ostensive purpose, the complexity leads to ignorance of the wider significance of one’s actions. The organisation you think is good is the one you aren’t well-acquainted with. Certain charities come to mind here, except that given that some of them do more harm than good, ineffective money-wasting charities can be a good thing because they’re doing less damage. However, it probably is sometimes better to do something rather than nothing.

Consequently, I would strongly defend uselessness and timewasting, but as usual it depends on how you define those things. Also, I’m reluctant to be too critical of large bodies which have a devastating and probably homicidal and ecocidal destructive influence on the world, because that’s an emergent property of activity on a large scale. But I don’t believe even slightly in the work ethic, although I do believe work with a purpose is good for mental health, and I don’t think anyone should be forced to work just to survive because everyone has infinite value and doesn’t need to justify their existence. I also think work is part of human essence, but that’s a topic for another post. For here, it basically means laziness is very often an illusion, and there is just paid and unpaid work. But the more useful you are, the more potential for harm you have.