Hi all,
Welcome to issue 1, part 1 of The Drudgery! We hope everyone is managing okay with Lockdown 2.0 (if you’re based in the UK) and generally coping with all things COVID related. It is a really weird time for everyone and unfortunately extremely dire for many people in terms of employment. This isn’t to say that the capitalist system of work hasn’t always been deeply problematic, but COVID has certainly exposed these inadequacies to a greater degree, with unnecessary redundancies at ‘esteemed’ art institutions, unemployment levels rising, pay inequality and minorities being pushed aside to bear the brunt of COVID without governmental support. Seeing all of these issues happening around us is part of our inspiration for starting The Drudgery. Coming together to write about and discuss issues surrounding work is a way for us to feel less alone in these confusing and disastrous times. Despite it being a somewhat negative subject, we are so pleased to see so many of you writing about your experiences of work and hopefully using this as an outlet to realise you are not alone in feeling apathetic about this capitalist system we are all trying to survive under. There will be a second part of this issue which will be released shortly so keep your eyes peeled for a notification about this on our Instagram.
The accompanying illustrations in this newsletter were made by the wonderful Joe Manners, who also created our logo. He’s a lovely lad. You can find out more about what he’s up to and take a look at his previous work here
Here is a list of some reading/watching we have been doing around all things work:
This is the new tv show by Lena Dunham about graduates interning at a high profile investment bank. It seems good from the little that I have watched and yet extremely stressful, flaring up my anxiety slightly as some of the characters spend their whole days and nights at work, which !spoiler alert! leads to a nasty end.
If Industry is too serious for you, then I would highly recommend Call my Agent, which is on Netflix. It’s set in a talent firm in Paris, and is extremely chaotic as the staff try to scramble their way out of ridiculous work situations. A taste of what’s to come is shown in the image below (it is funny i promise :))
I’ve just started reading this book and I am hooked! It’s about four women working late night shifts at a back-breaking food factory, all saddled with heavy personal problems until one of them kills her abusive husband and the other’s help her to cover it up. Although it was written in the 90s, a lot of the nuances are still extremely relevant to today’s work environment with long hours, overworking, little governmental support, and gender disparity.
Delusions of Failure by Megan Nolan
This is a really interesting article about how failure is now used as a way to show a narrative of success. Yet, as Nolan argues this only really applies to those who have experienced success and can look back at their failures with thanks. Notable quote: ‘How can we ignore the immutable fact that some people fail and go on failing, that their lives never recover or never get going in the first place’.
The Moment Before Work
By Anonymous
I walked into the office on my first day. No one looked me in the eye, they sat, put their headsets on and began to work. A man on a separate desk to the emerald insects on standby looked in charge. “Hi, it’s my first day, what should I do?” I said. “Give me five minutes,” he said. I stood there as five minutes went by, then 10, then an hour; then a week. I was getting hungry but I was happy I hadn’t been addressed yet. The moments before work and responsibility were always treasured in my family. Let me swim in this lake for as long as possible as strange men carrying their own smoke machines in suits of snake skin stare at watches. They’re waiting for me to stop paddling and come to the shore. I won’t.
Define Success
By Sophie Winfield
During a recent low point, spurred on by yet another job rejection, a friend offered to give me a tarot reading with the hope that it would offer some clarity on who I am and also provide some hope for the future. When having your cards read, it is important to focus intently on one aspect of life (such as work and business, love, or family) and ask one question that you are seeking the answer to. Fed up and trying to cheat the system, I focused on both business and relationships and simply asked the question “will I be successful?”. Halfway through my reading, I told my friend that this is what I had asked, and they asked me to explain exactly what my definition of success was. That was when I started to struggle.
Happiness is never really a factor when we discuss success. I put this down to the world of the #Girlboss, her #Sidehustle, and the fact that, despite these words often appearing on pretty pink Instagram infographics, they put forward a demoralising, tiring, capitalistic ideology that monetary success is the only kind that matters. It places the onus for your success on your shoulders and blames you when you fall short. It is why there are articles about mad tech men who work 18 hours a day, and it’s why those articles are shared with comments such as “we can all learn something from this guy” and “there is no excuse to do less”. It is the reason why the concept of having a hobby stresses me out. For as long as I can remember I have linked my value as a person to my levels of productivity, hence my incessant need to never allow myself to take my eyes off the ball of career success. To be slow is, unfortunately, not within my nature: being able to say “I am soooooo busy”, or “I haven’t stopped!” brings me a sense of pride, like I am doing the absolute most and that this will undoubtedly bring me a successful life.
When the country went into lockdown and my life was forcibly put on hold, I realised that I had absolutely nothing to fill my time with. I started taking afternoon baths because, as it turns out, I don’t hate taking baths – I simply hated the idea of being unable to do anything, lying motionless in bubbly water. I had denied myself the pleasure of baths for 23 years because being in the bath meant not being productive. It didn’t take me long to realise that I needed to unlearn that being successful means never stopping and, actually, allow myself to enjoy the journey a little bit more. It turns out that a lot of my tarot cards were linked to the concept of opposition; they suggested there is an internal struggle, which we realised was probably because whilst my initial definition of success is always relating to money and my career, there is always that nagging in the back of my mind that reminds me I also want to have a successful relationship, successful friendships and, above all, be happy. By detaching the concepts of career and success from each other and understanding that success and happiness can come from other aspects of my life, I have allowed myself to spend more time doing the things that bring me genuine joy – daytime baths, dancing round my room with my headphones on full volume – and, with that, I have started to realign my priorities and redefine what I see to be a successful life.
Ballad of the Twenty-Something Working Woman
By Rhiannon Fidler
Allergies
By Steph Gorman
Whenever a woman tells me
off
I grip the wireless
keyboard until
my nails
go pasty
and smile
while my throat goes
I have lived
mostly
with women
I have never
been in detention.
This is: a rare and precious form of shame.
Lo: the yellow and pink skin bumps of shame.
I avoid looking
at the
bumps
when I act
in front of the slim mirrors
in the loos
repeating these lines
with different breeds
of smirk:
whatever you don’t pay your taxes and you eat free lunches whatever you don’t pay your taxes and you eat free lunches whatever you don’t pay your taxes you lunch muncher whatever you don’t pay your taxes and you eat free lunches whatever you dodge taxes like seagull poo and you don’t pay your taxes whatever whatever whatever
Untitled
By Jack Hollis
In late 2018, a couple of months out from finishing uni and working as a marketing shit muncher, I decided to go back to uni and get an MA. An escape from bullshit jobs to something more meaningful, developing policy for an at-the-time inevitable left-wing government. Like a good neoliberal subject, I’d saddled myself with yet more student debt to self-optimise and chase the promise of a life in The Big City working on things that aligned with My Values as an Individual.
I don’t know if an MA would have actually meant shit for my career with or without the pandemic. After a brief excursion back to my hometown for lockdown, I made my way back to London and began frantically applying for jobs to keep the dream alive as all the money I’d saved for rent gradually depleted. A summer routine of application binges to the kinds of roles I’d been trying to escape, rejection emails and the occasional interview followed by a rejection email, all while trying to complete a dissertation.
A professor of mine was studying self-optimisation under neoliberalism, about how human experience is increasingly being quantified into data, combining with individualist rise and grind culture and a want for capitalistic efficiency on a scale never seen before both personally and in the workplace. One only needs to look to Amazon for the most egregious examples of this, ever increasing the ways that their warehouse workers are surveilled, their behaviour quantified and analysed only to figure out ways to work them harder.
As lockdown restrictions gradually lifted in the summer, the dissertation and the need to apply for more jobs became its own kind of work, ominously looming over any rare moment of socialisation. It became paralysing, only producing hours of staring at blank documents, scouring Indeed and looking at bullshit on my phone because I couldn’t do anything meaningful with that time for fear of wasting it. Of course I would not compare myself to an Amazon warehouse worker, but I’d been quantifying my own time and productivity in an unhealthy way that only served to stress me out and reduce my productivity. Eventually the money dried up.
I’m back in my hometown now, with old friends that I love. Still somewhat unemployed other than a few hours a week writing articles and generating leads for a social media marketing company. Still applying for bullshit jobs and getting rejection after rejection. But I’m not paralysed any more. Ironically, I’m self-optimising harder than ever, exercising, practising instruments, gaining skills that may not be marketable but at least they’re fun.
Of course, being unemployed sucks overall and I’m lucky to have family to fall back on, even if they’ve also lost their jobs and we may lose our home within months, but at least the self-optimisation I’m doing is for me now, on my own terms, doing things I enjoy. Despite that looming dread, I’m happier than I’ve been in ages.
Liked the issue.