Dare to Dream (of a "Jobless" World)
The many problems I have with "having a job" (and how creativity can solve them).
Recently, the artistic world was set on fire by
’s publicly vulnerable declaration of how she never wanted a job; she just wanted to make art.It blew up, presumably, because a shitload of people resonate and agree with her — me too, in essence. It’s highly validating to have a dissenting voice in our ear, piping up in spite of the societal noise drowning us in demands for our time, our attention, our autonomy, our sanity, saying ever so sweetly and softly,
“There’s another way. Hold your ground. You, and others like you, are exactly where you’re supposed to be, and slowly finding your way to one another. Trust the revolution coming together in quiet defiance.”
Like hundreds, probably thousands of these kindred others, I read her post and found myself nodding along and making noises of recognition. I reflected on my own version of this sentiment — the rambling, piecemeal life that resulted from my dogged avoidance of “having a job” and all the systemic pressures unceremoniously invited into the house with it. A life cobbled together with some clumsiness that has, at times, brought me shame and embarrassment, as though presenting a macaroni picture to a room full of French impressionists.
Yet I lived it anyway. Wrote about it anyway. When I felt alone and had to keep going somehow, hoping for some kind of reverberation from the void.
Now — finally — in this validating company of creative others, I can speak out again on behalf of my braver, wider-eyed younger self, unmarked by time and tussle with society’s claws, and reclaim my willingness to be “jobless” (and all that entails*).
I don’t yet know what I am going to say; it just seems like an ideal time to add my own thoughts and experiences to this conversation. It appears the revolution might be, at last, brewing in quiet defiance — though the more of us who add our voices to it, the louder it gets — and I would not want to miss it.
It’s already clear, through reading posts like Amie’s and others on this thin-skinned platform, what an uncomfortable amount of life of late I’ve spent silently “missing it”; refusing to speak my mind without a rigorous plan, ultimately too exhausted after running it through Tough Mudder-levels of perfection checking. I’m fighting this well-practised impulse even now, taking hours to write a simple introduction and a little aghast at creatives like Amie who just...say it. Loud, wholesale, before they feel right or ready.
This is my new practise. Not knowing what the hell I’m doing and talking about it anyway. Not knowing where the hell I’m going and walking toward it anyway. Letting the path or point-of-view unfold as the present moment requires it. If I am rigorously planning ahead, I am pandering to predictable rules of the game on a broken playing board. If I can see too far ahead of me, I’m taking ways that have been cut through too many times before.
As the wise poet David Whyte says in this interview:
“How do you know that you are on your path? Because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know.”
And this is why, I believe, all of us quiet, sly little creatives and system-shirkers and HSPs (Highly Sensitive People) are sneaking up on one another right now.
We are done going in purposeless circles on a broken playing board. We are dreaming new rules into being.
We are going rogue, renegade — hacking and thwacking and singing and paint-splashing and slam poet-ing our separate ways into a conjoined revolution.
From Amie’s viral post:
‘I now know that my feelings were more complicated than simply not wanting to work. (I now know I actually have an insatiable, veracious work ethic when I get to do meaningful, purposeful work chosen by me). What I was trying to say was this: the system fucking sucks. I don’t want to spend most of my life doing something that doesn’t light me the fuck up. I don’t want to spend my days working for someone else, for their purpose. How can I live in a world that is demanding that of me?
I have very little tolerance for a certain type of suffering.
I am sensitive, finely attuned, and as soon as I experience suffering, I have to pivot. I have no ability to stick it out. A quitter, you might call me. Undisciplined, Lazy, Child like, Weak, You might call me.
I certainly called myself those things.
I now realise that my intolerance for suffering is one of my greatest gifts.
I watch people who have a great tolerance for suffering as they toil away in lives they despise and I think, thank fuck I’m ‘weak’.’
Me too. Meeeeeee too.
* The concept of jobless, to me, is more symbolic than literal (as you might have gathered from reading the above). It does not mean I don’t want to pay my own way or earn my keep, or simply...bludge my way into oblivion. It refers more to rejecting the conventional path, finding one’s own original way, and outrunning like crazy the Blob of Conformity that seeks only to absorb us into its gluttonous mass.
I wish I could remember where I heard this, and from whom, because I have not been able to stop thinking about it for weeks.
We are the only species that pays to live on Earth.
Isn’t this just...simply, the most psycho thing you have heard? At least for a few days? (We are in 2025, after all, when something newly psycho surfaces every time we open a web browser.)
I think on some level, the younger me intuited this, as though she had somehow heard the sentiment floating backwards on the wind from nowadays. Since, according to my mother in a recent conversation, I had long asserted that I would never work full-time. From my earliest library-lurking, small-town-riding-around days, it seemed nothing short of insanity that one would carve out so much of their precious reading or drawing or painting or nature or daydreaming time to just...
Drive a lot. Sit a lot, often in a tiny grey cubicle under fluorescent lighting. Make lots of scary cold calls and emails (seriously, cold calls are the worst). See the sun and stand in grass at some point only if you’re lucky. Get more than two weeks off out of 52 — the Western standard, which equates to a measly 0.03846 or 3.84 percent of your year on holiday, by the way — only if you’re lucky. Invest roughly a whole third of your adult life to some flatulent company whose guiding ethos might be to hoard bigger piles of mint-green paper than the company down the road, or trade ones and zeroes on a screen with some random street in New York that somehow — apparently, by shared societal acquiescence alone — makes the entire world richer or poorer.
Now, as a Substack-lurking, making-up-for-lost-time-reading, hiking-as-often-as-possible adult...it still does. With some caveats*.
* Caveats being: I know by now it’s also possible to spend this amount of time in meaningful work — I’ve done it; that people have families to provide for and this is how they feel compelled to do it, out of urgency or external pressure; and there is scarcity mindset, sometimes based on very real lived experience in impoverishment. However, it is equally real that many of us — predominantly in the Western world — have to work this much because we spend too much fucking money on stuff we don’t need; that no other species needs. Because the potent cult-combo that is capitalism/industrialism/neoliberalism has convinced us that we’re losers if we don’t. Plain and simple.
As I wrote in a very snarky blog post in my early twenties:
‘But what happens when someone questions this system? What happens when someone looks at a luxurious property and thinks, It’s just a big concrete shell filled with stuff. Why am I barely getting by just trying to afford the right to live in something like this? Or when someone considers the bank notes in their hand and realises, It’s literally paper...scraps of paper with numbers on it we’ve decided, somewhere along the line, we’re to live and die and be ruthlessly judged for.
These things are societally-agreed-upon constructs. There is actually nothing that makes us go out and throw wads of paper at glorified piles of rubble — except the stories we tell ourselves. There is actually nothing written in the stars — woven into the very fabric of nature — that determines one part of town is “better” to live in, or that one person is “better” than another just because he’s some kind of rabid paper merchant.’
And I will add to this now: There is actually nothing — provided we switch our ways to using only what we need, as other species do — that should compel us to prove, and earn, our right to exist on this planet. For nature is inherently abundant, and she provides everything we could ever need, asking only in return that we nourish her with our profound capacity for creation and stewardship.
Never has she asked us to jump through hoops or cut through red tape to prove our worthiness to her. I am periodically reminded from random corners of the internet that certain indigenous cultures believe the “point” of being alive is simply to just be; that our worth is not dependent on what we are producing or what we are busying ourselves with, but the mere fact we are alive at all, simply experiencing.
So...anyone else having a hard time grappling with the concept of “having a job” after contemplating that?
‘I came to this realisation that my job in a way is to think something that is different from everyone else — but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.’ [My bolding.]
— Johann Hari, Stolen Focus.
I’ll be real with you.
I’ve been fired a whole heap of times from this matrix.
Reading between the lines: it’s almost always come down to two things, or some variation of.
I’m too slow + inefficient...
and I’m too sensitive + think too much.
Sigh.
Herein lies the eternal fissure in the heart of the Highly Sensitive Person (often too the creative).
It’s wild. In my mind, I feel like the fastest-moving human around; my thoughts move so quickly that sometimes I stop writing mid-sentence because it has already flown in one ear and out the other. Butting up against the wider world, however — I may as well be a sloth. There is a constant, grinding, infuriating mismatch between what drag-races through my brain and is so stuck-behind-a-learner-driver-on-a-one-lane-street-slow to filter through my mouth and activate my body. I could be a corporate productivity superstar, if not for the lumbering inefficiency of existing within the human paradox of having chess master brains on dinosaur bodies (and being too caffeine-sensitive to override it with coffee).
Trust me, I tried. I tried to be a superstar, I tried drinking coffee, I tried fast-paced, I tried full-time...and in hindsight, it’s comical just how quickly, how blatantly I was kicked out of those seats. Forget seats; I was in entirely the wrong building, the wrong city even. And the Universe let me know it, over and over and over again, until I remembered who I really was.
Three times in the first few months of 2019, I was fired. (Or was it four?) Not to mention all the jobs before that — retail worker, waitress, barista, acai bowl artist, teacher’s aide, personal trainer, just to name a few — in which I felt so achingly, ego-bruisingly out-of-place and perpetually run off my feet, yet persisted because I was trying to prove something; trying to prove I was tougher than my origami crane-like, Highly Sensitive Personality; trying to prove I wasn’t a completely useless cog in the machine.
For some stupid reason.
Who dreams of being a cog when they grow up?
To quote my fierce, Sagittarian friend Abi, my tough love rock during this time: “Good. You’re shit at these jobs anyway — and that’s a good thing.”
After all this time, and these too-wild-to-be-believed turns of events over the past few years (if you’re online, you know what I’m talking about)...
I finally get what she meant.
This mismatch, the one I mentioned above? The part-and-parcel of “having a job” in this industrialised culture that moves too fast for our dinosaur bodies to keep up with, and leaves us little to no time or energy to do what we really want?
I’m finally starting to get what that is, too. Thanks to the journalistic prowess of the abovementioned Johann Hari.
I have been listening to his audiobook, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again, in back-to-back instalments this past week or so, and it’s been blowing my fucking mind to infinity and beyond. Hari — concerned with his diminishing capacity to stay focused and present in his life, as well as that of his godson and just about everybody he encountered — took himself away to Provincetown in Cape Cod for three months with no cellphone or laptop; no gadgets, nothing to distract him, to see if he could reclaim himself.
Upon returning to the world of wifi, he interviewed a series of techxperts — some personally responsible for mainlining Big Tech, and its alarmingly addictive components, into the mainstream — psychologists, sociologists and more. They spoke to myriad factors impeding our collective ability to pay attention, the internet and our devices being just two of them. (However, they are undoubtedly some of the more pervasive influences that Hari originally tried to detox in Cape Cod, and therefore comprise several chapters of his book.)
Here are just some of the gems I have pulled from Stolen Focus that speak volumes about the detriments of our modern day work culture, and to the process of practising creativity. To be clear before diving in, there are several categories of cause-and-effect that need to be addressed (which you are probably already aware of, at least in part, though I will expand on them to encompass Hari’s perhaps lesser-known research).
“What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don’t have time to dream?”
Modern work culture is fast-paced, beyond the human brain’s capacity to keep up with — don’t get me wrong, our brains are powerful, but still have their limits — and there is objectively much more of it than there used to be (so you’re not imagining it!):
‘In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being — TV, radio, reading — it amounted to 40 newspapers’ worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day [my bolding]. The increase in volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.’
And,
‘As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year [my bolding] has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.’
Yet experts and researchers in Stolen Focus conclude, paradoxically: “As work hours swell and swell, people get more distracted and less productive [my italics],” and that, “These workloads are not sustainable.” And, in the final chapter, Hari links significant economic growth since the 1870s-1880s (following the Long Depression) to the speeding up of our world, and with almost all causes of our stolen attention. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest it’s the underlying cause.
Meanwhile, Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently came out swinging with the suggestion of 60-hour work weeks as the “sweet spot” for productivity (oh, and winning the race to develop artificial intelligence). That’s 12 hours per day to serve a corporate agenda that lines the pockets of rich white guys to further enslave us. Righto...1
With that comes a lot of stress, much less free time to rest, sleep, and process critical information, and the addictive tendency to reach for, erm, chemical help to cope and keep such an unnatural, machine-like pace. E.g.:
Based on Hari’s research that finds the average American worker2 is distracted every three minutes3: “If you spend your time switching [tasks] a lot, then the evidence suggests you’ll be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.” Remember — “multi-tasking” is a bald-faced fallacy; the human brain can only toggle between one or two tasks at a time. It then takes, on average, 23 minutes to get back into flow, and we “lose” the equivalent of ten IQ points every time we get pulled back out of it.
And,
‘Throughout the day, in your brain, a chemical called adenosine is building up, and it signals to you when you are sleepy. Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. “I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You’re not giving yourself more energy — you’re just not realising how empty you are [my bolding]. When the caffeine wears off, you’re doubly exhausted.”’
As if the average person doesn’t have to chug more coffee (or rail more lines of cocaine) than perhaps they would naturally feel inclined to just to keep up with grotesque workloads. And speaking of cocaine (or ketamine), Elon Musk and DOGE — among other atrocious and cultish operations too numerous to count — are hardcore hustling to make sleep deprivation “cool again.” Yes, yes; sacrifice enough sleep, and we too could become megalomaniacal fucksticks just like them. Aim high. Moving on...
Said stress and inability to match what the culture gaslights us into thinking we should be able to manage by ourselves without any issues (hello, comically miscontrued conditioning that is bootstrapping culture) makes us less patient. It makes us angrier and less empathetic. It makes us dumber, broker, sicker, prone toward impulsive, fear-based, overly simplistic — and exponentionally inaccurate — judgement, which plays out pretty disastrously for humanity as a whole:
‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions — and less likely to see clearly when they fail [my bolding]. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can’t get a handle on any of them.’
Twitter and Snapchat, Trello and Slack, email and phone calls, meetings and more meetings (and more meetings), endless pings and notifications, commuting while putting on makeup (because you didn’t have time to do it at home after over-sleeping your third alarm), catching up on a backlog of office memos while on a stationary bike (because you’ve been on your ass all day), trying to calm down your crying kid...while shovelling washing into the machine...while looking over your shoulder to check that dinner isn’t burning...while half-watching the news that’s letting you know how badly the economy is tanking and how afraid you should be...while whipping out your phone to tweet about it...
It’s all the same. It’s all distraction and mental load and exhaustion we aren’t built to handle. It’s all convenient fuel for capitalism and and rage-baiting and gaslighting autocratic regimes. On that note...
Speeding up and skimming over nuance and critical thinking in such a collectively exhausted and inebriated way makes us more controllable. People driven by anxiety and strung-out bodily impulses (and materialistic desires for relief), by the unrelenting busyness that work culture makes us wear as a badge of honour...simply, don’t have the capacity to think too hard and for themselves. Don’t have the time to advocate for their rights. Don’t have the energy to fight back:
‘“There’s this thing about speed that feels great...Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it.”
But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion...Sune [Lehmann, professor of mathematics in Denmark] said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions...Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth.”’
What’s more, our culture that forces us to keep up and send emails like good little workers for praise and promotion is based around some truly manipulative psychology. Hari dedicates a decent portion of one chapter to the work of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the “father of Operant Conditioning” (as if that title alone doesn’t give you the creeps), and his pigeon experiment.
The pigeons, placed in boxes and starved, were systematically presented with food rewards at regular intervals, which eventually led them to associate whatever random action they were performing at the time with making food appear. They not only began to repeat said actions in order to get fed, but developed previously undisplayed routines and “superstituous behaviours” that compounded with how often rewards were given out. Over time — despite less and less food being dispensed — the pigeons maintained their unusual patterning.
According to Simply Psychology, “This experiment was conducted to explore the effects of non-contingent reinforcement on pigeons, leading to some fascinating observations that can be likened to human superstitions.” [My bolding.] (By the way, similar experiments were conducted that demonstrated the complex of positive/negative reinforcement — i.e., hungry rats and pigeons were either given food rewards or electric shocks that strengthened certain behaviours and led to avoidance of others. Not unlike your boss baiting you with extra hours to make you look good for a promotion, or an office memo that “discourages” people from piping up about a morally contentious issue that might harm the company’s reputation.)
Tech and industrial giants, seemingly, couldn’t wait to apply these theories and experiments to the masses under their power. And according to Hari, “We now live in a world [and work culture] dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works.
“Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards?”
I sure as hell don’t.
Which corporations and politicians (and now, the corporations that fund the politicians) are only too happy to manipulate for their own Machiavellian schemas of profit and power. And are doing, in very real time, as we are seeing more and more examples of.
‘If we don’t change course, [Sune Lehmann] fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.”’
All while said upper class foists movements like Stoicism and mindfulness4 on us (with accompanying apps of their own creation) that lead us to — incorrectly — believe that we can cope, muscle through, that if we could just get a handle on all this...just get our shit together with enough personal discipline and white-knuckled willpower...we’ll be winners.
Whew. That was a lot.
That, in my mind, is the rabid “get a job” megaboss we are collectively up against.
I think you might agree: it’s a pretty bleak cascade of happening-against-our-wills and not-our-faults intentionally designed to make us feel like poor, helpless slaves to the system.
As comedic genius George Carlin put it: “Governments [and, I would add, the corporations that fund them] don’t want a population capable of critical thinking. They want obedient workers; people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
Thankfully, there is help. And proof of why slowness/inefficiency and sensitivity/thinking too much are secret, super-accessible superpowers.
Creativity (along with meditation, long-form reading, and other “slow/feeling” activities) brilliantly and rebelliously short-circuits this process. Here’s why (with more Hari — love this guy).
‘In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.’
You know who is great at focusing on one thing for a significant amount of time?
The creative. The reader. The meditator. The yogi. The gardener.
Deep artistic expression, reading and writing, meditation, yoga and tai chi, gardening are rare examples of slow, single-pointed focus. It’s bloody hard (though not impossible) to read a physical book and do something else at the same time, or paint while typing an email. Good luck checking your phone while getting stuck into the garden, because your hands are full of worms and potatoes.
These single points of focus (and probably more I’ve forgotten) create deeper meaning in what we do, and frequently push us to the edge of our abilities — where it has been shown we are happier and more fulfilled, despite the struggle in leaving one’s comfort zone, even though it’s typically not the easier thing to do (like tuning out in front of the TV after an exhausting day of work, or doom-scrolling).
From Stolen Focus:
‘“We have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature — and you build that into your daily life — you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness...nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.’
Creatives, in particular, are perpetually testing and feeling into their outer limits through their chosen medium — often moving damn slowly while doing it, and happier for it. One person who knew this was Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whom Hari refers to a lot throughout chapter two. A Hungarian-American psychologist, considered a father of positive and flow psychologies, became fascinated with artists for much of his career: the way they cultivated such intense focus (“flow state”) as to become unaware of the passage of time around them, and so cherished the experience of creating that they seemed “uninterested in rewards; even money didn’t interest most of them.” Upon finishing what projects they were working on, they did not seek praise or boast about their achievements; they simply moved on to the next idea.
This observation went against Csíkszentmihályi’s original hypothesis that humans only do things to receive rewards. Rather, he found this slow passage (and struggle) of birthing unique creative expression — of stretching one’s body or mind to its limits “in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” — brought them more fulfilment than reaching the finish line.
(Also, delightfully, contradicts B.F. Skinner’s B.S., by the way.)
The growth-obsessed, capitalist entities that employ, enslave, and eventually seek to absorb us into their mass only want to see us reach the finish line, for the sake of maintaining their bottom line.
Earlier, I showed you only the first half of something Hari said on this subject — on the choice we now have as an inherently creative collective.
‘Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards...or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?’
If you are a reader too, well...you have another tool in your mental kit for withstanding the pressures of work and other focus-snatching influences. Hari unpacks how deep reading (of books, since reading from screens teaches us to skim information in a hurry rather than deeply contemplating and absorbing it) teaches us three things:
“Life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down”;
“There is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page,” and;
“It is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.”
In short: Deep readers — particularly of fiction — see worlds of nuance and resist the kind of divisive, reductionist, black-and-white thinking that creates autocracies and fighting amongst ourselves (while broligarchs get away with the most horrific shit behind our backs); cultivate focus and awareness with every sentence read, and learn to set aside anxieties — at least for a little while; in order to deeply empathise with characters and worlds unlike their own. They train themselves to act like the heroes and underdogs from their favourite stories, and see more clearly those who might be written off as “non-player characters.”
(Which rage-baiters and techno-fascists really hate, by the way — *wink-nudge*.)
Yet, according to Hari, “Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent 17 minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”
Further research has shown me that half of US adults5 can’t read a book written at the eighth-grade (or thirteen-year-old) level — which explains a lot about the kind of misinformation and misunderstandings that fester online. Complexity just...does not compute for a great many — at least, not to the degree of understanding required for advanced topics over which we frequently condemn and kill others of dissenting opinion. Moreover, they are denied a vital entry point into flow state; which, as we have covered, equals huge collective loss of attention, accuracy, empathy, original ideas and connections in our brains — and ultimately, rampant toxicity in the reality we co-create.
Finally: let’s tackle sleep and rest.
I don’t think I need to tell you how hard it is to come by quality sleep and rest these days. And while it is not the only cause by a long shot, how much we work in today’s world compared to earlier in history is a major culprit.
For starters, there’s the aforementioned way we caffeine-bomb our nervous systems into submission for the servitude of our corporate and technological overlords. Some people seem (annoyingly) immune to its negative effects — I’m looking at the daredevils who actually order a coffee from the dessert menu before retiring home to bed — but many of us (like me, who can barely handle half a shot before 10am) will still have traces of caffeine in our bodies even twelve hours later, which hinders our ability to fall asleep. Caffeinate to compensate; repeat five days a week, 50 weeks per year.
That equates to a lot of lost slumber. 20% less, in fact, than in the previous century, as Hari points out in his book. Obviously this statistic isn’t entirely coffee-related; longer working hours — which push the barrage of daily tasks that beget survival in this modern world further and further into what remains of our non-working lives; of all priorities, sleep is often given the least amount of space — and the stresses6 they cause take the lion’s share of the blame. Not to mention the hotbeds of artificial light and overstimulation that are many a modern workplace (HSPs know WTF I’m talking about).
Aaiiee. It’s no wonder only 15% of us wake from sleep feeling refreshed. The consequences of what we are now so accustomed to that we write off as triviality are vast. Aside from how shit it is to always be feeling like shit, I see them as this:
Like the loss of focus and attention on the whole, sleep deprivation makes us dumber, broker, sicker, angrier, more controllable...and less creative.
From Stolen Focus: “When we sleep, our minds start to identify connections and patterns from what we’ve experienced during the day. This is one of the key sources of our creativity — it’s why narcoleptic people, who sleep a lot, are significantly more creative.”
Creative expression (as we know by now) is nothing short of the utmost victory because it suggests we are better rested and have lived to fight another day against the distraction machine. Rest really is rebellion.
Creative, well-rested, free- and deep-thinking, self-respecting and loving people are a nightmare for capitalism/techno-fascism/autocratic rule etc. because they don’t buy as much stuff. They don’t get as angry and click on as many clickbait links for corporate profit. They become harder to hack and persuade. They won’t spend as much time losing patience and fighting amongst each other out of fear and stress, while shady bills and policies and privacy changes slip in behind us.
I can’t recommend reading Johann Hari’s book enough to learn about how to employ more of this attentive trickster energy into your life. I certainly will be.
“I realised that email breeds email — and if you just stop, it stops.” [My bolding.]
I think it’s about damn time we all just stopped.
Chuck some rocks into the system until the system finally starts to work for us.
So.
This has been my (unexpectedly long!) take on why creatives like Amie, like me and many others, reject the idea of “having a job” wholesale — or at least as often as possible, in our own little ways. (For of course, there are certain unavoidable realities in the present “way things are” that hinder many and must be acknowledged before they can be mourned, composted, and regrown anew.)
The next time you feel tempted to diparage your silly little stories or scrappy little art piece — holding it up to the measuring stick of the most profound impact anyone has ever had in history and realising with sadness your inks and oils just don’t stack up — that you should be doing something “serious” or “real” or whatever with your time and energy...
Just remember that every act of expressing creativity is rebellion.
Every strike of the pen, every splash of paint, every high note hit or stanza rhymed or pirouette pulled off or even the first pancake turned out perfect...it’s all rebellion.
It’s all activism. It’s all empathy and inner strength and precious sanity in a societal construct that wants, needs, us to stay insane and confused and chasing our tails in defeat.
It’s all beautiful revelry that helps us stay present just that little bit longer and withstand the many, many powerful forces trying to pull us in and make us forget who we truly are — including literal oligarchies and techno-fascist regimes gathering steam as we speak, with numerous copycats (I’m looking at you, Australia and New Zealand; to name just two that are uncomfortably close to home).
And to the argument of “but what’s the point, no one sees what I make/say/write/share etc. anyway”...who cares if no one takes notice? You’re not doing it for them — you’re doing it for you and the proliferation of your own inner pilot light.
I wrote this down because I need constant reminding of it too.
To keep showing up no matter how hard or helpless it all appears.
And to keep saying a firm no-fucking-thank-you to “having a job” until we’re served up something way fucking better.
Still from Stolen Focus: “Internally, at Google, the unofficial motto among the staff is ‘If you’re not fast, you're fucked.’”
I can’t imagine statistics are too different for other Western workers.
Also shown in this handy link that illustrates other tidbits from Stolen Focus I’ve not had room to include! So have a *deep* read.
Don’t come after me; I know concepts like Stoicism and mindfulness aren’t inherently bad. I know they’re of great benefit and help to some people; I try and practise mindfulness and other such stillness routines myself. However, I am greatly opposed to them being used to weaponise what is a designed systemic catastrophe into distraction from it, and then gaslight us for our supposed personal and moral failures.
I was similarly shocked to learn that in my country of nationality, Australia, 44 percent of adults don’t have the literary skills necessary for everyday life. In the UK region (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales), statistics show anywhere between 1-in-4 and 1-in-8 adults lack, or have difficulty with, basic literary skills. While these definitions are somewhat vague, and rudimentary global literacy has improved on the whole in recent decades...these statistics still point to a fuckload of people getting lost in this world of mind-bending misunderstanding.
A YouGov poll Hari references in chapter three (I think) identified people who felt their attention was getting worse, and gave them a list of ten options to choose from as to why they figured this to be the case. Stress, as well as changes in life circumstances like having kids/getting older etc., shared close to 50% of the total vote. Disturbed sleep came third, and phone usage fourth.