[LEMONS] 6.06.2001
Employment is weird.
Another friend was laid off the other day. I can't even count all of my friends who've been laid off and are presently unemployed. I'm a distinct minority. This is thee future we were promised after all. This is what they told us in middle school and high school, what we were taught in our early college years, when a Bush was in the White House and the economy stank to high heaven: your prospects are limited. I always accepted this. It wasn't until '96 or so that I began to think that maybe--just maybe--I might be able to cash in now baby.
One thing I hope, is that this downturn will teach GenXers that we are not our jobs.
"What do you do?"
"I light things on fire and paint slogans on freeway underpasses. Then I smoke some weed and play Oni for hours on end. Oh yeah, then I go to work."
I hope that ours will be the generation that refuses to accept the notion that our employers own us. So many people I know were selling themselves wholesale to worthless ventures, putting in 70 hours a week for paper riches that never materialized, for false promises. Ours was the first generation to really assert our right to look freaky and wear T-shirts, why not take it a step further? If we are to have a revolution of our own, I hope it will be one where we truly reclaim our lives, rather than just the appearance of having one.
Four weeks vacation and a thirty hour work week, that's my goal. Technology has advanced to the point that our productivity doesn't have to take a major hit were we to reduce the amount of time we spend at work. I've polled most of my friends who work long hours--some of these are the same people you read about in New Economy magazines a year or two ago, people working all night for some oppressive Silicone Valley startup that took away all of your basic rights and gave you a foosball table in their stead. Most of these people seem to feel like they have a duty to put in long hours--even if they aren't actually doing anything.
This is the great piece of horseshit floating in the soup of the American economy: our assiduous knowledge workers are all slacking off on the job. Now, by that, I don't mean that they aren't working hard, they are. But many of them also feel that they've earned a few hours out of the day to play Quake, or surf the Web, or design their own Web site, or maintain a Web log... Horseshit. If everyone agreed to give up the canard and just go home, we could reclaim our lives. Get off your ass, get to work, and then go home early.
Last night I was talking to my friend Rob. We have been friends since high school, and still keep in touch regularly, even though he's in Atlanta and I'm in San Francisco. He just sent me copies of The Kinks' Are the Village Green Preservation Society and Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information, out of the blue for no reason other than that he's a nice guy. Rob is an actor and a comedian. His theater company has just filmed a pilot for the fox network, and he's suddenly on the verge of easy money. On the verge. As of now he's still broke, and may have to get another job to supplement his theater income until he gets another check from Fox.
But in any case, he's close to achieving the highest honor one can in American society: he's going to be on TV. This will be his job, being a television personality. Had you told me this in college, on a night when we were going from gas station to gas station, writing bad checks in order to raise enough money to go see Primus, I would not have been surprised. In any case, of all my friends, he seems like the one most likely to escape the hamster wheel. Good luck, buddy. I hope a life of leisure awaits you.
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