Reject the premise
There is no carrot, y'all.
Dear Writer,
So… this was making the rounds on the tweeters last week:
Here’s a summary:
Someone tweeted, with their name redacted for their own safety: “I remember hearing that John Scalzi will either writer for four hours, or one thousand words per day. I don't even think he could be called a full-time writer if he only works half a day or less.”
Someone else responded to that tweet: “If writing is all you have to do, and you’ve got an advance, and you don’t churn out 3,000 words in composition a day, you’re not competent enough to be a full-time writer. I have what amounts to three full-time jobs and I write more than he does.”
To which John Scalzi replied: “If it makes these folks feel better to think I’m a part-time writer, fine. In which case, I’m a part-time writer who doesn’t have another job. That’s actually pretty cool. Also, if typing is all you think qualifies as writing, well, okay, that’s a choice you can make.”
To which Neil Gaiman responded, “I wrote Coraline at 50 words a night.”
I don’t know where to start. The ridiculousness of the idea that until you work for 40 hours in a week, your work doesn't have real value? The ableism of the idea that unless you can work for 40 hours in a week, you’re not really working? The arrogance of telling a huge bestselling writer that he’s not working hard enough? The absolute arbitrariness of the 40-hour work week itself? Or the fact that the actual writing is just part of the job when you are a writer, which also includes promotion and book signings and meetings with editors and agents and answering emails and farting about on social media with people who yell at you for stupid shit, which is required by most publishers?
But that’s all weeds. We need to move out of those details and see from a higher vantage point.
We need to reject the premise.
Which Scalzi failed to do.
Scalzi came back with a response of “I do so work!” and he does and I believe him because I’ve been very close to some bestselling authors and they turn themselves inside out doing a million things that aren’t writing the stories, but which make it possible to make money for writing the stories.
That’s not the point. Scalzi failed to reject the premise of this argument, which is that if he’s not working every day until his fingers bleed, then he’s not honorable.
We’ve been faltering under the myth of the Hard Worker for a really long time. It’s a capitalist story where the Monied and the Powerful (MaP) convince the proletariat that they, too, can have wealth and a life of ease if they just work hard enough for just enough wages to mostly get by while telling us that the sacrifice of our time, health and wellbeing is honorable, and that honor is what you get instead of, you know, Maslovian security.
I say “Maslovian security” instead of “financial security” because up to a point money only provides you with the first two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, the basic needs that keep us alive and safe. Financial security, if any of us ever see that, comes after Maslovian security, which in the world’s richest countries should be a basic human right.
We’re batteries being given empty “honor” badges in return for sacrificing the most finite resource we have: the hours of our lives. For that labor and time investment, we’re told that if we manage to put away enough money after we meet our Maslovian needs—which most of us won’t be able to do because we barely make Maslovian wages—we can retire and “live the good life,” which for those of us lucky enough to have anything to save for retirement will be maybe just enough to get by.
Or maybe… maybe… we will hit it big and live the good life now, like Scalzi, but then we’ll have our labor-sourced honor taken away from us if we don’t show our timecard punches to everyone on Twitter.
But in the end, all that happens is that we’re discarded for the next set of fresh batteries, who have to work even harder not just for the carrot of eventual success/life of ease, but for the stick of crippling student loan debt, which will destroy them financially if they ever stop moving.
Capitalism is a villain that knows what it’s doing, y’all. I mean… it’s evil as fuck, but you gotta give it up for the genius of it all.
But let’s get back to rejecting the premise:
You’ve been sold a line of bullshit about your value and your labor. Not your work; your labor. Work is what you do for yourself; it’s meaningful and important. Labor is what you do for someone else.
When you labor, you are a battery. Sometimes your labor can also be work that is meaningful; often, it’s not. It’s just a treadmill with a carrot in front of you and a stick behind you.
But since your labor makes the MaP money, you’ve been set up to believe that your value is tied to your productivity. That is so you will continue to labor for them, and make them money. How this affects you is not their concern. They tell you your labor is honorable to make you feel better about being a battery.
Your ability to labor hard is not what gives you value. Nor is being pretty, or being thin, or achieving some other unattainable standard for which someone in the MaP has a class or a pill or a scheme that will fix everything if you just pay them what’s left of your money, of which you already don’t have enough. (Evil. Genius.)
People who labor less than x hours a day are not lazy. They just know when they’re done.
If you don’t have enough money, it’s not because you’re not laboring hard enough or because your labor doesn’t have value. It’s because the system is designed to keep you on the treadmill, endlessly chasing a carrot you were never meant to get, in fear of a stick that will destroy if you don’t move fast enough.
So while Scalzi’s response is true, and correct—he is, indeed, working his ass off for every bit of success he has—I reject the premise that this person making the accusations was defensible in their accusations. They said what they said because they’ve been abused by the system, and they in turn abuse others because they failed to reject the premise behind their abuse.
Which is about what we deserve.
We believe that people who have outrageous success deserve that success, because they work hard… and we forget that they’re not working any harder than anyone else.
We believe that people who are in poverty deserve it because they’re not working hard enough, even though people in poverty are working harder for lower wages in more volatile jobs than people not in poverty.
I mean… shit. One of the tweeters is speaking of having the equivalent of three full time jobs (120 hours of the 168 available hours in the week) and writing more than 1k words a day as though that is a badge of honor and not a red flag of abuse.
So… it’s time to reject the premise. We need to stop feeling bad about ourselves and slapping each other because the MaP fed us myths that hurt us and benefited them.
Neil Gaiman is taking the right approach. He says he wrote 50 words a night on Coraline and he doesn’t apologize for it. He doesn’t make excuses, and say, “Oh, but I also spent 12 hours a day doing all this other nonsense to keep my face in front of you all and remind you that I’m here and I’ve hustled for everything I’ve gotten.” That is likely also true. Gaiman fucking hustles. He deserves his success, absolutely, but no more than other people deserve that level of success who haven’t hit the lottery that is “right place, right work, right time.”
Hard work and success do go together, but correlation is not causation. Some people have success because the system is set up to hugely reward a few people to serve as the carrot that the rest of us chase so that we will continue to exhaust ourselves turning our time into a lot of money for someone else, and just a little less than enough for us.
The good news is, more batteries are starting to realize what’s going on and attempts are being made at disrupting the system.
The bad news is, people like this will continue to yell at the various Johns Scalzi, mad because they’re still on the treadmill, chasing a carrot they will never, ever get and holding up their useless honor badges as though that means anything.
Look, we’re still in the system and we still have to work in it until we fix it because our Maslovian needs still have to be met. But at least we can reject the premise and stop beating each other up for not laboring hard enough.
That’s a start.
Everything,
L