Kate Bowles
@kfitz I appreciated this post greatly, thank you for writing. It has sparked a big thought.
“the value of the human in the world as about being rather than doing”
We have created so many frameworks for valuing doing, from the micro of small talk questions like “and what do you do?” to the macro of the labour market, that we are estranged at the level of reflex and gesture from deeper questions of our being.
It feels as though there is a key to this in consciously addressing the limits of our being: our mortality. It’s our mortality that values our being on its own terms, I think.
Rest
I'm back to my all-too-slow reading of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, and am finding myself a bit haunted this morning by this passage:
Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
Haunted, because I at least in theory started a vacation yesterday -- or, rather, two days of vacation followed by my university's relatively new December 24 to January 1 closure. But I'm having a super hard time actually turning work off. Partly because the needs of my colleagues have not stopped just because I've taken a couple of days off. Partly because I cannot get myself to stop reflexively checking all of the various messaging systems through which they ask me for stuff.
That's on me, not them. I'm thinking a lot this morning about what it would take for me to genuinely shut everything down and walk away from it all, even for a couple of days. It's tough to imagine.
Anyhow, Burkeman goes on from this passage to talk about the "pathological productivity" inspired in no small part by the collision of Calvinism and capitalism, and the ways that one's "tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness" were -- ahem, are -- imagined to be a sign of one's state of salvation. Which rang all kinds of bells for me, and made me go in search of this blog post from 2012, which reminded me how little I've learned in the last twelve years, or rather how much I've had to learn again and again and again.
Rest for its own sake. Rest for purposes that are non- -- or even anti- -- instrumentalist. All of this requires the ability to understand the value of the human in the world as about being rather than doing. And this is hard, hard, hard.
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Finite
Webmentions
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@kate Yes, absolutely! That’s the thread throughout *Four Thousand Weeks*: that all of our striving and optimizing and productivity hacks are no more than a bulwark against mortality — and as such, destined to fail. The best thing we can do is accept that inevitability, recognize that now is all we have, and find our way to what's really important in our lives.
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@kfitz i'm taking a break from grading by...looking to see if there are jobs posted outside the higher ed sector that i'd be able to get. when a break from work is all about work...blech. i need to put this machine down now!
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@VCP It’s so hard!
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@VCP @kfitz Uff, relatable.
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@kfitz Aha yes! I’m checking out the book and I see that now. There’s a beautiful print in the collection of @lokigwyn that this all brings to mind, bottom right. https://mastodon.art/@lokigwyn/113606158535449395 Loki Gwynbleidd ???????????? (@lokigwyn@mastodon.art)
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@kate @kfitz Amazingly, I had been looking thru my following list to find @lokigwyn earlier today and have the 'Work is Shit' print in my cart but hadn't pulled the trigger on it yet
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@VCP @kfitz @lokigwyn I am such a fan! As I step quietly away from higher education, one of the most troubled sectors in terms of toxic and self-damaging overwork, I want to slip that little dormouse under the doors of many loved colleagues.
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@kate @lokigwyn Oh, that is so lovely!
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
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8 Reposts
