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I thought for a split second about martyring myself, telling her to take me instead, something like that. But it wouldn’t have done any good. She would have fired one of the new temps anyway. She just wanted to “teach” me something while she was at it. Worst of all, I was painfully aware of how much I needed the job… and so was she. Like the VP from Boston, she knew I wouldn’t be here if I had better options.
I can’t remember the temp’s name—she was one of the youngest. She was short and had a red shirt on. Some desperate thought convinced me she might suffer the least. The other temps looked like they might have had kids.But honestly, she could have had them too. I try not to think about it now.
“The one in red,” I said after a long pause.
The manager didn’t say another word. She walked over to the group and called everyone, over forty workers, together in a circle. My guts immediately started to rot. I assumed she would just pull the woman aside. But she didn’t. The group looked on. Alternating between Spanish and English, the manager told them all that we were behind because people had been making too many mistakes. That this was a business and we had deadlines. That we had to meet them. That we couldn’t afford mistakes. Then, abruptly, she pointed to the woman in red, calling her to the middle of the circle: “¡Ven!” She told her, in front of everyone, to go home.
I watched the woman’s head sink with shame. It sank in a way that, even now, to this day, is painful to think about. I’m a snotty kid, hurting, a coward, hoping some adult will come and save me and tell me this wasn’t my fault. The woman trudged out of the warehouse. She didn’t deserve this. What did her parents say when she came home? Did she have a kid to look at when she came through the door? I think about her often. Did she turn out okay? Does anyone?
I’ve never told anyone about this until now.
“So,” the other lady chimed in, “your manager tells us you’re leaving.”
“Oh?”
“Well, we were telling him how great of a waiter you are…” She waited for me to acknowledge the compliment. “And he agreed, of course. But he also said he was sad to see you go.”
“Ah, yup. I am moving on, sadly.” Why sadly? I shouldn’t be sad. This job was hellish.
“Where are you moving on to?”
“To Michigan, actually. I’m going to grad school.”
“Oooh,” they clucked in unison. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you.”
“How exciting,” the grey one said.
“It is.”
“And you’re going for what?”
“To get my Ph.D.”
“Oooh—a Ph.D. in what?”
“Comparative literature.”
“Ah!” she giggled. “So, we can expect to see you working here again when you’re all finished?”
aahhhh
Even consuming itself has become work. At the self-checkout, you can buy the best item for your needs—as identified by Consumer Reports or The Wirecutter or The Strategist. When you’re drowning in the condiment aisle, Serious Eats will tell you which mustard to buy. When we buy items sight unseen, drop-shipped from distant warehouses, buying guides and five-star reviews come to stand in for the reputation of brand names and union bugs. Review webpages are a cottage industry. Yet such overwhelming choice often deprives us of real agency when it comes to what fills our lives. Products are designed not for our needs but by the unfathomable logistics of a supply chain an ocean away, are sold via algorithmic data mining that clutters our digital lives, and arrive preposterously packaged to suit the needs of shipping and branding. Managing all of this is, increasingly, work, right alongside managing our identities.
This is work in the fullest sense, vital to keep us working and consuming, to keep systems of production flowing. Sociologists Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann have explored this at length in a study of household recycling, as we consumers warehouse and sort all the stuff that comes into and clutters our homes. Glucksmann identifies this as consumption work, a massive category of labor: “all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services.”
Add in the work of our jobs, our commutes, care for our families, etc., and it’s little wonder that our houses are a mess—especially as capital makes them into waste transfer stations. It’s worth remembering that maintaining a household was once a (deeply gendered) full-time job for many, even as it was unpaid—this is still often the case. The promise of automation often fails to trickle down the economic ladder, leaving the richer more able to outsource this work to both maids and machines. A personal assistant can research and buy the best robot vacuum for your needs.
Kondo instructs clients and readers, when parting with objects, to thank things for serving their purpose. This resonant closure acknowledges that we have relationships with things, helping to sever attachment. Thanking a thing honors and acknowledges it, implicitly recognizing its trajectory beyond your possession and the countless hands that labored to create and will labor to dispose of it. If things are animate, it is workers who have shaped that animacy. Whether or not you ascribe animacy to things, attention to their materiality provides an opening onto their whole lives: from the field to the factory, the closet, the thrift store, the dump. Taking Kondo’s method further, consumers might question things as they acquire them. I won’t declaim that you should “buy mindfully,” per New Minimalism, though doing so might help reduce your own household workload. No, the question must be asked prior to the point of sale. We must ask if the supply chain sparks joy. We must grab hold of it.
heh
In our world, we no longer work in order to satisfy our own needs. Instead, we work for Capital. Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us. Capital therefore represents a new kind of transcendence, which entails a new form of subjectivation. We are being expelled from the sphere of lived immanence – where life relates to life instead of subjugating itself to external ends.
Power that is smart and friendly does not operate frontally – i.e., against the will of those who are subject to it. Instead, it guides their will to its own benefit. It says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. It seeks to call forth positive emotions and exploit them. It leads astray instead of erecting obstacles. Instead of standing opposed to the subject, smart and friendly power meets the subject halfway.
Smart power cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining it through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences – to tell all about our lives. Friendly power proves more powerful, as it were, than purely repressive power. It manages not to be seen at all. Today’s crisis of freedom stems from the fact that the operative technology of power does not negate or repress freedom so much as exploit it. Free choice (Wahl) is eliminated to make way for a free selection (Auswahl) from among the items on offer.
Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button. Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating – and they click Like all the while. Neoliberalism is the capitalism of ‘Like’. It is fundamentally different from nineteenth-century capitalism, which operated by means of disciplinary constraints and prohibitions.
The imperative of boundless optimization even manages to exploit pain. Thus, the famous motivational speaker Tony Robbins has written:
When you set a goal, you’ve committed to CANI (Constant, Never-Ending Improvement)! You’ve acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is a power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life.
Now, the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization.
ouch, too real
The human being is a creature of luxury. In the original and authentic sense, luxury is not a practice of consumption. Rather, it means a mode of living that is free of necessity. Freedom is based on deviation: luxuriance, getting away from necessity (Notwendigkeit). Luxury transcends the intention of averting need (die Not zu wenden). But today, consumption is co-opting even luxury. Excessive consumption amounts to unfreedom: compulsion corresponding to the unfreedom of labour. Luxury as freedom – like play that is truly free – can be thought only beyond the world of work and consumption. Viewed in this light, it stands close to asceticism.
Nobody had warned her that the figure to pay attention to when she was being interviewed by Igor, the head of consumer outreach at Renewable Solutions, was not the "thirty or forty thousand dollars" in commissions that he foresaw her earning in her very first year but the $21,000 base salary he was offering, or that a salesman as persuasive as Igor might also be skilled at selling shit jobs to unsuspecting twenty-one-year-olds.
From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea--her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by--that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday morning reading an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times at a café.