Job Search - Part 5

The Strange Values & Ideas of People Who Don't Work Hard

Reflections on capitalism, culture, achievement, and gratitude, seen through the lens of joblessness.

There is a working class-strong and happy-among both rich and poor: there is an idle class-weak, wicked, and miserable-among both rich and poor. - John Ruskin

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have. - Colleen McCullough

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. - George Orwell

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. -George Orwell

I began writing this in early October… and was amazed at how prescient the themes turned out to be for our election.

I have moved easily between the (lower) elite and the working class for most of my life. On the one hand I lived in New York City and went to college for architecture and finally got a degree from the University of Arizona, thanks to the G.I. Bill. On the other I’ve spent many years guarding buildings and washing windows and selling phone plans to passersby and loading trucks. I’ve lived near lavish university campuses and in beautiful brownstone buildings-and also been homeless or jailed or institutionalized or forced to rent rooms from other struggling people. Most people who move between income quintiles (which is the large majority of Americans) tend to begin poor-ish and then slowly accumulate wealth and status-and then begin falling in both around age 55-60 as they enjoy their savings and exorbitant government benefits. Some people, of course, are simply never poor in any sense. (Incidentally, NO large group in this country consumes as many resources and is as carefully catered to as the old and prosperous. In a very real sense our public policy is their instrument and, in true Baby Boomer style, they use it for their own enrichment and security.)

The point I want to make is that my fortunes have not followed a gently rising hill or a diagonal trendline. I haven’t lived a conventional life. My fortunes have been as up-and-down and repetitious as a sine curve. The reasons for that don’t really relate to this essay. It’s difficult to be a man without much status and money in the United States, psychologically-speaking. I have told myself many times that my experiences make excellent grist for the writing mill and while that is certainly true (and I’m grateful for my struggles… now that they’re over) it is mostly a post hoc rationalization. In this essay I want to write about the strange view of American society that I have surveyed. Twenty years ago, I don’t remember being aware of elite delusions or feminine entitlement or lavish class prerogatives to the same extent. Have these creations grown? I suspect they have. My (earlier) observations about work ethic and office dynamics and gratitude have not changed, though. Wisdom has a kind of permanence that is a rare quality in today’s culture.

Hard Workers, and Everyone Else

What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.

-George Orwell

I’m convinced that most hard workers in the last election voted for Donald Trump. Hard workers are defined (in my terminology) as people who must stay busy moving and using their hands (for other tasks than typing or drawing) and making constant and meaningful changes to the physical/material world. They include all those working busy customer service jobs or doing manual labor or warehouse work or building/paving/scaffolding structures or carrying plates or visiting houses to fix your HVAC system or attending to your community’s landscaping or waiting tables.

There are a great many office jobs that don’t fall into my category but are nonetheless difficult and stressful and poorly compensated. I’ve worked in such jobs for years. Conversely, police officers and firemen don’t fall under my definition (despite being busy and often at risk), but sculptors do. Sculptors are not “hard workers” (in my scheme), even if they work very hard at sculpting. So it’s not a perfectly distinct or coherent category. As many as 20% of workers live in a kind of interstitial space, with elements from each category but I still think it’s a useful division. The cultures of the members of two economic strata are remarkably different, as are their psychological tendencies.

One real defining and fairly consistent quality of a hard-working job is: one which exists without the cover and blessing of bachelor’s degrees or credentials or bureaucracy or academic status. There are jobs with those things which make fairly low wages (teachers, for example) and there are busy and risky jobs which are not-according to my categorization-’hard-working’, but the rubric for sorting is still useful. Teachers may not have much in the way of status or the pillowing effects of credentials, but they certainly have more of those things than a carpenter or a lineman and with further education they often become counselors and administrators-both jobs which are well-compensated and decidedly not hard-working. Most of the office jobs I’ve worked are not ‘hard-working’. A degree will still help you gain employment… but it’s not a guarantee. Real non-hard-working jobs are those which deal with information, symbols, knowledge, and representations and derive their value from that knowledge, and are less concerned with moving through the world or manipulating the material world or building or delivering or cooking (etc.).

Hard-working jobs usually don’t require degrees. Non-hard-working jobs do, and that degree often functions as almost a guarantee of work, as well as a juvenile goal and an identity anchor.

Musa al-Gharbi

’s concept of ‘symbolic capitalists’ is a scheme that roughly overlaps mine. Symbolic capitalists are not ‘hard workers’ according to my terminology, even when they work very hard doing what they do. Their activity is intellectual, digital, verbal… and has much different (and to my eyes, stranger) dynamics when it comes to status and worldviews formation. The feminization of these fields (which I’ve written about elsewhere in this series, and which is better explored in

John Carter

’s essay, below) is certainly a factor.

Academia is Women’s Work

Women now account for more than 60% of new college graduates. I think that is accounted for partly by the fact that hard-working (physical) jobs are mostly sought and worked by men (and are less appealing to women) and partly because women are more susceptible to anxiety and especially averse to risk. Men are much more prone to risky behavior and living as an adult without a college degree is an increasingly risky proposition. I was an office manager for a large alcohol distributer last year. We had about 450 salespeople in the state. They had to be able to lift cases of alcohol, but the job was mostly driving and visiting stores and bars and restaurants and checking on inventory and speaking to managers. It didn’t require a college degree and few of our salespeople had one. >95% percent were male. That sex distribution (80-90% or more male) was also the case for builders and warehouse workers and window washers and combat arms soldiers, in my experience. Please note: most of these jobs are now totally open to women. Women don’t work in them because they don’t want to, and there are many excellent reasons for this.

Therapists, scientists, professors, graphic designers, architects, engineers, lawyers, teachers, nurses, doctors aren’t just people with different kinds of jobs. They’re (increasingly, it seems to me) different kinds of people.

I will be generalizing widely in the following paragraphs but I have begun to believe that much of the modern world functions as insulation from risk and from the messier aspects of the physical world. Those people by and for whom modernity has been created are now, in many ways, qualitatively different from those for whom it has not. We can see the difference in each group’s outlook upon life.

University of Arizona campus, 2023; No matter how you define the class of ‘hard-working people’, these folks are not included

Note: I used the label of ‘hard workers’ in things I wrote months ago. I know it’s a divisive and possibly confusing terminology. After all lots of therapists ‘work hard’, and lots of plumbers don’t. It’s also an imperfect way to refer to the working class, and to separate such jobs from non-working class occupations. Nevertheless, this essay is really just a series of earlier notes, fleshed out… and for anyone who’s waited tables or worked behind the counter at Wendy’s or in a warehouse, these jobs are HARD (draining) in a way that being an executive or a professor is not. They also include much more insecurity and less status. I think most people will intuitively know what I mean when I say ‘hard worker’ and if you don’t I apologize. I only have my own perspective to use here. I decided to keep it, despite my misgivings.

Book Smart

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said something like “I’m not a big reader… but I’m street smart.” This is not the kind of thing you will hear from your doctor or your therapist. It presupposes two assumptions, which have functioned as pieces of folk wisdom for a long time-and which seem to be less prominent than they used to be. The assumptions are (1) that there’s a difference between ‘book’ and ‘street’ smart and (2) street smart is a good thing to be.

Of course, the professional classes are less willing to celebrate or even acknowledge street smarts. Everything they’ve done in their life, every decision they’ve made and every vestige of their exorbitant privilege comes from their remove from the street, and their commanding view of it, safe in their lofty citadels. They fled the distant specter of the street in childhood (although they didn’t envision it in precisely that way, unless they grew up hard-which 99% of them have not). Everything that they have done in their life has been done with a kind of vague misapprehension and fear of the street. Of all the BLM activists and ‘anti-carceral’ writers I’ve known in my life, none of them actually lived in the ghetto. Of course, given their political commitments and pretensions, they wouldn’t want to advertise this.

In a (semi-)capitalist society like ours all decisions and values are rendered into a simple, one-dimensional scheme: profit. When high-achieving high schoolers and graduate students and interns work to please their bosses or get good grades or ‘grow in their roles’ they might be doing it out of love for the activity, but it’s far more likely that they’re operating from a kind of hungry self-interest, a banal and rarely-observed mix of pride and greed and fear that drives so much of our society forward and upward. That self-interest is the fear of unemployment and poverty and vagary and hardship. It’s the fear of a life without status and a job without prospects and a home without a mortgage. It is, in other words, fear of the street.

Helicopter Parents & Fear of Life

This is a topic which probably demands its own essay. It’s something I think about almost every day. I see signs of this condition everywhere I look.

Briefly: the attitude of greedy acquisition of status and success and fear of failure/difficulty/stress which is so potent in the elite psyche (potent enough to chase away all inclinations toward principle or compassion or nonconformity) comes from somewhere. Obviously, the factors which have created this weird blend of status-seeking and anxiety and existential blandness are multivariate: market forces and institutions and the synthesis of post-1960’s cultural developments.

I can’t say exactly why over-parenting and a risk averse approach to deciding and to living is so pronounced these days. It could be the relative wealth of many families. it could be the prominence of women as decision-makers in many households. It could be alarmism in the news-media or the erosion of communities. It’s probably all of these things and a dozen more, but it is a contemporary reality and it has serious negative effects.

Working class parents are less likely to over-parent their kids. One of the prominent ‘luxury beliefs’ pointed out by

Rob Henderson

is the idea that traditional family structure and marriage are just different ways of raising kids, and any unit will do. The idea that fathers in homes are important features is widely disregarded and ignored. Upper class women profess this belief (it’s close to universal in gender studies courses, in my experience)… and then go and seek mates, and marry at much higher rates than the working classes. For all the talk of polycules and tolerance and queer theory these are more often showy accessories for progressives; they might bring their kids to drag queen story-hour, but those kids mostly go home to stable and two-parent homes with married adults, living in the suburbs.

Rob Henderson

relates an anecdote of being the only child raised in a broken home in a Yale undergraduate class of >30. Every other person in that class had been raised by two married adults.

So, the working classes have absorbed (or at least they reflect) the cultural narrative that marriage is optional and unnecessary for parenting and that single parent homes are equally valid and workable. Women dating many men, promiscuous attachments, struggling single mothers-these are all artifacts of modernity and while they are accepted by the elites the elites know intuitively that these are not optimal living strategies. The working classes tend to be less intelligent (in terms of IQ) and less educated and their lives are more beset by struggle (almost by definition) and so the burdens and pathologies of single-parents and neglected children and romantically unwise mothers are disproportionately clustered amongst them.

Nevertheless, there are many stable and happy families in the working class and these parents tend to take a much more realistic view (to my eyes) of life. Rather than chasing status and organizing existence around elite college acceptance and spending time and energy advertising ‘virtuous’ beliefs, they live lives with similar ambitions and ethics but with the understanding that life is dangerous and risk is necessary and success is a complicated and multifaceted destination.

It’s Not Real

Go to Deerfield Beach, Florida or Harlem, New York or Tucson, Arizona (all places I’ve lived) and the kids you see riding bikes outside and haunting the gas stations and chilling on the football field bleachers will nearly all be working class. Parents who don’t work hard tend to organize their kids’ activities as they organize their entire lives-to preclude risk and low-status contact. How curious that a group of people who are so egalitarian in their discourse are so snobby (or at least disconnected) in their relationships. Perhaps it’s been thus for a long time and I just never noticed.

I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists. I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table manners… It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.

-George Orwell

The elites are afraid of life. They’re afraid of poverty (which they’ve never known) and they’re afraid of reputational harm, living as they do without any fear of criminal prosecution. Most of all, they fear the opinions of others-their friends and other kids and teachers and people online. The working class scares them in a way that they can’t quite articulate. This fear suffuses their children from birth. I am beginning to suspect it is growing in intensity as generations proliferate.

Referees

As Freddie DeBoer writes:

the woke set just cannot stop believing that their judgment in and of itself somehow has political force, somehow matters. They appear to be convinced that if they just judge hard enough, that judgment will somehow be given material force, somehow actually create change. This misguided thinking is the result of a number of factors, principle among them that the people who believe in those politics tend to be those who have always been governed by authority figures who they can appeal to and secure some semblance of justice, Mommy and Daddy or the teacher or the RA or some other figure in charge who makes the world make sense.

There’s a tendency to focus on feelings and victimhood and offense among the comfortable set. These subjective conditions are beyond question, and so they act as a kind of trump card in the endless status games.

In the essay below,

Paul Musgrave

writes:

Donald Trump has, once again, floated the idea of the United States taking “ownership and control of Greenland”. This comes after his kidding-on-the-square about Canada becoming the 51st state and revisiting the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panamanian sovereignty.

I’m so tired. I’m so damn tired.

Greenland, Again

In response, I wrote:

Paul is tired, everyone! Is he as tired as the landscapers whose real income has declined by 25% in the past four years? Is he as tired as the residents of Northern cities whose public schools were commandeered as housing for migrants? Is he as tired as the thousands of people who saw their dreams crushed by COVID policies which are now understood to be wrong and stupid (and never scientific)? I’m not sure. Those people don’t emotionalize their political problems and don’t tend to complain that much.

Only journalists and professors and other educated folks working in such settings (where your feelings are VERY, very important) say things like this.

I spoke to a man on death row in California about an hour ago. I wonder if he’s tired. I’m not sure. He never mentioned it. Perhaps because in his world such expressions don’t have the same memetic heft. Among the poor and downtrodden EVERYONE is tired, in a way that Paul may never have known.

I’m not trying to pick on Paul. The fact is that these kinds of messages are ubiquitous-but not among people who work hard. No firefighter or carpenter or soldier would ever speak about being ‘tired’ as a way of expressing disagreement or frustration in this way. ‘Tired’ doesn’t have the same resonance in a world where feelings are simply feelings (everyone has them!) and expressing offense or displeasure or exasperation says as much or more about you as it does about the situation. In many parts of society people must work hard to survive and, if they don’t, they’re often guaranteeing more hard work for others. In these places feelings are usually matters to be managed privately and shared with close friends and family. They’re usually not seen as very important. They’re not tools to manipulate the social structure. There’s another word for people who are easily and often tired: weak.

The elites have managed society for so long that they appeal to institutions whenever their emotional tripwires are triggered. Fact-checkers, servants, managers, and-yes-police, have served the agendas and catered to the wishes of people who don’t work hard for generations and so they feel instinctively that this is the way that things should be. I’m guessing here, but I imagine that the whiny, feelings-based, referee-seeking mindset of many elites is a primary reason for their displeasure with Trump’s ascendancy. Institutions and political norms are supposed to support net zero and feminism and work-life balance and DEI and LGBTQ activism and the importation of lower-class labor and the class prerogatives of the wealthy! After all, this has been more or less the national condition for two decades, regardless of who is in the White House. The augur of a new cultural status quo is frightening to these people. Yes, that’s partly because they perceive the erosion of what they perceive to be important political projects… but it’s also because they are supposed to run things. They create meaning. They make important decisions. Listening to the discourse in the aftermath of the election I was confronted with this attitude dozens of times: of course we’re better policy-makers and wiser voters and more compassionate people. We have college degrees! I think recent history might indicate otherwise. Could it be that all of the psychological tendencies and class prejudices I’m writing about here make for flawed electoral preferences? They must, in some cases.

The reaction to the recent Meta decision to overhaul fact-checking, the hysterical response to the AfD’s growing support in Germany, the deliberate and uncomfortable strategy of pained silence around the crimes of British immigrants (including the ‘Grooming Gangs’ scandal) all seem to be symptoms of this. These are not ideas or debates that should be occurring, within their cosmology. Where are the referees to intervene and re-impose their ideological prejudices on the system?! They still exist, but their power is waning. It turns out that the values of people who don’t work hard are soft and flawed and, in many ways, absurd.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

-George Orwell

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Previous Job Search Entries:

Job Search - Part 1

Job Search - Part 2

Job Search - Part 3

Job Search - Part 4

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Job Search Part 6 - The Wisdom of the Working Classes

(The Parasite Class, Centering Marginalized Voices, The Wisdom of the Working Class)

Job Search Part 7 - A Swarm of Costly Burdens

(Debt, Romance, Housing, Transporation, Healthcare, The Police)

… COMING SOON