Work
When I’m not thinking about it, I perceive work as including all efforts that are connected to my professional position. It’s a pretty clean line: administrative tasks (I’m a university administrator, mainly, at present), and anything connected to teaching and scholarship on one side; everything else on the other. There is a grey area where I read things for pleasure (or write things that are pleasurable) that sometimes feed or overlap with my professional projects and priorities. This is less the case now than a few years ago, when I was primarily (or at least half) a teacher-scholar. Back then, when reading something for fun (like Tolstoy, which I’m doing now), I would naturally be thinking about the way I conceptualize novels and narrators and how I try to get students to think about them, as well as my sense of modern western history. But teaching is quite a small part of my professional life now, and my scholarship is no longer primarily about literature, so Tolstoy now goes decisively in the “fun” bin.
I would not say that I’m satisfied with this division, though I chose to think of it this way (or, rather, I chose to adopt this very common way of thinking). When I was just over the hump into mid-career, I felt that I was working too much, and I made a conscious effort to clear away time to rest and recreate and even just waste time on the weekends. This resulted in cleaner lines between work and non-work, a division that has firmed up as I moved more and more into administration.
This clean work/non-work distinction is functional, but I also have a grass-is-greener desire for a more integrated life, in which I work when the spirit moves me and rest when I’m weary, regardless of the day of the week. Now, sometimes, I find myself bored or otherwise dissatisfied on off days; or I look forward to the weekend all week and then find myself at loose ends when it comes. A guy named Boyce wrote a book a long time ago called “Advice for Young Professors,” where he advocated a life in which you “work constantly but moderately”—and I feel like that would be a kind of sweet spot—never letting projects or priorities grow cold, always pecking away at them in a reasonable, moderate way. But that’s not where I’m at right now. A significant portion of my work at present involves activities from which I do not derive much pleasure, even though I frequently find them important and meaningful. Bits of pleasurable work (which tend to be writing and scholarship) get shoehorned into little pockets of 15 and 30 minutes. That is the way it shall remain until I retire, I reckon, which will come soon enough—after which I plan to tear down the wall between work and leisure and spend as much energy as I can muster doing work that is both pleasurable and meaningful (i.e. writing, mostly), for as long as I am able.
When I put on my cultural-studies goggles, however, all of this gets problematized—and I see the division between work and labor, the chimera of an integrated life, and the very notion of work itself as tied to professionalism and pay and social position as the products of capitalism and the ideological landscape it creates, where we essentially work not only to live but to distinguish ourselves and—at root—to justify our right to exist.
And I look at the climate (in all senses of the word) and think: we can’t go on living like this. Indeed, we’re not going to go on living like this, and the only question is how much deliberation and human agency will influence our trandition to whatever the next stage is, whether enlightenment or chaos or (most likely) a new incarnation of struggling against each other and muddling through, for those of us fortunate enough to muddle through.
Work around the house, errand-running, other stuff-that-has-to-be-done, I don’t think of as work. Cooking I take pleasure in. It’s a hobby although of course I can’t always treat it as such, but even when I’m just throwing something together I usually do a decent job of tuning in and enjoying it. I’m approaching my sixties and my wife and I rent a small house, have no kids, and pay others to do most of the truly laborious things.
So yeah, it’s pretty much work vs. everything else, a distinction I don’t believe in philosophically but which practically shapes the way I think and behave in everyday life.
Practically, work goes like this: I get in my car at about 7 a.m., drive an hour to work, and look at the big list of tasks and projects alongside the day’s priorities, and peck away at them. This involves much writing of emails, attendance at meetings, writing of small bits of documents and policies and proposals, etc. Days go fast or slow depending on how many of these tasks there are (days go faster when they’re busy). I could definitely do better at planning the days to leave little islands of pleasurable work; and I could do better at diving more quickly from one thing to the next—I waste time in marginally diverting internet reading and such (see “online life,” below). At noon I walk to get a beverage to drink alongside my packed lunch. At 2 I walk to the same building and fill up my coffee mug. At 5 or 5:30 or 6, depending on how backed up things have gotten, I walk to the car and drive home. I generally don’t look at email or do anything connected to my job until the next day at 8, when the round re-starts.
Life in my early career, when I was teaching and researching full-time, was not at all like this. I frequently graded or did class prep at night; and Sundays were frequently half- or even full work-days. Moving to administration, I realize as I am writing this, meant sacrificing a more pleasurable worklife for a more manageable one. And a more remunerative one, though modestly so.
As to feelings about work: how long do you have? J
If I could put it succinctly, it would go something like this: I spent about fifteen years trying to climb the ladder as a teacher-scholar, hoping to land a better position in a better place. In these years I found work generally pleasurable and satisfying—I almost always felt like I was performing well, and I experienced the usual accomplishments, rewards, and recognitions for someone in my field (promotion, tenure, books published, praise of colleagues, etc.). So I liked work, though there was too much of it, and I worked not infrequently to the brink of exhaustion. And time and again the dream of a better position in a better place eluded me.
Once I accepted that that wasn’t going to pan out—and I had been fully promoted—I tried new things, including a substantial shift in research topics and a move toward administration. The administrative pivot emerged out of three priorities (in this order): a sense that I had some skill for it and ought to see if I could do some more good in the world, on the premise that our purpose on earth is to use our gifts as fully as possible in ways that benefit other people; a sense of obligation to my colleagues; and the off-chance that it might get me a better job at a better place.
I will leave it to you, reader, to infer how all that’s working out.
Online life
My main online activity is reading. I subscribe to the New York Times and Washington Post online and get most of my news from them. Mostly I read them on my laptop during work breaks or before or after work. I also subscribe to The Athletic, and frequently read about baseball or basketball there during my lunch breaks. I also read here and there at the New Yorker and Atlantic monthly web pages.
I play online word games for about 10 minutes a day, usually in the morning.
I also listen to music online: I subscribe to Amazon Unlimited and to Sirius XM radio. It is miraculous how much music I can now avail myself of instantly; it also makes getting hold of music much less special. (I remember going to record stores and bugging the clerks about when the next Bob Dylan album was coming in). Nonetheless I feel like this access has been a net plus: when I bought a new stereo earlier this year a key element was good sound reproduction when connecting to wireless devices. I listen to podcasts when I drive now and then.
Up until the time of Trump’s election, I spent a good amount of time on social media. I used to write funny little poems and post them, and I used Facebook to keep up with friends and their kids & such. From about 2009 till maybe 2016 I reconnected with a good number of old friends that way. And I did the usual stuff—posting funny things about everyday life, sharing photos of my food and my vacations, etc.
I also, less frequently, shared political opinions, and I got into a few political dust-ups on Facebook now and then. Then, during the Obama administration and in the very early days of the Trump presidency, I got into some really nasty arguments with people on there. I harshly criticized a former student for publishing an anti-vax essay during the swine flu outbreak, an area in which she had no expertise, and got jumped on by her friends. And I got attacked online by an old friend when I simply praised the protestors at the women’s march just after Trump got elected.
All of this—as well as subsequent revelations about disinformation—soured me on social media, and I pulled back dramatically. I stayed on Facebook only for professional reasons (a project I lead has a group page). I now frequently go weeks at a time without checking Facebook; other times I look at it for two minutes, just to see if I’ve received any messages.
I am still on Twitter (which as of today is now known as X, as Elon Musk continues his assault on this property he so desired). In recent years I have benefited a lot from professional contacts there: I find out about online conferences (a robust phenomenon since the pandemic), scholarly publishing opportunities, archives, and things that I should be reading. (Probably 70 percent of my Twitter cohort are academics in my or adjacent fields). So, for the past 4 or so years I’ve spent perhaps 10-15 minutes a day on Twitter.
Of course, while I am on there I encounter things that fuel political rage. I also encounter a lot of people complaining about life in the contemporary academy. But I resist the urge to engage or to pursue rabbit-holes. I look at it every workday, but I don’t think I’m ever on it for more than 7 or 8 minutes at a time. I also see some funny stuff on there, animal videos and small kids doing cute things. There’s a small group of heavy posters who I know primarily because, somehow, we got into each other’s feeds.
Getting on Twitter provides little mini-breaks during the day. (I’ll sometimes permit myself to look at 20 posts, as a wee break). This is a very marginal, low-level pleasure. And it’s definitely the case that my feed has steadily gotten weirder, less on the mark, and less pleasurable since Musk took it over.
So, I’m a modest user of social media these days. I rarely post, and when I do it’s usually a short response. (Example: last week someone asked a question about my academic field that I could help with: I posted a short answer with a suggested reading).
I don’t miss my days of more intense engagement. By and large I feel like social media has been bad for us, and I consider myself largely disengaged from it. But since I spend little time on it, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time, and th us I don’t have strong feelings about its role in my current life. Sometimes I do think I should spend less time reading about sports and more time reading stuff that gives a more robust pleasure, but that’s about it. I really enjoy the word games.
I am online almost constantly at work, to communicate, perform work functions through systems and platforms, gather information, etc. In odd moments I google things, like recipes or how to patch a bike tire or guitar chords and lyrics for songs, etc. I try to resist the urge to look up names of famous people or films that I can’t think of.