Work and Pleasure

When I think about work, I think “whether you like it or not, you have to do it.” I’ve been depressed without work for a while now. Luckily I have some money saved up and I’m living with my parents. Obviously I don’t want to stay in this situation forever. I used to work as a software engineer, so it’s not as if I have no good opportunities financially. Yet when I think about work, I’d be lying if I didn’t say there’s a pang of terror that strikes me, like I’m about to be stuffed in a box for the rest of my life. But I have to make money somehow, whether I want to or not - what is it about it that just makes my mind immediately freeze up?

“Whether you want to or not.” I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD my whole life, and now bipolar. And in my experience, I’ve found that I can’t do almost anything for an extended period of time in a state of boredom. So when I say to myself “whether you like it or not,” quietly alongside it I think - okay, but how do I like it? In conversation, I’ve heard people talk about how our generation was too encouraged to find their dream job. We were set up for disappointment, and we have to make peace with the reality that most people don’t enjoy their jobs and find fulfillment in other areas of our lives. But I don’t see my problem as being about “fulfillment”. My problems are, “How, for the duration of time that I am scheduled to work, do I actually work?” and, “Is this emotionally sustainable? Am I just going to get depressed and give up again?”

So, like a man who needs his partner to put on lingerie and act out his kink to perform sexually, I need rituals and emotionally stimulating behaviors intermingled with an activity to make it possible. It’s hard for me to write without some degree of humor or emotional intensity. It’s hard for me to do a boring activity like editing code without bitching and moaning. Commiserating with coworkers about how awful the code we had to make modifications to made the work much more tolerable. Who wrote this crap? That’s right, I did!

The self help world markets us solutions for our perceived lack of self discipline. Get off social media, stop spending so much time on the internet, eat a brain healthy diet, meditate twice a day, here’s three tips for staying organized that will take you from zero to hero in the workplace! Now, just take this constant stream of self help wisdoms and convert them all to variants on viagra commercials. “6 brain healthy foods that will drive her CRAZY in bed!” “Meditating twice a day will make you last twice as long in the sheets! You’ll have her moaning for hours!” Just like all the snake oil that preys on mens performance anxiety, much of the world of “self help” is more or less the same, except it preys on performance anxiety of a different kind. But feelings of inadequacy related to work can run much deeper than feelings of sexual inadequacy. After all, it has an impact on a person’s ability to support themselves and maintain their lifestyle. And because it’s not taboo, people talk openly about such advice all the time. We admire people who get things done and seek to emulate their behavior. Ability to perform is related to social status, respect, and even our moral evaluation of others. People who can’t perform must be indolent, undisciplined, prone to compulsive and self-destructive behaviors.

So, you try to take all the advice - cut out social media, meditate, engage in activities which promise to increase your ability to focus and get the job done. But what if you do all this, and you still find yourself unable to perform? What if you are particularly mentally disabled in this regard? Then the art of making an activity pleasurable becomes the pragmatic reality of day to day life. Like the pervert who just can’t get off without their kinks, you just can’t get the job done without a bit of emotional extravagance and intensity. In counseling for ADHD, sometimes people try to emphasize the positives - people talk about the ADHD capacity for “hyper focus” as a “super power,” the ability to spend long periods of time vigorously engaging with activities of interest. And with bipolar, therapists try to assure you that mania can be a source of enthusiasm and creativity, and that many high performing individuals have the disorder.

I think, unfortunately for me, the label “disorder” is an apt one. I think it largely is a pure deficiency in executive function, organization and the ability to focus. But it is a deficiency which puts a person in a circumstance where they need to learn how to compensate in a particular way to get by. If you can only summon your sustained attention for stimulating activities, you have to learn how to make activities stimulating. So, how do you do that? I speak from my perspective and what works for me, but I think for the most part these can be extended to all people with various degrees of effectiveness.

The first, obviously, is inherent interest, something a person already finds psychologically stimulating. In my work as a software developer, there were parts of the work that held my interest and parts that I found dreadfully boring, and that’s how most work is. The truth is, I mostly just wanted to spend time learning about interesting ideas and then finding excuses to put them to use in my software. The job was making tools to serve business needs, and obviously, the software I wrote had to ultimately meet the required specifications, or I would have been fired. But the reality is that many software engineers are super passionate about some technical detail which in reality is not important to making a product which meets business requirements. If I were to focus exclusively on work performance, I would have spent less time focusing on the aspects of the problem I found interesting and more on just getting it done in the shortest amount of time possible with the least complexity. And I would have focused more on “best practices” like testing, which can be pretty boring. I’m not an awful software developer - at least I’m a good problem solver, and a good learner. But my need to keep myself entertained can get in the way of focusing on the more boring but more important details. I think many people do this to some degree, regardless of their line of work - they overemphasize the importance of the aspect of the work which they find satisfying, simply so that they can spend more time doing it.

Second is social and behavioral pleasure. Praise, status, gossip, humor, commiserating, etc. Joking around with co-workers makes the day to day drudgery a whole lot easier. Many programmers have a tendency to give functions and variables silly names and leave humorous comments sprinkled throughout their code. It’s interesting to see these little artifacts and imagine the author trying to cope emotionally with a boring task. That’s how I see my writing - I usually have something serious I want to say, but if I can’t make the act of writing itself satisfying there’s no way I’ll make it through. These behaviors usually take place in a social context, or at least in an imaginary social context. I’m here alone in my room, trying to entertain myself - but maybe you, the reader, are being entertained along with me. There’s also praise and status - feeling appreciated by others for the work you do, and feeling respected as an authority or someone whose behavior is worthy of emulation.

That leads into my third category, the pleasure of the heroic fantasy. People with bipolar are infamous for being grandiose and delusional when they’re manic, and I am no different. I’m part of something greater, the work I’m doing is important, I’m going to be famous, I’m on the cutting edge, I have all these ambitious goals and I’m going to make them happen and it’s going to be awesome. I’m killing it, I’m on a roll, I’m in the matrix. Who doesn’t want to be an interesting person, who hasn’t at some point wanted to do extraordinary things, be one of the greats? How many artists imagine having a wide audience? How many mathematicians and scientists are propelled by fantasies of unraveling the mysteries of nature? It doesn’t have to be so grandiose - at its root it’s about meaning and purpose. Many businesses, especially tech giants, try to market themselves to their employees as a place where you find your true calling, realize your true potential and participate in creating innovations that will change the world. Doctors and nurses save lives, teachers build minds and prepare future generations, etc. The day to day reality might be far removed from these fantasies, and it might undermine them, but they can keep some people going.

The age-old ideas about how to become a person who can manage their responsibilities involve abstaining from worldly pleasures and cultivating mental discipline. How do I become more level headed, more rational? How can I become less easily frustrated or prone to boredom? There is a mild ascetic undercurrent to much of the common wisdom on productivity. I find it rather morbid. Life is a burden, and you simply have to get better at bearing it. You can’t just do what you want, just clench your teeth and get it done. I hate that these sentiments get passed off as pragmatic. “There are things you have to do.” No shit. It is the second part, the “just deal with it” part, that doesn’t function. It is an anti-wisdom. The problem you need to solve is precisely how to make an activity joyful. It is not merely a “nice to have.” If you are too miserable you fall apart.

Why would you want to be a person who is great at enduring drudgery when you could be a person who knows how to make life worth living? Who can whistle while they work? Who knows when it’s necessary to inject humor and healthy emotional expression into an activity? That, to me, is the essence of creativity. Creativity doesn’t have to be about making music, or art, writing, or any particular end product. Creativity at its most fundamental is learning how to make an activity joyful, how to make it a natural outlet for expression. It just happens that certain activities are more natural outlets for fluid expression. I think one that goes underappreciated is speech, conversation. We admire singers and trained musicians. Yet just speaking is an expressive, musical act, which can be just as beautiful as song. And many of us do it all the time. Just using your body is naturally creative. I didn’t make much money working at restaurants, but learning to move about quickly and skillfully in a kitchen (though I wasn’t very good at it) can actually be pretty satisfying. You can make a game out of it.

Sometimes, you just can’t figure out how to make something enjoyable, and that is where “you just have to do it” comes from. You are forced into a circumstance, you feel you have no choice. But the idea that you should simply accept some things are miserable and just continue doing them is masochistic, and not in the good way. If there is a way something could be less insufferable, then you should make the change. And if you don’t have to do it, then maybe just don’t. Learn from music. Joy is in motion. Joy is in expression. We are all, in some sense, musicians, in the simple manner in which we express ourselves every day. Maybe we’re not accomplished jazz musicians, or freestyle rappers, but we can cultivate the same capacity for spontaneous expression in how we participate in the minutiae of everyday life.

Learning to play an instrument is a clumsy endeavor. You don’t just start off with the capacity to play fluidly. The attitude of “just bear it” is like trying to learn an instrument without any hope of the reward of being a skilled musician. Practice can be drudgery. And you can be a joyless masochist - I’ll just do my scales, I’ll just learn these progressions, because I have to. There is no hope of any joy to be found in the activity. As much as you can, you should treat the whole of life like learning an instrument - yes, you have to struggle, but you don’t just practice your scales “because you have to.” The reward of struggling to live should be that you get to live freely. So that you achieve self-mastery in the broadest sense.

But you can’t do this if you’re timid. You can’t do it if you fret over what other people will think. Not every song is a crowd pleaser. Why is the world full of cacophonous, angry, chaotic, depressing songs? Why are there artists who dedicate their time to creating “the devil’s music”? Because life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Because we suffer. Because we feel all sorts of things intensely, not just whimsy and beauty. Sometimes we know we want to say something that will make other people uncomfortable, maybe that will even make them outraged, or hate us. But a jazz musician doesn’t have notes they’re afraid of playing. They can do what they do because they’re not holding anything back. And that’s how it should be with life - there should be nothing we ultimately have to restrain. The more you hold back, the clumsier you get, the less you can get in the flow. I’m not saying you can’t rest, or that it has to be that way all the time. But that is the test of a healthy life to me. Can you let loose? Can you be really, fully free, and not just when other people like how it looks?

Perhaps cultivating the capacity to endure drudgery is a necessary evil. Not everything can be fun right from the start. But far superior is cultivating a capacity for living creatively, in the broadest sense of the term. And we should ask - what is it that is preventing us from living this way? We ultimately have to take responsibility for our own lives, but in figuring ourselves out we end up having to ask the question - what is it about our culture that makes life so miserable for so many people? That makes people repressed? Are most workplaces capable of being an outlet for healthy expression? What social and material conditions prevent people from achieving this in their everyday lives?

The whole of life shouldn’t feel like a mandatory burden. When taken to an extreme, “whether you like it or not, you have to do it,” sends a person into a panicked search for an exit. This leads to the grim realization that actually, you don’t have to do anything at all - you can just kill yourself. But you do have to struggle to get what you truly want, what everyone wants - to live creatively, freely. Again, I don’t mean being some great artist - I mean quite simply deriving joy from the process, the motion of life. We substitute this one true aspiration with cheap counterfeits - you’ll have a house, a car, a family, you’ll go to movies and shows, you’ll witness spectacles, etc. All of this is bullshit. Whenever you imagine having something you desire, you imagine a creative, free experience in its company. The fun of driving that car, of laughing with your future friends, having passionate sex with your future lover, etc. But if you are a miserable person who joylessly struggles to attain these things, when you get them, you are wholly unable to have the experience you imagined, because joy is about process. And that is why it feels so empty - because we lie to ourselves by claiming to be motivated by things which do not actually motivate us. We are always, whether we know it or not, motivated by the idea of the process, what it will be like. But one way or another we eventually learn - you can’t buy the process. You can’t attain it. You can only learn it - and you have to make it up as you go.

I want to feel myself. I want my day to day experience to be free. All other goals exist purely as pretenses for an activity which can be experienced moment to moment. Regardless of what I end up having to do, I’ll try my best to invigorate the process, even if it means I might get into trouble. Some people just can’t handle you being yourself. People are complicated, and so if they’re being authentic they can be difficult to handle. We have dark feelings. Expressing yourself will inevitably create tension. Some people are in a position where being themselves can actually put them in real danger. We all have something on the line, but some much more than others. My heart goes out to them. The elements of culture which create that suppression are what require change.

But if you’re not yourself, you’re dead. You have to find some healthy outlet, some space where it’s possible. You have to find clever ways to get away with it. You have to push the boundary and give other people a chance to be comfortable with you. It’s a matter of survival. To survive, you have to have something to survive for. And ultimately, you live to live another day. So your job is never just your job - your job is, how do I get my material needs met, while also enjoying the process enough so that I don’t want to kill myself? So don’t just get better at bearing suffering and making that the whole deal. That doesn’t work. It’s not pragmatic. You have to make it pleasurable. You have to make it at least a small outlet for expression. Otherwise, you’re fucked. Or at least, I am. And I know I’m not alone. So I’m keeping my head in the game, and I’m never letting “you just have to bear it” trip me up ever again. I don’t have to bear it. In fact, I can’t. I have to make it bearable. I have to find joy in the process, or find another way.