Not Working - Josh Cohen

Question 1

Introduction

We live in a culture that demonises idleness.

Work, connectivity and a constant flow of information are the cultural norms, and a permanent busyness pervades our quietest moments.

Modern working life is plagued by enervation and fatigue, compounded by a sense of unfulfilment and meaninglessness, bereft of guiding purpose beyond its simply being there to do.

Attest - provide or serve as clear evidence of

Artificial intelligence will take over many jobs we have come to think of as irreducibly human.

Since childhood, the value of work as the primary meaning and aim of life has never felt self-evident to me. All respectable middle-class professions seem to assume a belief in work as its own justification.

The window always held more interest than the blackboard.

Inertia - a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.

synonyms: inactivity, inaction, inactiveness, inertness, passivity, apathy, stagnation, enervation, sluggishness, lethargy, languor, languidness, listlessness, torpor, torpidity, idleness, indolence, laziness, sloth

Answer 1

Enervation - a feeling of being drained of energy or vitality; fatigue. “a sense of enervation”

Lassitude - a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy.

Listless - (of a person or their manner) lacking energy or enthusiasm. “bouts of listless depression”

Our lives are subject to a constant, nervous, compulsion to activity that brooks no pause. The emblematic image of our culture is the panicky phone-checker, filling in any interval of rest or silence, with emails and work documents or else with social media updates.

Nervous distraction provides the only relief from a perpetually incomplete to-do list.

Our perpetual busyness is fuelled by a culture that derides or trivialises the need to stop.

An ethos of anxiously competitive workaholism ensures that millions of men and women spend a vast proportion of their lives at work.

The scornful moralising about work from commerce, politics and the media world would count for little if it didn’t find ready amplification in our own minds. Many of us are all too vulnerable to being embarrassed by having to stop.

Psychoanalysis offers various thoughts about why this might be. We carry within ourselves an idealised self-image, or ‘ego ideal’ in Freud’s terminology, that presses us to do and achieve more.

Question 2

The ego ideal is the residue in us of an unconscious belief, transmitted to us by our parents from earliest infancy, in our own perfectibility. It is liable to become insidiously punishing, inducing feelings of shame and inadequacy at the gap between who are we are and who we feel we should be.

The ego ideal is an irresistible sitting target of today’s culture of work and employability, with its unrelenting demands and incentives to maximise our potential.

Our discomfort with stopping, with time unfixed and unspoken for, also gives rise to a mode of constant distraction, the perfect twin of the imperative to work and produce: the moment we come to the limit of our capacity as producers, we can activate our capacity as consumers.

Intervals away from technological devices induce feelings of abandonment and emptiness.

The profound effect of a play by Samuel Beckett or a painting by Pablo Picasso is to alienate the empty modes of language and communication imposed upon us by modern capitalist society.

Abject sloth = extreme laziness
Catatonic lethargy

The weariness of the self - Alain Ehrenberg

Catatonia = a state of immobility and stupor.

So thoroughly have we internalised the sweet and bitter fruits of work as the measure of our worth and significance that the traditionalist conception of work as a means of satisfying basic needs and comforts has been consigned to an unimaginable past.

Answer 2

Opaque - (especially of language) hard or impossible to understand.
“technical jargon that was opaque to her”

synonyms: obscure, unclear, dense, uncertain, indeterminate, mysterious, puzzling, perplexing, baffling, mystifying, confusing, enigmatic, inexplicable, unexplained, concealed, hidden, unfathomable, incomprehensible, impenetrable, vague, ambiguous

The sovereign status of work

An entire battery of psychopathologies has been exacerbated under neoliberalism: stress, anxiety, depression etc

It is culturally acceptable for us to complain aloud about how busy and how tired we are, as though in doing so we reassure the world we fully acknowledge our moral and social obligation to work and contribute. Acknowledging the need to stop is more difficult, for it implies a shaming admission to being weak-wiled, lightweight and not quite up to it.

Recalcitrant - having an obstinately uncooperative attitude towards authority or discipline.
"a class of recalcitrant fifteen-year-olds"
synonyms: uncooperative, obstinately disobedient, intractable, unmanageable, ungovernable, rebellious, mutinous, wilful, headstrong,  obdurate

Not working has almost always been valued only to the extent that it serves the cause of work. It is time we spoke for not working, in all its creative possibilities, as its own value.