The work you do, the person you are (2017)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Key advice;
Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
In other words, there is the hedonistic treadmill and then there are human emotions and these are real for you, me and for a Nobel-laureate writer.
She was a writer and hence was trying to make a point in a forceful way which is relevant to all of us today since we seem to have lost sight of the fact that we should "Work to Live" and not "Live to Work". This is sound advice since it is the Family Support that is crucial to weather/overcome all difficulties in life.
I have seen extreme poverty (in India) and materialistic decadence both in the US and India and can assure you that while it is true in some contexts it is false in many others. This is why in India (and i am sure in many other poorer countries) you have various govt. schemes like UBI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_Indi...), UHC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_India) etc. to make sure that "Live to Work" does not become the norm.
In the context of Morrison's advice, she is not talking about the above but a far more fundamental mindset i.e. keep your Life and Job separate in your head and realize that your Real Life is with your Family/Friends/Society.
When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent.
Come on! Why would you go out of the way to burn somebody's house down, or beat up a person so bad the person get permanent injury[1]? I dont even try to understand how the state ignores the law breaking, states are complex, but a common man doing such things? I can't understand how a person looks in the mirror and not think of himself as a wretch and a demon(?).
I am from Portugal and I am sorry we lost ultramarine territories because i consider the peoples from Angola, Guinea and Mozambique as kindred. But we definitely deserved to lose them with prejudice. What was done to those citizens has no name, and as such I condone their right to arm against their oppressors the same as I would if any other citizen was singled out like they were. I also think all ex-Portuguese peoples(except Brazil) should have the right to claim Portuguese citizenship if they wish to.
All this to say I am very scarred of these events, because if they were so prevalent, it must be very easy to become a monster. I am just ignorant of how, yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X?useskin=vector#Hinto...
Jill¹, who I've known since we were both quite young, is barely a generation removed from the Australian frontier wars, massacres for a century+ prior to 1930², something her parents lived through.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre
( two geographically seperate references, I know .. it's to carry a point not to join a specific person to a specific event, which could be done )
Divisive rhetoric that creates "us" vs "them" groups. Then comes the dehumanization and rationalization of violence against the othered group. I recall people calling for violence against people who refused to wear masks during covid, as the most recent example that comes to mind. An environment where neighbors are incited to turn against their neighbor breeds monsters.
While rhetoric can increase things, humans seem to have an inherent us-versus-them mechanism whereby clans/tribes are easily created psychologically.
A couple of chapters mentioning various experiments in Ezra Klein's book:
There's a funny spectrum between like, someone intentionally infecting the water supply of a city with a disease as bioterrorism which is obviously a crime which society at large agrees the police to use violence against the perpetrator to stop the act from happening, arrest the perpetrator and put them in jail. And then at the other end of the spectrum is things like spreading HIV, herpes or Covid which different people have varying opinions on whether that's acceptable, bad but non-criminal or criminally harmful to the people being infected.
Humans have very natural intuition around some types of harm or violence - directly observable things like punching or stabbing someone. But if the harm is more indirect and not directly observable, things like pollution or spreading disease, we don't have the same immediate fight-or-flight activation type of recognition and so we are often more lenient towards the perpetrators of those types of harm.
Not comparable. There is "us vs them" based on identity attributes someone is born with, that they have no control over, like their skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and then there is "us vs them" based on someone's deliberate choice to be anti-social, belligerent, and put others at needless risk.
Neither justifies violence threats, but they are not the same thing.
If humanity came across a group of purple aliens, how we would treat them would depend on how advanced they are.
If they were on the level of advanced animals, we might trap them and exhibit them. Keep them in cages and "study" them.
If they were much more advanced than us (maybe the can communicate with us, or zap one of us to death with lasers) we would submit and seek cooperation, and humble ourselves before them.
"My tenants are not paying me rent. I have a wonderful idea! What if I burn down my rental home so that I can perpetuate my inability collect rental income?"
Toni Morrison has had a far more difficult life than most of us normal people here who did not have to worry about whether they will be lynched, whether whatever little they had will be taken away from them, whether they would have a job and be able to feed themselves etc. She most definitely was not born with a "silver spoon in her mouth". Her name/fame/money/etc. which you seem to be sour about came much much later in life after she had survived all of the above with her integrity as a Human Being still intact.
Do not belittle other people's achievements because you have some weird notions which almost seem racist in this context since nobody can see any logical reason for your bias.
When I read the article, I read the article, immediately jumping past the headline and lead graphic, not bothering to check who wrote the article before coming back here to read the comments. I only learned of Ms. Morrison's authorship from your top comment.
Outside the story's impression of poverty versus wealth in the 1940's, and without knowing who the author is, what gave you the idea this article had anything to do with race? Or that the person's notions you commented on 'almost seem racist'?
From the article linked to above;
Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.
Morrison books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.
And as for the racist talk, I have people very close to me who also don't have an immaculate white skin, I'm talking about my mother and my mother's mother (my grandmother), does it make any difference? What skin color do your close-ones have?
I can say that I emphatically agree with the author, regardless of her bavkground.
This is great advice especially to keep in mind when you have a well paying tech job you're getting disillusioned with. There's hopefully the opportunity and flexibility to make projects one is assigned more interesting to oneself to keep oneself engaged instead of always strictly doing what's best and most efficient for the company. I find that sticking strictly to what's best and most efficient is soul sucking.
Sometimes I dream of a job where I am challenged, valued, and appreciated for my professional contribution, not just because I speak well and have the right credentials. But the dreams quickly fade when I think about how much free time, energy, and desire I'd have to give up if that dream came true.
A review : https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
I do think there are limits to what employers can demand of us, and in Morrison's story, she learned one place to draw the line (take the salary instead of the used clothes).
Last sentence of the article:
> I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.
Tying identity to a company or specific industry career ladder, not so much.
I'm always cynical about the New Yorker and other mags like it. You have to consider the audience. Is the person reading this article more likely to be the child worker or the over-bearing home owner? Consider not just the authors perspective but also the perspective of the upper-middle class recipient of 8 hours of compartmentalized labor. Would you rather someone who fights for their rights, or someone who bears with it so they can go home to their family feeling some satisfaction at doing your laundry and scrubbing your floors. Perhaps it even helps alleviate some guilt such a person might feel: their servants "purpose" may be to scrub their floors, but at least those poor souls can find some meaning in their limited family time.
Kierkegaard talks about the Knight of infinite resignation [1] and I think it is relevant here. When one is feeling despair or anxiety (as clearly described by the author) one strategy to alleviate it is to simply accept your dire circumstance. This resignation provides a temporary relief from that anxiety.
To be sure, it is a major improvement over allowing oneself to continuously suffer. But the next stage is to truly believe that you can have the same kind of satisfaction in your labor pursuits as you have in your home life. It is to believe that you can manage to erase the distinction between working and living. He argues this kind of belief, especially when there is significant evidence that it is impossible, requires a religious mindset since it is based on faith and not reason.
Yeah I mean this tracks because we can look at data to prove that it’s true. The value of a single family home in California has increased 10%-11% year over year. Is your salary increasing 10-11% year over year? What’s the point of chasing income at your job once you own a single family home here? Lol. I had to explain to my wife today that it’s ok that she hasn’t replaced her 70k a year salary and that it’s ok for her to be in school right now. We could sell our house and pocket the difference and nothing was lost financially.
Hopefully the companies doing business here catch up, I know it’s going to take a lot of difficult conversations and hand wringing, I’m really rooting for them. I can’t imagine the struggle of figuring out how to pay employees a living wage. Really can’t imagine what they must be going through right now as they execute mass lay offs in tech. My heart goes out to all of the execs. Truly. lol.
> and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home
I think what the author was referring to was not the value of [a] home (i.e. equity in the house) but the concept of a home as it relates to family.
This is a fallacy. You're born "short housing", because you need somewhere to live. Owning a house is just cancelling out your natural short position. If you sell the house, you're short again. You might make a "profit" on the house if the market went up, but that just means you'll be buying another house in the new more expensive market.
If you want to upsize, you're actually better off if the market goes down, because then to get a house that is X% more expensive requires less additional capital.
As someone who doesn’t own a home and dreams of buying one, I really don’t believe this take. Anyone who bought a home in the late 2000s post-crash is now living in a much nicer place while spending the same.
I don’t think I’ll get an opportunity to see such a massive increase to quality of life by doing practically nothing. Housing prices won’t go down any time soon, so now I have to spend way more with much poorer ROI prospects.
Unless we aren’t short again. 10% is the median year over year growth. What if it was 20%? Is that more realistic than her doubling her income in the same time period? I think that we could only be short if rent increases at the same rate that the property appreciated? Maybe I’m completely cooked / fried - it’s pretty late - and I’d be happy to be wrong - as my version of reality I’m seeing feels pretty destitute as it is
Only in a perfectly spherical house market. In my limited experience (non-US market), your assumptions are poor. Opinion:
1: You often can't get a mortgage on the same terms so you often can't find equality between selling a home and buying a home.
2: When the market is down, turnover can reduce drastically so your choices for a house can be severely restricted.
3: when the market is down, prices are sometimes driven by unwilling sellers and bargain hunters. A desirable home may sell at a reasonable price but an average home might not.
The market is often down when interest rates are up and you can't get a mortgage on terms that suit you.
> You're born "short housing"
You are short the "minimum" necessary which is a lot smaller than a whole house. You are not short 1.0 houses. Maybe short 1.0 rooms. And it really depends on who else you are tightly linked with (family or partner).
When interest rates fall the value of the asset goes up and the cost of borrowing the same amount of money has gone down
Firstly, people can afford to pay $x for mortgage interest. The "cost" of borrowing remains constant because incomes don't change. As mortgage interest rates decrease, $x doesn't change. Instead people can borrow more (for the same amount spent on interest) and they bid more. So house prices go up.
Okay, on rereading: one problem is that I have never heard of "buying down" because I think the concept doesn't exist in the New Zealand market. The US market for mortgages is extremely different from most countries. I wrote my comments generic enough to cover both (I hoped).
Buying down is not a neutral option: I presume it is making a bet on the future of interest rates. So I'm not sure your logic follows. If we want to make interest rate bets then there's lots of different worms we can eat.
The information gap remains!
But yeah, capital income is rising way faster than salaries. At this point this really shouldn't be any kind of news to anyone, as it has been a trend for a long time now.
For the average Joe it doesn't really mean "you should buy a house" because homes can be really shitty investments, and it is not really one if you live in it. It is more about the fact that everyone should be focusing getting capital income as early as possible. Index funds being the most obvious choice.
You've got a roof over your head and your capabilities and health allow you to move freely across the globe and get work and roof anywhere else, too.
You could lose your house tomorrow, but you'll still have a home. After all, you do have a wife.
"Your real life is with us, your family."