Don’t Tie Your Worth To What You Produce

We’re choking on coins, capitalism, and conspicuous consumption and it's not cute.

Licensed from Adobe Stock // finwal89

What if you’re losing a game you never wanted to play? What if it was a game where to win you needed all the aces. Everyone else knows the game because they’ve played it before; they were deck-shufflers out of the womb. And there they go, tucking the aces up their sleeve. So, you place your bets, believing you can beat the house. You’ve studied the cards, you’ve put in the work. What you don’t know is this: the house always wins and you’ll always lose.

Yet, we keep on playing.

A week after my I reverted to from Chapter 13 to Chapter 7 bankruptcy, I received a flood of welcome back, baby letters from Navient and a pile of other private lenders I owe money to because the girl who grew up poor in Brooklyn buying bodega chicken legs and selling her wares on a sheet on Thirteenth Avenue wanted an Ivy League degree. Because the degree meant something.

This kid was going places.

What I didn’t know was those places would be dictated by the monthly bills I’d have to pay. Lenders in call centers determined my future. I was twenty-five and twenty-seven when I took out the loans to pay for graduate school, and who knew I’d be forty-five and still wincing over final payments that are twice as much as the loans I’d applied for. Who knew I’d be negotiating compound interest rates from the casket? Who knew I’d slouch through life living to acquire pieces of paper instead of living to live?

It took me four years to become financially responsible, and still I wake to the burden of my debt. Welcome to America, where we bear the burden of financial boulders on our backs. Where food, shelter, and healthcare are luxuries for the rarefied few. My Kaiser insurance card might as well be an Amex Black. In the land of not-so-free, our worthiness is tied to what and how much we can produce. It’s acceptable to work three jobs and sleep in our car between shifts until we die from the exhaust fumes.

Otherwise, we’re barnacles sucking at billionaire teats. Stealing from a system that was built on stealing from us.

It wasn’t always this way. We didn’t always subsist on a steady diet of hustle and overwork. “For 95 per cent of our species’ history, work did not occupy anything like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it does now,” says South African anthropologist James Suzman in an excellent New Yorker article. Before the Industrial Revolution and the cult of productivity and machinery, work wasn’t the center of our lives. It was once perfectly normal to spend unmolested time with the people and hobbies you loved.

Boredom wasn’t a state we were desperate to flee by filling our hours with things to give the appearance of movement even though we’re running in place.

The past few weeks have been strange. I feel off-kilter, caught in the betweens, and it’s been hard to think about marketing when all I want to do is read, tell stories, and hatch plans to flee to somewhere unnavigable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. Like the machinery in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, we’re reared from the womb to be productive, cuter, and fitter capitalists. Click on any social network and you’ll find unlimited ways to profit from it. Communities are not about connection — they’re centered on the tender care and feeding of our bank accounts. We’re not worthy unless what we create makes money. Open a browser and you’re greeted with 1,001 ways in which you can optimize time, squeeze more activity into every second, and it breaks my heart because the water’s coming to a boil and we can’t even feel the heat. We don’t see the blistering and burning on the horizon.

Why do we believe we’re better off in a pressure cooker than diving into the sea?

I think about this a lot as someone who works in marketing for a living, where my job is to get people to buy things, and as an artist who wants to write strange little stories in hopes they make people feel less alone. I’m struggling because I love working with people and companies who want to leave the world in better shape than when they entered it. But I also recognize I’m guilty of feeding into the system I’m rallying against.

Why is everything tied to money?

What are we willing to sacrifice for pieces of paper? Are we willing to discard art and beauty for pragmatism and a paycheck? Why is it that if we’re not monetizing something, it ceases to be valuable? The peanut-crunching lot pat our heads as if we’re small children and their words are thick with condescension. We are deemed lesser than, frivolous, worthless, not pulling on those bootstraps hard and tight enough.

I have one life — why is the world telling me I have to machine through it? I’d like to live, please.

When I applied to graduate programs in 1999, I didn’t tell anyone at Morgan Stanley. It was only when I received the acceptance letters did I announce my resignation. At first, they thought MFA stood for Masters in Finance, and when I told them I wanted to be a writer, they were flummoxed. A cross-section of responses included:

“Why?”

“Felicia, you’re smarter than this. You have a real future here.”

“Writers don’t make real money. Why would you do this to yourself?”

“No, but seriously. Why?”

To which I responded, I’m tired of getting rich people richer. I’m tired of coming to work with the realization I’m producing nothing. I move money from one rich person to another. There’s no altruism within these walls even if our annual reports and holiday parties tell us differently.

I didn’t want to be a writer as a career — I just wanted time to create without disruption. I wanted to see if I was any good. I wanted to inhabit a space where people believed stories meant something, changed lives, even if they didn’t buy a Hampton’s house or a holiday in Telluride.

And while I worked my way through graduate school, the hours in those classrooms at night felt sacred to me. I could talk books, Weimar film, philosophy, and words and simply be instead of being productive.

In Cortney Cassidy’s incisive essay, “A Soft Manifesto,” she also reckons with creating art free from the binds of commerce. She writes,

“The entrepreneurship of mainstream do-it-yourself artist-as-business comes from a place of economic motivation, and rightly so under a system that requires money to survive. It perpetuates “more of the same” because there is no freedom to take risks. In contrast, the DIY spirit of alternative subcultures like vegan punk houses, feminist community centers, and peer-to-peer educational programs seek empowerment and community. It fosters healthy divergences to help us understand what we may not have understood before.

If you aren’t in the status quo, it takes a lot of miscalculated physical, mental, and emotional energy to force the fit. To keep up with the pace of fitting, it takes a passionate working style, glorified as hustling (which was recognized as an early sign of an impending nervous collapse, way back in 1909).”

For as long as I could hold a pen and arrange words like a symphony, I was told my art would always be second place. It wouldn’t matter. I would make no dent in the world. Better to be serious and work your way up to a respectable title, a 401K, dental and health insurance, a bonus check. It was never hard for me to get those things and don the mask of a shiny, happy person while I rotted from the inside.

What was hard was making space for words and believing the stories I wrote had weight and value beyond dollar signs and man-made calculations.

What was hard was detangling my worth from what I created. What was hard was waking up and seeing how the relentless pursuit of money has colored and tainted every aspect of our lives. Insidious, it spreads like a sickness and we don’t even know we’re carriers because we’re rewarded for perpetuating it, for making things go viral. Our favorable status and flush bank accounts are the rewards for spreading disease.

French sociologist Emile Durkheim once wrote: “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.”

Witness our wants metastasize.

I love marketing. I love writing. And for the longest time I was able to have both worlds play harmoniously in the same sandbox, but all this waste, greed, and emptiness I see gives me a double-take. Why can’t we create to just fucking create? Why are we not cool if we’re not trotting out our income reports?

Here’s the thing — we’re all worthy. Our work does bear meaning even if five people read it. And this is what I have to remind myself when I feel like I’m losing a game I never wanted to play in the first place. I can’t sit out every hand.

Cortney Cassidy posits,

“When you’re losing a game you don’t even want to play, or forcing a fit into a form you don’t want to be in, the best thing to do is to stop playing and go find your shape.”

What follows are a series of questions that invite you to consider how you can briefly step out of this world and form a miniature sub-world where beauty and art are written on the body instead of burdening our backs.

People are always telling me to write shorter pieces, use simpler words, create more spaces in between paragraphs, write happy things, be positive, spoon-feed my reader with formula, and it goes. I say, fuck no. I am not your woman. I’m not here to make the world simple and give you what everyone else is giving you because it’s palatable. Because it’s common. You have thousands of writers who will hand-deliver you a formula — I am not one of them.

I am not here to be liked or loved. Or hold your hand through your attention span. I’d rather have a smaller audience than be less of who I am.

Yet, all the time, people ask me to be a different woman. A different writer. They want to mold and shape me to something tolerable, something they prefer to see.

I am not your woman.

I printed out and read Ann Patchett’s ridiculously beautiful 28-page essay, “These Precious Days,” because it put my heart on pause. I want to feel something in a world where I’m slowly becoming numb to everything in it. I sent this to everyone I care about and it was like pressing a hot poker against their backs when I wrote, I know this is long, but you have to read it.

Now, I have to reckon with storytelling that doesn’t push greed out into the world. I have to consider my part in spreading the sickness and what I can do as an artist, a woman in business, to halt the spread. Or at the very least slow it down. I’m thinking about how I can create free of the constraints of capitalism. What platform do I choose? What do I craft and share? Who would be willing to read and listen? These are worthy questions for which I don’t have the answer, but at least I’m asking the questions.

I feel called to be more discerning than ever because do I want to spend my days making money to eat, to buy things I don’t need? Or do I want to have enough to live decently and pursue that which bolts me out of bed without tying my work and worth to the money it can make.

This is me, trying to find my shape.