Missive 33: Work Ethic™
Two words. One of the biggest lies of the Poets, Priests, and Politicians that forever keep people in the chains of judgment and guilt:
Work Ethic.
There isn’t a more Anglo-Saxon-Judeo-Protestant lie that represents the angst of society more than this. “Work Ethic” exists to ridicule the true meaning of life: laziness.
“Lazy” is a term the rich use to slander the poor who must — obviously — have no work ethic. Taking an afternoon nap, one of life’s most precious endeavors, is sermonized into the double standard: The poor are lazy, while the rich are getting a much-deserved rest. If the Spectacular Failure were to get a tattoo — which he has none because he doesn’t believe in advertising — it would say: Not now, I am napping.
In the Bradley Cooper bio-pic of Leonard Bernstein, there is the line from the great maestro: “I love music so much it keeps me glued to life even when I’m most depressed. And I can get very deeply depressed. But I have a work ethic, and that keeps me afloat.”
Good. For. Him.
“Work ethic,” like most personal belief systems, such as “loyalty,” “honesty”, “integrity”, are very relative and personal forms of measuring self-loathing. Each of us must come to terms with how we live up to our own definitions of these prisons. Where we are both guard and inmate in still another Stanford Prison Experiment of the mind.
The arbitrary societal definitions are what lead to psychosis, depression, and self-destruction. Perhaps Bernstein’s depression was a direct result of the self-enforced construct of his work ethic. But then, we got “West Side Story”, so I’m not complaining.
Lenny Bruce said, “The truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.”
Those someones are the Poets, Priests, and Politicians who have been trying to sell this manipulation from the moment the thought of fairness entered the picture.
“Where is it written that life is fair?” is every parent’s response to the wrong child being slapped when his brother farts.
In the tales, scriptures, and policies of the Poets, Priests, and Politicians, that’s where.
Trying to hold yourself up to a standard that you, as a person, may never be able to attain is the shell game of the oppressors. The lies that get told to us while in the crib transform us, so that once out of the crib, we become the oppressors of ourselves — mastering it so that we can pass it back to the crib.
The lie of what should be.
Even in the crib, the Spectacular Failure knew all of this was bullshit. Parents want their babies to sleep just so they can sleep. No wonder your kids grow up with no work ethic — and thinking that taking a nap is a mortal sin.
The Spectacular Failure understands that everything is on a sliding scale. Everything is judged on a curve — even the curve. There are no absolutes, and even the relative is dangerous. Like the Lamas in Shangri-La: everything in moderation. Including moderation.
The Spectacular Failure believes, like Einstein, Either everything is a miracle, or nothing is a miracle.
Everyone deserves everything, or no one does.
How do you sell salvation in a worldview like this? How can you possibly deny others while claiming for yourself? Without the 99% the 1% would feel so common.
Either everything is a miracle, or nothing is a miracle. And the Spectacular Failure doesn’t believe in miracles. The absence of any absolutes is what makes the Spectacular Failure believe and act in the seemingly bipolar manic states of optimism, self-reliance, determination, and hope. Only to push themselves off the edge into oblivion, realizing that they are in fact nothing, with nothing to offer and no hope of ever being able to change their destiny of obsolescence, through a solid “work ethic” or some such crap.
The middle ground, the state in between, some might call “procrastination.” That purgatory where great ideas and intentions come into mortal combat with the “fuck-its”. And the Spectacular Failure has put the Gonzo-like “Pro” in “crastination”.
Perhaps best described in the muttering of the wealthiest ‘working class heroes’, John Lennon: “Part of me thinks I am a loser. The other part of me thinks I am God Almighty.”
Procrastination is not, as most believe, the thought: “Oh, I will do that later.” No. Procrastination is the below sea level of consciousness mind game: “I will tell myself I will do it later when, in fact, I know I really have no intention of ever doing it at all.” But because we know we have to, or at least, that we should be doing the thing that is repeatedly pounding into our forehead like some crack-fueled woodpecker, we have to lie to ourselves at some level. “Oh, I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
The procrastinator never does.
The person who does get around to taking care of it tomorrow is not a procrastinator. They are a “planner”. The distinction is obvious — one has a work ethic, and the other is free.
The Spectacular Failure has learned, through his own paying attention, that when he is out of sorts — not sleeping, back hurting, or denailing his own fingernails with a skill and precision that would have impressed the Grand Inquisitor — it is typically due to his avoiding something he knows he should be doing.
Born from the nagging in the crib — the Spectacular Failure knows exactly what must be done to quiet the soul and get back to his nap. Some never figure out the source of their nagging and flail at scratching an itch they can’t define — with scars manifesting as rage, ulcers, or addictions. Addiction is an easy off-ramp to procrastination. But every addict knows they are only putting off what they need to be doing. It will always be there waiting for them. That is why addicts rarely recover. Just don’t want to do the things their nagging crib nannies have told them they must.
Sometimes we put off the mundane. Other times it’s the big stuff. Regardless, the great irony of the procrastinator is that the amount of energy you expend avoiding doing the thing is so much greater than the energy needed to actually do the thing. But where’s the fun in that? The secret joy of the procrastinator is in the not doing.
Not so with the Spectacular Failure. Knowing what it is they need to do — and knowing that he can’t get back to failing at what is important until he does — the Spectacular Failure actually makes the plan to do whatever it is that is calling. Whether it be to run an errand, do the chore, or sit and create the thing they know that is inside them, that is like the Alien, screaming to get out. Unlike the Alien, though, the Spectacular Failure knows the only way to keep living is to let the beast rip him open from the inside.
The Spectacular Failure plans the time and makes the appointment in their minds as to when and where to get this shit done.
It just never happens. For the Spectacular Failure has, with savant-like intuition, arranged their life with the already necessary thing that will pop up, just at the right moment, to prevent them. To interrupt them just as they are about to start. Being a “can’t say no people pleaser” — a core character flaw — the Spectacular Failure will enlist others to provide the procrastination for them. A favor needed returning. A call at just the right time with another to-do for someone else. A spouse or another needing a hand, in health distress, or simply for the Spectacular Failure, humanity’s sponge, to mop up their despair.
The Spectacular Failure — long practiced in self-sabotage — has arranged the chessboard perfectly. Any move they make to address a task triggers another at precisely the right moment to block them, halting all momentum and opportunity.
How perfectly constructed it all is. No fault of his own — it would appear to others — people, places, things, precisely placed to interrupt the Spectacular Failure at just the right moment.
Like a perpetual motion machine of inactivity. That does nothing — perfectly.
Next: Missive 22: The Afterward
Previous: Missive 9: Spooky Action at a Distance