Death of an anarchist

David Graeber, author of one of the most influential books I’ve ever read—Debt: The First 5,000 Years—died earlier this week.

David Graeber may have been professor of anthropology at Yale, Goldsmiths and finally the London School of Economics, but he was always conscious that his work must not be allowed to stifle in the deoxygenated air of academia.

He was a practical and public intellectual who faced down the big social inequalities of our time and has given thousands of people the tools to build an alternative.

Occupy debt

Graeber came to my attention in 2011 as something of a doorman for the Occupy movement. He opened doors we thought were permanently locked and showed us entire suites of rooms that we never could have imagined were there.

Reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years, I often laughed.

I learned that systems of credit and debt, far from being the pernicious invention of modern capitalists, are how human societies have managed their economic affairs for millennia. But I also learned that we are perhaps the first society to orgy in credit and debt without having in place the checks and balances that protect the poor from catastrophe.

Graeber traces how these checks and balances came into being in ancient Sumer:

In years with bad harvests especially, peasants would start becoming hopelessly indebted to the rich, and would have to surrender their farms and, ultimately, family members, in debt bondage. Gradually, this condition seems to have come to a social crisis—not so much leading to popular uprisings, but to common people abandoning the cities and settling territory entirely and becoming semi-nomadic ‘bandits’ and raiders. It soon became traditional for each new ruler to wipe the slate clean, cancel all debts, and declare a general amnesty or ‘freedom’, so that all bonded labourers could return to their families.

Biblical prophets also formalised this system of ‘Jubilee’ and cancelled all debts every seven years. This was how humans arranged things for centuries: all debts cancelled, every seven years.

Its simplicity and justice still makes me laugh.

Graeber dared us to wonder why our society couldn’t declare regular jubilees, write off all debts and protect the poor against the wealthy? There’s no reason why not. It’s a choice.

As you can imagine, this colour of politics was too much for the fine upstanding Yale University and we were lucky that Graeber decided to move to London—in fact, he joined the university over the road from where I lived: Goldsmiths.

On bullshit jobs

Graeber taught a number of my friends at Goldsmiths and I attended a few of his public seminars, where we got to discuss and share ideas in an atmosphere of open debate. It’s hard to overestimate this guy. He was like a rockstar to me and my friends.

In fact, Graeber’s 2013 article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs came about after a friend of mine, STRIKE! magazine’s Vyvian Raoul, asked Graeber whether he had ‘anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish’.

Oh yes he did. It was an idea that would call into question the value of entire industries, let alone jobs—including, perhaps, his own.

This was his original thesis of ‘bullshit jobs’:

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

The article hit such a nerve that it crashed the magazine’s servers multiple times and was copied and republished (frequently by bullshit companies) across the known world. In 2018, Graeber expanded his ideas and the polemical article became a more carefully researched book.

The bullshitisation of work

In his book, David Graeber details a taxonomy of five varieties of bullshit job, each with its own identifiable features. Before explaining further, Graeber stresses that there can be no objective definition of a bullshit job: if an employee asserts that their job is bullshit, then bullshit it is.

Likewise, however, it’s very hard to argue against someone who believes that their job isn’t bullshit. So don’t be offended if you recognise your job as one of those broadly categorised as bullshit. Maybe it’s not for you.

Nevertheless, the response to Graeber’s book seems to suggest that people know when what they’re doing is worthless—even if they’ve buried that sense deep down inside.

  • Flunkies: people whose only purpose is to make someone else look important. Doormen, concierges, some receptionists and personal assistants.
  • Goons: those people whose job has an aggressive element. The military, but also most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers.
  • Duct tapers: employees whose jobs exist only because of ‘a glitch or fault in the organisation; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist’.
  • Box tickers: ‘employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organisation to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing’. Bureaucrats, in-house magazine writers and the unfortunate authors of unread government commissions.
  • Taskmasters: these employees come in two types. Type 1 Taskmasters are the opposite of Flunkies: ‘unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates’. Type 2 Taskmasters are the bullshit generators: those whose ‘primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs’.

Ring any bells? I recognise plenty of my past jobs in this list—and even a few of the ones I force myself do now I’m self-employed. I’m not alone in having thoroughly absorbed the logic of the bullshit economy.

The antidote

As well as describing the boundaries of bullshit, Graeber also suggests an antidote, reasoning that nothing can be called bullshit if it’s concerned with caring.

Now, maybe there are arms dealers who ardently believe that they’re in a caring career, but even so I think we can agree with Graeber that some jobs are more naturally compatible with caring: nurses, cleaners, teachers, mechanics and electricians (of the non-duct-taping variety) to name a few.

By choosing a non-bullshit career as a member of what Graeber calls the ‘caring classes’, you almost certainly won’t be rewarded financially. There is an inbuilt inequality in our society that seems to imply that bullshit jobs are so sociopathically awful that they need to be highly paid otherwise no one but sociopaths would be masochistic enough to take them.

The book summarises the results of a study by the New Economic Foundation that looked at the social return generated by various different jobs. See if you can identify the bullshit ones:

  • City banker – yearly salary c. £5 million – estimated £7 of social value destroyed for every £1 earned
  • Advertising executive – yearly salary c. £500,000 – estimated £11.50 of social value destroyed per £1 paid
  • Tax accountant – yearly salary c. £125,000 – estimated £11.20 of social value destroyed per £1 paid
  • Hospital cleaner – yearly income c. £13,000 (£6.26 per hour) – estimated £10 of social value generated per £1 paid
  • Recycling worker – yearly income c. £12,500 (£6.10 per hour) – estimated £12 in social value generated per £1 paid
  • Nursery worker – salary c. £11,500 – estimated £7 in social value generated per £1 paid

See any injustice there? It was something that was deeply felt at the Occupy protests—indeed, Graeber describes the Occupy movement as the ‘revolt of the caring classes’. He observes that the most common complaint heard at the protests went something along these lines:

“I wanted to do something useful with my life; work that had a positive effect on other people or, at the very least, wasn’t hurting anyone. But the way this economy works, if you spend your working life caring for others, you’ll end up so underpaid and so deeply in debt you won’t be able to care for your own family.”

But of course the Occupy movement wasn’t enough. That’s why Graeber wrote this book: in the hope that it would offer millions more flunkies, box tickers and duct tapers the intellectual courage to quit and join the ranks of dissenters.

Funnily enough, though, the only reason STRIKE! magazine—and Graeber’s original polemic—ever existed at all was thanks to a bullshit job.

Bullshit origins of STRIKE!

Last year, I interviewed Vyvian Raoul for a review of Bullshit Jobs that I never finished writing. He told me how, back in 2013, he’d been working as a communications officer for a big charity in London. A classic bullshit job.

‘It was basically internal PR, jeeing up the troops,’ he explained. ‘People hated us. We should have been spending the money on more nurses.

‘One time I corrected the grammar on a blogpost that the CEO wrote,’ Raoul said. ‘It was the only useful thing I ever did there—and I got a bollocking for it.

‘From that point on, I’m coasting,’ he continued, ‘and I started setting up STRIKE! in my spare time at work.’

Raoul remembers exactly where he was when he first read On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs:

‘I was reading it in Vauxhall Park in the sun when my boss walked past. We reluctantly greeted each other,’ Raoul said. ‘I knew, in that moment, that I was going to leave the job—and maybe jobs full stop.’

The first issue of STRIKE! was paid for out of his redundancy pay from that bullshit job. Graeber’s article was published in the third issue of the magazine and was only posted online as something of an after thought. It went viral: office workers around the world nodding their heads and beating their desks.

‘We got quite a few people emailing in to say thanks for publishing the article and that they’d left their jobs on the basis of it,’ Raoul told me.

I like the circularity of this story. Severance pay from a bullshit job liberated Vyvian Raoul and gave him the independence he needed to start a radical newspaper that published a tract against bullshit jobs, which has itself inspired another generation of bullshit employees to quit and revolt.

Raoul finished our conversation about Bullshit Jobs in a reflective mood: ‘Perhaps liberation is more of a process than a grand, Utopian, revolutionary moment,’ he suggested. ‘And maybe that’s the point of the book?’

~

All I can add is encouragement for us all to continue our process of liberation. All of David Graeber’s books and many articles are available for free online at the Anarchist Library.

Besides his writing, David Graeber was an excellent public speaker and many lectures and discussions will outlive him online:

If you’d like to support the ongoing publication of David’s work then check out Anthropology for All and buy some ‘politically challenging’ books from Anthropology for Kids (content suitable, nay important for all ages).

Above all, please, please make sure that you really give a damn about what you’re doing. Do yourself a favour and care.

I raise my cap to a proper public intellectual. Someone who grappled with politics and ideas in a way that made sense and was immediately useful. Rest in power.

Stress and the search for the antischedule

The last three weeks of lockdown have been difficult. I know there are people who have been and still are in much worse situations, but Covid-19 gave me 90 straight days without human contact and nothing to do really other than work and exercise—a reliable recipe for stress-related illness.

And for three weeks up to last Wednesday, I delighted in a wide range of symptoms, from wanting to sleep the whole time (and not feeling rested when I did) to brain fog, mouth ulcers, diarrhoea and IBS. Not pleasant.

Luckily, I’ve been able to take the whole week off (birthday week!) and spend time with other human beings, both socially distanced and in a bubble with my parents. The rest has released the pressure, the symptoms have largely disappeared and I feel restored.

This is all good: everyone needs human contact and a break from work every now and again. Ordinarily I might leave the insights there, but lockdown is encouraging me to reexamine the way I do everything.

What if there was a way of working where holidays weren’t medically necessary to cure my mouth of ulcers and clear my body of stress hormones?

The problem

As a freelancer, I’m paid by the hour. Time, sadly, is money. According to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Dana Carney, workers who have an ‘economic mindset’ about time—i.e. people who are paid by the hour—report higher levels of psychological stress.

One reason for this elevated stress might be because hourly workers spend less time socialising with friends and family. Gutted. If time is money, then we are constantly locked into a (subconscious) hedonic calculus: is seeing my friends for an hour really worth another hour’s work?

The answer is almost always yes, but salaried workers don’t have to answer this question, not even subconsciously.

Orthodox solutions

Look on the internet or in self-help books for how to reduce ‘time-stress’, you’ll read a lot of advice about efficient scheduling.

For example: the Ness Labs newsletter popped into my inbox this week with an article about how to manage stress. Perfect timing! One of her suggestions was, yep, better time management.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s approach is typical of the genre. This is her opener:

Except if we end up inventing time travel, we need to accept the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. In order to achieve our goals, we need to be smart about how we allocate our time to different tasks and activities.

Anne-Laure’s suggestion is ever more precise calendar use, with everything scheduled down to the last hour, including breaks and spending time with friends.

On the face of it: great advice—and I’m sure it works for her. But what if I already have a killer schedule? What then?

My current orthodox solution

My current schedule is managed on two spreadsheets:

  • One acts as my calendar and reminds me about deadlines and such like
  • Another tracks what projects I’m working on and for how long

Here’s how it plays out:

  1. In the evening, I check my calendar and lay out the work I’ll do the next day, building a to do list text file.
  2. In the morning, after yoga and breakfast, I get to work. I set a timer for 90 minutes and begin. Thanks to the timer, I find it very easy to prevent procrastination and slip into work mode, no matter how reluctant I was feeling before the clock started.
  3. When the 90 minutes is up, I write down my hours in my working spreadsheet, which automatically tells me how much work I’ve done and, if it’s hourly paid work, how much I’ve earned.

It sounds like a great system and, for the most part, it is. I get plenty of work done, on time and with minimal fuss.

But if it’s such a great system, why did my body break down with time-stress? What if scheduling by the clock created my time-stress?

I suspect that this is more than an idle what-if question.

Taking on time in an arms race

The orthodoxy posits that the solution to time-stress is ever more precise time-scheduling.

But that sounds to me like an arms race, where there is no end until one side or the other blows up. In this case, I can guarantee that time isn’t the one that’s going to blow up…

My scheduling system probably could be improved with time-management techniques from high achievers on the internet—but I suspect only marginally. I haven’t found any advice online or in self-help books that offer the radical changes that I suspect would materially reduce time-stress.

If we guess that my system is already, say, 80 percent efficient, then the effort needed to eke out the last 20 percent of efficiency gains might only add to my time-stress.

I’d argue that time management in itself can be very stressful, especially as it becomes more and more precise. Time management forces us to think about time with a stressful economic mindset—especially if we are paid by the hour.

Side note on Covid-19

Of course, I’m not the only person who has found the last three months psychologically difficult. The World Economic Forum discovered that the number of people in Belgium at high risk of toxic stress had increased to a quarter of the population during the Covid-19 pandemic, up ten percentage points compared to last year.

I think a lot of my time-stress goes away when I’m able to whinge about stuff to friends. Nothing like a good old whinge. Isolated from these friends thanks to Covid-19, I’m not getting my quota of whinging.

But what kind of a time management system is founded on whinging? Not a very good system, if you ask me. I think we can do better. But how?

I propose a pincer movement:

  1. Shift away from orthodox time management that promotes a stress-inducing ‘economic mindset’
  2. Introduce activities that expand perception of time

I’ll explore these in reverse order, finishing with the antischedule.

Playing with time perception

Time is immutable, but humans aren’t embodiments of pure physics and we can play around with our perception of time.

Humans have an internal clock that beats ‘time’ throughout the day, but different activities are counted at different paces. Sometimes time crawls, sometimes it flies. When you’re asleep, for example, your time perception goes right out of the window.

Time-stress is what happens when we feel that there isn’t enough time to do everything we want to do. Time is real, but we should forget that time-stress is a feeling.

If we do more activities that make us feel like we have oodles of time, then we reduce our sense of time-pressure and so reduce our time-stress.

But what are those activities? They probably vary from person to person. Here are some of mine—a few of which have had their time-expanding properties documented scientifically.

You’ll have your own ideas. What makes you feel like you’ve got endless time?

  • Reading books
  • Taking a bath
  • Chatting to friends
  • Playing games
  • Exercise: walking, swimming, running, cycling (without clock-watching)
  • Sunbathing
  • Taking psychedelics
  • Cooking and eating
  • Spending slow time in nature, especially awesome nature
  • Watching the sun rise or set
  • Walking more slowly

These are ways we can trick our minds into dialling back time-stress. If I’m walking slowly to an appointment, I might arrive 30 seconds later, but I’ll be in a much more restful state of mind.

If you’re not sure you can spare those 30 seconds, that’s a classic symptom of time-stress. I prescribe Relax for the same result by Derek Sivers.

Now we’ve expanded our sense of time, we can try to reintroduce work in a way that doesn’t trigger the economic mindset.

The antischedule

The only article that I found on radical alternatives to the time-management orthodoxy was this piece by Dr Adam Bell.

A typical junior doctor on a tyrannical schedule, Bell found inspiration in a tweet by Naval Ravikant:

The single best productivity hack that everyone should aspire to—don’t keep a schedule.

So Bell stopped tracking time and keeping a schedule. The effect was transformational for him:

My inner tyrant had left his post, and so too had any sense of time pressure. Now there was an abundance of time, rather than a perpetual scarcity of it. And there was no inner voice barking orders anymore.

It’s a terrifying prospect, to work—or live at all—without my calendar, to do list, timer and working diary. How will I stay on track?

But. Wait. What kind of a track am I on? One that gives me mouth ulcers and diarrhoea? What kind of a masochist wants to stay on that track?

Some other ideas

My holiday ends on Sunday: what will I do when I start work again on Monday? I haven’t committed to adopting the antischedule. I’m scared.

Besides chucking out my orthodox scheduling tools wholesale, there are a few other options I could explore.

  • Seven week sabbaticals. This idea from Sean McCabe was one I adopted with relish before Covid-19 struck. The idea is simple: six weeks of scheduled work followed by one week of unscheduled, unstructured time—a mini sabbatical. For some reason, I thought Covid-19 meant I couldn’t take sabbaticals. Stupid.
  • Switch from a countdown timer to a countup timer. Hitting start on a timer is a great way to shortcut procrastination, but there’s no reason why that timer can’t count up instead of down. I’ve started experimenting with SpaceJock’s free TrackAMinute software, designed for freelancers like me but useful in most computer-based lines of work.
  • Sacrifice time-accuracy for reduced time-stress. I have to track my time because I must invoice for my work hourly. But I don’t have to track that time myself: what if I invoiced based on passive time-tracking software like RescueTime? It might be less accurate, but surely a reduction in accuracy is a good sacrifice to make for the sake of my oral and gastric health!
  • Find satisfaction from completing worthwhile projects, rather than from stacking up hours of work. This is a tricky one. On the one hand, tracking the hours I spend on my projects takes out the mystique of creativity and production. I know now that writing a BBC Radio series is simply a matter of showing up and putting in the hours: that’s tremendously liberating. On the other hand, sometimes the hours I put in can get muddled up with whether or not the work is taking me in the direction I want to go.
  • Decide on and stick to my boundaries. When is enough enough? Putting in the hours is all very good, but how do I know when to stop? Should I stop work at 6pm? 4pm? 2pm? I could take weekends off—or only work a half day on Wednesdays. I had some success with this approach a couple of months ago, working for 4 hours or so in the morning and then taking the rest of the day ‘off’.
  • Use technology less. I run everything through my spreadsheets, even my time-expanding activities like reading and exercise. I could use pen and paper much, much more—even if only to add the data in batches at the end of the week.
  • Say no more. Say no more.

~

Have you found a way of avoiding time-stress? Do you use clocks and watches and timers? Are you acutely aware of time—or not? I need help!

No Computers And my new favourite day of the week

I have a new favourite day of the week. It’s the day that I don’t use my computer.

To be fair, it’s only been two weeks now, but still. On my first day of No Computers I went for a long bike ride with friends, and then spent the evening reading and listening to the radio.

Last week I went for a long walk before eating my bodyweight in falafel and falling sound asleep. Tomorrow, I’m going to a day-long conference on the brain with my dad.

No wonder I look forward to these days!

But what’s No Computers got to do with it? Couldn’t I have a great day while still allowing access to those gleaming bits and bytes?

I suspect not, and my results over the last fortnight seem to concur. With my computer by my side, I find it hard to switch off – literally.

My humble Acer is a gateway poison: the one keystone habit that supports (what feels like) all the stress in my life.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I am able to work at any time and from anywhere. Thanks to the wonders of late stage capitalism, it feels like I always should be.

Remove the keystone, however, and the arch comes tumbling down. Sorry, but I can’t log on, I can’t publish, I can’t reply to your email. I am not available.

It’s not like I’m bereft of technology on my No Computer days. I can use anything else from my panoply of devices:

  • My smartphone for internet, email, messaging, music, radio, camera, podcasts, maps and yoga.
  • My digital radio and MP3 player for auditory entertainment, and my speaker system for amplification.
  • My Neo typewriter for distraction-free writing.
  • My GPS watch for tracking my runs.
  • My stop watch timer for meditation, saunas and HIIT exercise.
  • My clock, thermometer and hygrometer for tuning in.

As you can see, it’s not like I’m limited in what I could do. But the tool selection changes everything.

I really don’t like responding to email on my phone, except really short replies, and I don’t like browsing the web on my phone, except really simple, factual searches.

Without preventing me from addressing anything that’s really urgent, the tool selection gently pushes me into doing other things, like getting out of the house, listening to music, or reading a book.

I can still do the type of work that really nourishes me, like writing and thinking, but I can’t do work that’s draining, or straight-up unproductive.

No Computers has been such a relief that I’d like to expand it to two days a week. Older readers might remember these kind of regular breaks – they used to be called ‘weekends’.

I’d like to end by quoting from a long article I read this week that’s consonant with these ideas: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen.

We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.

Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

Switch off.

Work is the Opposite of Worry

One of my favourite aphorisms is “Happiness is the very opposite of selfishness”, attributed to Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University and obsessive historian of Tony Blair. [Read an elucidation of his aphorism on the BBC]

This aphorism is a great tonic for when I find myself footling around in my brain for that elusive drug, happiness. It gently nudges me back onto the path, calibrates my compass, gets me out of my head and connects me with others.

But there are times when it doesn’t work. Continue reading Work is the Opposite of Worry