When you marry a French person, you slowly start to learn that August = Vacation.
And then you get back to America, and Labor Day – that glorious holiday for retiring our white pants – doesn’t celebrate less work and more picnicking, but in fact becomes the marker of “BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO WORK, BACK TO THE REAL WORLD GO GO GO GO GO!1”
(If only there were an anti-capitalist anthem for the Southhampton close of summer White Parties…)
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff coming up, and a lot of it is very exciting.
Monday 9/23 I’m playing The Troubadour in LA, a dream venue
Thursday 9/26 my next single “Ash & Smoke” comes out
But a lot of it’s also got me having that “what if I just ran away to a cave and never did anything ever again?” sort of feeling.
And what I’m realizing is it comes down to how I’ve learned to think about “Work”2.
Work is essential; work is how we use ourselves, what we do to create, be of service, make an impact. We may not want to “go to work” – but we all have things we want to work on. Finishing a good day’s work should feel great…but what if you spent a weekday doing chores, exercising, talking to your therapist, and learning how to crochet? Would you call that a good day’s work? Would you let yourself call that a good day’s work?3
I seem to have solely aligned “work” with “Identity,” “Profession,” and “Production,” so that’s how things get all anxious and procrastinatory – and activities like “playing shows” and “making music” become so overwhelming that my partner threatens to stop sleeping in the same bed as me.
Everything and everyone4 – yes, even those of us so far up the hierarchy of needs that all of our basic survival skills have been distilled down to pressing “Add to Cart” on Amazon – we all have work to do.
Given our privileged perch on Maslow’s pyramid, our work should be of the kind that brings self-esteem or self-actualization. Instead, work is something with which we extract value (or have our value extracted…). And pure work, the kind we do because Life Simply Requires Work, gets perverted into work done solely for some external reward.
Real talk: Self-Actualization is not a box you can check — or rather, it does not stay checked but continually gets washed away, an ornate sandcastle that you’d never call finished ‘til the tide rolls up and does its thing.
Putting in Good Work, however, the kind that nourishes the soul, that’s a key part of how you get there.
Look, work necessitates toil, and toil is no fun. But I toil at all sorts of things with no issue – cooking, cleaning, even admin tasks…no problem.
It’s only those toilsome tasks that I’ve identified as what I “should be doing” for reasons of self-worth, identity, career advancement that I put off. Which is ridiculous because they’re exactly what I love doing the most.
They are, of course, also the activities that now scare me the most precisely because I attach added value to their reception, not just to being good at them – but to being so good at them that other people will tell me I’m good at them.
But work is purpose, passion, creation. Work is not incumbent upon how it is received.
“A Life’s Work” is what we leave behind, whether that’s a concerto, a business, or a family.
We can measure the life of a person in the work they do, but that measurement does not have to be time-bound. It’s not about the hours spent. It’s not about the way those hours translate into money, status, acclaim. It ain’t even about whether you got that thing done by EOW that you said you would.
Work is the way you use yourself. And I want to use myself well.
-DR
Also, “BUY A NEW VERSION OF THIS THING YOU ALREADY HAVE BECAUSE IT’S NOW 1 YEAR OLD AND YOU NEED NEW STUFF AT A 20% DISCOUNT!”
Dave The Revolutionary opened up draft one of this essay with “We must dismantle our cultural understanding of work” – which I still stand by – but I’ve decided I’d probably get more readers starting things off a bit more softly. That said, when I say “Dismantle,” I do mean piece by piece, slowly but surely…aka a fun joke about wearing white after Labor Day and then a serious discussion of why we stress ourselves the fuck out all the time.
Hint: you should. That sounds like a sick day.
Squirrels work to get them acorns in the wintertime; birds work to build nests…although, birds aren’t real, so I guess that’s a bad example