The Shadow Work of Destroying Death by Death

Work is killing you even when you’re not working. Be cultured enough to give me the leisure to work up to that.

The Art of Manliness blog always paces around in the shadows of social media for me. Like the suspicious guy in the alleyway AofM keeps showing up in the feeds of my friends. I was always aware it was there, but wasn’t quite sure what it was doing, or really, whether it should be doing whatever it is it’s doing.

First of all, the name “Art of Manliness” sounds a little bit sexist. Then, their notion of manliness is overly dependent upon an unhealthy beard-growing obsession, truth be told…. I could probably grow delicate tulips before I’d ever be able to grow a proper beard. I also detected a severe overuse of C.S. Lewis in their posts–my attitude toward that cultural institution of Anglo-American-Anodyne-Christianity is decidedly heterodox.

But then something they wrote made me punt all that prejudice into the poubelle. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve been working longer hours ever since my contract work ran out. Being poor is expensive and time consuming. In a late modern paradox of sorts, it feels like having a job with definite outlines was an escape from the business of no work. Part of this had something to do with what AofM identifies in one of theirs posts as “shadow work.” They use the term in their manly review of a widely read book by Craig Lambert, Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day:

Amidst the debate over which sex does more, few have noticed the fact that all of us — men and women alike — are working not only unpaid second shifts, but third, fourth, and fifth ones as well. Think about Bill’s day again: even though he had one official job, he wore many different hats.

As author and professor Dr. Craig Lambert explains, we all increasingly “find ourselves doing a stack of jobs we never volunteered for, chores that showed up in our lives below the scan of awareness.” Lambert calls these tasks “shadow work” and in his book of the same name, he describes this labor as “all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.”

You perform shadow work whenever you do jobs that used to be done by a paid employee, but have now been outsourced to the consumer: pumping gas, booking a travel itinerary, bussing a table, and so on. We likewise do shadow work whenever we bank online or use an ATM instead of a teller, check-in to flights or a hotel using a kiosk rather than a human, and wait on hold for an hour to talk to a scarce customer service representative. When we can’t find a knowledgeable salesman to talk to and get a recommendation from at a big box store, and instead must take over his job and shop online, spending hours comparing model features and reading reviews, we’re doing shadow work then too. When we follow through on these online transactions, entering in our credit card number and address for the umpteenth thousandth time, we do yet more shadow work — this time as DIY cashiers.

So, as you can see, having a “real job,” even when it involves commuting a total of three to four hours a day, can be a relief from the drudgery of shadow work.

Unemployment is so much godforsaken work: applying for jobs, asking for recommendations, going to foodbanks, writing blogposts (then editing them too late after spamming facebook groups), asking for rent assistance, applying for government programs that make up for the gross social laziness of churches, worrying about making rent, car, and electricity payments, and so on! It’s killing me.

I think I now understand why reading Josef Pieper’s book on leisure is like throwing a bomb from the playground of leisure into our placidly accepted culture of endless work. I predict its popularity will only continue to grow over the years as the contract economy expands.

If you’re given to conspiracy theories and other such intellectual slop, you can compare our present situation to what the Nazi’s did with the drug Pervitin. They carried out their Blitzkriegs thanks to being hopped up on drugs. It turns out that everyone’s favorite “honorable” Nazi, Rommel, was nothing more than a Pervitin junkie who called it his “daily bread.” Yes, as the old caffeine slogan goes, “Do stupid things faster!”

Doing stupid work for free faster is obviously killing us, but I’ll have to get back to unpacking that tomorrow.

My springboard will be the relief my wife and I felt going to a Capella Romana concert of Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” (not off our own money, mind you, but thanks to two acts of our friends). It was such a relief from everything that listening to Rach’s music felt like we had died and gone to heaven, even if there were some disturbing texts about death in it.

Yeah, I know that the title of this post holding together with its content depends upon further elaborations. I shore up my fragments for now, do my best Klee Angelus impersonation, and hope to write more about that and about the role of death in life tomorrow, or later, depending on how much time I can find in my busy unemployed schedule.

I have an interview and a couple more things to submit. Wish me luck, or leisure.

Finally, here is Capella Romana in a decidedly relaxed rehearsal mood:

See: The Anxiety of a Freshly Unemployed Man on Labor Day for more tortured confessional prose.

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