Are You Working Too Hard? Are You Enjoying Enough Sad Entertainment To Make Yourself Happy?
Okay, well, hey, hello, read this.
Being unemployed these last few months has been a learning experience. Right up at the top of the lessons is that “unemployed” is a mischaracterization of what I’ve been. I’ve moderated a panel, did a fireside chat kind of conversation for a conference, worked on some book stuff, and spent a great deal of persistent effort trying to get my next gig together (and got knocked down and got back up again a bunch of times) (I take a whiskey drink, I take a lager drink.) (Don’t cry for me, next door neighbor.)
It’s what I do. In July, I talked to a guy I worked with who got laid off the same morning I did in June. He was going to take the summer to relax and start looking for the next gig in the fall. Me, I was bouncing around possibilities by the late morning of the day I got laid off. I grind, man. Our society uses the verb “grind” slangily to mean working hard and it has a positive connotation. It’s also what we do to coffee beans to turn whole things into powder.
The restlessness of not having a regular job combined with the stress-induced return of semi-latent depression caused me to stop and consider my approach to labor, and I think it might be similar to yours if you’re the kind of person who listens to a person like me.
When I’m working in a team setting - office setting, group of freelancers, creative team, whatever - I really like having a section of the task that I’m responsible for and then walling myself off and crushing myself with it.
I don’t ask for help from colleagues. If I do that, they will think that I’m weak and incapable. If I do that, they’re going to see my own work for the fraud that it is, they’ll realize that I made the engine in the car we’re building out of Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. If I do that, they’ll have ideas that will change the fundamental nature of what I was doing and those ideas will be better than mine and then I’ll be a liability. If I do that, I’ll have to figure out the ways normal people interact with each other and will probably blow it.
And if I truly NEED help? I’ll just work harder. If it’s the work of two people? I’ll work twice as long.
I protect my little silo and I don’t bond with the team. It’s a way of controlling my world through warped thought and fear. And, of course, it’s no more effective at controlling my world than eating disorders or OCD at controlling other people’s worlds. It pushes me into isolation and, at best, creates an ersatz universe that makes a kind of satirical sense to me but is useless outside that. And I miss out on happy hours.
I first started getting paid for freelance writing in 1998 and it always felt like a natural solution to the problem of wanting things I did not have. Need kitchen renovations? Take on some gigs. Then realize I want to keep being able to pay for things so I just keep that extra gig going for as long as it lasts. After a while, I was able to write books, which pay a lot better and take a ton more effort than freelancing. So I was working a regular job, still freelancing, and writing books, all while I was also raising a family. It’s a lot. Maybe you’ve been in a similar situation.
And what gets sacrificed along the way? Yourself! Because if you’ve dealt with depression, you have an innate low opinion of yourself so it makes all the sense in the world to dump that load on that poor sucker. Make the money, be there for the family, lose sleep, and starve yourself of the pleasantness that is supposed to come with being alive. It’s a lousy bargain.
I’m getting ready to get started on the new job thing. I’ve been saying that for quite a while now but a huge obstacle just got cleared and the new thing is definitely a lot closer. I hope I approach it differently than other work. To do that, I have to overcome my own patterns. And that’s a lot of work.
When someone you love and admire fails to use the Oxford comma, you forgive them. You look past it. Such is the case with Open Mike Eagle’s new album, Anime, Trauma and Divorce.
I first got to know Mike many years ago when he was a guest on Wits, a comedy-music variety show I hosted on public radio. We booked him because we had never heard music like his anywhere before. Pensive, personal, innovative hip-hop that comes from inside his mind. And he’s funny as hell. Mike and I have hosted podcasts together and I try to see him and book him wherever possible because I love his mind, heart, and art.
The new album is beautiful and it hurts. Mike’s Comedy Central show was canceled and he was going through a divorce that was brought on, at least in part, by watching an episode of Black Mirror with his wife. For me, listening to the album was kind of odd. Here are these songs about transition, pain, collapse, and disappointment so that hurts. And it’s from a friend so that hurts more, knowing my friend went through that. But it’s transcendent in its wisdom and vulnerability. This is from the song “Bucciarati”:
I seen it, I seen it, I seen it, the phoenix
Tryin' to emerge from these disparate pieces
I'm watchin' it struggle, watchin' it juggle
Its feathers was burnin' a hole in the puzzle
It trapped and it's hooked on the shit that they hustle
Picture was blurring, the drawing is muddled
It's ugh
Can’t get enough painful songs about divorce? Check out Richard and Linda Thompson’s classic Shoot Out the Lights.
On the very first episode of The Hilarious World of Depression, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin talked about how, counterintuitively, one of the best things for addressing depression is to listen to sad music. Like, go to a blues club, get up close and personal with some strong musical sadness. It won’t increase your own blues, usually, but it will make you feel heard, it will make you feel less alone. To hear about someone else being downhearted will make you feel like you got someone else to be downhearted with.
But be careful about the blues. You don’t want to listen to the wrong blues.
There is a new World of Tomorrow sequel available and here’s a trailer that will be pretty but might not mean much to you if you haven’t seen the original film.
World of Tomorrow, a short animated film by Don Hertzfeldt, stars Hertzfeldt’s niece Winona Mae. It is, like the recent Open Mike Eagle album, painful and beautiful. Maybe my favorite animated film ever? It’s hard to explain so I’ll let Wikipedia do it.
A communication unit in a white room begins to ring, and a little girl (voiced by Winona Mae) runs toward the machine, where she excitedly presses a random series of buttons on the console until a live video transmission appears on the screen.
The person in the transmission is a woman (voiced by Julia Pott) and addresses the young girl as Emily. Speaking in a robotic monotone throughout their entire conversation, the woman introduces herself as an adult third-generation clone of Emily contacting her from 227 years in the future. The clone Emily then explains to the original Emily regarding the complex cloning process that humans have devised in an attempt to achieve immortality, as well as describing other crude forms of life extension that less affluent members of humanity can afford. The clone Emily goes on to explain how she was able to contact the original Emily through an experimental and dangerous form of physical time travel. The clone Emily proceeds to transport the original Emily into the clone's present time in the future via time travel.
Here’s a trailer for that original.
It costs money to rent or buy the movie because the filmmaker, rightly, wants to get paid for his work. Give him your money. It’s a bargain.
Brené Brown is a smartie, as everyone knows. The latest episode of her podcast features an interview with Joe Biden wherein she tries to get an idea of what he thinks about the idea of power. It’s rare for a host to tell the audience before the interview what she intends to do in the interview but I appreciated the insight. I think it helps the listening experience.
The fact that the interview had a focus (many do not, sadly, especially in podcasting) combined with the depth of Biden’s humanity make this an excellent listen. So listen to it! And vote! VOTE!
VOOOOOTE!