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via "Les Confessions" on 01/08/05
The other day, while on a caffeine high (alas, all other forms of stimulation have been exhausted) I decided to become competent at my job. All the bothersome tasks that had been troubling me for weeks (or months) were to be confronted. And one by one they fell with the speed and manner of the 20th Centruy French military when faced with anything better armed than a Vietnamese rice peddler. And I realised, my job, obviously - isn't that difficult. If I wasn't such a spaz then I'd almost never be under any stress or pressure. Sure, I'd be doing difficult and complicated tasks, but on the whole work would be reasonably easy. And this, as always, got me thinking.
Bastardising the point somewhat Marxists argue that the economic system will have an affect on the values held by a given society. This is obvious, but in simplest terms might mean that notions of (say) honour and loyalty or duty will tend to dominate a feudal society, but ones of efficiency and materialism will dominate in a capitalist society.
Bertrand Russell went on to say that the sexual ethics held by an individual might reflect the economic system of his or her grandfather. That is, these things "lag", and we might hold a bunch of beliefs / values which don't really fit current realiites. This is kind of obvious of course, and if you look at religions they are full of this sort of thing. Eating pork at one point may have been a bad idea for hygeine reasons, but now there's not as much of a problem. Yet people still refuse to eat pork. A belief outlives it's usefulness.
And that's what I'm talking about here. Specifically, the notion of hardship, in all it's forms. That life is (or should be) hard, or difficult, or troublesome. Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" says :
I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible be like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.
I for one used to live by this sort of ethic. Life is nasty, brutish and short to quote Hobbes (the non-tiger one). Existence is pain.
And of course, this is very true for a great number of people. For many people life is horrible. There is hunger, poverty, war, crime, disease, etc. Opening my browser and going to news.bbc.co.uk I read about terrorist bombers, a kid who was killed with an axe through his head for nothing in particular, a guy who was stabbed on a night bus over something just as trivial . At any one moment it seems fair to assume that there are hundreds of thousands of people in physical agony and many millions more suffering some kind of severe distress over the prospect of pain/hunger/etc. So I guess that's the horrible.
What of the rest? No doubt there is a great deal of misery. Apparently millions of individuals in America are on anti-depressants and the ones that aren't might be killing themselves or at least contemplating it. We are told that suicide and self-harm (surely some signs of existential despair?) are rampant and rising in segments of our youth, seemingly unchecked by iniatives to curb them.
But even on a more mundane level, life is generally acknowledged to be hard or difficult. But why? Should every day be some ceaseless struggle? Is there an actual reason, or are we just presuming that this is how things are?
It's strange, because this concept has survived (possibly because of the "lag" described previously) beyond actual conditions of (economic) hardship. In only a couple generations the standard of living for a great number of people (in the developed world) has vastly improved. To take a few quick examples ; my mother was brought up in rural Ireland. From what she used to say, they used to use a mangle to "iron" their clothes. Not a hardship per se but gives an idea of the level of development. My father had to leave school at 14 to get a job to help support his family. My mother-in-law spent some of her childhood in a corregated iron roofed shack in District Six. The point is that barring some economic collapse or just rank stupidity they are conditions that my hypothetical children are unlikely to have to live through.
Which is good, obviously.
But we don't seem to have got past the notion of 'hardship'. Despite everything getting better and better (for some) we carry around some bizarre racial memory that things should be difficult. This seems like a strange point to make, I realise. And indeed, on the face of it - who gives a shit?
Perhaps the easiest way of explaining this sort of concern is to give an example. As most of you will be aware, I live with four other individuals in a shared house in South East London. There are three males and one female. I will put my hands up and say that I am one of the laziest, dirtiest, smelliest, disgusting individuals you could hope to meet (or not as the case might be). My housemates are on the whole not particularly dirty or messy, but my housemates don't care enough about the mess to do anything about it. Or so it seems.
So anyway, predictably the house falls into a gradual decline whereby plates, cups, etc get left everywhere. Mould grows. Chicken boxes fester away under the sofa. Ants routine patrol our front room floor collecting morsels of rubbish to feed their ever growing ant-empire. There is a smell that is ever present but somehow undefinable / untracable. And so on. You get the idea - I'm sure most of you know a household that fits the description.
Now, no-one who lives here is particularly happy with the situation (I suppose) but you stop noticing after a while. It's only when someone visits for the first time in a while that you realise how things are. One person said that they don't think they could live in such a state. And they're not a particularly tidy person.
So you get used to it. For the people inside the house, it's normal. I mean, obviously there's ants on the floor. Why wouldn't there be? Yes, that pizza box has been there a month. It's difficult to comprehend how things could be any other way.
What we're used to is what we expect and what we expect influences what we try to change or challenge.
So life, is hard. How does this affect things? Let's have a quick look at a couple of examples.
1. Relationships
I'm sure most of you will have heard at one time or another the idea that relationships are hard work. And I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. Whether it's a marriage, a working relationship, a boyfriend/girlfriend a flatmate or lesbian life partner you might hear the refrain that "it's hard work". Or that you need to work hard to keep it working. I've never really understood why.
Don't get me wrong - I've been in relationships which have been hard. Monstrously hard in fact. But you know why that was? It was because one or more people involved were jerks. True story. Take something like :
"It's hard sharing a living space with someone"
No. It's hard sharing a living space with someone if one or more of you are arseholes. Unless you're sharing a coffin or a shoe box then it's not difficult putting up with someone else. Unless you've got some strange psychological problems of course.
"I've had a few problems with my boyfriend. I guess it's hard getting used to other people's little ways, you know?"
No. It's hard getting used to your boyfriends ways because he likes putting cigarettes out on your back while he wanks over pictures of your sister. There is nothing inherently difficult in adjusting to a new person unless you or they are unreasonable (or merely mismatched). Putting up with someone cracking their knuckles, or taking ages in a shop - these are not difficult things, unless you've got some major problems yourself.
Relationships do not need to be difficult. They do not need to be hard work. They are not assignments. They are not prison sentences. Hard work is exactly what they shouldn't be. If you find maintaining a relationship with someone difficult, think about why this might be. For instance, I find it difficult to get on with my mother. It could be because we're not putting in the requisite amount of effort, or it could be the more likely explanation that I am a self-centred cunt and she is crazy.
Even something like raising kids doesn't need to be difficult. People lose their tempers all the time with the kids (unacceptable imo) and then fall back on the comforting idea that it's meant to be hard. It's not. You're just broken. (Yeah, I know, check out the self-righteous prick with no kids of his own)
2. Work
I've already talked about this, and many of you know my feelings on the subject more generally. There are a lot of ways modern work can be criticised. For instance, more eloquently than I am capable of, T&F wrote here :
Working is also losing all meaning, anyone reading this, ask yourselves what you do, how is it helping, can you trace it back to any sort of useful production or investment in society, sure in its own context, but really what's the point of any of you. Ask yourselves if you are completely irreplaceable. Ask yourselves if you actually look at your job as a cruel form of torture which interrupts things you would rather be doing.
But it's not just that. It's not just the politics. It's also the efficiency.
The broad area of work I am in, as I have mentioned previously, is housing maintenance. "We" (in the loosest sense) repair people's homes and make sure they have a decent place to live. It might be a repair to a dripping tap, or making sure their windows are wind and water-tight or any number of things. The things that come our way are varied.
In one case we're dealing with at the moment, we're knocking through two houses so a 23 year old woman and her twelve children (see here) can have a home which is of a more appropriate size. In another, we're making sure an elderly couple have an appropriate heating system before it gets to winter. And so on. The point is that even if you oppose welfare systems on principle or housing associations as a method of service delivery it's reasonably "worthwhile" work with socially desirable ends.
So, that's all good. But...things are pointlessly difficult. Bizarrely stupid procedures are if not actively encouraged then completely tolerated. People are encouraged to put up with stupidity in systems which easily double or treble the amount of work needed. This is not a call for idleness - this is a call against stupidity and complacency.
I could give you fifty tasks at my work which are unreasonably difficult. For instance, we have 12,000 properties with about 12 officers looking after the tenants (each with a patch, obviously, of about 1k properties). Finding out which officer deals with a particular property or road is curiously difficult. I have witnessed 4-5 phone calls and various e-mails about answering just that. Most people just shrug their shoulders at this- what else are we going to fill our time doing? It couldn't be any other way...
As it is with software. Simple tasks that should be one/two clicks away are incredibly convuluted. Lazy (or merely ignorant) software designers happily allow users to carry out tens of thousands of unnecessary man hours of work because they can't be bothered to explore alternative ways of doing things. And of course, no-one challenges it because, well - that's life. Things are expected to be shit or annoying.
Of course, if you want life to be hard, that's cool. If you want to drive yourself then bravo. Projects or activities can push you to your limits (or beyond if you like) can only be encouraged. Climbing Mount Everest - that should be hard unless you're some sort of ninja. Taking the stairs instead of the lift at your building, well - if that's hard then you're probably a fat bastard (or suffering some sort of disease).
Life, on an everyday level, should not be hard. If it is then something's wrong. Try and fix it. If everyday life is hard how the fuck are you going to cope when something genuinely horrible happens?
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