2024 Week 39: A Book Update

September 30, 2024

2024 Week 39: A Book Update

I have finished War and Peace. That means I have completed the 2 mega books I intended to read this year. My intention was to "understand the real world" a little better, and I suppose came to much the same conclusions as Thomas Hobbes...

Both books left me feeling that events in the human world are repetitive and that humanity is not able to transcend its propensity for violence. I don't think I believe in free will. Especially when I read The Penguin History of the World, it seemed like humans are just a horribly destructive species of animal, no different from (I don't know, say) kangaroos in Australia or killer algae in waterways around the world. We're almost biologically determined to destroy.

I did some side reading on labour recently. The granddaddy of "labour literature" has got to be George Orwell, who in the 1920s chronicled life as a dishwasher and menial labourer in Down and Out in Paris & London. His successor is undercover journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who worked as waitress, cleaner, and in retail in the 1990s to experience life among the working poor. The result is Nickel & Dimed.

But those are pre-Internet age reports. Low-wage work has, believe it or not, gotten worse ever since with the rise of gig labour and fragmentation of income. Guy Standing wrote about this condition extensively in The Precariat - a class (perhaps even generation) of people with "unstable labor, low and unpredictable incomes, and loss of citizenship rights".

Seasonal Associate offers a glimpse into the precariat lifestyle and its profound impact on the psyche. The author, Heike Gessler, unable to survive on her freelance writing income, tries to dig herself out of debt by working in an Amazon fulfilment centre.

In On Work, The Atlantic's Derek Thompson paints a more positive picture of precarity. In an Ohio town afflicted with prolonged widespread underemployment, there is burgeoning arts community as people increasingly turn towards economically-unproductive work to fill their time and address needs (e.g. socialising) once met by employment.

Thompson also writes the relationship between work and religion, arguing that the gospel of work has increasingly replaced religion as nations become more secular. I wonder if anti-work might also be a competing religion, given that there are so many cloyingly evangelistic accounts of "seeing the light" and opting out of work. Books like How To Be Idle and The Art of Frugal Hedonism, is generally self-congratulatory in flavour for having escaped the shackles of capitalism, etc.

There is surprisingly scarce published material on the "anti-work" phenomenon. I was glad to discover David Frayne's sociological approach The Refusal of Work. After interviewing several people who voluntarily work less or not at all, he is at least in a position to critique unreliable narratives.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing is an interesting case. Shoji Morimoto is obviously a skeptic about work, but he doesn't argue for or against anything. Instead, he uses his free-form human rental service to ask: "If tech can do anything, can humans still have value?" Given that his most popular services are (a) sending reminders and (b) being around while the client does something they would otherwise put off, maybe human value lies in obligation or accountability.

Casting about for a book to sink into next. I am halfway through Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, a bingeworthy book on the classical economists (Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc.) and 10% in The Diary of Samuel Pepys. But there are also: Rousseau's The Confessions, Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, Boswell & Johnson's Tour to the Hebrides, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and George Gissing's The Whirlpool & The Odd Women. I can't decide.

MON: research for Beyond book, yoga

TUE: wrote A Year in a Bookstore, yoga, Mos Burger & Tori-Q dinner

WED: researched KL trip, dinner at Donki, travel meetup

THU: collected bunny, lunch with dad and grandma, editing Beyond e-book

FRI: more KL planning, bunnies check out, Jon's brother's birthday

SAT: swim, lunch, more editing, more bunnies, Pizza Hut dinner

SUN: lunch with dad, lay in bed reading trash (Archer's Voice, oh god it's so bad, sigh. Really only read it for the beta male, but actually he's not that beta all the possessive "growlll she's mine" ugh)

I'm feeling very very unmotivated. I suppose anyone could rise out of mediocrity with some effort. The old itch to achieve was back in the past 2 weeks and I cycled through many Possible Selves the past couple of weeks. There's Clara the Published Writer, Clara the Arts Community Organizer, Clara the Grad Student, Clara the Book Editor, Clara the Research Assistant, Clara the Couchurfing Wanderer... But finally, I think the excitement has died down and I am back to being Clara the Unaccomplished Normal Person.

Yes, I am going to KL and can't wait. It'll be my first time taking the coach(es) and I have finally decided to try Aeroline (from JB to KL) and KKKL (from KL to Bishan!). I will really only be spending 1.5 days in KL and plan to go for yoga, walk around the bookstores, people watch, and go for a meetup at night.