to sink or to swim in a sea without substance

this was weirdly hard to write and i still feel like it's not specific enough. but hopefully you get what im feeling

Money, status, fame, privilege, prestige, success, honor, influence, education, title, respect, notoriety, safety, security, passion, beauty, intrigue, intellect, accomplishment, legacy, income, investment, branding, persuasion, power. These are strong currents to paddle against. When my arms are tired, I am pulled towards directions I do not desire, and my lungs become waterlogged. 

Eyes bobbing above the water, I see boats all around me. Some vessels are sturdy, while others are held by scraps. I swim back to my craft, a vehicle of respectable size and made from solid materials. Some stretches of wood are worn down, visible only to me, but I worry that my company in the water expects me to capsize.

Each who I see out at sea, mostly sole captains, occasionally accompanied by a navigator, seems focused on their route, and pays me no mind. This is somehow more offensive. 

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I think it should be mandated that everyone gets fired at some point. I think losing your job is like the first time you go abroad, or fall in love, or indulge in taboo: it opens you up to the bigness of life. But I also get why unemployment is very scary. Exile is scary. 

To explain, I don’t think “belonging” is as geographic as it used to be. In an increasingly globalized world, living in a digital “monoculture,” with a rapidly shrinking space-time continuum, our regional differences are practically negligible. We are all tourists in the cities we live in. Our tenancy is as victims of happenstance. My parents are from India and raised me in Michigan to be educated in Illinois and I now live in California. Everyone I know seems to be a different combination of two to four random throws of a dart at a globe and yet we are all exactly the same. Very different and the same. 

In 2023 we are not ruled by kings or protected by our army, but also not really under the thumb of our city clerks or local ordinances until we get a parking ticket or are summoned for jury duty. At the very least, the governments with loose territorial jurisdictions are not the bodies that care for us, or protect us. Most of us only interact with the “state” when it is engaged punitively against us. Currently I have parking tickets in California and jury summons to Georgia which I feel like should cancel each other out but somehow they do not. 

I feel we are stateless. As young adults, we are encouraged to seek distance from our family units and hold tightly to our independence. We furnish our “own” apartments and cook our own meals, and every month give a fraction of our paycheck to an idea of the government that vaguely takes care of something for us, and we give a larger chunk of our income to those brave enough to have put their name on the deed of the building we live in. We make sure to pay for our monthly health insurance and then when we’re sick we pay for it all anyway. It is somewhat rewarding to be alone together. 

Far from home, on our own, we worship at the altar of the Jobs. Employment! The gracious thing that becomes the state we live under, the nation we pledge allegiance to, the body that promises to protect us. Before I know a new friend’s star sign or how many siblings they have, I know their job. I know the body that they toil for, that in turn protects them. The job houses us, lets us access medical care, it mentors us, fulfills us, provides us with community. Ultimately the job is Us, in the greatest sense. If I see no one else in a day, I see 16 squares on Microsoft Teams who smile at me. I can tweet about Slack notifications and feel connected to and respected by my generation. A job allows me respect. A job tells me that if I do well every month, they potentially will even allow me, someday, when I’m very old, to leave. 

The first time I was both unemployed and not in school, the feeling was like being exiled from society. Which feels intentional. When you have a job, or financial success, you are allowed to partake in culture and community, at least in the most common and easily accessible forms. You can pay to go to drinks, or pay to go to dinner or the movies, the tax you provide to the establishments that offer us the privilege to exist outside of our homes. The privilege of going to the movies, of paying to ride the subway, or paying to park your car. 

When employed, especially employed at an institution that does highly profitable work, (though to me, how profitable work is usually seems to have an inverse relationship to how essential it feels) you can pay for a driver, social lubricant, exclusive tickets and the outfits to match. 

When unemployed, after being exiled from your job, without those finances, you are first removed from dinners and drinks. You may be exiled from receiving medical care. You may stay at home, and save your money, be more cautious about putting gas in your car or paying $3 multiple times in an evening to use “public” transportation. But eventually, without income, god forbid, you could be exiled from your home as well. On the street, practically every major city and town will work to exile you from life itself. Hurricanes, earthquakes, troublesome air quality, and disease would provide their help. 

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Whether it comes from true integrity or insecure resentment, part of me constantly wants to turn my nose up at the chase for corporate validation in any form that it takes on. But in the face of the gnashing jaws of state violence against those who do not contribute to the profit rearing of American business interests, to scorn the inevitable feels like a uselessly pretentious practice. Nevertheless, my truth is that I hate to accept inevitability. I hate to pretend that things that are fucked are not fucked.

The chase for status is all around us. In LA, I watch proclaimed anticapitalists froth at the mouth when someone with more money, more opportunities, or more clout enters the room. I cautiously cheer when a peer has been validated by “the industry,” because of how the totality of American literature and history has made me wary, in general, of “industry.” Even so, hours a day, I stand at my whiteboard, plotting my own escape to a higher tax bracket. 

I am fully aware that to live in the heart of the American empire with my capacity for joy intact, I must constantly accept ideological constraints. At the same time, I can’t put down the nagging voice in my head that is critical of the sources of any validation I see at work in the world, and in myself. I constantly claim that I would prefer success to come as the aftermath of following my creative conviction, pursuing only my self actualization, rather than to constantly weigh hefty contradictions and compromises that imbue those who “achieve” under capitalism. At this point, I’m clueless which of the values in my head are those of who I want to be, and which are those of who I am. 

That is why, even while acknowledging the devastating nature of financial struggle, I naively recommend losing a job or two during the young part of life. I recommend it specifically to people who grew up like me, nerds who will work hard to no end with a singular idea of what security looks like. I recommend a temporary stroll down a wayward path to anyone who is afraid of failure. I am not a deadbeat, but I recommend failure- and not as a path towards success, but as a path to failure. Soaring through the sky is elating, but life sprouts and grows in the smallest, darkest, most unassuming crevices on Earth. 

I recommend, as a process of alignment towards your path in life, to constantly push things away and see what’s left, what comes back stronger. I recommend accepting when you have been pushed away, though I concede that is much harder. The first time I was completely unemployed, (a vision for my future that I had never imagined as a child who knew to succeed before I knew to think) I realized how hard it would be for the world to truly exile me. Never in my life was I more sure of my own vitality or the viability of my future, than when I officially knew it would not be the consequence of any other name than my own. 

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This idea is only novel to me because of how it threatens the scaffolding that I grew up with. My parents came to America in 1993, started as computer programmers and worked their way to a financially stable life in Southeast Michigan. After purging my dreams of becoming an Astronaut or an Illustrator, I had decided on pursuing the respectable career path of “Lawyer.” As a teenager, ego bigger than all the combined pus of the zits on my forehead, I thought someday I could be President of the United States. Now I’m like- hold up. I wanted a career upholding the LAWS? The same laws that made racism? I wanted to be PRESIDENT? The guy in charge of WAR? I don’t even like a confrontational text message. 

At school, I studied Theatre and spray painted abolitionist slogans. I discussed with my roommates the utter obviousness of open borders. Now, officially being out in the world that I spent my adolescence only discussing, I am constantly reconciling the intense contradictions in my personal / political / professional… my life. 

I seek to take care of my soul. Creativity is vital to my soul, and my soul shines brighter when it is fed, when it is clothed, and when it is sheltered. I would like to be able to live off of my creative ability, and hence, I live in Hollywood. Hence, I go online. Hence, I have a job. Hence, I cultivate my own ambition. And hence, I participate in, reinforce, uphold, and strengthen the culture in which I live. A culture that strives for visibility, achievement, validation, money, fame, and prestige. A culture where people are integrated or excluded based on one of several numbers or names intangibly attached to their face when they walk into a room. And thus, I understand how success by any form of currency becomes enticing. To have extra dollars, degrees, followers, and affiliations by your name becomes armor that you can wear to battle in a world that can be cruel. 

In an economy where the gap is narrowing between living paycheck to paycheck and topping the charts, a fixation on vanity and attention, fame and prestige, feels justifiable as a manner towards securing and strengthening one’s own safety in life. As a public figure, or a person with influence in general, you receive small levels of loyalty and devotion, from a population that in turn, determines your worth. Attention gets you into rooms you might not be in otherwise. It becomes the quantitative value of your social, institutional, and physical currency. These metrics are not accepted by all, but definitely are by some, and that some seems to be important enough to turn these absurd realities into inescapable truths. 

The truth of our cultural obsession with prestige, to me, is built on obvious fault lines. Cyclically, we create idols, worship them, and tear them down again. This is true on the largest scale of celebrity, and even the most minor forms of dive bar popularity. We are nicer to beautiful people, but also more cruel. 

I feel the urge to break a fourth wall when chatting at a party or deep in group chat discourse, and I realize a shoddy cultural scoreboard is being uncritically utilized amongst those I love, including myself. But it becomes hard to condemn, as the metrics that flood our zeitgeist simply reflect an economic system that keeps rewards scarce, available to those who play by the rules. And punishment for those who do not wish to play is small and large forms of exile. 

Gratification is enticing: grades, authoritative approval, popularity, salaries, clout, engagement, and it all does seem to come with tangible effect. It is blatantly obvious when people with more are treated better. It has been obvious to me, to witness how I am treated when I have more and how I am treated when I have less. I both accept this reality, and it makes me sick. The contradictions bring me fatigue. I open my phone, and see the words come faster than ever before. I see takes get stronger, I watch depth deflate, and see the faces get copied and pasted. I see myself, and those I know be flattened, smashed, grilled, and consumed. At the same time, I worry that I would rather be eaten than thrown away. 

For this reason, I will always recommend losing a job, deleting an account, wasting money, wasting time, following your heart, fucking up, and breaking rules. Because it’s hard to paddle against the current, but the strongest swimmers do.