The Church of Hard Work | Kier Adrian Gray

The Church of Hard Work and its Discontents

Kier Adrian Gray

A note to the reader: the concept for this essay was developed in late January of 2020. Although the first articles about a modern-day plague in China were emerging, the threat still felt far away. It wouldn’t be until early March that life would change for me.

And so I was feeling rather alone with my conviction that we needed to divorce ourselves from the notion that hard work, in and of itself, is a moral and social good. I couldn’t fathom what type of massive upheaval would force people to examine this on the most crucial level for understanding: that of their own daily lives.

Sure, many people complain about work over a beer on a Friday. But for people like myself, people who are disenfranchised from the working world, this is not simply another topic of conversation. It’s my life, and the lives of many loved ones, that are defined as worthless within the current paradigm. And it was hard to convey the effects of this to even the most compassionate working friend.

Then, all of a sudden, the lockdowns began, and people the world over were suddenly confronted with the question of who they were when they were not working. The conversation I wanted to provoke with this essay was suddenly in the headlines. Universal Basic Income, a fringe idea treated with suspicion and doubt by the left and the right months earlier, was being discussed not only as a viable solution to the economic predicament of the pandemic, but perhaps the only one that could close the massive gaps in the patchwork of provincial and federal programs that left so many scrambling to feed their families.

I found myself without words. The unthinkable but crucial moment of reckoning with our devotion to the church of hard work was upon us. Where did that leave me and my essay? (A question I got around to after tracking down toilet paper and refilling my prescriptions.)

Hard work divorced from meaningful ends is a bad habit, one that is very difficult to kick. Many people who stopped working during lockdown threw themselves into a hobby to avoid the gaping void of idle time. As if idle time were dangerous. As if allowing themselves to truly rest might make it impossible to return to their job when called back. And that’s when I realized that I still had something to say.

So here it is: An essay imagined before the pandemic, written during it, and dreaming about what comes after.

TESTIMONY

At the age of 30, I am considering retirement. I am not a self-made millionaire, I don’t have a trust fund, and “considering” is a generous word choice. Let me explain.

Nine years ago, I was working full-time at a downtown hotel, lugging a room service cart loaded with bottled water and wine and chocolate up and down hallways, into and out of elevators. I was there as a salt, meaning that I got the job with the intent of unionizing the workplace (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen). So I was also initiating casual but purposeful conversations to learn about the frustrations of my coworkers and their relationships to management, whenever I could catch someone alone. Most of my time outside of my job was devoted to doing unpaid work for the union who’d sent me to the hotel. I also tried to sleep every so often.

I was 22 and had no idea how to take care of myself. Growing up, I was never allowed to miss a day of school unless I was vomiting or had a high temperature. No other injury or source of distress called for rest. So when my forearms developed a tingling weakness four months into my hotel job, I did what I had been taught to do: I ignored it and kept working.

I was also binding my chest at the time, which felt great gender-wise but shallowed my breathing and limited the range of motion of my arms. I broke all the binder safety rules (don’t wear it while exercising, don’t wear it for longer than eight hours, never sleep in it) and was wearing a size too small, but the physical discomfort felt like a worthy trade-off for the flat chest it provided me.

At least for a while. But before long, the pain crept all the way up my left arm and into my neck. It got so bad I had to ditch the binder and leave the job.

The union I’d spent nearly a year volunteering for was of no help. They’d excommunicated me a month earlier, shortly after I’d started expressing concern about the coercive nature of a tactic they used called pink sheeting. They’d demonstrated the same lack of respect for my time and energy, and the same unrealistic expectations and ownership over my schedule, as my boss had. I may have been working for a union, but I was a non-union worker. There were no sickness benefits for me.

Over the next year and a half, the pain would bloom across my body and become several chronic illnesses. Other symptoms across many body systems joined the pain and my world became very small.

In the time between then and now, I have learned how to take care of myself. I get proper sleep, eat nourishing food, exercise as I am able to and take good care of my spirit. If I need a day off, I take it. My life has become brighter, more pleasurable, and much more worth living. And yet the debility persists.

I have played the following game many times now: I get a job. I become too sick to work. I have to quit. I get better. I get a job. I become too sick to work. I have to quit. So far, I’ve had to leave school once and work three times due to my health. It turns out I am only well enough to work when I am not working.

That’s what I mean when I say I’m considering retirement. I am asking myself: how many times do I submit to this cycle, hoping for different results? When do I stop? What will it mean to end my relationship with paid work at my age? Who will I be?

I’m not alone in facing hard questions about my future. My fellow millennials are poorer, lonelier, sicker and dying younger than the generations that preceded us. It’s less that my generation is unwilling to make a living and more that an increasing number of us are unable to, whether for health-related reasons or for lack of economic opportunity. (We are not, however, snowflakes. Boomers have millennials beat in the arena of hypersensitivity, according to a recent study on narcissism at Michigan State University.)

Work is central to identity. It is shorthand for describing someone’s role in society. It is the first thing people ask each other when they meet. They may say “what do you do?” but they don’t want to hear about your cat puzzle. What they mean is: how do I categorize you? Where do you fit?

This puts those of us who don’t work in a tough spot. Measuring human worth by a person’s possession of a paid job reduces people like me to service recipients with nothing to offer, and it reduces everyone else to being little more than how they get by. No one benefits from these reductive and isolating categories except for the capitalist class, who relies on our inability to find common ground.

This liminal space of the workless will see its ranks swell in the transition to widespread automation, as more and more workers see the jobs they trained for become obsolete. This has only been intensified and accelerated by the pandemic we find ourselves in.

We have the potential here to reimagine our lives and the lives of our descendants, to stop trying to fit our existence around work that we barely consent to. We must put everything on the table: reimagine how to provide for ourselves and for each other, how to foster responsibility and safety in the midst of chaos, how to protect our agency and our joy, and how to do this in ways that don’t outsource suffering to people somewhere else.

We cannot give up the utopian dream of automation, of no longer having to organize our lives and societies around paid work, so easily. Past transitions, such as the widespread adoption of the automatic washing machine in the postwar years, did not end up producing their stated effect. In that case, it was promised that homemakers would find themselves with more leisure time. What happened instead was that the generally accepted standard of cleanliness went up, and women simply swapped one set of cleaning tasks for another.

When the second-wave feminist movement opted to fight for equal opportunity in the workplace rather for than wages for housework, they didn’t consider the possibility that their efforts would result in the cost of living doubling. Yet this is exactly where we find ourselves.

If we are not diligent, automation will be used by the global elite to invent new ways to hoard wealth by exploiting the poor, the animals and the land. In Los Angeles, an algorithm is used to determine which homeless people qualify to be assessed for permanent social housing. It requires the input of an applicant’s traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings and fears, information which is then shared with 168 different organizations for a duration of seven years. If the algorithm determines an applicant’s cost of survival exceeds potential taxpayer savings, that applicant is deprioritized.

Amazon’s automated warehouses require workers to carry hand-held devices that track their movement and efficiency. Money is deducted from their paycheques when they take bathroom breaks or can’t keep up the pace set by the machine. The requirement of constant movement prevents workers from having any sustained contact with their coworkers. The same is true of Uber, which also requires its drivers to listen to a specific number of anti-union podcasts every week.

It is clear that the societal outcomes of automation will not inherently be equality, or increased stability, ease or agency in people’s lives. But they could be. With enough creativity, innovation, solidarity and determination, the working class and the workless can surely band together to bend the coming shift toward these ends.

For too long, the working class has distanced itself from the workless. It has neglected to see us as comrades. But it is imperative that we recognize the common cause of creating dignity and true quality of life for all people.

This alliance has precedence. In the 1930s, the Unemployed Councils of the USA advocated for unemployment insurance, social insurance to cover maternity leave, illness, accidents and old age, and an end to discrimination against black American and foreign-born workers, among other goals. They spearheaded a national hunger march and organized mass resistance to evictions. At its height, the UC had 20,000 adherents, and managed to restore 77,000 evicted people to their homes in New York City alone. When an impoverished family’s electricity was shut off, UC members would appropriate electricity from nearby public outlets or homes. They found ways to reactivate water mains. The unemployed were a force to be reckoned with.

The working class is not only made up of workers. It is also made up of homeless people, disabled people, homemakers, caregivers, people serving unpaid yet crucial roles in their communities, those who feel hopeless and are searching for meaning. Building a mass movement for economic, climate and social justice requires joining up as many people as possible. It is only the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, the employers, who benefit from our division.

In order to come together, we must first examine what’s kept us apart, and dismantle the church of hard work.

SERMON

Nearly any way you cut it, work in North America is getting worse. Wages have stagnated as the cost of living has soared. Jobs that used to be permanent have become short-term contracts, devoid of extended health benefits, a pension, or any ability to plan for the future. Minimum wage continues to lag substantially behind a living wage. Fewer workers have the protection of a union, and many of the new jobs being created are in the gig economy, where contract workers are forced to fight for access to basic protections because their bosses refuse to call them employees. Those who are employees are considered disloyal if they have personal boundaries, and across many industries are expected to be digitally available nearly all hours of the day and night, workdays and days off alike. And that’s without speaking of the forced or severely underpaid labour happening in fields and prisons here in North America and in many places around the globe.

In 2021, we are expected to work harder, faster and for longer hours, without any increase in pay, than previous generations of North American workers. If we can’t keep up with these ever-escalating expectations, it is blamed on a lack of character or commitment, a bad attitude, or poor self-care.

As motivation, access to health benefits are tied to weight, exercise regimen, which foods we eat. A meditation app becomes a substitute for healthcare. The fact that a 40-hour work week makes it impossible to take care of our homes, our families and our health is individualized as a moral failing. If we could only learn to schedule properly, imagine how much more time we would find. Imagine how much harder we could work.

Silicon Valley celebrities, held up as beacons of innovation, productivity and worldly success, are attempting to quite literally hack their biology in order to work harder. From fruit-only diets to intensive fasting, from intentional sleep deprivation to ingesting frog poison, the regimens of these superhuman CEOs are seen as a path not only to financial freedom but to spiritual enlightenment as well. In this day and age, the two are nearly interchangeable.

The key difference between a Twitter CEO and your average Joe is not a hefty inheritance or the opportunity and networks provided to Ivy League legacies. It’s that Joe’s not trying hard enough. He eats food every day; he sleeps all night long. How does he expect to get ahead, living so indulgently?

And we buy in. Hustle culture, also known as grind culture, is a trending lifestyle in which you are never not working. It is being promoted by self-employed people (and more subtly by the capitalist class, who benefit most from the rollback of labour movement gains) as exciting and deeply satisfying. There’s a certain logic to why such a claim would gain so much traction. Working 14 hours a day with no weekends is probably more bearable if it is evidence of passion rather than of mounting bills. It’s embarrassing to struggle, and most millennials take a lack of financial success as a personal failure, blaming themselves for the profound effects of graduating right into the Great Recession. Hustling is a way to install a light at the end of the tunnel, to elicit the feeling of taking charge of one’s future and consenting to one’s present by opting into, and believing in the abundant potential of, drudgery.

Self-employment, in all of its uncertainty, may seem increasingly appealing when the only alternative for many (especially those without a university degree or with unrecognized foreign credentials) has become precarious contract work in the gig economy. Zero guaranteed hours, no benefits, no pension, scant hope of a raise. You may even make under minimum wage, which isn’t illegal because you’re not technically an employee and so labour laws don’t apply. But think of the freedom! The freedom to work all the time, the freedom to juggle three or four different jobs, the freedom to patronize your predatory payday loan shop of choice.

Work has become the ultimate cultural value. Activities that don’t result in income need to be called work in order to possess worth. Keeping house, volunteering, caregiving, taking up an art practice, a hobby. Cloud gazing becomes contemplation becomes mindfulness becomes self-care work. It has to, or else it would be a waste of time. And given the never ending demands on our overstuffed schedules, what could be worse than wasting time?

The church of hard work has been incredibly successful in its evangelism. It has amassed worshippers on the left and on the right, both radical and moderate, in corporate boardrooms and on union shop floors alike. It has become compatible with many religions, belief systems and lifestyles. People who have little else in common can bond over their agreement that nothing could be worse than being lazy.

In response, we seem to have developed an aversion to downtime. Idleness is too similar to laziness, and in the popular imagination it leads somewhere even more frightening: uselessness. On our days off, we should be honing a skill of some sort, something that we will eventually monetize. The idea of spending a whole day in bed evokes guilt in a lot of people, no matter how badly they may need it. This shows the depth of our indoctrination into the church of hard work. Even without a boss looking over our shoulder, even when we are off the clock, we still cannot rest.

But when we do, when we give our bodies, minds and spirits the rest they need, the spell that keeps us obedient and dreamless begins to break. As our minds clear and our bodies regenerate, as we reacquaint ourselves with our imaginations and our intelligence, we start to wonder exactly where we’re going, running on our boss’ hamster wheel. We start to wonder if thankless hard work is what we were created for, why we are here. Is this really all there is?

And that crack in the monotony of our drudgery is how the light gets in. That crack reminds us that stress kills, that sleep deprivation kills, that having no time to exercise or cook for ourselves kills, that we are sacrificing our longevity at the altar of worldly success, and there is no guarantee that our prayers will be answered. The millions of humans who’ve worked themselves to the bone to no avail suggest they won’t be, not if we pray only to the god of hard work. This is the moment when we realize that there must be something more. It is this moment we start looking for the exit. But where do we go?

HERESY

1. Conceptual

What are your most dearly held values? What will take the place of hard work on your altar? Are your values reflected in the allocation of your time and energy? What are your deepest wishes for living them out?

From where do you derive your self-worth? Do you know that you are valuable simply for existing? What would it take to truly believe this? Are you willing to go there?

What is a good life? A worthwhile life? A life well-lived? What does it feel like? How close or far away is it? What pieces exist already in your day-to-day? What is missing? Are you waiting for something to change before your life can be good?

Do you honour rest? Do you believe in its power to repair your body, to relieve your mind, to regenerate your spirit?

Do you believe that you deserve to rest? Do you think you shouldn’t rest until you have accomplished a particular goal, rather than when you’re tired? Are you experiencing consequences from resisting rest? How would it feel to give in to this most basic need?

What is the size of your responsibility to yourself, to your loved ones, to other humans and the animals and the land? Is it shrunken by a lack of time and energy? Is it bigger than is fair to ask of yourself? Is it a size that acknowledges you are one human being, both in how powerful and how powerless this makes you?

Do you allow yourself to do things the easy way, to take shortcuts, to ask for help? Are you willing to say no? Do you save a portion of your energy for what’s most sacred to you? How can you ensure you remember that you’re the only one who can do this for yourself?

Do you treat your energy like the precious and limited natural resource that it is? What are you willing to work hard for? What is meaningful, important or necessary enough to deserve it? How will you refill your reserves afterward?

Have you lost your ambition? Do you worry that if you weren’t working, you wouldn’t be able to make yourself do anything? Would that be so bad? What if doing nothing brought back your inner motivation, caused your dreams to start up again? What if you just need some time to de-alienate? Who would you become on the other side?

2. Practical

What is your relationship to work, paid or unpaid? Does it make use of your talents? How valued do you feel? How respected? Is it stressful? Are you able to stand up for yourself, to possess human needs? How can you ensure there’s some of you left over at the end of a work day? Is your work worth what it takes from you? What are your options? What do you require to do more than get by? Do you have vacation time piling up? What are you waiting for?

What is something you’ve always wanted to do? What activity can you resist turning into a side hustle? How many low or no-cost hobbies can you think of? What is something you’re bad at and like doing anyway? What creates joy for you, in the very moment of doing? How can you do more of it?

How can you nurture your relationship to rest? What would you need to let slide or let go? How thankful would your muscles be? Your mind? What if you decided to make up for all those times you withheld rest from yourself? What would the most regenerative day look like for you? How can you make it happen?

What are you willing to trade for more time? What could you do to work a day less a week, or switch to a less demanding job? Would you live with more people? Would you share a car? Would you use the library for books and films and music? Would you cook more at home and eat out less? Do indulgences get confused for freedom? Are there types of consumption tied to stress that could be cut out if the stress was reduced? Do you ask about trades or sliding scale when you encounter something you desire but can’t afford? What skills could you offer in place of money to access someone’s goods or services?

Have you been struggling to hold down a job for years? Does your health fluctuate wildly? Have you been hard on yourself for not being able to “push through it” the way that others seem to? Do you think you’re not disabled enough to deserve support? Do you know that many people on disability assistance once felt this way, too? Would you be willing to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to create a foundation of stability in your life, one that doesn’t rely on the number of hours you can work? What if, rather than feeling useless, you decided that you were in possession of a rebellious body that refused to submit to the demands of capital? What would that open up?

3. Political

How would your life change if Universal Basic Income, or Universal Basic Services, became a reality? What possibilities would arise from knowing a $2000 cheque would appear in your bank account every month, no matter what? Would you leave your job? Go back to school? Would you devote yourself to a passion that doesn’t pay well or immediately? How would your priorities shift? What would you do with the time and energy you’d regain?

Are you familiar with the four-day work week study conducted by Microsoft Japan that demonstrated people are more productive in a four-day week than a five-day week (while still being paid for five) while benefiting from decreased stress and improved work-life balance? Or the one that shows the productivity of employees declines sharply at 50 hours a week? Has this entered the public conversation where you live?

Is there a fight against poverty, a push for better income and disability assistance rates where you are? Are there picket lines that need public support? Newly unionized workplaces that could use your business? Are there tenants organizing rent strikes? How do we build power within communities navigating enforced poverty? How do we resist, en masse, the relentless growth of the poverty gap? How do we use our labour to our own collective ends in unexploitable ways? What does a successful working class mass movement look like in 2021, and how do we make it happen? What cards do we hold in our hands?

How do we rebuild the commons? How do we create public spaces beyond libraries for people to exist together? What new ideas would arise from a labour hall, a community hall, a place free of capitalists and bosses, a place where everyone is welcomed and heard, a place for people to learn and dream and plan, a place that is encouraging and coercion-free?

What free events could we put on to connect with community members we may not otherwise meet? Would breaking down isolation create an environment conducive to prosocial organizing?

How do we pool our resources? What about a tool library? A community-held rent bank? An online skill-trade portal? A seed exchange? How do we make life more affordable for each other? How can we share more? What if we replace self-sacrifice with mutual aid? What would this do for our spirits?

How do we support workers who do undesirable but essential work, who cannot quit and are vulnerable to exploitation? How do we improve the pay and working conditions, the dignity and respect for temporary foreign workers, for retail and service industry workers, for caregivers, for contract workers, for freelancers? How do we band together and let the bosses know their exploitation will no longer be tolerated? What does it look like to truly have each other’s backs?

How do we keep people in mind that we do not see: prisoners, sweatshop workers, those in refugee camps and labour camps and concentration camps? What about our struggles are distinct and how are they interconnected? How do we ensure our push for a better quality of life uplifts those same efforts in other places and contexts?

How do we raise awareness that accessibility benefits us all? That Indigenous cultural revitalization, that reparations for slavery, that economic and climate justice benefit us all? How do we recognize who we neglected to invite to the table? Are we willing to shove over, to make room for more people? Are we willing to pass the mic around, to hear what it is we don’t know we don’t know?

What does prosocial technology look like? What would artificial intelligence be working on if the project managers were chosen democratically, if they had to prove the societal benefit of their endeavours? How do we ensure benefits of automation such as affordability of goods and healthcare innovations actually reach the working class? What if automation were used to support livelihoods rather than threaten them? How do we prioritize advances that make physical labour less difficult and dangerous? What technological innovations would increase your and your loved ones’ quality of life, and that of the larger community?

Consider this an opening, an invitation. The questions we face are of enormous consequence, and arriving at answers requires our full attention and collaboration. When we reclaim some of our time, energy and identity from our workplaces, when we embrace rest, we are investing in our imaginations, our critical faculties, our ability to create a future worth living for. History shows us that social change doesn’t always chug along steadily. One change makes possible another that was previously unthinkable. Change can cascade, like a waterfall, and the sound of roaring water grows louder. The world is hungry for fresh visions. What have you got?

This essay would be incomplete without thanking the Nap Ministry for sparking in my spirit a belief in the liberating power of naps. The Nap Ministry is deeply influenced by Black Liberation Theology, Womanism/Womanist Theology, Afro Futurism, Reparations Theory, Somatics and Community Organizing. Check out the Nap Ministry to start deprogramming from grind culture and to begin the journey towards true and sacred rest.

Kier Adrian Gray is a writer, daydreamer and gardener who lives in their hometown on Katzie and Kwantlen territory, an hour outside of Vancouver, BC. Their writing has appeared in the Toronto G20 anthology Whose Streets?, The Dominion and Poetry is Dead, as well as online at the Vancouver and Montreal Media Co-ops. They’ve performed their work in theatres, galleries, cafés, living rooms (one haunted) and a vaguely themed Irish pub. Their most recent zine, Make/Believe #1, was called “a specific slice of brutal Canadian honesty” by Broken Pencil Magazine. Their online home is kier.substack.com and they can be reached at kier@substack.com.