Work was kind of the point. Whether because it was fulfilling or put food on the table, much of our world is directed toward the goal of a career. Hopefully a good one, but few would argue that the goal is to do…nothing. Unless you subscribe to the notion that the point of existence is “lying flat.”
By June, American news outlets were describing the “lying flat” trend as a natural consequence of China’s hypercompetitive middle-class culture, where employees often report working “996” weeks — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — a lifestyle praised by the founder of the online shopping giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, and other captains of commerce.
China, which might have a few cultural and political differences that push its citizens to an extreme beyond human endurance, is where the concept arose. But that’s not where it stayed.
It’s not just Chinese millennials who are figuring out that work is a false idol. I should know because I’m lying flat too, holed up in my parents’ house in West Virginia. Earlier this year I quit my job producing an NPR program in Boston, and I haven’t been able to stomach rejoining the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. I’m far from the only one: A recent tweet that proclaimed “i do not want to have a career” racked up over 400,000 likes. Instead, proclaimed the tweeter, @hollabekgrl, “i want to sit on the porch.”
It probably didn’t occur to @hollabekgrl that she could twit her brilliance if nobody made her iPhone, Twitter and the internet. Plus, she might get hungry and thirsty sitting on the porch if no one made Cheetos and hard cider. Indeed, there would be no porch on which to sit if no one built it.
And it apparently didn’t occur to Cassady Rosenblum, former NPR producer of “Here & Now,” who has retreated to her parents home in West Virginia, which they likely bought with the money they earned from, wait for it, working.
The lying flat movement, or tangping as it’s known in Mandarin, is just one expression of this global unraveling. Another is the current worker shortage in the United States. As of June, there were more than 10 million job openings in the United States, according to the most recent figures from the Labor Department — the highest number since the government began tracking the data two decades ago. While conservatives blame juiced-up pandemic unemployment benefits, liberals counter that people do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.
There is a well-publicized post pandemic shift in the American workforce, as people who were unemployed due to the pandemic and surviving on handouts from the government decided not to go back to work as jobs became available and went begging. The assumption was that people didn’t return to their crappy, low-paying, unpleasant and unfulfilling work because they were making more money on the dole than they would get from work.
But there may well be another influence at work here (pun intended) that is keeping people out of the workforce and on the porch. They just don’t wanna. They don’t want to work at unpleasant jobs. They don’t want to work with people they don’t like. They don’t want to work.
In the United States, Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions, perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans. Tricia Hersey, a performance artist and the founder of the Nap Ministry, an Atlanta-based organization, is one of them. Ms. Hersey says she discovered the power of naps during a draining year of graduate school at Emory University, an experience that inspired her to bring the gospel of sleep to fellow African Americans whose enslaved and persecuted ancestors were never able to properly rest. She argues that rest is not only resistance, it is also reparation.
Does she not realize that eventually, she’s get hungry, or that if everybody lies flat, nothing gets done? Of course, She’s not stupid.
Me, now, in the hills.
To be clear, there is immense privilege in lying flat. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.
Given her perspective, it seems fairly clear that she will achieve her dream of not having a career. But is this the new dream for the future, a nation of slackers, the Slackoisie, who only bother to get off the porch if they’re hungry? Is ambition, aspiration, achievement and, yes, sacrifice to get there, now a bad thing, an old thing, that’s run it course?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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