Is Work Hot?

We have all seen the “yummy mummy” of the Upper East Side, parading around in yoga pants and an oversized scarf, shaking ice cloaked in some pink or green liquid judiciously suctioned through a plastic straw from a cup exactly the size of her hands. Her curls flow over an unlikely array of necklaces, usually all gold, and she seems to need to carry nothing but her phone and the iced golden venti matcha cha cha. She is talking on the phone, perhaps, learning the latest PTA gossip from a friend, or she’s listening to her trusted spiritual guru, Brené Brown, reminding her that everyday life is a wilderness to transverse. Or is she listening to music? I have no clue what these creatures listen to. A top 40 playlist curated by Ryan Seacrest? A single song on repeat? I’ll say Taylor Swift because that feels safe, unoriginal, and won’t get me into any trouble.

On the other side of the street, there’s me. I wouldn’t say that I am haggard, perse, but rarely do I lean into pleasure and consumption as wholeheartedly as our mummy there. I am always up to something; I stomp around the city with a mission on my mind and, more importantly, a metric ton of stuff. On any given day, my backpack or tote bag carries a water bottle, notebook, keys, pens, an iPad or laptop, a book, an extra pair of socks, spinning shoes, a change of clothes for the gym, an old and crumpled New Yorker magazine, and at least two chapstick sticks. All, just in case.

Heavily laden, I look at the yummy mummy with envy. How can she leave home so… unprotected? How will she survive the trials and travails of the town? Doesn’t she need something? Isn’t it 10 AM on a Tuesday? Doesn’t she… Oh. Right. Of course, she doesn’t work. Harrumph.

In those moments, shoulder throbbing, bag straps clawing into my neck, I want nothing more than whatever she has. I want to talk about how much I lOve the pistachio pastry thing at that coffee shop, you know, the one we went to with Cam a few weeks ago, yes, that one, it’s SO yummy, omg, we should totally go back. I want to care about microdermabrasions and the latest research on the link between oral health and skin care. I want to parade around and do a little bit of nothing. And yet, today is Saturday, and I could be parading around doing nothing, passively consuming things for my pleasure and show, but I don’t (though I did buy some boots and a coffee and a cute little guava croissant, which, omg, you must try). Instead, I am writing. Do I really think work is Not Hot?

Today is my birthday. During the last week, I have been feeling rather mopey and reflective. Actually, I have been mopey for a couple of months—a product of a mixture of the SADs, a bruised heart, and a changing family landscape that has left me feeling unmoored. As with any marker of the passage of time, I have been wondering whether I am on “the right path” (as if there could be a path other than the one on which I find myself), and I question whether I am spending my days in the right way.

It shouldn’t be news that I aspire to be A Writer, and that I have been experiencing my day job as a weighty toll I must pay against this dream that I have. I have been musing on whether I really need A Job, dreaming about how nice it might be if every day I could get up and structure my days without considering anyone else’s will; do what I want exactly when I want, and still have enough money to buy boots and guava croissants (I love you, NYC, but $20 for a pastry and a coffee is just ridiculous).

Last night, on the eve of my birthday, I had dinner with a dear friend who has recently leaped to pursue a creative calling. She shared that she’s been feeling frazzled; she has completed the work of closure (finishing and releasing the ways of being from a previous cycle) but hasn’t been able to start building. She’s worried she doesn’t know how to create a consistent flow of creative energy; it only comes once in a while. When it does, she taps into it and works until two in the morning, but some days it doesn’t come at all.

I work at a management consulting firm interested in work. How do people work? Why do people work? How do people work at their best? When I first joined, I was intrigued by the idea of how to make organizations more efficient—after three years in book publishing, I wondered whether there was such a thing as a well-functioning business system. No one really thought about work in publishing; we obsessed about the product, and that resulted in what, to me, felt like a badly managed, inefficient, and primarily fantastical business logic dependent on their employees putting cultural value above economic renumeration (and their ability to, well, eat books).

I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry. Let’s establish some shared vocabulary. In physics, work is the result of a force exerted over a distance. Nowadays, however, work is mental just as much as physical, so the idea of effort must be abstracted from space. Since I’m more exposed to “white collar” labor, let me turn to other views on work. “Controversial” organizational psychologist Elliott Jaques defines work as the mental processes required to carry out a task and which are valued by others. In Jaques’ view of the world, mental processes can be split into two categories: knowledge (which thereby requires the application of language, computation, and structure) and unconscious processes (such as biases, instincts, and flights of fancy). Work translates unconscious mental processes using knowledge into things that are useful and usable out in the world. Work, therefore, is the decisions and choices we need to make to achieve a goal.

Jaques posits, like Freud, that work and sex are both integral parts of the human experience. Without them, we risk the species. Sure, I can see how the purely reproductive aspect of sex is imperative for our well-being, and it’s easy to see how pleasure and connection are similarly pillars of society. But work? How is that necessary? Yummy Mummy across the street looks like she is doing just fine.

I’m habituated to identifying only work that receives economic remuneration, and I fail to label other kinds of work as work. This is at the core, as we all know, of the complaints about gender disparity in household or emotional labor—we’re conditioned to believe work to be only those things we do for which we get paid, that if we see work occurring that isn’t paid, we fail to identify it as work. Jaques, however, only says that work must be valued by another, he doesn’t say how it should be valued—recognition can be just as valuable as an exchange of money or goods. Fair enough.

I guess, then, that our yummy mummy must do some kind of work. If I look at my life, almost all I do is work. I am constantly reasoning and making decisions to accomplish tasks, whether that is finally figuring out that the funky smell in my apartment was a pair of potatoes that were rotting over my fridge, deciding to toss them, and then cleaning the apartment from top to bottom, to welcome my new year in peace (I value this), sitting down to write this long overdue newsletter dispatch (you value this), reaching out to a friend to check on how they’re doing and whether their grandmother’s birthday was as dreary as they feared (she values this?), or compiling Coda documents to organize and plan the firm’s research function’s activities in 2024 (the firm values this).

As we wrapped up dinner yesterday, I realized my friend was struggling because, since she isn’t yet being paid, she failed to see the creative act as work. This is not a terribly original thought if you’ve spent any time learning from how other humans make things, but it’s remarkably novel when you’re in the thick fog of creation. The only reason I’ve written as much as I have this year is because I have arduously established a discipline of sitting down every Saturday and Sunday morning and forcing myself to write for a couple of hours (I don’t allow myself to take a shower until my three hours are up, it’s the only way). I don’t wait for the creative fairies to pay a visit; they often only arrive at the most inopportune times, and I’d rather train them to visit on a regularly established schedule so that I can actually produce writing. With this insight, my friend and I spent the rest of the evening planning out her creative work, setting the minimal processes in place, just as I would for the executives at my office, so that she can do the work of creating that she so wants to (and must!) do.

So, is work hot? Yeah, sort of. It enables, it launches into action, and it allows you to transverse distances, real or otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, I, like many, lust after an idle life, but I know that its attractions are only on the surface. Sure, surface-level attraction is part of what being Hot is about. But we also believe in a Hotness that goes beyond what can be bought to fashion an appearance. Let’s be honest: after just a few days of nothing to do and nowhere to be, I will start chewing the walls. I need to impose structure and some kind of rigor on my time and, more importantly, on my mind. If it’s not put to use, it might consume itself.  

Where does that leave our yummy mummy? I hope she is happy and finding balance in leisure, work, and pleasure. Maybe she’s closer to that balance than I am, which is why her day looks so enticing. But perhaps that’s not true, too. Maybe we have different ideas of what balance is. I am enjoying myself right now, writing this nonsense. It may likely be a while before I’m paid for this in cold, hard cash, but as long as both you and I value it in our softer, fuzzier ways, I’ll keep going.

That’s all for today. If enough of you wish me a happy birthday, I’ll send more dispatches soon. (I joke; I’ll do it anyway. I have a few sitting in drafts that have been neglected. I promise to send a yearly round-up soon, at the very least).

xx