I didn't want a job

I wanted to make art

There is no greater crime in our culture than to not want to work.

I suspect it is akin to not believing in God in the depths of the Middle Ages. If you doubted The Almighty, you kept fucking quiet about it. Because talking out loud about that could get you killed.

Declaring “I don’t want a job” might not get me killed in today’s society, but it would and has ostracized me. Work is now The Almighty. Having a job is our true north.

When I left university, it became apparent that I needed to get a “real career job”. I did not want to do this. I did not want a full time job. I did not want a part time job. I didn’t want to WORK in the myriad ways it was being presented to me. I didn’t want to work in a publishing house. As a personal trainer. As a receptionist. As a waitress. In marketing. ( Though I gave them all a shot). I scrolled through thousands of job listings, applying to hundreds of jobs knowing it was not what I wanted to do. I couldn’t believe that the rest of my life was going to mostly consist of doing labour for someone else. I couldn’t believe no one else was making a fuss? Why was everyone so content to just accept these conditions? Why was I so intolerant to the idea? Was I so privileged, so precious, so lazy that I couldn’t just accept that this is what life is?

I remember the day I told my therapist I didn’t want to work.

She said, well you have to have a job, Amie.

I said: Well that’s fucking bullshit. (I didn’t. I think I just cried.)

I think about this therapy session all the time. I felt so fucking embarrassed, ashamed, disgusting. I couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud.

I now feel a huge amount of compassion for that version of myself. She wanted a life filled with art, creation, joy, but she was being told that life was actually about offices, labour, doing shit you didn’t want to do.

I now know that my feelings were more complicated than simply not wanting to work. (I now know I actually have an insatiable, veracious work ethic when I get to do meaningful, purposeful work chosen by me). What I was trying to say was this: the system fucking sucks. I don’t want to spend most of my life doing something that doesn’t light me the fuck up. I don’t want to spend my days working for someone else, for their purpose. How can I live in a world that is demanding that of me?

I have very little tolerance for a certain type of suffering.

I am sensitive, finely attuned, and as soon as I experience suffering, I have to pivot. I have no ability to stick it out. A quitter, you might call me. Undisciplined, Lazy, Child like, Weak, You might call me.

I certainly called myself those things.

I now realise that my intolerance for suffering is one of my greatest gifts.

I watch people who have a great tolerance for suffering as they toil away in lives they despise and I think, thank fuck I’m ‘weak’. ¹

I have an intolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle.

This perhaps, is a better way to describe my condition. Because I can suffer. You don’t finish writing novels without an ability to withstand pain. You don’t own your own business without being able to handle tax time, and that is true suffering. I can move through pain, but I have an intolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle.

I must have magic. I demand a life that I love.

These demands are reasonable. I want you to have these demands, too.

“We as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

I wish I had David Graeber to talk to in my twenties. I wish I had found his work earlier. I wish my therapist had responded to me by saying: “We live in a capitalist world, you will need money to live. But there are so many ways you can rebel against a system that wants you to be compliant and stagnant and unfulfilled. There are ways you can reclaim your life and demand magic from it. You don’t have to work in the way society is asking you to. In fact, it is imperative that you don’t.”

Through most of my twenties I fought for a life that I loved. Yes, I worked in jobs I did not like, but I also refused to believe that this was it, that this was the way my life had to be. Every job I took, I promised myself it was a means to an end, just for a little while. I wanted to be an artist, a writer. I wanted to tell stories for a living. I wanted to share ideas and connect meaningfully with this precious little time I had. And so I went about fighting for that. And it was a fight. But it was the most worthwhile fight of my life. In many ways, it was a fight for my life.

We live in a culture that venerates toiling and drudgery.

Because I have an intolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle, I created a life that was filled with meaning and purpose. Ironically, to do so, I worked harder than I ever have before. But it was work that absolutely glittered.

Now, I write, talk, paint, connect. I do it to make money. I do it because it lights me up. I do it because that is why I am here on this earth. Life sparkles.

Yet, I still feel like I’m getting away with something. Like I’ve snuck around a compulsory part of being a human being: doing work that sucks.

We live in a world that venerates meaningless work. We financially reward meaningless work more than we compensate meaningful work. Think of the way we pay middle management, compared to the way we pay teachers, nurses, emergency services, artists. If you get meaning or a sense of purpose from your work, we pay you less. The meaning is payment enough.

The fact that I wanted to both write and be paid for it… that felt as taboo as saying I really didn’t want a job. But these are the stories that need to change. Our work culture needs to change. Our veneration of TOIL must end.

“A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

There are of course ways to find deep meaning outside of our work, something we must do. But we spend a lot of our lives at work. And I refuse to accept that the majority of our time must be spent doing shit that does not light us up. “That’s just life!” - it really fucking shouldn’t be.

“Everyday we wake up and collectively make a world together; but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

A lot of my writing and work is about supporting artists who want to make money with their creations. This essay sits at the foundation of why that work is so important to me. Because, I want you to live a life that is filled with meaning. I want you to find work that is meaningful. I want you to earn money doing something that you love. I want to wake up and collectively make a world that sparkles.

And I’ve written a book about it. It’s called We Need Your Art and the amazing Matt Haig, author of the Midnight Library, called it, “A battle cry for the creative spirit”. It comes out on the 11th of March. Preordering it means that more people will find it!

1. An edit from a few days after posting. I’ve been having beautiful and hard conversations with people about this part of the essay. I want to clarify that many people, because the system is fucking cooked, have no choice but to suffer. It is a matter of life and death. These creators do not have a great tolerance for suffering, but are simply oppressed by a system that leaves them no other choice. You must suffer or you must starve. For many others though, we have been convinced we have no choice but to suffer, but the reality is that we do have a choice, that there are other ways to do this, even if they come at great cost.