B.F. McGee-zax Was the hope to make a living with your art?
One of my friends in existential crisis took a year off too and always wanted to do something creative yet he doesn't really know how to. I am not that different. Overthinking probably plays a big part in that. Sometimes I feel like it is also a matter of not having the right surroundings, but maybe that is passing the buck. Didn't David Byrne write a book about this? Anybody?
Ideas seem to come in the spur of the moment and are easily forgotten. The beauty of that is that you can always tell yourself you're a genius and the world would have known if only you had written that one brilliant idea down before you forgot it.
I feel like a job somehow lays claim to a lot of your brain's capacity. I find it very hard to let my job be, once I'm off. What I see at work needs to be processed after. That after is in my own time. So arguably I'm not at all off in my off time. I've met a lot of people who say they don't think about their job as soon as they close the door at the office. I've always questioned whether they're speaking the truth. I know for a fact that this has never been the case for me. My previous statement that manual labor might be an out for me therefor probably is a pipe dream.
In this sense a job definitely gets in the way of doing something creative. On top of that there's also the drain of the actual work. When I do a morning shift, I have to get up at 6 am, which I HATE , am done around 4 and am basically a sack of shit for the rest of the day. I generally fall asleep around 5 and feel miserable for the rest of the day once I wake up. Evening shifts are not as bad.
Not having a job is brutal too. There's no money coming in, which creates stress, but there's also the mental side of it. Since you are not adding value, you are basically valueless. I've been on sick leave for three months earlier this year and it made me feel dreadful and worthless. Not participating in anything really fucked with my head. I felt like a pariah and in some ways I was.
I remember a guy I used to work with who was a squatter and fanatic recreative drug user who said about the people in the occupy movement: 'do these people not have jobs?' That blew me away. In the '80s squatters were all on the dole and proud of it. There's been a real change in that respect. Not taking part in the grand scheme of things seems to have become a taboo. I'm not hearing any narratives that back people who do not want to be a part of society except for leftists who seem to get a kick out of pointing the finger.
Which brings me to the three friends I brought up. They're all fit to work, but can't seem to find a place where they fit in. They are not crazy, but what they are up against has turned them into social outcasts of some kind. There seems to be no narrative to voice their discontent in a constructive way. The only way to get out of their situation seems to be therapy or medicine, which is insane to me. Their problems are not of a medical nature. They're symptoms of society's ills.
It seems that all society's shortcomings are put on the shoulders of those victimized by them. In Europe this used to be considered an American trait, but things seem very similar here now. Maybe the West for lack of a better term, is slowly arriving at the same station after following the neo-liberal tracks Reagan and Tatcher got us on.
Of course European countries all have their own rules and culture, but the idea of the welfare state is in overall decline, because of the supposed costs - money again. Fukuyama's claim that the fall of the Soviet Union meant the end of history always struck me as ridiculous and time has been on my side on that one, but I do feel like the West is becoming more and more of a monoculture in which there's no place for people who do not fit the mould. The internet and social media play a huge role in this process.
The only thing I can come up with that is some sort of counterweight to this is the neurodiversity movement, which again explains difference in a medical way. The thought seems to be that if there is a medical reason for someone being different, it is to be accepted by 'normal people'. There's an imbalance in power there, because these supposed 'normal people' do not have to justify themselves against the neurodiverse, which might boil down to an imbalance in numbers.
Just riffing...
