Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.
Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.
Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.
I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.
It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.
Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.
For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot.
I would say I was working.
The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.
The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.
As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way.
Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?
Terms FROm this POSt
- bias
- It’s hard work thinking differently than others, and I often think of bias as a mental shortcut we all take so that we don’t need to. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s outright dangerous. But it recognizing it makes us more human, I think. That’s my bias.
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- capitalism
- I live in a time and place where it is commonly understood that people need to trade their time and skill for money. This is an income which allows the acquisition of currency that can be exchanged for goods and services from others. We assume everyone knows this and thinks about it because it is the system we were born into and we know no other. But it isn’t the only system and being inside of it necessitates certain choices about how creative people interact with the world that are worth thinking about, calling out, and discussing from time to time.
- corporate
- Having worked in many desk jobs, I tend to think of the corporate mindset and anything related to it as a kind of collective brain of capitalism and the search for profit. It is a core piece of the culture, but personally I’ve found it to be the antithesis of creative spirit, and often use the word as a pejorative in this sense.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write this blog. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- short story
- Usually averaging about five thousand to ten thousand words, a work of short fiction is an exploration of a big self-contained idea in a small space, leaning into clear and intentional writing with an eye for literary economy.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
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