Get A Real Job
Navigating the tricky passage from "employed" to "living a life."
Years ago, my undergraduate college department, a small and niche liberal arts program within a giant public university, published a regular newsletter featuring updates from alumni. It felt bit like a flex, a “who’s who among our brilliant and iconoclastic grads.” I remember picking a up a copy during an early- 00’s visit to my thesis advisor, and, among the [names entirely fictional] “Joe Smith achieved tenure at Yale” and “Marlena Powell has translated the Iliad into fourteen languages” finding one entry that stood out: “Anne Richardson is living a life.” The entry was shocking in its refusal to play the achievement-orientation game; doubly so because the department actually published it. More than twenty years later, it still periodically pops into my head.
In April, I left my “secure” government position and began to pick my way along the precarious-yet-rewarding path of building a life less connected to job titles. Some of what I’ve spent more time doing - tending the various hairy and feathered farm animals, weeding and mulching (with less attention than might have been ideal) the garden, baking bread, doing the laundry, fall into what might be described these days as “homesteading” territory. And while this home-based work could easily, joyfully and abundantly fill every spare moment of my day, I also continue (thanks in no small part to a partner who may be the last unicorn and has not taken my lack of structured employment as a sign that I’m now the Sole Household Chore Doer) to do other things that I enjoy for money: teach yoga, coach, bake bread. However you define this new state of affairs, I’m busier than I’ve ever been - and perhaps busier than I would, strictly speaking, like to be.
Still, well-intentioned friends and acquaintances persist in asking questions like “How many paying clients do you have?” and “Have you thought about building a commercial kitchen and doing the bread full-time?” and “How many people are usually in your yoga classes?” All questions intended to convey interest, I hope, but which have the insidious affect of making me feel like I am still, somehow, not doing enough, am failing to take advantage of my unplanned sabbatical to hustle harder. I haven’t burst onto the scene with an inspiring “former 9-to-5er builds multi-million-dollar business in under six months by posting clever Substack notes” story. My story of growth and transformation was and continues to be slower, quieter, less linear, and definitely further removed from clear-cut financial gains.
In December, after lots of fraught internal (and external) dialogue, I did something that felt like a little bit of a concession: I accepted a part-time job, a “real” job. The kind you log into and then position yourself in front of a computer screen for several hours Producing Deliverables, and then someone cuts you a check for the number of hours you worked. I took the job because it was in my field, because a friend had forwarded it to me, because I wanted (for reasons I’m still working to fully explore) to remain “professionally relevant”, and because, in full disclosure, I wanted a little trickle of reliable income. (This is also a somewhat exaggerated, cynical take - I do have values-aligned reasons for doing the work, but for the moment let’s leave those outside this conversation.)
My dad responded to my job news by immediately (and literally!) bursting into song, absolutely delighted at this achievement (have I mentioned that I hadn’t applied to any other jobs - hadn’t been looking?) As I mentioned the new job in passing to others, I heard things like, “You must be so relieved to have found work!” and “It’s got to feel good to structure your days, huh?” And, well…no. I’m not relieved because I wasn’t panicked; my days didn’t lack structure before because when you have animals and outside commitments, they can’t.
A couple things have become startlingly apparent as these conversations happen on repeat.
First: We are so entrenched in our current, trade-life-for-cash-for-life model that it can be impossible to imagine anything different. Those who know me well know that over-enthusiasm and over-commitment - Mr. Toad with his many passions - are a far greater risk than idleness. It is work for me to sit still. But many with “real jobs” genuinely have a difficult time imagining what someone who doesn’t plug in to one for 8-12 hours a day does with her time.
Second: I, too, am entrenched in this model, even having attempted to step outside of it. I know this because otherwise, it would be far easier to shrug off the “what exactly do you do around here” types of questions as so much noise. Instead, I still feel compelled to answer with an exhaustive list of household, farm, and business-development tasks, the part-time job, classes and clients, bake days and plans-in-the-works for an expanded line of farm products. And while most of this is genuinely fun and inspiring to me - and may even be more traditionally “profitable” some day - the fact that this long justification feels necessary says something about my social conditioning.
In What is “women’s work” anyway?, my friend Laura asks two questions that have stuck with me: “How can we have a language for something our culture doesn’t value, look for, and name? and “Where in your life have you done “invisible work” that held things together?” The fact is, our capitalist system, whether you’re a true believer or a skeptic, tells us that if something is valuable, the market will reward it. Ergo, work less valued by the market - the kind of work I’ve spent the last many months doing, the kind that many women do, invisibly, for their entire lives, must not be valuable. This is, of course, false. We are starting to see, with startling clarity, what happens when only the mysterious hand of the market - and the more mysterious hands of the oligarchs atop it - are allowed to shape where we invest our time, our selves, our souls.
As Grant Martsolf notes in his piece “I’m a proud Luddite”, Around 1800, nearly 90 percent of family economies were what we would call “corporate families,” meaning families that produced economic goods within the home. Of Luddites, he continues, “…they understood that the mechanical loom, combined with the factory system, would eviscerate their home-based economic life—a system they valued deeply.” The suggestion here: industrialization and mechanization have corrupted the idea of work for women and men, endlessly prioritizing production over craftsmanship and separating work from life. This severance is hailed as an advancement - our fun can finally be liberated from our labor! - but I’ve met very few people who seem satisfied with the bargain.
While I’m not quite enough of a Luddite to have taken a hammer to my iPhone - some days, the temptation is very strong - I do think there’s something to the idea that we all - not just women - have suffered from the separation of work and home life. I’m not proposing that women should be home, tending to “women’s work”, while men go out, make widgets, and pull levers. What I’m asking, instead, is: what if we all learned to re-value the “invisible” work that knits our societies together? Maybe all of us - not just women - need to be far less invested in our day jobs and far more invested in our families, farmsteads, and communities. What would that even look like? Can we remember? Can we imagine?
It’s January, and if you’ve been following these yoga and meditation posts for the last several months, our light thematics have brought us to the crown chakra - Sahasrara - center of our connection to higher consciousness, our point of transcending individual limitations as our sense of self expands to touch all that is above, around, and beyond us. I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, abut the attachments that each of us have to our titles and roles…to the external boundaries through which we identify. What would it look like, practically speaking, to dissolve some of these attachments? What might it feel like? What might we build together?
Below, a 20-minute yoga nidra for expanding your sense of “I am.”
