The Anti-Work Ethic Onscreen - How to Escape Your Job

working feels bad and i don't ever want to work one more day in my entire life have you ever felt like you're wasting your single precious life doing a job you hate right now millions of u.s workers are quitting their jobs in the great resignation after the covet 19 pandemic sparked a mass re-evaluation of priorities but on screen we've gravitated for decades towards characters who express a philosophy of life that's an alternative to capitalism's assumptions we don't have a lot of time on this earth we weren't meant to spend it this way filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements these anti-work characters riot against unlivable working conditions challenge irresponsible companies that care only about making a profit refuse to acquiesce to senseless labor call out parasitic consumer culture use the jobs that are exploiting them to their own advantage reveal the evils of a system based on capital and won't give up their principles or identity for the workplace if given a choice between doing something and nothing i choose to do nothing but i will do something if it helps someone else do nothing i'd work all night if it meant nothing got done being anti-work doesn't mean being against all labor and effort it's about refusing to let what we do for income cost us our lives and our humanity here's our take on the anti-work heroes of film and tv and what their anti-work ethic teaches us about resisting soul-sucking jobs and changing the system if you're new here be sure to subscribe and click the bell to be notified about all of our new videos thank you to brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is an interactive problem-solving website where lifelong learners can improve their stem skills brilliant has recently upped the interactivity on their platform to a whole new level and i love how their courses help me learn through doing best of all they use fun activities like puzzles to help you master math and science try brilliant today just click the link in the description below or visit brilliant.org the take [Music] anthropologist david graber points out that in the early 20th century it was believed that by the year 2000 people in rich countries like the us and the uk would have a 15 hour work week due to technological progress but instead technology only made work more soul deadening and somehow has led us to work more by creating new positions that are actually pointless graber distinguishes two types of terrible jobs jobs and just bad jobs jobs are those that appear to offer no true purpose or contribution to society so i go through these thousands of lines of code and uh it doesn't really matter because they are so meaningless jobs cause existential despair the employees of dunder mifflin compare their workplace unfavorably to prison you got outdoors time michael why don't we get outdoors time but paradoxically many unnecessary jobs are overpaid while more necessary and meaningful jobs are underpaid as dallas hawthorne wrote on twitter i don't think boomers realize how many of us actually want to work as librarians gardeners and teachers those jobs just don't pay us enough to feed us so we have to take jobs we hate to get paid more it's as though there's a trade-off happening in modern employment you either earn money or get to do something with meaning according to graber the existence of so many jobs in a capitalist society is surprising because it goes against the primary goal of any company to earn as much money as possible efficiency is probably number one people because waste is a thief but perhaps one reason for all these useless jobs is the need to maintain social order in a way jobs act as a kind of daycare for adults as twitter user neo underscore url wrote commenting on the black lives matter protests of 2020 i can't help but think about how large a part of people being able to mobilize and protest right now is because of them not being at work and how the 40-plus hour work week leaves most people for no time for political participation and how that's kind of the point bad jobs meanwhile present more severe and immediate problems than the angst of jobs they can be humiliating physically and mentally taxing with criminally low wages if we're gonna give them our day we need to have enough to cover our basic necessities this terrible state of affairs became especially obvious during early coveted pandemic lockdowns when only essential workers had to put themselves at risk to go into work and the situation revealed that many of those jobs society actually needs to run pay the lowest people working for minimum wage can't expect a comfortable retirement or really any kind of financial security living paycheck to paycheck with a single medical emergency or unlucky mishap enough to put them on the street as twitter user pickwick put it so when did if you work full time you should be able to comfortably afford shelter food and utilities become an extreme leftist belief the writer charles bukowski who worked grueling blue collar jobs for decades before meeting a benefactor who supported his art once said they never pay the slaves enough so they can get free just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work the idea of modern work as slavery is a prominent theme in boots riley sorry to bother you so wait are you telling me you sell slave labor to companies over the phone the company that hires cassius green as a telemarketer runs an initiative called worry free which sells a barely disguised form of slavery as a wonderful career opportunity that takes all the anxiety out of life you're guaranteed employment and housing for life stop worrying and get worry-free the worry-free living quarters are state of the art the worry-free food is to die for perhaps the only redeeming quality of bad jobs is that unlike jobs they're at least useful to society so they cause less guilt and rumination in 1999's office space peter's friend who's a construction worker is less mentally tortured than peter in the end peter also ends up working construction and enjoys that manual labor allows him to actually see the product of his work but ultimately both bad jobs and jobs compromise employees humanity and sorry to bother you the idea of workers being robbed of their humanity takes an absurd turn to the literal chemical change to make humans stronger more obedient more durable and therefore more efficient and profitable as bukowski wrote what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse people simply empty out they are bodies with fearful and obedient minds these lines mirror the classic visual aesthetic we see in cinema about modern work such as dystopian imagery of rows upon rows of deadened soulless drones toiling away mindlessly because thinking would make their situation unbearable in charlie chaplin's modern times the hero struggles to survive in a newly industrialized world at his job the workers move in sync with the machines they're operating like they're one in the same thing the same is true of 1927's metropolis in which the workers move in sync with the machinery in a weird dance as if they're part of the city's infrastructure in the later half of the 20th century films about office jobs focus on the imagery of the cubicle as a visual metaphor for the way modern work destroys individuality human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day every human is shut into a tiny box that is just like every other box and rows of them stretch towards the horizon describing the employees of such jobs bukowski writes the color leaves the eye the voice becomes ugly and the body the hair the fingernails the color palette of movies about contemporary office jobs echoes this featuring muted desaturated gray or bluish tones the unflattering fluorescent light makes the characters features ugly and sickly looking just as the workers of early industrial jobs resemble cogs in the machines they operate the workers of office jobs resemble the weak flickering gray screens they stare at no i wouldn't say i have a passion for hr all these visuals seem to say this work is literally sucking the life out of these people and steadily making them less human [Music] among the tv and film characters that resist work there are several distinct subtypes the first type is the delinquent immature slacker these are usually young professionals who are distinguished by their profound lack of ambition i'm not really cool with the amount of responsibility i have now so if you wanted to promote me down a peg i'd be cool for that what makes these overgrown children-esque characters so fun to watch is that they find ingenious ways of making their terrible jobs work for them they turn everything into a game you're literally making paper airplanes out of police reports right now well how am i supposed to get it into that garbage can or just use their time at work to do whatever they feel like doing obama what what time is it were you just sleeping with your eyes open in earlier times these slackers might have been framed in a negative light but now they're portrayed as aspirational this speaks to the way millennials and gen zeus are disillusioned in the career ladder the carrots of future promotions and raises don't motivate them anymore because in the current economic climate these promises end up often being false as david underscore mozcrop tweeted every time i read some weekend column about a boomer struggling to retire on 100 thousand dollars a year and a multi-million dollar home i'm reminded that my retirement plan is to die in the climate wars but there are limitations to the immature slackers anti-work philosophy though their personal rebellion and don't care attitude is satisfying it's not necessarily a solution that works in the long term for their benefit what's a 401k i'm glad you asked basically it's a retirement plan so you can uh no never mind i totally thought it was a laser and their actions don't really address the systemic problems either the second type of anti-work character is the workplace saboteur whereas the slacker just doesn't care at all about their work these characters disagree with their jobs on a philosophical level and express their rebellion in more subtle ways for ron swanson of parks and rec government work is antithetical to his libertarian values am i interrupting something important impossible i work for the government ron is enthusiastic about his own hobbies and a hard worker but at the parks and rec department his only goal is to stall government work on principle i like saying no it lowers their enthusiasm when anti-social april joins forces with him they form the perfect workplace sabotage team i'll make sure you don't have to go to any meetings if anyone comes to see you i'll scare them away wait april if you had to choose between these two ties you're hired the office's jim helper might seem like one of the slacker characters but he actually fits best into the workplace saboteur category because his dislike of his work stems from a philosophical place jim's pranks on dwight are actually an expression of his workplace philosophy sabotaging dwight who takes the job intensely seriously once once in a while i'll take a long lunch a siesta time thief time thief fire him represents jim's opposition towards the attitudes encouraged by modern corporate work yawn four seconds what are you doing oh you had said that you don't do anything personal during work time so i'm just making sure the third type of anti-work character is the workplace anarchist these are the characters who are brave enough or crazy enough to overtly call out or take action to dismantle the bs of corporate work peter in office space is reminiscent of the influential hermann melville character of bartleby a law clerk who whenever he's asked to do something responds i prefer not to while this behavior confounds everyone around bartleby from a certain perspective it's actually rational maybe doing nothing is better than doing something pointless i did absolutely nothing and it was everything that i thought it could be the narrator and fight club confronts his boss in a much more aggressive manner he turns the corporate world's tools of manipulation back on itself using the workplace norms and conventions typically used to exploit the employee to manipulate the management thank god please don't hit me again amy jelico the heroine of the short-lived cult hbo series enlightened initially adopts a less confrontational more proactively passionate approach after a mental breakdown she returns to work convinced that she can single-handedly change the entire structure of the company to make it less harmful to the world i just wanted to ask you if you had a chance to look at that research that i gave you honestly amy no when she realizes that she can't get what she wants directly she formulates a plot to destroy the entire company from the inside out i guess abaddon is paying off government officials it's huge while this category seems the most influential or admirable in terms of actually trying to take down the system it's hard not to notice that the workplace anarchist characters are often mentally ill or unbalanced peter is under the spell of a hypnotist the narrator and fight club suffers from some kind of split personality or dissociative disorder and amy is inspired to create change after a mental breakdown but this brings up the question are these people quote crazy or is it the world they inhabit that's completely bonkers people are living under the illusion that the american dream is working for them it was right in everyone's face tyler and i just made it visible it was on the tip of everyone's tongue tyler and i just gave it a name while none of the three work-resistant character categories offer us a complete solution to the problem of terrible work there are some lessons to learn from them lesson one don't get seduced by consumer culture one of the ways modern society keeps us working at terrible jobs is by propagating consumer culture working jobs we hate so we can buy we don't need for the companies customers buying more stuff means more profit for the customers spending more requires earning more which requires working longer and harder for the companies films like american beauty and fight club speak to the way capitalism offers consumption as a substitute for meaning this isn't life this is just stuff and it's become more important to you than living and locks workers into an inescapable loop as they feel compelled to constantly chase more and better things what kind of dining set defines me as a person we can find an alternative to consumerist society in the king of slackers his dudeness himself the big lebowski's protagonist is an anti-capitalist hero unemployed and totally satisfied with his relaxed lifestyle he doesn't have the consumerist urge for novelty but sticks with what he likes bowling white russians and one good rug while his antagonist the other jeffrey lebowski is a fake he has no money of his own the dude is presented as an almost christ-like figure whose commitment to taking it easy contradicts the evils of the hustling striving capitalist world it's good knowing he's out there the dude taking her easy for all his sinners lesson two question the status quo it's dangerous to think that the way things are is necessarily the way they should be as queerly autistic tweeted i've come to the conclusion that the sole purpose of homework is to condition children into accepting that unpaid overtime and ridiculous hours and not being able to escape work even in your own home are a normal thing to expect in your future but even those brave enough to attempt to disrupt the status quo need to be watchful too because capitalist markets have a tendency not just to crush revolt but to subsume it using descent to their own advantage rather than simply destroying it then maybe they want to organize maybe they want to rebel and that's why we need someone on the inside who represents worry-free's needs this is illustrated symbolically in the matrix reloaded when neo finds out that he isn't the only one but is one of several versions in a repeating formula where the one's revolt is used to actually maintain the system the anomaly is systemic in the 1976 film network when newscaster howard beal announces his plan to commit suicide on air after he's fired for low ratings the gesture of revolt causes a huge surge in his viewership thus benefiting the tv network he was revolting against and when beale's later on-air tirades get too anti-corporate the head of the network takes the teeth out of beal's protest by indoctrinating him with the kind of dry abstract big picture language that corporations love because it removes the human element and makes audiences eyes glaze over one vast andy maine interwoven interacting multivariate multinational dominion of dollars language notably similar in that sense to the architects in the matrix reloaded your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix in real life we can spot how corporations likewise co-opt societal resistance in their marketing which shamelessly attempts to reduce social justice issues to press campaigns or claims to be boldly fighting against climate change in service of getting us to buy more pollution causing products lesson three don't make work your identity the world tells us that work is not just a way to earn a living but also a route to self-fulfillment creative expression and general badassery a job can become an identity especially if the work is necessary and or driven by passion you're off work christina go enjoy your day i'll enjoy my day if i can help retrieve a heart i promise but nowadays it doesn't seem to matter what you do as long as you're working really hard at it as sleepy socialists tweeted the worst capitalist brainwash is being proud of your own exploitation saying you've worked 80 hours a week since you turned 17 isn't a flex it's sad where have you been sleeping all night as we discussed in our video on the devil wears prada and workaholism our modern day obsession with work can be traced back to the calvinist branch of protestantism sociologist max weber wrote that because calvinists believed in predestination they sought to be successful in order to prove they were part of the elect destined to go to heaven in the protestant work ethic mindset which is hugely formative in american culture work is associated with virtue while sloth is a sin but within calvinism the focus isn't just on work but on success and anti-work heroes force us to consider the question who defines what constitutes success thus the anti-work movement is not only a social and economic shift it's also a spiritual one our great war is a spiritual war our great depression is our lives when eliot on search party declares that he doesn't want to write his book because he hates working at first i thought it was writer's block but then later i realized it's actually just the discomfort of hard work at first this seems like a typical millennial joke about how boomer cs is lazy but eliot's revelation that he doesn't like working strikes a deep record with people today who are increasingly rejecting the explanation that constant work is just kind of what you gotta do in life no not for me lesson four help others act on lessons one through three finally it's important to keep in mind that many of the anti-work actions that can be taken are only available to those with a certain amount of privilege it takes having money to not care about money most people do not have the privilege to opt out of terrible jobs and many have to fight for jobs most wouldn't want and as eva duvernay illustrates in 13th there are racial aspects of employment problems like the way that prison inmates mostly people of color are forced to participate in basically uncompensated labor often for the profit of private companies we now have more african-americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850s partnerships between correctional industries and private business are a rapidly growing segment of a multi-billion dollar industry in america so it's not enough to just rebel on an individual level big societal changes need to happen in order to stop the onslaught of terrible humiliating and unlivable employment well you don't talk weight enough i'm not talking about sounding old nasal it's like sounding like you don't have a care crazy like i don't really need this money and while the obstacles might seem insurmountable it does feel as though meaningful changes around the corner with the great resignation millions are quitting in search of more livable pay better work life balance or just work with more meaning the resulting labor shortage has the potential to give workers more power to dictate terms pushes for the four day work week and remote work prove that americans are moving away from workaholic assumptions about success and are valuing their personal time and quality of life more and more so hopefully sometime in the near future we will be able to say more often and more sincerely that we do what we love this isn't so bad huh making bucks getting exercise working outside this video was written by friend of the take anya formosava if you liked the ideas here you can check out her channel q22 for more interesting cultural insights thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring this video overwork can make me feel sluggish and foggy like my mind isn't the sharpest it could be that's just one reason i turned it brilliant it's an amazing website and app with interactive courses designed to help you boost your brain power brilliant believes that doing is the best way to learn and i can tell you it works because recently i signed up to do the mathematical fundamentals course in the past math wasn't my favorite subject but this course was actually fun i had to think creatively and strategically to solve each challenge and it felt so great to flex that mental muscle join me and 8 million others on brilliant today just click the link in the description below or visit brilliant.org the take [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: The Take

Views: 240,074

Keywords: the apartment, the trial, american beauty, the office, parks and recreation, modern times, charlie chaplin, ron swanson, brooklyn 99, gina, workaholics, the matrix, neo, jim halpert, broad city, ilana, office space, search party, elliott, the big lebowski, fight club, playtime, network, 13th, april ludgate, enlightened, amy jellicoe, sorry to bother you, cassius green, walter mitty, up in the air, waiting, horrible bosses, corporate, howard beale, silicon valley, dunder mifflin

Id: _TYjARMlkJA

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/myaltaccountisbanned]

Sorry to bother you is such a great movie. Easily one of my favorite of the last few years