Brakes to the Grindstone

Somewhere during a murmuring sleepless night recently – too much taurine - staring at the jagged France-shaped hole in my ceiling, I collected a few splinters of thoughts together regarding a new predicament. It may have become a little muddled, shelved as it was between other thoughts such as my recurring fear of an upcoming but fictional exam, and a prolonged scene of harmless affection involving Claire Danes. Bless her wee cotton socks.

Anyway, in the sweatshop world of data entry, I was thinking that there is one reason to maintain efficiency, and two reasons to abort it. The reason for efficiency is driven by the obvious fear of being laid off for non-performance. It is no shock that your labours are catalogued on lists and poured through. I found a mysterious stack of my spent data sheets balancing on an in-tray with my initials appended, due for filing. I found a group of people sitting by my desk one morning when I arrived, discussing the merits of so-and-so, and how many database entries each had done. All these people whose fate they were deciding were only initials to them, they had no idea that one of their number was listening while waiting anxiously to get his seat back and paper-cut his way through another day.

The two linked reasons for procrastinating, on the other hand, are firstly that you are paid by the hour, and therefore naturally find merit in increasing work time at the expense of efficiency. The second reason is the distinct possibility that your work might run out, and that you will be cast into the street, inevitably in the pouring rain, to wheedle home in a lamenting state and roll up all your empty timesheets and burn them under a chimney flue so that you can at least you can try and delude passers-by that you are choosing a new Pope, however unlikely that act is to take place in Streatham or wherever.

But these contradictions add up to the work-equivalent of seeing a 15 mph speed limit on an open motorway.

In the end, I, along with others who started at the same time, will fall victim to that very last reason, the finite nature of the work, next week. In the horribly imposed competition, done on sleuth, we were willed to go as fast as we dared, knowing we were racing towards a wall, but preferring to hit the wall in the distance rather than be dragged screaming off the course mid-way for slipping behind as at least that way we stayed in the race the longest. I suppose that had we been more organised, some kind of union or cartel kind of arrangement could have taken place where we gained some kind of mutual benefit by grouping together at a slower pace. Applying Game Theory and the Prisoner Dilemma to the real-life scenario of keeping a job didn’t really cross my mind as I don’t fully understand it, and the intricacies of ‘Generous Tit-for-Tat’ and other statistical lunacies pale when you are confronted with a large stack of paper. But it is still a harsh lesson to learn a fortnight before Christmas. The bar scene in “A Beautiful Mind” illustrates this nicely.

Now I realise that in order for companies and capitalism to work, there can be no other way for them to operate. And that is not to say that I am not about to dig up Marx from his Highgate resting place and tote him around on a stick down Oxford Street, standing beside the “Golf Sale” people and extolling the virtues of seizing back top-hats’ profits for the liberation of the masses. It is just an observation. On a side note, an accountant friend once told me of his desire to read “Das Kapital”, Marx’s tome pleading his economic case. Normally the word ‘seminal’ would be used here, much as it is customary to use the word ‘eclectic’ when referring to Jools Holland’s show, but I feel the author’s name speaks for itself. We finally found it towards the end of a day filled with aimless absurdities and considerable dog-earing of a travelcard. We had expected an awe-inspiring political pamphlet like The Communist Manifesto which is slim, readable on a medium-length city bus journey and thought-provoking to the extreme. By which I mean that you step off the bus cross-eyed. The thing actually turned out to be split into volumes, each of which was so weighty that to fondle it out from the bottom shelf and lift it to reading height would have contorted your spine into an irreversibly damaged shape, possibly consigning you to your bed for life, and able to amply claim that device of income redistribution by the state we call Incapacity Benefit. Perhaps that’s ironic or something.

My real point is not to weigh one economic system against another, I have neither the knowledge nor the insight to achieve this, nor is it to advocate one method of work as opposed to another. It is simply to ask this: Why the fuck are we all going so fast? And what is this going to cost us?

The world is full of technological innovations that were supposed to turn our lives around, to free us from the all-waking-hour necessity of gaining nourishment, inviting us to pursue leisure. No need to grill bread, here’s something called the toaster. Need to get to work? Why not live miles away and we’ll slap down some tarmac so that you can jump in a vehicle and be there in minutes. What’s more, you can now separate out from your neighbours in all the new space afforded, and spend your ample down-time fulfillingly in the expanses of park in between. The vacuum cleaner was widely marketed as the tool that was going to liberate wives from house work. Yes, this magical suction device will mean you can make the home spotless in a fraction of the time, meaning that you can take your children to the lovely new park after their morning toast for hours at a time, marvelling at that motorway on-ramp that made all of this possible.

A couple of years ago, I read a report that the human race has accumulated more information and data in the last five years than in the entire history of the species prior to that. In the couple of years since that report, it would not surprise me if we had near doubled that amount again. There will be no end.

I don’t deny the beauty of technology and the outstanding effects some of it has had on the human race, I just wonder whether at some point we might all realise that in some aspects we have been chasing our own tails. I have long wondered whether there is a state of equilibrium for the amount of discomfort that we can experience collectively, and that some ‘improvements’ only serve to change the position of this equilibrium. This would be fine if this point of equilibrium was at a point of comfort. But our nature means we must push it as far as it will go, to a level bordering on the intolerable, and there we shall stagnate until relief pushes us onto a differently situated but equally intolerable position. But there is an absolute cost as well. This new position can arguably be worse, as lifting the benchmark forces everyone to meet the new target. Compare it with, say, the measures made in the UK to allow people onto the housing ladder. Banks allowing mortgage-lending at higher levels relative to salaries and other policies to make borrowing easier have the laudable aim of letting people access properties which higher prices had sadly ruled out. However, everyone has been given this same chance, the equilibrium of what people can afford moves upward, and it is against this new benchmark that all people will now have to climb. And they wonder why bricks are like gold dust. More on this in later posts.

Of course, all this means that everyone has further to fall when it all goes wrong. One defective rung of the ladder, let’s call it the sub-prime rung, might rot through, causing everyone to tumble. And in every walk of life where this principle of endless efficiency gains become more and more vulnerable as time goes on, and the boundary drifts further ahead, like the horizon you can always sail towards but never reach. The problem with this theory of undoing the endless acceleration and turning it into a collective deceleration that will allow us to move the point of equilibrium to a place more comfortably within the capabilities of our ape-descended minds, is that it only works if everyone does it. Or if we do it in total isolation, Amish-style. Unfortunately for us, this is probably a futile enterprise.

Unless, that is, my plan to found my own state on a very small area of a third-floor flat in Glasgow comes to fruition. I realise this idea has been travelled to the nth degree on TV programmes and the like, but my state is special as it is going to be founded on a hopefully harmless ideology. It will be called The Republic of Lethargy, and the order of the day will be the living of life at a reasonable speed. And in a group, it is only fair that that falls to the speed of the slowest member. Procrastination, rather than being seen as the thief of time, will be seen instead as the borrower of life. There will be no king or queen, only a democratically-elected chairman, who, as the name suggests, will be required to remain seated at all times (on a commode though, for hygiene reasons) so as to eliminate the possibility of he or she partaking in a fitful burst of pointless work. My flatmate and I have already made admirable steps in eliminating all unnecessary haste, slobbing of a workday evening under duvets in the lounge. In order to maintain the sanity of the weak-willed, a state religion will be introduced, though it will be optional and possibly only practised by those under the temporary umbrella of despair. As one of the aforementioned duvets in the flat is decorated with the character, Hamtaro “Little Hamster, Big Adventures”, I feel it is only fair that Hamtarism become this religion. I am sure nothing sinister can come from the expansion of a state founded on a sole economic idea and a flimsy religion. We wouldn’t have the energy to fill in the paperwork to buy a missile anyway.

Anyway, so I plead with you, please come and join the Republic of Lethargy and help end this circus once and for all!

In recognition of this plea, and it is especially directed at the millions of needlessly frantic people in London, here is an invitation to listen to a beautiful song named Go Slowly by Radiohead. Even if the original meaning of the song is not entirely related to this blog entry, perhaps its leisurely pace will convince you of the merits of avoiding breakneck speed for a while. Not all races are worth sprinting. Round that last corner and you’ll be within sight of the cemetery.

You shouldn’t take any of this too seriously though. I am just bitter about losing my job. I should be able to find another one from the temping agency hopefully. That is, if someone else doesn’t get there first.