One of the friends you grew up with is now a popular YouTuber. When they visit your city, they ask if they can stay with you, and you oblige them. You get a glimpse into their life.
An employee might get a lunch break, but not a YouTuber; lunch is for filming. They constantly are on the lookout for content ideas. They try to get you involved in their video, cracking jokes, baiting you, or asking you to hold the camera. It’s exhausting.
“Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise,” Byung-Chul Han puts forward in the The Burnout Society. “People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.”
That passage reminded me of the YouTuber scenario, which actually happened to a friend of mine. When I imagine myself at that lunch, I wonder if the YouTuber is even certain when they’re performing for YouTube and when they’re actually being themselves.
This is the struggle that Devi Vishwakumar, the protagonist of Never Have I Ever, encounters when she’s tasked with writing a college admission essay. Her father passed away recently, and someone advises her to use that as material, which she eventually does, in her own style and acknowledging the feeling of exploitation.
A nicer word for this, perhaps, is instrumentalization—the act of making your creative work and life experiences a resource. It’s a difficult way to work, and not a particularly great business to be in either.
Nassim Taleb explored an alternative approach, when, over a decade ago, he resolved to do “nothing except if it felt like a hobby.” He described this as intellectual concentration as entertainment, using the example of his great-uncle approaching an afternoon game of bridge.
While I’m not sure if “entertainment” is the best word to describe this—perhaps “contemplation” is more precise—the approach sounds like the antithesis of exploitation. I’m grateful Nassim put such an applicable idea forward.
Perhaps it’s also just a matter of practice: letting the urge to “optimize” something pass. If something good happens, it’s entirely okay to let it happen, and not to figure out how to “hack” it to happen again. When one of my good friend Nik’s posts hit the front page of Hacker News, he wrote, “I’m grateful for it, but I’m not gonna start trying to hack Hacker News.” That resonated with me.
I once received a box of free cookies because I, unintentionally, visited the store near closing time. I made a mental note: ah, I left the house at 7:30pm or so, I should try that again sometime, and then I decided I wasn’t going to do that. If I did happen to leave the house because I wanted to grab a cookie, then so be it; I wouldn’t put it in my calendar or anything. (I never did end up returning at that hour.)
I have written many ideas down for this blog, and I enjoy the process. In order to preserve this enjoyment, I also need to restrain it; if a good idea comes to me at 3am, I’ve decided not to write it down. It will pass. I’m not working right now. And that’s that. Even if it’s the best idea of my life, if it finds me again after I properly wake up, I’ll scribble it down; otherwise, it was simply not meant to be.
Still, the journey continues. I often find my mind caught up with trying to promote my work. I lose sight of playing the game of writing as an infinite game, and I buy into other people’s definitions of Winning. I practice wanting success less, and inch forward in practicing restraint. To play more. To practice writing, not being an author.
It occasionally feels like a struggle, a negotiation between exploitation, entertainment, contemplation, gratitude, generosity, and play.
It’s up to me, and you, to decide who wins.
My friend Rachel Jepsen recently wrote about how AI creates an alienation of the self, which, I sense, rhymes with this.