I Don't Want a Career, I Want to Lie Down
Marx, puritanism and the madness of adulting under late-stage capitalism
Karl Marx was, according to historical record, the original dirtbag leftist. Per an 1853 Prussian police report of Marx:
He lives the life…of an intellectual Bohemian, washing, combing, and changing his linen are things he does rarely. He likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance.
For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and then sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room.
I may be a 25-year-old Asian American woman living in a major city with only myself and my cat to feed, but considering that I am still manically typing this essay the night before I said I would publish it (forgive me if the quality of my writing here makes that obvious), this 19th-century German man is literally me.
I did a brief stint in the regular 9 to 5 world (9 to 6 with an unpaid lunch) and didn’t even last a year before I quit. At first I thought it might prove to be a suitable career path for me. Although I wasn’t all that passionate about the field, I was more passionate about it than any other prospective career I’d considered thus far. The pay was okay, there was opportunity for upward mobility and my health insurance could help mitigate the mountains of medical debt I might rack up if I got sick or hurt.
Admittedly, I haven’t been looking that hard for another Real World College Graduate Grown-Up Job in the year since I left my last one. I have a bachelor’s degree that I may as well put to good use, but I’ve always known that I was not built for 9 to 5 life. I don’t think many of us were. Remembering how fast life whipped past my head working 9 to 5 Monday through Friday kinda makes me feel like it’s not really worth doing until I’m at least 60 and can cash out on that 401(k) I totally have spare income to contribute to.
They say time moves faster as you get older. That’s just because you start doing the same thing day in and day out for decades until you retire or die, hopefully in the middle of the workweek so it doesn’t spoil your weekend. I quit my job because I thought maybe waiting tables or working retail part-time would give me a little more control over my life. In exchange, I’m broke and don’t do much of anything with the free time I have except halfheartedly search for a new job or try to drum up some sort of freelance work. As much as I lament the endless hours I wasted during my brief stint in the 9 to 5 world, maybe I would be willing to go back to a mind-melting office job if it got me closer to the career I really want.
But what career is that exactly? Do I even want a career? Is there such a thing as a dream job, or do I just want to make my exploitation as painless as possible? I was not put on this earth to type emails or operate a cash register. I don’t even think I was put on this earth to do anything in particular. I just want to eat good food and feel the sun on my face and talk to my friends and lie in bed. I really love lying in bed. I imagine on my death bed I am going to feel so relaxed and at peace that I’ll be glad I spent a lot of time just lying around, reading and watching movies and listening to music and hanging out. Nobody has ever been lying on their death bed wishing they’d put in more hours at their job. I would hope that at least in death, if not in life, we can escape such inconsequential worldly concerns.
I was on the phone with a friend recently when he coined the term “financial puritanism,” specifically personal finance puritanism, and I would extend this back to the Puritan work ethic, to which the cultural proliferation of capitalism is largely attributed. According to the Puritan (or Protestant) work ethic, diligence, discipline and frugality were considered to be pleasing to God. And so in being a good worker who handled your earnings responsibly, you would not only win the prize of material security in this life, but a favorable place in the afterlife, too. Today, we still societally reward those who are perceived to have a so-called good work ethic and shun those we deem lazy and lacking in the skills and drive necessary to succeed. But under capitalism, a hard worker is more often than not a highly exploited worker, and a lazy person with poor work ethic is someone who either doesn’t have the resources they need to be reasonably productive or is satisfied meeting the bare minimum requirements in order to maintain gainful employment.
It seems especially puritanical to dedicate the bulk of one’s adult life to the grind just to be so fiscally responsible that it dampens any pleasurable way of life that can be had as a proletarian in a world rapidly descending into fascism. I certainly gave up on beating myself up over my finances long ago, primarily because my income is so low I should be proud of myself just for making ends meet. As long as you have a few frozen meals in the refrigerator of the sixth-floor walk-up apartment you pay an evil amount of money each month to occupy, maybe you should treat yourself to maxing out your credit card on that trip you’ve always wanted to go on. I’m not trying to influence anyone to waste their income frivolously because they work so hard for so little of it; on the contrary, I believe that because we are giving up so much of our time for so little incentive, we ought to allow ourselves a little more indulgence, perhaps even a little more liberty with our day-to-day life.
In an increasingly turbulent economic landscape, is financial puritanism just how some of us cope with the crushing reality that financial security is an illusion? As we feel more and more out of control of our lives, does it just feel nice to have control of one’s checking account? Look, I grew up in a trailer park, and I don’t think my parents even had bank accounts for most of my childhood, so I recognize that having been brought up in poverty has skewed my perspective toward caring less about good financial standing than most. But I think a lot of us are realizing our bachelor’s and even master’s degrees are not the golden tickets out of working class struggle we thought they were. We are so much worse off than our parents. Wages are stagnating, the debt still isn’t canceled and we can’t afford to buy houses or have children. I’m grateful that at the very least, having already been poor my entire life already has cushioned much of this disillusionment.
Marx also lived in poverty for most of his life, depending on his wealthy Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels for financial support for many years. And yet, he chose to sacrifice material his comfort in order to dedicate his life to exposing the truth about the pursuit of capital and its consequences. As he wrote in his 1844 manuscript, “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”:
The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital.
The more you save, the less you are, and you’re getting older while the planet’s getting warmer. Personal finance was never going to pull any of us out of poverty, and keeping our heads down and doing our jobs will certainly not save us from the advancing threats to the freedoms we do have. You don’t want to spend this life fighting to get just one more inch ahead in the endless rat race. I’m overwhelmingly optimistic about what I will witness in my lifetime — I credit that to all the time I have spent lying down, soaking in the beauty that very much still exists in this world. I know my generation will create a more caring world where no one will have to sacrifice so much of themselves just to keep themselves alive.