how reading sally rooney changed my relationship with work, capitalism, and consumption
lola: capitalist identity drone / alice: free being / eileen and the mean girl sister / felix and his bloody hands / frances rejects employment / marianne opts for time / connell disseminates currency
boomers: the boxes are real to them (updated 18:13 est — audio voiceover)
if you are a member of the younger generations, it is highly likely that your parents sincerely believe in hundreds of thousands of bullshit concepts;
the capitalist identity drones come for eileen
In Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Eileen is a brilliant thinker and reader with a despondent passion for essay and e-mail writing. Highly educated and years out of university, she nevertheless works for low wages as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine, her income falling far below her economic potential. Simply by living this way, recognizing she needs a job but unconcerned about vacation- and money-maximizing, Eileen is a far braver person than I was for much of my twenties.
I spent years working jobs that caused me emotional agony and internal turmoil.
When I mentioned that I was saving money to quit one of these jobs, there were people close to me who reacted in horror: my worth as a human, I sometimes felt, was tied to employment: not to work, but to employment and money making. I know this is not what they intended to communicate to me: but that describes our culture.
So yeah, social pressure played a role in me finding ways to justify keeping myself miserable. I so relate to the phenomenon of Eileen’s sister, Lola:
Lola asked Eileen about her career plans and Eileen said she was happy at the magazine. Right, for now, said Lola. But what’s next? Eileen told her she didn’t know. Lola made a smiling face and said: One day you’re going to have to live in the real world. Eileen walked back to the apartment that night and found Alice on the sofa, working on her book. Alice, she said, am I going to have to live in the real world one day? Without looking up, Alice snorted and said: Jesus no, absolutely not. Who told you that?
Eileen is lucky to have a friend like Alice.
Here is someone who, unlike Eileen’s sister, offers up zero judgment about choices which have no real effect on anyone other than Eileen herself.
Probably this is because Alice wants to be a novelist, which for many ambitious young writers turns out to be a financially fruitless pursuit: writers accept the grim financial reality. Writers accept the idea that they could live their entire lives in relative obscurity, producing the finest work but making no money off this work at all. Since the fortunes of a writer are based so much on chance and fortune, it’s not possible for a writer to continue in the craft without accepting that possibility: as writers we must accept that from a capitalist perspective, we could very well be working for “nothing.”
This contrasts significantly with those like Lola.
The Lolas of the world have a different agenda: they are capitalist identity drones who are eager to dispel others of the notion that they have any real choice but to devote themselves to the pursuit of money. Like the man identity drone programmed to turn other beings with penises (or other beings he thinks have penises) into his culturally generated ideal of the perfect man, the capitalist identity drone believes that anyone who does not prioritize the accumulation of wealth is fundamentally disturbed, and therefore the capitalist identity drone strives (unconsciously) to teach others the “reality” of the world: the “reality” being that “money makes the world go around.”
The Alices of the world are not identity drones: good artists cannot be identity drones.
In my own life, there are plenty of Alices and plenty of Lolas.
dublin (november 2021): i sat on lots of benches and read conversations with friends + normal people in three days
the nature of the lolas
It can be difficult to assess the motives of the Lolas. Usually, they are relatively wealthy, and perhaps even conceited about their wealth, having devoted themselves to high-earning pursuits. Other times, they are not rich, but they hold some position or qualification that they want others to recognize as prestigious: at least some models of the capitalist identity drone accept “prestigious positions” as substitutes for money.
Do they really believe that everyone must follow this sort of pathway? Yes and no: remember, they are identity drones. Deep down they are free beings, but they have been hijacked by cultural programming to obliterate deviants.
We should have compassion for the Lolas.
They have spent years denying their own freedom to make real choices about their lives. They make themselves miserable, put themselves through hell, live in anger toward others, all for no reason, all while telling themselves repeatedly: “this is the real world / must be an adult / must be grown up / must force friend to make money”
Anyone who deviates from this mantra is a threat to the integrity of the capitalist identity drone: the presence of an openly free being reminds the free being trapped within the shell of a capitalist identity drone that yes: you too have always been free.
Of course Lola’s motives don’t necessarily just come from capitalism. There is a sibling dynamic between her and Eileen. Sometimes siblings want familial recognition that they have defeated their fellow siblings in some kind of competition. If their competitor simply drops out and takes a low-paying job at a literary magazine, what does that say about the existence of the competition they supposedly won? The indifference of the free-being sibling toward prestige and money is taken by the identity-drone sibling as an undermining of her own supreme achievements.
Lola clearly believes that, by virtue of her own economic choices to have a “real” job, she is an objectively better person overall than her sister.
Twice Rooney shows us the biting text message Lola writes to Eileen:
Hmmm do I really want to hear about how immature I am from someone who’s stuck in a shitty job making no money and living in a kip at age 30…..
Does Lola hope her ruthlessness will goad Eileen into admitting that Lola is a success and Eileen is a failure?
What matters to Lola, a capitalist / sibling-competition identity drone, are not Eileen’s feelings: Eileen has repeatedly told her she is “happy at the magazine.”
But Lola refuses to accept Eileen’s feelings,
Lola substitutes “happy” with “stuck.”
dublin november 2022 again
when pausing between intense emotional experiences reading rooney, i walked around listening endlessly to phoebe bridgers
To Lola, it is unacceptable, or perhaps unbelievable, for someone to be “happy” with such low-paid work and the lifestyle such work must imply.
Instead, they must be trapped; they cannot have made this choice on their own, can they have? Just like the identity drone man sees the being with a penis embracing girly things as “unwell,” so the capitalist identity drone sees the free being who has opted against the pursuit of material objects and socially constructed prestige.
In the eyes of the Lolas, these people are losers.
Thus the entire personal worth of Eileen is, to Lola, irrevocably tied to her job description. Even Eileen’s level of maturity is evaluated based on the type of job and housing she has. And Lola needs Eileen to acknowledge this.
the reality for people like felix
Eileen is lucky because, like me, she actually does have choices to shrug away high salaries. Most people obviously don’t have the luxury of these dilemmas: most people do not have master’s degrees and other expensive qualifications that enable them to slide in and out of high-paying work; most people don’t have wealthy parents either!
Felix, another character in Beautiful World, Where Are You, is trapped each day working in an Amazon-esque warehouse.
above: the cliffs of moher
below: cliffs on the aran islands (photos my own)
He becomes entangled in a complex sexual relationship with Alice, who by this time has become a millionaire novelist living on the Irish coast. She spends each day alone in her massive house while Felix wastes away robotically packing boxes with products. There, he hardly even notices when he frequently cuts himself and bleeds on the job.
As he tells Alice,
I was thinking about you at work today…. I find it makes me feel a bit better for a while but then I actually feel worse, because you’re lying around here all day and I’m stuck in a warehouse packing boxes…. That’s the other thing I will say about work, your feelings get really messed up in there. You start feeling things that make no sense. I should have been looking forward to seeing you, but I actually felt pissed off. And then I didn’t even want to see you anymore.
Another characteristic of capitalism is the determination of corporations to ensure that people like Felix are forced to choose between starvation and misery. There is no reason why we cannot raise revenue and direct tax dollars toward providing free community college, free university, and universal basic incomes so that people like Felix would have the autonomy to make choices and live more fulfilling lives.
Actually, there is a reason: our society is run by capitalist identity drones and they hate the idea of someone like Felix being able to do anything without being miserable. Meanwhile they set their own children up with every opportunity on earth.
And even as they provide their children with all these opportunities, the capitalist identity drone parents still try to restrain their own children from using these opportunities toward living authentic lives. There are children born into immensely wealthy households, with every opportunity imaginable, and they end up spending their whole lives frantically making money on wall street before dropping dead at 65.
the lola bot’s unlimited devotion to her employer
It’s not just about money.
In numerous cases, the Lola bots actually relish devoting as much of their lives as possible to their employer.
The Lolas have to prove their human worth: measured by the hours spent on the job.
When I was a graduate student in Washington, DC, it was nauseatingly common to overhear twenty-somethings discussing with pride how much of their day was controlled by their managers. They grumbled about colleagues who gave their employer only eight hours per day.
“Lazy,” these were labeled. “They leave right at 5:30,” some complained.
In their conversations there emerged a simple equation in which human value was a quantitative function of one variable: “time-spent-at-work.”
I matter, I am impressive, I am accomplished. I am better than you.
Why? Because I was at work super late last night.
The deep fear here is that someone might not fully grasp just how much time they spend at work. They must be vigilant in constantly signaling their devotion to others.
Eileen encounters this mentality at a party while seated next to a woman, Leanne.
The hours can be long, yeah, Leanne was saying. I’d be in there until nine a few times a week, anyway….. Eileen said she left work before six o’clock most evenings. Leanne gave a high, almost horrified laugh. Jesus, she said. Six p.m.? Where do you work, sorry? Eileen told her she worked at a literary magazine…. Leanne started to tell Eileen about various nights she had recently spent in the office, on one occasion getting a taxi home at half past six in the morning only to return to work in another taxi two hours later. I can’t imagine that’s good for your health, Eileen said.
I shuddered as I remembered past colleagues.
I worked with a 22-year-old who threw his whole life into “the office” to the extent that he did in fact once sleep in his cubicle. I also recalled the mix of judgment and jealousy from colleagues at other jobs who struggled to process that I didn’t keep serving the organization in my living room at night. I was in the habit of leaving my laptop on my desk so I could run home for exercise. “But how do you work at night?” a colleague asked, appearing worried. Scared to admit to her that I didn’t work at night, I told her that I had everything I needed for work on Google Drive.
“Oh!” she said. “That’s great!”
“Yes!” I said, and then I ran home, got into my pajamas, and watched The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
An interview for an operations role at an elementary school in brooklyn:
I was presented with a typical schedule of the day. I was then asked how I would accomplish several additional tasks that were not on the program.
My interviewer, who would have been my boss, explained to me that on a typical day, I’d need to stay late for what he called a “working dinner.” I was non-committal at best about this proposition, and I didn’t get the job.
a typical view i’d look up to while reading rooney in dublin
the moral imperative: die for the employer
That sort of self-sacrificing mentality is fairly normal in education: in particular at charter schools exploiting minimally trained, uncertified, and non-unionized labor, like me. Uncertified teachers are relatively easy to exploit because their managers reserve not only the right but even the potential obligation to fire them at any time. Once fired, they cannot switch to teaching at a unionized public school that may have better working conditions: because, again, the technical legality of their position as a teacher is questionable at best.
Unless granted exceptions due to being overwhelmed by teacher shortages, almost no public school would be willing to hire them. The charter school managers know all this about their non-unionized employees: they work them until they quit and then they frantically recruit fresh, idealistic, and untrained 22-year-olds from universities who will listen to everything they say and do as they are told until they also quit.
But charter school management does not only need to rely on fear.
Administrators can also appeal to the employee’s sense of morality: this is why the 22-year-old recent graduate is such an appealing target for New York City charter school recruiters. These recruiters do not focus on snagging teachers with years of experience and knowledge: they deliberately recruit the most inexperienced people possible simply because those people are the easiest ones to emotionally manipulate.
“As a teacher,” a manager said to one of my colleagues during a “coaching” meeting, “you need to make this job more important than your personal life.”
When numerous teachers raised the issue of “work-life balance” at a beginning-of-year staff meeting, another “coach” solemnly announced that it is simply inherent to the job of a teacher for work to out-balance life.
And then there was another charter network at which I worked, where a young teacher naively asked Z, the CEO: “What is your advice on work-life balance for young teachers?” The response went something like this: “You can’t have a life if you are going to be successful in this work. This work has to be your life.”
At the same organization, during an assembly of school leaders from across the entire network, a woman complained that she had been forcibly transferred from a school near her home to a school over an hour away by train. E, an assistant to Z, the CEO, was unsettled: though I suppose also relieved by Z’s absence.
Another woman — a random employee from some random school — stood up, enraged. She declared that we must all trust in Z’s wisdom. “Whatever choices Z makes are in the best interests of the children!” she boomed. “We cannot put ourselves before the children.” She extolled us to all trust in Z. People cheered.
This all contributes to a widespread mentality in many schools that if the work isn’t your life, there is something sinful about you.
hiking outside dublin (above and below)
the capitalist take on self-care
“Self Care” is important, but only so the employee will be well-rested on the job. I sat through numerous professional developments about how “we need to take care of ourselves so we can take care of each other,” meaning our colleagues and our students.
Notice: we don’t take care of ourselves for its own sake.
We take care of ourselves so we can perform better at work, by which we mean job.
For the capitalist identity drone (and characteristics of the capitalist identity drone can also manifest in non-profits / government / schools), enhancing a worker’s productivity is the sole purpose of self-care.
Their own lives are not ends in themselves. Their lives exist to serve the job.
passion as a job requirement
Many teachers, especially young ones in New York City, accept this: every year a fresh batch of 22-year-olds arrives in Brooklyn and spends their early twenties feeling guilty for not working enough.
In Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, I found it spookily believable when Connell finds himself inside his former teacher’s house.
The place had that strange unfurnished cleanliness that lonely houses sometimes have. She seemed like a person with no hobbies: no bookcases, no musical instruments. What do you do with yourself at the weekends, he remembers slurring. I go out and have fun, she said. This struck him even at the time as deeply depressing.
A grim life indeed.
At a school in Brooklyn, the misery of a depressing work environment combined with emotional manipulation from megalomaniacal managers (not all of them) to leave me constantly depleted, both physically and mentally. I have no idea how other people were going home and continuing to work. I just wanted to watch Sabrina and write.
The teacher, in her devotion to her job, becomes hollowed out.
The teacher is hardly unique in our capitalistic culture.
It is a widespread phenomenon that Millennials are expected to believe in the “mission” of the company and be “passionate” about their jobs.
And if passion is a job requirement, it is easy to see how the emotional labor and infinite time which the job demands can obstruct engagement with meaningful hobbies. The worker comes home and simply has nothing left: they gave all their passion to the bank, and there is nothing left for him but to watch television.
have “white collar” jobs just become miserable too?
Beautiful World, Where Are You made me wonder how many of these hollowed-out professionals should actually be considered working class, simply given the fact that so much of the passion in their lives might be drained away from them by the unfulfilling jobs that ruthlessly appropriate their productive and creative energies.
When Eileen is told she is not working class because of her parents, she responds:
“Yeah, working doesn’t make you working class. Spending half your pay cheque on rent, not owning any property, getting exploited by your boss, none of it makes you working class, right? So what does, having a certain accent, is it?”
These same themes are also explored in Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends. Is it really so crazy, given how personally draining and dehumanizing many professional jobs can be, that the university-student protagonist, Frances, says she doesn’t want any job at all?
I hadn’t been kidding with Philip about not wanting a job. I didn’t want one. I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything. I’d had various minimum-wage jobs in previous summers - sending emails, making cold calls, things like that - and I expected to have more of them after I graduated. Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy. I’d checked what the average yearly income would be if the gross world product were divided evenly among everyone, and according to Wikipedia it would be $16,100. I saw no reason, political or financial, to ever make more money than that.
the lola bot’s path to existential fulfillment:
be paid to perform an economic role
Wait, ask the Lolas, Frances really doesn’t fantasize about “a radiant future where [she is] paid to perform an economic role”?
What does she think she’s going to do with her life?
And there we have it: absent an interest in employment, Frances has failed “to take an interest in [her] own life.” And even though this is fucking absurd — to reduce someone’s interest in her life to a function of her interest in employment — Frances finds herself wondering: am I a failure who doesn’t take an interest in her own life?
Most shocking of all to the world’s Lolas might be the fact that Frances is not lazy. She just doesn’t necessarily want to receive money for selling her time to someone else, who then controls what she works on all day long. Not only is she well-read and creative; she enjoys devoting whole days to labor:
Over the summer I missed the periods of intense academic concentration which helped to relax me during term time. I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows. I would open fifteen tabs on my web browser while producing phrases like ‘epistemic rearticulation’ and ‘operant discursive practices.’ I mostly forgot to eat on days like this and emerged in the evening with a fine, shrill headache.
I truly love that kind of labor. That’s why I write so much.
For a while, in the early years of my sorrowful professionalism, I still lived that way, forgoing social life by isolating myself in coffee shops to devote myself to various writing and self-educational pursuits. But gradually this became unsustainable. My jobs simply left me too depleted to focus on any of my own priorities. A whole month was lost to working for my employers, binge-watching TV shows, and then going out to drink with friends. Then another month lost to frantic consumerism: specifically the planning of various excursions abroad, which I was allowed to claim as a “hobby.” Then a third month. A despondency expanded inside me. Even the hours that were ostensibly my own had, under the weight of job-induced exhaustion, been transformed into lost time which I’d never get back.
That’s a bit of what Normal People’s Marianne, another university-student character, is contemplating when she is talking to her friend.
On the phone Joanna frequently describes her office, the various characters who work there, the dramas that erupt between them, and it’s as if she’s a citizen of a country Marianne has never visited, the country of paid employment…. [Marianne] asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on Earth for the human invention known as money.
It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real.
The money is also real.
Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.
Yes, but I’m still alive at work, says Joanna. It’s still me, I’m still having experiences. You’re not working, okay, but the time is still passing for you. You’ll never get it back either.
But I can decide what I do with it.
Joanna’s conversation topics are what first grabbed my attention in this passage. Jobs often become so dominant that I find myself talking about them for hours afterward. I develop superficial relationships with colleagues, with whom I have essentially nothing to talk about save for our common employment and what happens there.
Then there are new acquaintances, whose first question is “What do you do?”
By this they do not mean “What are your hobbies?”
They mean, to borrow from Rooney,
“What is the economic role for which you are paid?”
self-obliteration for money and luxury?
Money may be a social construct, but it’s also real, isn’t it? And yes, we need it. There is no denying: it is a privilege to scoff at extra money.
But many people in our culture are devoted to money to the point they accumulate accumulate accumulate relentlessly: they love money so much that they self-obliterate in the name of devoting their entire lives to amassing money and things.
Once we cross the threshhold of having enough money to be comfortable, still we are willing to give up substantially large chunks of our lives for more. We are willing to trade away our comfort, our time, and our autonomy for more money, even when we do not need that money and even if there is some other thing that would make us happier and even if we are utterly miserable in the job we have found. This is why money-making does not so consistently result in happiness: the pursuit of money requires a substantial degree of self-obliteration.
Unlike Marianne, who like me comes from a wealthy family, Connell in Normal People isn’t used to having money.
But then he wins a scholarship to cover his expenses at Trinity College.
Everything is possible now because of his scholarship. His rent is paid, his tuition is covered, he has a free meal every day in college. This is why he’s been able to spend half the summer traveling around Europe, disseminating currency with the carefree attitude of a rich person.… It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.
I can’t relate to Connell’s experience of going from being poor to disseminating currency across Europe, but I can relate to the sentiment which kept me working miserable jobs in exchange for more money: “That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”
I was constantly traveling on my many breaks from the job. I wasn’t even trying to find meaning in the job: I loved the students and other teachers, but the management was vicious and twisted like a nightmare in a kafka novel.
I wanted to be like Eileen, finding meaning outside of a job, not worrying about maximizing my income. But I gave into the Lolas telling me to live in the “real world.”
I consoled myself by believing I needed my “real” job to fund the half-fulfilling mania of international travel, and I vaguely feared how the Lolas might condemn me for any deviant economic behaviors.
Would they stop being friends with me?
Would people in my family call me weird and lazy? (Yes)
Soon I spent much of my time simply looking forward to my breaks and the farflung adventures they might entail.
I came back from each trip — Cuba, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Germany, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Denmark, etc. — in a sour mood, knowing that soon I’d be trapped in that building again. But I always returned anyway to the dreaded workplace. There, by counting down the days to my next vacation, I might sometimes detect the faint foreshocks of a theoretically approaching euphoria. I gave up my day-to-day happiness for the anticipation of a future ephemeral luxury: I wasn’t accumulating things (I spent money almost only on travel and food) but I was accumulating experiences like feathers in my cap. Sometimes I got beneath the surface: other times I was simply a hedonist (and yes I do think hedonism is great sometimes).
for a much more detailed and thorough analysis on how Sally Rooney expresses a marxist world view, read this piece next by :
for related content to this subject of meaningful work under capitalism check out Creativity Under Capitalism by
:
love that this came out right after i just finished rereading all my sally rooney books in anticipation for intermezzo lol
I'm so grateful for your inclusion here, Andrew! <3