Responding to your inner slacker: two options
December 02, 2008 By: almostgotit Category: James Dean, Janet Fitch, NaNoWriMo, Uncategorized, creativity, job search, korrektiv, slacker, slackers, unemployment, writing
Ever feel like this guy?
I am tired. Tired of my life and tired of my mind. I am an intelligent guy; I have a degree and should be making more of life. But, to be honest, I don’t have a clue what I want. In fact, I almost feel like I don’t want anything.
Last month, some of my friends participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) — including Korrektiv’s Rufus McCain, who recently quoted one of the little “pep-talk emails [he] received from famous writers encouraging [him] to finish [his] novel, which is stuck on page 2.”
The letter Rufus reprinted in his Nov 20th post is from Janet Fitch, who wrote about hitting a creative wall while writing White Oleander.
Luckily I was seeing an amazing therapist at the time. I explained I was afraid that if I chose route 6, then I would be eliminating all the other possible routes. What if route 15 was better? Or 3 1/2 ? So I hedged. I couldn’t commit. I was stuck. And she gave me the piece of advice which has saved my writing life over and over again, and I will give it to you, absolutely free of charge. She said, ‘I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.‘
Ah yes, the Amazing Therapist. The butt-kicking amazing therapist, who saves people’s lives even, by giving the same sensible advice that Every Wise Person you ever met also gives you, advice which you know perfectly well already but which, sadly, hasn’t helped you at all.
Because you’ve made a lot of decisions already, and too many of them have been wrong.
Enter Cary Tennis, who addresses our Poor Tired Guy quite differently:
To me you simply sound like the philosophical rebel — what we term these days a slacker.
Ah now. Here it comes – more butt-kicking. Right? But no…
Do you not realize that you are a member of the cultural opposition? … Perhaps that makes you the true misfit — one who does not even recognize it and would disavow it if asked.
… You are the solitary man without a country, without a home, wondering what’s wrong with you — because your protest is yet an inchoate thing, innate and unfocused. Your plight is thickened because your context is so thin — today you’re a rebel without a context! Is there still a Greenwich Village to flee to? Is there still a San Francisco where one can rent a cheap room above a bookstore without becoming a real estate agent or a software change agent or an FBI agent?
This is entirely wrong, Mr. Tennis. Celebrating the Slacker? What kind of crazy American work ethic is this?!?
What should be you doing if you are not on the job and have nowhere to be? Should you pick your toenails or eat some lasagna? Should you read an edifying book or stroll through the park? What should you do? … You live within this matrix [of who works, who doesn't, who gets paid a lot, who doesn't] and may wish for it to mean something, and indeed rules can be deduced …but at times, to the individual man caught in the tornado, the only thing it seems to be is random and insane.
That is why the philosophical rebel is so dear to us — because he alone has the courage to say, “I have no clue what this shit is.”
Good heavens. Is that courage or laziness? What possible value to society is such a stance?
Of what value to society is such a stance? … Most important, he is anathema to hoo-ha — he does not swallow the Kool-Aid or follow the company line; he does not jump when the Man says jump — he scarcely moves; he hardly hears the Man; he can hardly even see him; he has to squint. It’s his constitution to be cautious and to ask the relevant question Why? Which in our current situation we could use more of — if we in the West had been more skeptical, if there were among us more bantams in pine woods, we might not be so deep in shit as we are. …
Could it be that the voice of what you want is God’s voice? Could it be that what you want is what God wants? Could it be that you are eating and sleeping and fucking for God?
Erm, beg pardon… eating and WHAT?
Give yourself a break, my man. If you are depressed and have a drug problem or have a metabolic imbalance, then that’s some serious stuff and you need medical care. But if you simply lack ambition, I take my hat off to you. The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar.
Oops! Let me just get something to clean up the milk coming out of my nose.
Almostgotit honestly doesn’t know what to make of this, and can’t say she’s quite as lacking in ambition as all of that. But she loves a good iconoclast and wonders if Cary Tennis might be on to something. What do you think, readers?
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I’m Scattered and Have No Ambition By Cary Tennis (Salon.com)
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December 3rd, 2008 at 7:56 am
Do not be fooled by Mr Tennis. One, he has thought this through an awful lot. Two, he has committed it to trendy website to distribute his knowledge to others.
Take it from the slackest vicar in the Church of England, a real slacker thinks about writing all this stuff down but then goes off to watch Bargain Hunt instead. Mr Tennis is just trying to pose with us before on his next witty planned iconoclasm. We may be slackers but we’re not idiots.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 am
I appreciate hearing from you again, Fr. Dave. I hope all of this thinking didn’t spoil your Bargain Hunt too much…
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
After all this talk about slackers, all I can think about now is Mr. Strickland from the “Back to the Future” films …
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
“Oops! Let me just get something to clean up the milk coming out of my nose.”
This is hilarious; just cracks me up.
On my what a vision, “My eyes, my eyes!!”
Not tired in my mind now.
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Hmm… Although it alludes to some relatively current events (e.g. Jonestown) , I prefer the version set out in the old tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hilarious commentary, and wisely skeptical of the Amazing Therapist. I was amazed to find anyone making that claim in print. I’ve seen too many Woody Allen movies, I guess, and the results. Maybe that’s not an accurate barometer for therapy.
You’ve capture the essence of the dilemma, I think. The decision to make a decision isn’t helpful when you’ve a lot of decisions already.
Fr. Dave gets it right as well; publishing his piece at Salon puts the lie to Tennis’ lack of ambition.
Mild consolation to those of us with failed ambitions – which is just about everybody, I think. You do what you have to do: go to work, set your sights a little higher or a little lower, depending on whatever renewed sense of prospect you’ve been able to develop from all the available information. Keep on making decisions because you have to. With life anyway; where a novel is concerned, I think it would just sort of peter out. And you’d come to see that as a kind of decision, or the culmination of a lot of little decisions. That’s my experience, anyway.
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I should clarify that Tennis’s piece is a response to the tired guy, who wrote Tennis for advice. Tennis does not ever claim, himself, to be a slacker!
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:30 pm
I decided my career when I realized the English majors I knew went on to grad school in English (not for me!) or selling cosmetics at a department store. This was my senior year in college, and no marriage being on the horizon [my only real ambition was to have children], I thought I’d better think of something to earn my way–my parents not being fans of leeches. Hmm. “Well, when I was small, I thought I’d like to be a librarian.” I applied to library school immediately, and so a satisfying, flexible career was launched, AND it worked well with five children. I haven’t a problem with lack of ambition [see above], as long as the slacker is paying his or her way.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I left this part out…
I may be entirely wrong, but I interpreted the article as deliberately exaggerative, with Tennis’s point being that our cultural celebration of ambition and over-work may be just a bit pathological…
December 6th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Thanks for this post and the comments it prompted. These are things I often think about.
Being an artist (or someone involved in any sort of creative or intellectual labor) relies so much on self-motivation and a certain kind of ambition… and this dependency on the will lends itself to wild swings between obsessive over-work (either with or without pay) or muddled indecision. Either way, most artists and academics I talk to have internalized the cultural message that we should be overworking, getting paid more, showing more, publishing more…. and yet, are not making the sort of “progress” that the culture actually values. It’s so difficult not to get caught up in that race… even when it offers no real benefits.
But I’m making my peace with being an artist… I pretty much have to as it’s all I’ve ever done. Some of the peace-making terms for me are to be true to the work and the pacing of each project (even if others think you’re “wasting time”). I really only have one professional goal: to create a thoughtful body of work and document it. I believe that anything that happens beyond that will be an honest progression founded on the work itself and not external ambition.
Coincidentally, when I made that decision and started serious (and potentially “time wasting”) documentation (over the last few months), an academic gallery offered me a solo exhibition that I didn’t even know I was being considered for.
That ended up being about me and my experience. I really just wanted to say something about the torturous ways we validate our existence by acquiring capital, cultural or otherwise.