Hello! Today, we have on Leigh Claire LaBerge, a professor at CUNY and the author of Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, a funny and touching look back at what it was like to be young, naive, and have your whole life in front of you in 1999.
Something about this bothered me a bit and I don’t wanna sound like it’s directed just at you but as someone who works a busy but often fairly mindless administrative job (with a bachelors and such) and at this points almost demands podcasts like this while working for intellectual exercise, it’s weird to hear the people opining about my situation have never been in it. Internet provides some space for expressing opinion, but realistically I’ll always be a commenter, so while I enjoyed the discussion it does make me question podcasts discussing our kind of labor generally…I went to a school termed “the Ivy League of the South” so I’m not exactly a poor blue collar worker whose story is being stolen by an Ivy League journalist or whatever, but what’s the point of talking about dull (not bullshit) jobs when only those of us who escape and profess have a bigger platform to address. I suppose one could make a YouTube channel but I feel like popularity on that is kinda dependent on some super anti capitalist screed rather than expressions of personal ambivalence. I really liked that you brought up Ehrenreich which is good because I think it points out the way the curiosity surrounding labor is more directed at the poor because it’s more dire. I’ll have to read Leigh’s book, I liked Bullshit Jobs and it was a bit of a comfort but more honestly my job is just boring and only sometimes bullshit but I do feel the moral imperative to help the team I work with and like. Maybe the difficult part of it is the fact that people like us do to some degree see value in what we do, we’d just rather do something else.
Something about this bothered me a bit and I don’t wanna sound like it’s directed just at you but as someone who works a busy but often fairly mindless administrative job (with a bachelors and such) and at this points almost demands podcasts like this while working for intellectual exercise, it’s weird to hear the people opining about my situation have never been in it. Internet provides some space for expressing opinion, but realistically I’ll always be a commenter, so while I enjoyed the discussion it does make me question podcasts discussing our kind of labor generally…I went to a school termed “the Ivy League of the South” so I’m not exactly a poor blue collar worker whose story is being stolen by an Ivy League journalist or whatever, but what’s the point of talking about dull (not bullshit) jobs when only those of us who escape and profess have a bigger platform to address. I suppose one could make a YouTube channel but I feel like popularity on that is kinda dependent on some super anti capitalist screed rather than expressions of personal ambivalence. I really liked that you brought up Ehrenreich which is good because I think it points out the way the curiosity surrounding labor is more directed at the poor because it’s more dire. I’ll have to read Leigh’s book, I liked Bullshit Jobs and it was a bit of a comfort but more honestly my job is just boring and only sometimes bullshit but I do feel the moral imperative to help the team I work with and like. Maybe the difficult part of it is the fact that people like us do to some degree see value in what we do, we’d just rather do something else.
y’all should get someone from defector on one of these days. david roth is great but really anyone on staff could be great for leftist sports talk