Consumable and Disposable

[rynling]

I'm going to say something that sounds like self-pity, but it's really more of an observation.

I feel like, at the beginning of every relationship I have with another person, they grant me a certain number of "goodwill points." These goodwill points will never increase, but they will steadily decrease. The only way for me to prevent them from decreasing is to be constantly active and productive, thus maintaining the level of goodwill this person felt for me when our relationship first began. I have to be very careful about what I do, however, because one wrong move might reduce the remaining goodwill points to zero in one fell swoop, thus influencing the other person to terminate the relationship.

I know this might sound like the deluded thinking of someone with anxiety, but I have no other way of interpreting the behavior of other people that, as far as I can tell, has no relation to who I am or what I do. From my perspective, I'm just being myself and doing the sort of work I've always done. I'm pretty constant, and I try not to cause trouble for anyone if I can help it.

What I'm trying to explain with this model is how I can sometimes wake up in the morning and find that people have randomly unfollowed me on social media. Like, I don't think I did or said anything weird, but I could have, or it could simply be that I reached the limit of someone else's tolerance.

I should clarify that I'm not butthurt about losing one or two followers. Rather, since I became more active on social media about five years ago, this has been an almost daily occurrence - you gain some, you lose some. I know that it's random, but it still feels a little personal.

I guess it's become almost something of a truism that social media has had a negative influence on the way we treat other people as consumable, with relationships being ultimately disposable. It's not entirely accurate to say that you have a "relationship" with someone who follows you on social media, but I think this mentality also applies to a lot of professional relationships, with the vast majority of people who have entered the workforce during the past fifteen years being treated as consumable and disposable.

I just read Emily Guendelsberger's book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, and nothing she experienced surprises me. What she writes doesn't just apply to low-wage work, however.

Speaking from my personal experience as a former tenure-track professor, I constantly felt like I was under an enormous amount of pressure. I worked seventy-hour weeks for five years, and (unsurprisingly) this ended up making me sick. I was forced to declare a disability in an attempt to temporarily reduce my workload to a fifty-hour week, at which point my tenure liaison gleefully informed me that there would "never be a place at this university for people like you." Since reaching out to my colleagues in the field via various professional networks, I've come to realize that I'm far from the only person who has received this sort of treatment. Ironically, we're the lucky ones who were at least on the tenure track, and we were spared many of the indignities experienced by the adjunct precariat who work just as hard (if not harder) and make exponentially lower salaries.

As painful as it's been to be fired, it's even more painful that none of the people I've worked with for the past six years has said anything to me. Like, it's not my anxiety telling me that I'm not good enough, and it's not my anxiety telling me that the people I was friendly with didn't actually care about me. Employment in the twenty-first century, low-wage or otherwise, is deliberately designed to be exhausting, and it's difficult to make real friends or form lasting relationships if you are constantly, constantly working your ass off to avoid being judged as unproductive and insufficient. Friends are wonderful, but "friends" aren't going to pay the rent.

In the absence of real relationships, then, we've collectively developed a vague system of steadily decreasing goodwill in which your value as a person is measured solely by how productive you can be and how successful you are at regulating your behavior to remain on-brand.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

This hit home on multiple points for me and I wish I could contribute more than just nodding my head to every other sentence you wrote and going, "Same," but legit tho.

It's bothered me how lightning-fast people consume anything these days, whether it's content or even people. The need to be productive for every waking second is disgusting and I wish there was a way to hard reset society regarding that.

[lassarina]

I think the "attention economy" (for lack of a better term) and the hideous, hideous drumbeat of "networking" (and the implicit corollary that everyone one meets professionally is evaluated for usefulness in said network) has a lot to do with this; the fact that you're "so late" to media if you're generating content two weeks later (god, how long do people think stories take to create? art? how long did it take to consume the original media? what the actual tap dancing fuck? does anyone sleep?) has really cheapened, well, connection for lack of a better term: all of our discussions about connection have become transactional. And you can't build a relationship (in the sense of trust, connection, meaning, emotional impact) off of that. You can build a transaction, yes, but not a real friendship. And that makes me so sad because I don't need transactions or business networks; I need people who would go out of their way for me not because I have transactional points they want to redeem but because I matter to them. I like to think I treat my friends that way. I like to think I would do that, in fact, for a lot of the journal names that appear on my reading list, yours included; I just wish there was a way to make more people think that way.