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God I want a cigarette.
He started to think about the department meeting he had at the end of the week: he was already dreading it. Somehow, people still thought that academic life was glamorous, but what it really was, was total bullshit: full of busy work. At least fifty percent of what he did, as a tenure track professor was bureaucratic detritus; committees, interviewing job candidates, data-collecting, emails, meetings, constant anxiety about his own upcoming tenure review.
How many people were just sitting in offices on Facebook messenger, complaining about their office or reading something stupid? Why was the obsession with employment so great that people were paid to pretend to do something rather to be allowed to do something creative and life-giving?
American capitalism was such that either you were unsuccessful and poor, doing mean, ugly labor; or successful and trapped in easy but meaningless, soul-destroying labor.
How many of his friends from grad school were too prideful to admit that their Harvard degrees at best bought the right to be comfortably pointless; to ascend to some position that they would then spend the rest of their lives preparing to retire from. Much of it was in tech, where you could retire early, actually — but the tech people he knew who had retired by 40 were terribly bored. They hadn’t acquired a value system that allowed them to live with empathy, joy, and spontaneity; they could only enjoy what they bought; their idea of cultural experience was getting drinks…
