Subway Diary

Quit my job…so — until the next one starts in six weeks — I’m no longer taking the subway at 6:30am — just whenever — in the middle of the afternoon; blissfully, or anxiously, depending on my mood.

“A workplace with countless rows of desks.” by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

It’s really insane what 8am-4pm daily labor has done to me. My eyes have grown weaker from being on my laptop so often; I have trouble concentrating on a book; for the first time in my life, my brain has begun to register a book as a foreign object; my eyes don’t necessarily automatically scan the pages anymore. I have to retrain my mind.

And my soul —

My soul more than my mind —

We need to get rid of the idea that we have a life just because we’re alive; nothing could be less true — nothing could be more antithetical to the spirit of life, in fact.

What do I want to do with my six weeks of unpaid vacation? I want to finish a novel, direct a play, lay in the sun, turn off my phone — read. Study languages. It’s ridiculous: I want to cram years worth of life into this little slice of time.

A close friend told me recently that medieval peasants only labored about five hours a day — and that much of the calendar was taken up with holidays. And this anecdote squares with a theory of mine: that culturally, we have created the narrative of progress, in order to justify a decreasing average quality of life — in order to justify the horror of monotonous 21st century labor.

We have longer, richer lives than ever before — according to the measurements invented by economists and politicians. But how much time do we spend in celebration? In the sun? In the fields and trees? How much time do we spend together?