Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. Iāve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldnāt be the people who carry things for a living.Why donāt websites hire service people to write about food? How do ārestaurant journalistsā exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, āa website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,ā and I wanted to laugh. I suspect itās easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
a few people directly recommended this piece to me & they were so correct in that impulse that i am going to quote multiple parts from it that intensely resonated
They say that once you start making real money, you start to swing conservative; I found the opposite to be true in my case. I became more radical, more left-wing, when I got a salaried position at a major software company. Having more money than I could think of things to spend it on, +insane amounts of perks, from doing what was probably the lightest job I'd had up until that point; learning about how miniscule the capital gains tax is compared to how they tax actual bust-your-ass wages; listening to my co-workers, who were all making far more than I was, bitch and scrimp out every dollar when they tipped at lunch so they wouldn't go over the required minimum. Suddenly being treated with incredible respect for performing a job I regarded as an amusing intellectual exercise. Discovering for certain that the most miserable jobs are for some reason the worst-paid and least respected, while you can get paid mountains of cash for doing almost nothing, and that that is 'respectability.'
I think the reason is, despite being educated, despite somehow getting to go to college, I've never thought myself one of these people, I've never been 'in,' I never belonged, and so I didn't feel being professional was my birthright or some fortress I had to help defend against the hordes. I was amazed to find myself in that position, which kind of says it all. Most people at that social stratum seem to regard it as normality, although apparently that isn't enough; they have to convince themselves they deserve it, which necessarily means those less fortunate are deficient somehow.
