What a beautiful goddamn quote.
At the surface level, it is not true of me. On weeks where my time on the clock rolls over 40 hours, or where incredibly understaffed and stressed, labor chases me Beyond the Wall of sleep, and I deal with customers, coworkers, and an array of shitty management in an endless rehash of the day's events.
But the quote is from the incredible James Baldwin, speaking about the mythos surrounding the amarican dream: "I have no dream job, I do not dream of labor."
And I don't either. Not really. Certainly, not in a capitalist sense, where one is required to work merely even to survive. I want to create, to write, to draw, to make music, to put things out into the world. I want to travel, I want to pursue photography, I want to learn to metalwork, to refine the carpentry skills I do have. I want to observe, to preserve, to help maintain this amazing planet we live on, to help the flora, the fauna, and the culture of humans last as long as possible.
Do these take effort? Work? Labor? of course! But language is representative and flexible. Labor as "exerting effort" and labor as our bodies and capabilities as a resource for capitalism are two different things. Baldwin is saying he refuses to give into capitalist realism, and that we are so far much more than the work we do to earn a living.
To reword the quote a little, "my highest aspirations are not inherently tied to fighting for survival in a world of forced scarcity."
I repair cars and sell car parts for a living. My job title doesn't even make the level of mechanic. I don't have a college degree. I have worked a variety of jobs and none of them have defined me in terms of a career. I just work.
On the inverse, I have never been paid for anything I've written. Everything I have ever published has never earned me a cent, and there is a very solid chance that will be the case for the rest of my life. Would I like for my writing to earn me enough to live? Absolutely! It would be a shocking turn of events, and come with issues of its own, sure, but it would be rewarding for me.
In a world where I did not need to trade my mind and body and time for the basic necessities, I would write every moment I could, and never even touch a car again.
This is Microblogvember! We're going off of @NoelBWrites's Microblogvember prompt list!