"The Employment Machine"

Thoreau, writing to his Harvard class of 1837, a year into his Walden experiment wrote: “I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry…My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on Earth.” I would like to be able to recite this when others ask what I do. As if my standing there isn’t sufficient, I must further explain myself. What a bother!

Some (who are they?) may think I have avoided or resisted “choosing a career” or have not tried hard enough. However, to me, fulfilling employment has simply seemed to evade and dodge me at every turn.

I keep seeing on my Facebook feed that “procrastination is not laziness” but proof of unresolved childhood trauma. While I can believe it, I have no distinct memory I can pinpoint. Therefore, I feel helpless to do anything about it. You can see how it becomes a circular problem!

As most are aware (who reads this anyway!?), I have always had a distinct pull towards author documentaries, author biographies and movies about authors’ lives. Is this a coincidence? I am beginning to wonder… From Emily, (about Emily Bronte), Little Women, to Miss Austen Regrets, writer’s lives have fascinated me. How did they do it, when they had societal expectations to be a companion and mother, or perform some other low-level role? Even Anne of Green Gables showed the reality of Anne Shirley balancing teaching, writing and her romps with her bosom friend (never mind figuring out if Gilbert Blythe really was a “chum”.)

My draw to Henry David Thoreau has equaled if not exceeded that of those authoress’ lives. Gender aside, perhaps because he wrote critically and satirically of his own day and age, never accepting their customs, from their newspapers to their ways of making a living. Perhaps because he also was considered lazy, romantically impotent, and a “career failure” by the age of 35. Perhaps because he never married or had children. Perhaps because he was most likely Asexual and/or on the Spectrum. Perhaps because he was a writer when others thought he was “doing nothing.”

While writing is not preaching, lawyering, or doctoring, it’s not blowing bubbles either. Or if it is, it’s doing it in a more solid form.

I want to look to Thoreau’s writing, his journals and his essays, for how he fought against the “Employment Machine”—and look at his clever quips as arrows he shot against it.

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I go to his master work Walden, which has the most currency for my metaphorical joint stock company. A “course and boisterous money-making fellow” asked Thoreau to help him to dig and build a bank wall for 3 weeks. His response could have been adapted for use in a more philosophically literate SNL:

“The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me….I prefer to finish my education at a different school.” That’s right, you tell ‘em!

He writes that if it were suggested that individuals should throw stones over a wall, then throw them back over simply for money, they would be insulted. The sense, of course, would be that this action is not only irrational but demeaning. “But many are no more worthily employed now.” Boom! This is the honest to goodness truth. No offense to data entry jobs, or positions where the Tin Man’s song, “if I only had a Brain”, can be heard playing between the water cooler and the cubicles.

“In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.” I heartily believe this to be true.

“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earn money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.” Cheats himself! PREACH! Remember he was referring to jobs back in the 1840’s and 1850’s…just think of the types of jobs people have now. Jobs are less about supporting one’s quality living and more about supporting one’s daily suffering/dying.

“What most gets paid for, is often the least desirable to do. You are paid for being something less than a man.” No need to shuffle off this mortal coil at 83; you can become a zombie at 23!

Not only are you paid for being less than a human, but you may also just be being paid less, period. The human social services (which in my opinion are the most needed, and often hardest) are the LEAST paid: Childcare, Senior Care, Nursing, Teaching, etc…Women’s work one might have once said. Now it’s just demeaned and sidelined seemingly without cause. Outdated pay scales and unaccountable prejudice do not die so easily.

“Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. [I feel ya Thoreau; right there with ya!] I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient…I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” Burn!

“Does Wisdom work in a tread-mill?” It does not. It should not! Thoreau’s notion of a tread-mill is different than our own modern one, of course (he was not thinking of Planet Fitness then) yet both meanings suffice in their metaphorical satirical accuracy.

Again, in his Journals, he strikes a blow to the ol’ railroad spike of tradition:

April 27, 1854

“You cannot hear music and noise at the same time….Most men are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum, and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man’s nobler faculties.” While it is for money most men work, the thought is they aren’t even in touch with their higher faculties to engage themselves artistically or creatively even if they had the chance. They drudgingly work because they cannot think of what else to do.

Thoreau compares himself to a portrait painter he heard of who went around painting the nobility. He compares himself to a portrait painter in his surveying. While he would have preferred to go around lecturing, he never or seldom got asked or paid to do so, whereas his surveying was asked for and paid accordingly. He says anyone in New England could do the work he does; yet not everyone could go around philosophizing. Yet, because little is asked of us, our best is not given.

“All the while that they use only your humbler faculties, your higher unemployed faculties, like an invisible cimetar, are cutting them in twain. Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed! That is to deny God and know him not, and he, accordingly, will know not of them.” (Dec 22, 1853)

And from his essay “Civil Disobedience” we hear about this machine of Society and our duty to fight against it: “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” The machine takes on many forms then as now. We must fight on.

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Thoreau went to Nature—to where he felt the most at home— to live deliberately and not when he came to die, discover he had not lived. What is so wrong with that? Why do we have to give up living intentionally or in accordance with the rhythms of nature in order to have a career?

Why must we go into artificially lit, white-walled buildings (with B level wall art) doing work we despise or demeans us, when we’d rather go into the woods—which calm our nervous systems—and spin webs of finest philosophical silk? Where is that job posting!?

The reality was that Thoreau was not unemployed or even under employed. Beyond everything—he was a philosopher—a contemporary critic. By his own words,

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”—Walden

What I love about Thoreau is that his words matched his actions. He had his own garden where he grew his own food. He abstained from grains, sugar and coffee so as not to aid the slave trade. Some may harp about his not doing his own laundry or going home to dinner one night a week. The reality is he cared about his freedom, but he didn’t leave his friends or his family out of the equation.

When he wrote that he found a way to live unemployed, to keep himself at the top of his game, and “ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on Earth”, he meant it. As a philosopher and poet—he was every bit a success, even when no one saw it. His eventual publications only further proved it.

No exit interview necessary.

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