being human

and silly and frivolous, and what we will

I recently told one of my close friends that I worry about how much responsibility they take on, and that I hope people do not take advantage of their willingness to selflessly expend energy in service of other people. They responded with: “I just feel like I’m not doing enough. Like I need to do more.”

I tried to tease out this thread a bit more over the next hour or so. They told me that it wasn’t all negative — they’re reading a book about wellbeing and burnout, after all. But didn’t this just serve as something instrumental to translating effort into “productivity,” rather than just being intrinsically healthy? They mentioned that they have consistently gone to the gym over the last few weeks, but admitted that even working out “is something I need to do so I can be stronger and better and healthier so I can do more.”

I’ll admit that part of why I engaged so deeply with this conversation, and why it has stuck with me so much that I feel compelled to write a longer exposition here, is because at times it felt as though my friend were holding up a mirror and I were talking to myself. I apologized for getting up on my soapbox mid–text conversation, but I also recognized that I craved the excuse to say some things that I had been avoiding telling myself.¹

For a while, I had and largely continue to have a discordant relationship with leisure. Those who knew me in college may have received Google Calendar invitations at some point for any given reason, even just for grabbing lunch or “hanging out,” part of my continuous attempt to optimize the available time in a day, relaxation (and sleep) be damned. I was motivated by a genuine fear of “wasting time,” and I somehow managed to gamify my social life in the process. It is an exercise in humility and irony to look back at what I considered worthy of my time back then: countless hours spent on silly, frivolous activities, and unfortunately not always enough on classwork.²

And even now, I have to catch myself and adjust, or at least question, my habitual thought patterns. Is there anything inherently wrong with silly and frivolous? Maybe the issue is that the intent behind the time investment (notice how we use language like “investment” to imply a future return on simply choosing to do something for a certain amount of time, “spending” time a certain way) was so contrary to how I perceive that investment in retrospect.

Then again, this person I am now who thinks to myself how foolish I was to squander so many opportunities for more optimal time usage! is the same person who carries those maybe-less-optimal experiences with me, silly and frivolous they may be. Perhaps they impact me in ways I do not know.

Choosing something silly and frivolous intentionally, on the other hand, is a beautiful thing. I brought four juggling balls halfway across the world when I moved to Buenos Aires. This journey began fifteen years ago when, as part of a circus education program at my elementary school, I sensibly decided among several compelling choices — spinning plates, Chinese yo-yo, devil’s sticks, even being a clown! — to opt for the humble art of juggling. In reality, I don’t remember whether I chose this path or whether it was assigned to me, but I ran with it, learning new tricks and eventually graduating from three to four balls (two different techniques entirely).

Me, age 12, with the same juggling balls that traveled with me to Buenos Aires.

Now, years later, I am blessed my the decision I made last year to forgo other perhaps “more useful” items in my luggage to bring along four juggling balls, which I can break out every so often or bring along somewhere as a party trick. Not to mention that, even absent the physical presence of the props themselves, I can invoke this silly, frivolous skill as a fun fact whenever I please — give me three (or four!) objects of generally uniform and moderate heft, ideally nonbreakable, and I can test the limits of my abilities.

In small ways, we can resist the forces that encourage us to translate every minute of our lives into productivity, as if we must have something to show for our waking hours or else they have been wasted. These same forces attempt to co-opt our attention through our screens, flooding our brains with dopamine and exploiting every spare second with (literally) mind-numbing content. My attention span has certainly fallen victim to these phenomena, and I’ve begun deleting social media apps off my phone for days at a time in an effort to fix my addled brain.

I tell myself that I “should” read or write or work out or cross at least one more thing off my to-do list, but I end up getting overwhelmed so I “take a break” (from what?) to lie in bed and scroll, scroll, and 15 minutes pass and the sun dips a bit in the sky and 15 more minutes pass and I haven’t accomplished anything but I did see some Instagram reels: a café I should check out, which I “followed” but whose name I’ve forgotten; some tips for improving my tennis serve, although while lying down I didn’t experiment with rotating my shoulder or elevating my elbow; some comedy sketches that made me chuckle (and some that didn’t); hundreds of microscopic lobotomies that I don’t and won’t remember, that make it harder to remember. And I haven’t accomplished anything but would I have accomplished anything in those thirty minutes anyway? Lather, rinse, repeat. I could’ve picked up my juggling balls.

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In December I wrote about the gospel of wealth and the Gilded Age, with all its “garish displays of extreme wealth,” in a discussion of money and society going back to the life of Jesus Christ (and before! I recommend giving it a read if you haven’t yet). In the late 1800s, the robber barons began to launder their own reputations by officiating a grotesque marriage between godliness and wealth accumulation — retroactively blessing their manipulation and exploitation of workers, state institutions, and the Earth.³

There had never been such a flagrant class divide, monopolies and financial speculators wreaking havoc completely unchecked, not just in the United States but across the world. At the same time, naturally, labor movements began to pick up steam. Across several industries dominated by massive conglomerates (perhaps chief among them being steel and railroads), workers regularly toiled away at sixty-hour weeks of backbreaking labor yet still had to ration food and make sacrifices to survive. Amid this backdrop, coupled with fierce repression against anyone who even hinted at resistance against this broken system, organized labor nonetheless provided a space for communal flourishing and collective imagination.

Images from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

Among the central demands of global labor movements in the 1870s was the eight-hour workday, which would not be realized in most industries for several decades. The platforms of organizations such as the Knights of Labor advocated generally for workers to be freed from the capitalist pressures that demanded more and more work, speed, and effort for the same (or less) pay. The eight-hour workday distilled this wish into something quantifiable that people could rally behind.

The song “Eight Hours,” written by I.G. Blanchard in 1878, became a popular anthem for the labor movement, in many ways illustrating their priorities more clearly than in a political platform or draft legislation. “We want to feel the sunshine / And we want to smell the flow'rs,” went the lyrics. “If our life's to be filled with drudg'ry / What need of a human soul?”

The song did not just signal this desire to experience “the earth and the fullness thereof,” as Samuel Gompers responded to the question of “What does labor want?” in 1893. It expressed an intention on the part of organized labor to do everything in their power to achieve this goal, to disrupt the forces that sought to keep them down. The second half of the song has the “bent and battered armies” of labor “mustering all its powers” to “fill the world with light.” Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, there would be massive swells of mass mobilization in pursuit of the eight-hour workday.

My favorite part of this song, though, is the chorus: what everyone fought for. Implicit in the eight-hour workday was “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest / Eight hours for what we will.” Feeling the sunshine and smelling the flow’rs are but a couple of examples of what we will, but they exemplify what is most beautiful about the song and the movement it emblematized. In a society that was undeniably hostile to the idea that workers should be anything but workers, and that actively sought to extract every bit of their living essence to serve the money machine, those same people set their sights on nourishment of the soul, nothing less.

I can’t help but compare the aspirations and successes of these labor movements to the depressing reality of contemporary American work culture, which I have the unique experience of observing from afar as I’ve left my corporate career behind to freelance in a different hemisphere. Eating lunch at my desk, which I did more often than not at my previous job, is for the most part unthinkable here in Argentina. That’s just one example. Even outside of the workplace, there’s this unshakeable obsession with filling our time with fruitful, self-betterment endeavors like learning a new language or going to the gym, exacerbated by social media influencers who definitely have their shit together (and so can you!).⁴

What bothers me about these tendencies aren’t the recommended activities themselves. Surely meditating in the morning or going on walks or taking classes to learn a new skill are all healthy and inherently good! It is the way in which these pursuits are prescribed and encouraged that rubs me the wrong way. It’s as though we have lost sight of “what we will” in favor of “what we should.” We should be doing something, we should be doing more.

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I was discussing movies with a group of friends recently, and I described one film as “indulgent” before hastily adding that I had enjoyed it.⁵ I genuinely meant it as compliment, momentarily forgetting the word’s negative connotation until seeing my friends’ sour faces at my distasteful expression toward a film they liked. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since that conversation.

There’s something about words like “indulgent” and “luxuriant” that provoke a twinge of guilt, as if giving into our desires and allowing ourselves particular luxuries are excesses to be ashamed of. I’ve seen it used to criticize music and writing that (perhaps) panders to an author/artist’s personal preferences without considering their audience. And, of course, more generally it can be used to describe those who take to particular vices, like drinking or sex, that are best consumed in moderation.

Maybe it’s self-indulgent of me to even say this, as a writer who is writing for writing’s sake, but why shouldn’t we allow ourselves the things we enjoy or desire? Is it indulgent to spend time on something that may be silly or frivolous? So be it. We’re human; we have urges and preferences, things that make us tick and people we love. The most brilliant examples of our gifts and passions are those that are untethered from questions of productivity and success, whose worth has nothing to do with money.

While we were having the conversation about productivity and “doing more,” I texted my friend: “I just want you to not deny yourself pleasures and leisure and fun just because it may seem like a ‘waste of time.’” These indulgences make us more complete people; nurturing our interests and values nourishes the soul. It was something I needed to tell myself, too. I give into the pressures of should, should, should, and it overwhelms me at times.

I clearly don’t have all the answers, but that’s okay. Allowing myself some simple indulgences, or just being gentle with myself if I go a few days without writing or “accomplishing” something, or if I take two months to post a new piece on Substack, or taking ten minutes to master a juggling trick — it’s all part of the process.

It’s being human.

“Should he, to whom the Maker / His glorious image gave, / The meanest of His creatures crouch, / A bread-and-butter slave? / Let the shout ring down the valleys / And echo from every hill.” [Me, in Patagonia, enjoying the view.]

1. And, well, what is a blog but an online soapbox? I won’t apologize for this one, though.

2. Chief among these activities was Model United Nations, which is essentially theatre (or LARPing) for international relations nerds and consumed large swathes of my time during my undergrad years. The social element of this charade was indispensable; my friends were doing it too, so it must be normal to spend so much time and expend so much energy (and lose so much sleep, figuratively and literally) on it!

3. One method of Gilded Age–era reputation laundering (not a term I claim credit for, by the way) was the founding of universities such as Vanderbilt, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Duke. Of course, not all US institutions of higher education were founded by businessmen, but they essentially behave like corporations, beholden to profit margins. I lived in a college town for years, so I am familiar with the tensions that arise when universities are also real estate magnates and political powerhouses, but expect special treatment for providing the unquestionably important service of education. Just as businesses in the United States insert themselves within the political system through lobbying and dark money (I wrote about this for a foreign policy publication in March), universities are an inextricable part of local politics.

This element of American colleges and universities has come to the forefront in recent months as thousands of young people risked their physical safety and future livelihoods to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has recently accelerated as the IDF attacks Rafah (striking an area that Israel had previously declared a “safe zone”) in flagrant violation of both international law and intrinsic morality. Among the well-documented and straightforward demands shared by the vast majority of these campus encampments is the divestment of their respective universities’ endowments from aiding the war effort in Gaza, mostly pertaining to investments in weapons manufacturers and technology firms. In this way, these students (and, in many cases, faculty and other affiliates) are standing against their own direct financial complicity in war crimes and atrocities, not to mention holding the US government accountable in general.

Let’s not forget that many of the same businessmen who created these universities, foundations, and other institutions to launder their reputations got their start in war profiteering during the Civil War. It’s built into the business model.

It was not lost on me that so many of these universities’ leaders were more than willing to call in law enforcement to brutalize and arrest peaceful protesters — students for whose safety they are directly responsible — in the same way that the business magnates of the Gilded Age routinely called upon the (notoriously corrupt) police to quell any labor movements seeking to upset the status quo. For me, it was particularly poignant to see how the NYPD descended upon and arrested dozens of NYU students in Gould Plaza, which is named after Jay Gould, once reviled as the most hated man in America. Gould is well known for attempting to crash the US dollar by cornering the gold market, leading to the widespread financial devastation of Black Friday (1869) that adversely impacted millions of poor Americans, not to mention his total lack of business ethics and scruples. Gould also personally authorized strikebreakers, including Pinkerton agents, to break up organized railroad workers, for which he was responsible for several deaths. This digression is already quite long, so I won’t beat a dead horse — the thread should be apparent.

4. This isn’t even to mention the excess of content out there on the virtues of hustle culture, of maintaining a “grindset” to maximize every waking hour, mostly in terms of accumulating money (which we’ve already established is not inherently virtuous).

5. We were talking about The Society of the Snow on Netflix, a movie that recounts the harrowing incident of a plane crash in the Andes in 1972, and what the surviving passengers had to do to stay alive. The film is almost two and a half hours long, and one of the critiques that I had heard from several friends is that it was longer than it needed to be. I meant to say, however, that its indulgence was a virtue, that its message was strengthened by how it lingered on different characters and relationships even while being primarily driven by its dramatic plot.