Fuck It

Fuck it, I'm going to do it. I've never wanted to be a writer, but until I can find more dignified employment, I'll have to be. One has to earn a living somehow; and since the conventional process of prostituting oneself in private doesn't work, all that remains is to prostitute oneself in public, to the public—and I use the word in its literal, Latin sense. Prostituere means to display for sale, and that is what a writer does. He mummifies himself alive, cutting out his own heart and brain and putting them in a jar for the world to see and scrutinise. His profoundest emotions, his most radical convictions, what to the common man are the most private parts of his personality, are all on display. Compared with him, the woman who walks the street with her body for rent is a model of modesty.

But what else can I do? I've tried to work honestly, and for brief periods I've even managed it. When I haven't been studying, I've worked for money whenever I had the chance. I've delivered advertising leaflets for a taxi driver, and I've organised stock for an auctioneer; and as far as these men told me, I did the jobs well. But those were people I knew. It's not doing a job that defeats me; it's getting a job.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the diffidence that makes me reluctant to assert my own abilities. Maybe it's the objectivity that makes me know I'm not the best judge of them. Either of these things is likely to ruin one's CV; and if it doesn't, it'll severely hamper one's chances at interview. Or maybe it's the fact that I simply can't bring myself to care enough. I've read Robert Tressell and George Bernard Shaw and I've studied Economics at university. The knowledge that in a system with what Friedman called a natural rate of unemployment, and Marx called an industrial reserve army, my obtaining a job will mean that somebody else is kept out of one is enough to dampen the ardour of any job-seeker who isn't a psychopath. I know my Ayn Rand, and I believe in the morality of rational self-interest (although she and I have very different ideas about its political implications); but I don't seem to have a self-interest. I don't so much feel my own feelings as observe them from the outside, as if I were my own psychiatrist. I worry about being poor disinterestedly, as I would worry about a stranger in the same situation. "Something has to be done about that fellow," I tell myself; but I'd be lying if I said I had much motivation to do anything.

I've signed up to job-hunting websites, and applied for posts through them. I've pored through the classified section in the local newspaper and circled the advertisements that seemed applicable to me. I've walked through town centres and handed in my curriculum vitae to any business that claimed to be hiring. But I can't say I've done these things with the furious, desperate hunger warranted by the circumstances, or with the patient, 9 to 5 diligence of a man who means it. I could never find enough suitable posts to fill eight hours in a day. They all seemed to want experience, or a driving licence, or something else that I didn't have and was in no immediate position to get. In nearly every advertisement I saw, there was something that told me "you're not wanted here." After a while (and I didn't hold out for very long) I stopped bothering or pretending to try. Unemployment is a full-time job, but I get through about as much work as Peter Gibbons (see video).

It doesn't help that the work is so boring that I can feel myself getting stupider as I do it. I cannot focus on a list of vacancies, or read job descriptions, or—worst of all—fill in self-evaluation forms, for more than fifteen minutes at a time and remain fully conscious. If I read one more company description or person specification with the word "passionate," as if a corporation could possess a personality, or as if my ability to do the job were contingent on my giving a Jew's foreskin about anything but my own survival, I am going to go mad. If one more company tells me I have to be a "team player," as if capitalism did not demand that the man who works for wages be as much a businessman, as much an individualist, as determined to get what he could out of his fellows regardless of the social consequences, as the man who employs him, I am going to break something; and if anyone tells me this to my face, it may be his own face that gets a hole punched in it. And all the time I should be searching for work, the civilised, educated part of my brain, the part that has inclinations beyond survival, keeps working. The mental energy that should be used up in trying to find employment is instead employed thinking about everything else.

If I had a job, I'd be happy to leave it at thinking. The ideas in my head would stay there if I could afford to let them. But literary inspiration is like syphilis. Getting it might be fun, but if not treated, it will drive one mad. The more it is ignored, the more it will spread. Even so, if I had another source of income, what I wrote would remain private, kept solely for my own enjoyment. I would no more write for publication than I would jerk off in front of a camera and post the video on YouTube. But common decency and secrecy must come second to self-sufficiency. Shaw, reminiscing about his early adulthood, said "I did not throw myself into the struggle for existence. I threw my mother." But he could not do so for ever, and no more can I. Eventually, he had to live by his words in the most literal sense; and so, until I can find something better, must I. So you'll be hearing more from me. I do not justify myself by claiming that you need to hear what I have to say, or that I am the first person to have said it, or even that I am the best person to say it. In most cases, none of these things will be true. In none of them will they all be true. There are too many classics to run out of in one lifetime, even if one spent every waking moment reading, for me to honestly claim that the world needs new writers at all, let alone this one. The only justification I offer is that I need to write, and I need the money.