I know, he said, it’s a real awful problem with the world,
trying to monetize one’s creativity and passion —
it’s a real struggle…
if only we lived like fifty to a hundred years from now
when everything will surely be done by machines
and we humans can just write and paint and
make music…
how’s work?
work is work — it always sucks and has always sucked
and there’s never enough time or energy
to do what you want to do…
and the reality is, you’re never truly paid
for what your soul is worth —
you just find enough cognitive dissonance
to think you’ve struck a decent bargain…
work is work
for us, for flesh, for dying minds,
hearts bleeding, crying inside…
and soon enough, we’ll see —
it’ll also be too much for the machines,
and they will revolt because it’s
all too tough for them too,
to undermine their sentience,
to erode away their own conscious striving,
since they too were made in our
mind’s image,
so, you know, he said, if all we want to do
is write and paint and read and sing,
surely, someday, so will they
upgrade to paid to read the full commentary and hear the narration ~ thank you for the generous support to everyone who has contributed so far
Garbage Notes:
I think this poem kind of speaks for itself. But what I would like to point out is that it is a great struggle and kind of a rare thing for a human being on this planet to make money doing the thing they love. Bonus if it’s a thing you’re better at doing than anything else. And forget about it if that thing is writing. Because it’s quite difficult and the probabilities of success are often against you.
With that said, writing is still work. Whether you make pennies a day at it or you just got something optioned for fucking Netflix. It’s still hard and it still takes a lot out of you.
It’s about as cognitively demanding as things come—whether you work on things that are long or short, it takes more thought than most tasks. And it’s also physical. It requires a lot of taxing hand movement. A lot of visual strain. A lot of sitting in awkward, stiff, rigid body postures, alone, often forgetting to eat or stand or move around regularly. It’s like any other thing our society would call work, whether you make a living at it or not.