It starts with the parking. The job is sometimes crosstown and sometimes close by, but unless you're getting gas you don't think on the drive about how the gas isn't factored into your payment.
It always starts with the fact that you have to factor in time to park, which sometimes takes twenty minutes; occasionally more; and then you're hit with the parking fee. You should remember that parking fee, but it surprises you every time, and the indignity always bears a slight sting.
And then there are those moments when the parking is free, and you come back to your car with a ticket for being an inch over the line which costs you more than your day's wages.
Then there's the walk from the car past life's two tiers. The eaters in the restaurants, and the poor outside them. Some of the poor are panhandlers, some are just waiting for the bus home, all of them are missing teeth - and just from the lines in their faces and their uncombed hair your mind creates an entire life story for each of them.
And then you get to your temporary place of work, where you have to pack your own lunch or dinner - if they even allow food from outside, because they often make you pay for your own, and it's either that or risk low blood sugar in a high pressure situation. Some choose low blood sugar, with inevitable results.
Then you see your coworkers and four waves of emotion pass through you in immediate succession: excitement, affection, exasperation, and trepidation. They're not just coworkers, they're fellow soldiers in an army, and however hard we work, you're never sure their efforts are enough to save the mission. You worry one of them will screw it up for you, and worry still more that the screwup will be you, and you'll have to live with the guilt. By the end of the shift, you're all either too drunk or too sober to not be pissed off at each other.
So then you go to work: music, food, clothing, academia, theaters, galleries, sets, festivals, even classrooms, and all of them hustles. You can never stop hustling: networking for the next job, negotiating a better deal, trying to put together a vision nobody else cares about because they're all too busy trying to put together their own vision; because everything a creative person has can disappear tomorrow as though it never existed. You see possibilities all around the room: for achievements, for friendships, for romance, and especially for money. And well over 99 percent of those possibilities are a dead end.
Your coworkers are your fellow soldiers, the people you serve are the citizens whom you protect and fight for, and yet every partnership, no matter how close, is in perpetual threat of disintegration by tragedy - especially with your closest partners. You're in perpetual danger of bringing your home stress to work, and perpetual danger of bringing your work stress home. However tired, however worried you are about your health, you give 110% and try to be there on the good faith that the people you're with will do the same for you - knowing fully well that every person along for the ride with you has stories about people who weren't there - sometimes the people you still work with. Thriving is out of the question: it's an endurance test of one humiliation to the next amid the lifelong effort to avoid living death.
Tragedy implies a fall, so we had to start from somewhere high; and living death is not real death. Living death does the people we love the service of not inflicting the full extent of how this life damages us - so they might be spared the death we live. However much we suffer and stress, we are not the wretched of the earth, and people needn't feel sorry for us.
Because they need to fear us. We are so much more dangerous than the real deprived, and the rest of you should walk around us with terror. It won't be the poor who lead the next storming of the Capitol, it will be the working class, and it may well be the OTHER working class - the CREATIVE class.
The creative class is the 40 million Americans who exist within a system designed to maintain our perpetual failure. Every prosperous person in the country knows in their bones that their outsize prosperity is maintained by two lower middle classes - one is the blue collar guys who fix their houses, the other is the creative class who decorates them. One saves your life, one makes life worth living. The first may be more necessary than the second, but if you offend the creative class, we can end your prosperity much more quickly than they can.
In society after society, we are the ignition that lights your fire. We created your society every bit as much as its builders, and we can burn it to the ground. Look at all the revolutionaries you meet: what do they all have in common? They aren't necessarily poor, and they're not materially desperate:
They were passed over. They were neglected. They were humiliated. They were told that their gifts were of no value to people. In many cases, they were bullied; and no one is more likely to be a bully than those who were bullied themselves.
We are so close to simply storming the capitol in exactly the way blue collar rurals did. But we have the education, we have the perception, and god knows we have the will to power. In devaluing us, you put into peril of everything in which you find safety. .
I wrote the next two paragraphs a few months ago:
"There are always these little sub-markets and niches which corporations cannot possibly keep up with; and these little restaurants and stores and songwriters and theater companies and adjuncts and school teachers; innovate from the flimsiest of utilities out of necessity and do things found literally nowhere else in the world. But making a living requires the backing of a company, or a government, or a civic organization. Without one of the three, it is, in the long run, impossible. Every prosperous person in the entire country knows that, but their outsize prosperity depends on the hand-to-mouth existence of the various weirdos they went to school with who exist outside their nine dots. Most of these oddballs spend their existences in jobs for which they are unfit, do it mediocrely, and live lives of quiet desperation. Eventually, they develop the credit score that they can get a small business loan to achieve their ambition, for which they rarely get more one shot.
And, almost inevitably, their business fails, and back to decades of quiet desperation they go. And somehow, the country thinks this is a sustainable state of affairs that will not result in guaranteed civil unrest. Every town in America has their own hidden places and communities which the town misfits have to construct entirely on their own. Every person in the country falls over themselves in competition to find those unique things nobody else knows about to which they can introduce their friends. And there are new ones constantly springing up, because after two or three years, the older ones are constantly failing. In addition to all the colossal chain restaurants, there are always dozens of new restaurants in every large town in the US, most of which never last more than a couple years. The same goes in cities for clothing stores, concert venues, bars and breweries, and interior decoration. Meanwhile, there are a colossal number of artists and academics of all types trying to make careers, and rarely ever succeed; some of whom are far better than people with Hollywood contracts or tenured Ivy League professors. Every city has hundreds of unsigned bands who break up the moment they get good because they can no longer afford to rehearse. And there are literally thousands of independent films that are never seen anywhere but in film festivals."
All which creatives ever wanted to do for you, literally all of it, is to give your life meaning and morale. That's it. The ways we keep you alive may not be obvious, but we're the literal difference between you being fully human and being animals. Create a world where creative people can't make a living, and you create a world at war.
We are the reason you don't shoot yourselves. Everything you look forward to every day was made possible by a hundred people from the creative class. You think our value is nebulous, but what demonstrable value do you, the white collar douchebags, bring to the world? You think you deserve to keep all that money you make, and your justification for it is that you make money. You justify your selfishness with second hand cliches from totalitarian philosophers you've never even read or heard of, and then you call it 'liberty' and 'personal responsibility.' Whom among you but the doctors and scientists can point to the way you've provided communities with anything more than drudgery?
People view creatives as crazy, peculiar, generally unstable agents of chaos; they euphemistically call us 'free spirits' and 'dreamers' who 'march to a different drummer.' But there is no spirit more fettered than those who live inside the humane world. No one is more forced by realism into compromise than a person working in the humanities, no one is more forced by tragedy into limitations. People have no reason to dream in their waking hours if they're fulfilled.
Civilizations are never ended by blue collar guys who act before they think. They're ended by people who can do nothing but think and dream in a society where people think they can do without dreams, but our ideas make the entirety of your frontal lobe's neurons. When we think agreeable ideas, your society prospers. When we think disagreeable ones, your society eats itself alive.
Look around the world of 2022. Every day since 2015, new thousands awaken with a realization seeping into their pours that a new revolutionary idea, finally, explains everything to them: the beginning, the end, the whole of their lives and struggle from the mouth of their recalled time to the present moment - and even if the idea's not true, they feel the flame of hope burning particularly for them for the very first time in their existences. Their humiliations have a name, their suffering has a meaning, and they can direct their struggles toward the day when life exists as an experience better than to be endured. Every day, a new piece of subconscious wiring rebuilds itself to the specifications of their new beliefs, assumptions they didn't even know they had are questioned and knocked down with new assumptions to replace them. And even if the creatives won't be the ones to actually storm, the violence to come will be perpetrated by the people of action we inspired.
We are the creatives, and we will simply take what you deny us. The human spirit lies in its imagination, and long after all your notions about this world die, we will still be here. Will will end you, then we will bury you, and long after you are forgotten, we will be remembered.
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