NEURODIVERGENT MUSINGS ON WORK
What the Hell is Grind Culture and Why is it so Toxic and Ableist?
Why moving to the top is not always a good thing.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!
(Mario Savio, Sicilian American activist from mid twentieth century)
I’m good at doing more. But maybe I don’t need to do more. What are we going to be drawn to doing? What we’re already doing!
These are approximations of what my therapist has told me about my tendency to hyper commit and over commit. It is also an apt description of my attempts to fit into what people call Grind Culture. For a long time now, I have been trying to ‘excel’. I’ve been looking for the ‘next big thing’, some kind of opportunity or breakthrough, some kind of enterprise that could carry me from having ‘no life’, to one brimming with excitement, affluence, resources and recognition. As if I needed to do any of that to feel fully human. I tried and tried so hard. I got jobs I couldn’t do because they were too traditional or the expectations were too traditional, but nevertheless carried a bit of weight about them. I work at a library, it’s pretty sweet. I work with kids, it’s pretty cool and I help them out a lot. These kinds of things seem to carry with them all the connotations I mentioned. And it was certainly better than saying, “I have nothing.” And, I could say these things as a cover up for how I was really feeling: Stressed and fatigued, emotionally desperate.
“I have nothing.” Deep inside, I was telling myself, “I am nothing”.
It wasn’t that I was not content working in retail or a so called ‘mundane’ job. I’m not looking to be rich. In fact, I would have happily worked at Target had they not denied me multiple times right off the bat. But such was my drive, and my misplaced ambition, that I felt forced into these positions. I literally forced myself into a visit into the ER because I had a bad day at work where I lost my control and started to yell quite aggressively at some kids who weren’t even part of the program I was working with, as part of the school system where I lived at the time. I felt convinced to go in because if I didn’t go in, get some immediate help of some kind, that I would fail at this job because something was wrong with me and nobody would hire me. After all, I had gotten denied at Target. What kind of person in their late 20’s gets denied at Target? That too after not having a stable job for majority of their adult life?
That’s how my mind worked at that time.
I have a feeling that many many many people are experiencing some form of what I am describing. It may not be the exact experience. I certainly hope that others aren’t getting into confrontations or behaving inappropriately the way I did that day at the Discovery Club. Regardless, the idea of ‘grind culture’ seems to permeate everyday life. You are only as good as what you produce, what you excel in, what you can do with yourself. If those demands weren’t there, then how else would you explain trends like ‘quiet quitting’ and national movements like the so called, ‘Great Resignation?’ There are even movements in China that amount to the same kind of ideals.
Think about that.
Pursuit of economic success, at an individual level, comes at a price. Economic affluence, when addictively consumed, leads to catastrophe.
And to be quite frank, Grind Culture is toxic and rooted in outdated modes of ableism. There were times when people worked their asses off in ‘mundane’ jobs to become affluent or to provide for their families. But those days are over, and they never applied to a lot of people anyways. Nowadays, the kinds of jobs where you just worked and worked and worked are gone. Factory jobs, coal mines, those kinds of things. They are gone, or limited in scope and they don’t give much benefit back to the people working them. Why do you think that jobs like food service, cleaning agencies, are being swallowed up by minorities and immigrants? For them, it’s a way up to a better life, and I don’t discount that. I don’t mean to sound racist or discriminatory, but there are a lot of advantages to working here in the US as opposed to Burma, Ethiopia, or Mexico. And it might be harder for them to move up and get cushy jobs anyway.
(I worked with people from all three of those countries when I was at the Alton Memory care doing food service.)
Instead, you have the ideal of pushing for degrees and getting cushy jobs, maybe in IT or some other kind of profession. That kind of ideal is being combined with an unrealistic hustle culture, a combination that doesn’t work in most cases.
True, there may be some reasons and advantages that some countries and cultures have by pursuing this kind of ideal. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The level of success you achieve in Lagos, Nigeria, by getting to Victoria Island has nothing to do with self worth. It has to do with making sure you are on the opposite end of living in a place like Makoko, the infamous floating slum. And if you are living in Makoko, what are the chances of getting to Victoria Island, the closest area to Manhattan you are ever going to see in an African city? You’re screwed.
And here comes the Ableism. Do you know how many people with disabilities wish they could be working their asses off in the way I am describing so they can feel ‘normal?’ I myself am one of them. And there are countless people who not only have bought into this but feel the need to go down this path unguided. Such an attitude has gotten me into trouble as well.
I am not an entrepeneur. I am not living a cushy lifestyle based off of any kind of traditional path. I am not even an aspiring artist in some ways, because aspiring means that you have to get somewhere. Art is not about getting somewhere. Yes, you have to make a living as an artist but if you are hyper focused on opportunities to do that, where the hell does your art go? I can’t be making deep and fantastical stories like my novel in progress, Shadow’s Zenith, if I am thinking too hard about making it big. And as for doing traditional jobs, I can’t really do them to a large degree. Look what happened at the library job I had. I’d work 16 hours a week and my brain was fried. That too after toiling for two months to achieve an expectation that I was required or expected to have surpassed within two weeks! Same thing for double timing my memoir class with my art of film class.
Not everyone can do these things.
Even if I feel like I’m ‘supposed’ to be doing these things because, I don’t know, it’s what my friends are doing and I’ve been beyond broke for my whole adult life and no one notices what I’m doing and living this kind of hyperdrive hustle life is the only cure to fix that problem and by extension fix my life…this attitude doesn’t bring anything good. It’s made me miserable.
I have a lot of capabilities going for me, that’s true. But there are people who have even less of a foothold in the traditional world than I do. People who are so brain injured they can’t remember where the bathroom is, but think they’re too good for the special olympics. People who think that by just throwing themselves out there, they will somehow magically become a ‘Star’ and a famous sensational singer, despite having heavy cognitive deficits and emotional impulsivity?
Hell, one could even say that I am kind of like that myself.
I’m not proud of it, by the way. I’m living with two non speaking autistics and I’m forced to confront this ableism every day. The two of them are extremely intuitive and gifted. Hell I wrote a poem with one of them yesterday and it was a damn good one. But you would never know their capabilities by looking at them.
That really shouldn’t bother me but it does sometimes. Not all the time. Most of the time I am extremely accepting and sensitive toward them. I don’t care if they can’t do the things I can do, they are perfectly fine being themselves.
And the same is true of all of us.
Grind Culture is not really about Making It To The Top. It’s about trying to compensate for a lack of self worth built in by a society that wants you to feel this way so that it can keep on producing and dominating everything.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
short poem by famous Persian sufi poet Jalal’uddin Rumi, otherwise known as Rumi.
