Author Matt Suddain offers advice for navigating your way in a (nearly) post-pandemic, pre-apocalyptic workplace.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Daniel Vernon (@yeehawtheboys)

You’re anxious about your future. What will the working world be like in 10 years? Will there even be a world? Will AI be doing your job? How will it feel to be fired by the same algorithm that tells Countdown how many eggs to buy? Will your monthly paycheck be enough to cover one trip to the supermarket? Will you still be working at the job you hate, with slovenly co-workers and dull-eyed middle-manager?

The pandemic inspired thousands to rebalance their lives and seek meaningful work (that’s normal work except you sell it on Etsy). Now they’ve returned to their old jobs. Why? Well, because a head of broccoli costs five bucks now. But also because a regular job provides stability. Certainty. Some people are even coming out of retirement. Why would they do that if they didn’t love working? That’s positivity: the willingness to do what it takes, even if only one of your knees and none of your hips are original. 

Success is all about focus. You get about 500,000 precious hours alive. About half of those are spent sleeping, or working. The remaining 250,000 are yours, so it’s vital you spend most of them thinking about work. If work is eating into your worrying-about-work time, try sleeping less. Spend a few hours of precious sleepy-time thinking. Visualise your success: be it getting a promotion, or smoking your boss from behind with an electric pallet truck. When the sun rises you’ll be focused, ready to sit at the breakfast bar with your fists clenched, ready to shout WHAT? at your kid when she tries to show you a picture she drew.

Watch her shrink back in shock, eyes wide. Bet you wish you could do that to your boss.

Money is tight, but working late can show your boss you’re amped for that promotion. Plus, you can mine-sweep the office for half-eaten lunches to take home to feed your family. Have you considered serving dinner at 11pm so the kids can skip breakfast? You could save cash by making your own bread, butter or insulin. A lot of us have had to start making our own toilet paper lately, so it’s not much of a stretch. The solutions to your problems are only limited by your imagination.

You’ve heard of remote work. What about remote-remote work? That’s where you pitch a tent in the bush while you AirBnB your house for cash to pay the mortgage. If your workmates ask why you’re doing the Monday WIP from the Waitākeres, say you’ve changed your background pic.

Positivity is the most important currency in this climate (aside from actual dollars), and yet it seems in short supply. Young people in particular seem to have endless dumb questions, like, “If I work full time shouldn’t I be able to afford life’s basics?” and “I just want quality services for my tax contribution, and the knowledge that I’m not giving my life-blood for this country while some billionaire refugee gets to hollow out a luxury survival-bunker under Timaru.” 

Well I want a jet-pack and a talking Alsatian. 

You have to stay positive. Even with the Arctic heading towards a Mediterranean climate. Even while a group of billionaires, too few in number to fill an InterCity coach, hold more than half the world’s wealth. Even while some of them are buying up chunks of the South Island like Monopoly squares because they suspect their enterprises might have brought civilisation to the brink of collapse.   

We can imagine a dark unhappy future. Equally, we can imagine a bright tomorrow where we all have productive work and everything is delivered by subscription box. Imagine services that send framed pics of our kids to our workplace so we remember what they look like. Imagine workplace subscription services where you pay a monthly sub to get priority parking, advanced knowledge of promotions or tip-offs someone in the office is talking shit about you on Teams. 

As for the mega-wealthy moving here to weather the coming storm, all I can say is rats flee a sinking ship. If the rats are swimming towards your ship, isn’t that a good sign? 

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” wrote evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould. 

I know you’ll probably say that quote is some critique of capitalism. What I think he’s actually saying, though, is that if we overthink things we’ll wake up one day and find we never reached our potential. We could have been designing Apple products. Instead we’re selling them in a “Genius Bar” like a moron; screwing MacBooks together in some dire factory; sitting in a marketing meeting for the new iPhone while thinking, “If I ran hard at that window could I punch straight through?”

I have a poster of Einstein above my desk. It has probably his best-ever quote: “Think Different”. It’s a reminder that we need to think differently about things, or preferably not at all. 

Because capitalism won’t change. Why would it? Capitalism is a system of private ownership of the world’s production machine for the purpose of accumulating more capital. That’s not some radical, Marxist definition. That’s what’s printed on the tin. What’s weird is not that we’ve sustained for so long a system which exploits us, and grinds us down; it’s that we’ve also somehow come to believe that it can, and does, care about us as individuals, and that it’s our own failings which make us feel unhappy and alienated.

Think about it. The oil industry knew for 40 years (because their scientists told them) that they were signing humanity up to a subscription box of artisanal catastrophe which would come to a head some time in the 2020s. It chose to suppress that information while extracting profits at an ever faster rate. It’s like your boss discovering there’s a bomb at work that’ll detonate at 4pm and saying, “We better get our work done then.” 

We are the fungible tokens our masters shove into the machine of progress so more money spits out. 

… Anyway what was I even saying? Right, work hard, stay hydrated, think differently, remember to stay positive. Because capitalism isn’t eternal, or inevitable. Society is. We represent the outer edge of a web of human connections stretching back through history, and then on back through whatever came before history. No system of control can ever take from us the idea of what it means to be people, and to know other people. Every disaster, every pandemic, every elegantly brutal power structure, just lets us learn a little more about what it means to be human and connected to each other. We can’t make capitalism care about us. All we can do is frustrate its tireless efforts to stop us caring about each other.

What else are we going to do anyway, switch to communism, anarchism, sado-monarchism, some new idea that hasn’t been invented yet? We don’t have time to invent a whole new system. Some of us have work.

All week on The Spinoff we are delving into our relationship with the world of work in Aotearoa. For more Work Week stories, click here.