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Pigs, I am a lazy and shiftless person, really, and have been ever since I realized, way back in grammar school, that you really don't need to do very much work in order to succeeed in this world. Work is one of the Big lies we're all told—the other two being 1) that size doesn't matter and 2) you can make a living writing, instead of slowly devolving into Internet Kook who Used to Put Out Own Magazine. But I digress: I was speaking of the realization that very little effort, really, is required to get through life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is screwing you. My education went like this: In the beginning, I had my brother and his nearly-autistic brilliance to compete with, and I gave it my best shot but still came up slightly dimmer, if more charming and definitely better-looking. Around seventh grade I had a life-epiphany and gave up grade-grubbing for drinking, smoking, and playing video games. I waited a few weeks for the cosmos to smack me down, but it never happened. I had the glorious revelation: Hard work is mostly a waste of time. Here are the three Laws of More Shit I Gotta Do: 1. Most tasks can be performed by anyone. Stupid, stupid stupid people can do most things pretty well. Some things—brain surgery, space missions, zine publishing—require some effort and spark of genius, yes, but 95% of everything in this world you can do with no preparation, training, or advanced knowledge. 2. Almost everything is represented as more difficult than it actually is. Every now and then there is a shining moment of honesty, and someone will tell you right off the bat that something is easy and doesn't require much by way of effort, but usually you'll hear the opposite. This is usually bullshit. See above: If someone tells you that brain surgery is difficult, believe it. If someone tells you their salaried office job is difficult, do what I do and reply to everything they say really, really sarcastically. Unless your head is filled with small, perfectly round pebbles instead of a brain. 3. Everyone is invested in difficulty. It's that final law that really tells the story. Everyone—you, me, everyone—has an interest in making the things we do seem more difficult than they really are. This results in an endless spiral web of bullshit cocooning us, sort of like The Force from Star Wars. Think about it; there are three main reasons that we all engage in this kind of bullshit: 1. Continuing employment. We all know that the company that pays us our filthy lucre is an inhuman Borg-like entity that eats souls to survive. The moment it thinks it can get by without your skills, experience, and charm, it will cut you loose like a fat man in line at the taco stand. You'll be downsized so fast you won't even have time to retrieve your humorous cartoons scotch-taped to your cube wall before security arrives to 'escort' you from the building, and all your cube-nesting gone to waste. So, what do we do? We protect ourselves. We must always be essential to the survival of the company, so our job must increase in complexity, subtlety, and obscurity until it is impossible to fire us. Over the course of years, people slowly bury the actual function of their jobs until it is a mystery how any of it works, and all people know is that you need that motherfucker's signature to get anything done. Since corporations hold us all in contempt, they rarely try to disguise their intention to fire us, outsource our jobs, kidnap us and sell us into slavery in Mexico. One of their favorite tricks is to ask you to train some fresh-faced kid unruined by booze and cynicsm in your job—you know, just for redundancy, in case you have an 'accident' and end up sold into Mexican slavery. People know how to handle this move, though: Make your job seem like the most impenetrable, boring, complicated thing in the universe. The harder your job looks, the longer you'll last in it—with the added benefit of making any mistakes you might make look not so bad, considering. 2. Self-importance. This one should be obvious. If your job involves pushing a big red button once every hour, and you start to get the sense that other people don't take your skill-set very seriously, you start making it seem a lot more difficult. Everyone does this. You need to do something, you get lucky and it's a snap, but you preserve the illusion of difficulty in order to gain the awe and worship of your fellows. Or at least their respect, eroded by years of alcohol abuse, pantslessness, and zine-publishing. 3. Distrust of simplicity. Finally, most of us have been trained to distrust anything that's easy. Anything worthwhile must be difficult, right? Of course, there are exceptions to this—no one, for example, wants their electronic devices or appliances to be difficult to operate, because the complexity and difficulty is already there in the myserious, magical inner workings. It's complexity and difficulty is included in the engineering and manufacturing techniques used to create the damn thing in the first place, so an increase in difficulty inches over into waste of time territory. But, of course, with so many of us putting so much energy into making things seem more difficult than they actually are, using the difficulty or ease of a process to judge its value makes no sense. The perceived difficulty of anything is suspect, so you'd best find another way of judging things. Which none of us will probably do, since it would seem too easy a solution.
So where does this leave me? Lazy and shiftless, as ever. You're lucky I even get this zine and web site done, ever. Or unlucky, depending. Bastards.1 1 Ever notice how when I don't know how to end something, I just write bastards and stop writing? It's genius! E-mail me your outrage here. Jeff |
August 31, 2004