Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,5
being held, the two copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that I keep meaning to read, the armchair that I bought from a thrift store because it was on sale but that I will never sit in because I am afraid it is haunted, and my phone, now in my hand, waiting.
Don’t do it, I tell myself. Close your eyes, go to sleep, wake up, show up to work on time for once in your life, do a good job, answer all of your unread emails, donate to charity, vote, care about the world, raise a good kid or a dog (tbd), yell at fewer strangers on Facebook, smile more (unless someone on the street tells you to, in which case don’t smile), have hope (shoutout to Barack!) but also be realistic about what you can expect out of this life (shoutout to systemic oppression!), figure out what a realistic expectation for hope in this life is, be a better person, die eventually.
You know, the usual.
I have a joke that I want to jot down for the next day’s column, but I am resisting (or should I say, I am #Resisting. A few months early). If I start writing, I’ll have to admit I’m awake, and then I’ll want to keep writing and probably tweeting, and then I’ll check the news, and then I will never get to sleep and I will be either grumpy or late to work (survey says: both!), which will lead to me not responding to emails or being a better person or building a community or figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing in this life.
And what is the benefit if I do write it down? The best thing that can happen: Everyone laughs. That’s the point, right? It’s a humor column on the internet in the days before nothing was ever funny again. When the jokes work, people like them and share them and it feels for a moment like all of the internet laughs. Positive internet attention is the best thing that can happen in this scenario.
The worst thing: No one laughs. Public scorn. Being canceled. And also lateness, not being a better person, eventual death, etc. The over-under isn’t great.
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I am aware that this is not the way anything is supposed to work. The job, the opportunity, the positive attention. It feels unearned, even though I am in my mid-thirties and it’s not like I haven’t been unsuccessfully writing things—some of them funny—for years. But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise. And that’s true and not true. Did I have a plan? No. Did it work out? Seems like it. It’s easy for me to see the blind luck at play and hard for me to see the parts of me that put in the work. On top of that, writing the column is fun, and as someone who has started many games of Monopoly and finished zero, I know that capitalism is not supposed to be fun.
Though I do have a constant hum of low-level anxiety about organizing my time, and producing a punchline, and keeping this gig, I still feel like I should be struggling more. Remember how Carrie Bradshaw got drunk at lunch every day and stayed out till four in the morning on dates, and wrote just one weekly column but was still on the side of a bus? I’m not on a bus and I write every day, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’ve put enough effort in to deserve this.
Deserving anything related to money is a fraught concept for me, particularly when it comes to art. If you’re pursuing some kind of artistic product—and I think of writing as art—then you’re doing what you love, and your labor is one of love. So, money is good, and money is necessary, and money is that thing that tells you that what you’re doing is not a fool’s errand. But the money is also an albatross, changing your relationship to the art. It’s like writing a random joke for a couple hundred people you’ve met throughout your life and then suddenly having thousands of people you don’t know respond. It is not bad, but