I’ve been reflecting on work and the chaos it incites. What we lose to work, what we lose in our attempts to appease chaos. How our bodies, our relationships, what we know to be essential about ourselves, all on the line. I’ve been revisited by this incessant imagery of a vortex, and an altar, within a room.
In this room, it is incredibly hard to parse out anything with clarity. Unrelenting, a river of air so strong so gust-filled you feel the punch in your lungs. You are robbed of air while abundantly antagonized by it. You are antagonized. Dig. This is the position to brace yourself. I marry my feet to the concrete hoping this arrangement is a protection, a salve, bent knees, lean forward, I reach, you sink— everything to survive the all-sides-ness of unending pressure. The air is pressure but the sound is too. Every one of my senses sensates exasperation under survival. I cannot be uprooted here— we think, lifted up into this disastrous thing— no. You taste your sweat, adrenaline, focus, threat-tinged. We know we’ve been here before. Facing this vortex— massive, swirling unrelenting matter. I am not a storm chaser. I want a moment without. I ask for it. On the edge, we shift weight carefully, asking not to be betrayed by the floor and swept into this voracious disaster. In shifting slightly, we see an altar. Gold, god, iridescent, perfectly unbothered— waiting for you. You think, if I can just make it to where the altar is, if I can give it something. Anything. Me. Surely, there will be no storm. No vortex. No weather event. I imagine how much room is truly in here when an overwhelming phenomena no longer occupies the center, swallowing the ceiling and attempting to swallow me too. We think, it’s time to head into the center of this thing, we heard it’s always calmest in the center, and if we can charge through to the other side— I can, I can reach that altar.
I’ve seen this image replay in my mind more times than I can count and each time I exit with the phrase holding the line.
It exists both as an ask and a task that is ultimately rich in a reflection on work, and a very necessary understanding that work is unquenchable in nature. Work under capitalism is thirsty to violate the body, and no amount of enthusiasm, commitment, hustle, dedication, or willingness to sacrifice will appease it, but most of us must engage it, which means there is profound urgency in drawing, naming, and holding our lines.
I’ve begun to understand this responsibility by reflecting across three essential topics. The cultural imbalance of work, the meaning of holding the line, and the risks that come from choosing or not choosing to hold our lines.
Work as an Imbalancing Act
The culture of work is one of imbalance and imbalance is an act of chaos. Work at its current core is a chaosmaker that uses the methodology of imbalance to achieve its aims. Work asks, demands, and creates conditions where it needs and wants more of us than what it can give to us in return. It’s through these conditions that work organizes and affirms its goal of siphoning the bodily autonomy of those who must work.
This imbalance is also sustained through the affective reality that most people have relationships to work rooted in antagonism and fear. And for good reason, work was not designed to think about people, privacy, agency, and autonomy; work has life and death stakes for most people on the planet. We end up doing more life at work than we do with our communities and under capitalism most have no choice but to engage in this unappeasable thing. Absolute survival depends on it, and the nature of work prefers it this way. But we should not be willing to let everything be collateral for survival.
As a condition of imbalance, work is designed to invisibilize the ways in which we are overwhelmed from it. By extension, the experience of trauma occurred and accumulated in the workplace is flattened. This cultural environment performs a cruel optimism where the invisibilization and flattening functions to mask work’s responsibility as a harm generator on the micro and macro scales of our lives.1
Work maintains this environment by creating conditions where people in work have a reduced sense of agency about their lives due to the demands of work. Also where people in work feel they have to perform a sense of piety to their jobs to manage the anxieties around potential job loss. And where people in work are expected to adapt to the conditions of work but never the work adapting to the conditions of the people.
These chaotic configurations find us in many forms of severance from our bodies, dimming the information our bodies feed us about our actual right to agency, health, and reciprocity. Furthermore, they benefit the popular notion of what work “should be'', and how a person should be in work by flattening trauma and the reality of how work harms us expansively and multivalently. This cycle performs an ideological maintenance that disempowers the person in work and sustains the imbalance, a collective “this is how it is” around the “how” of how work should be practiced and how much essential right it has to your life and all within your life.
It’s time to understand ourselves as sacred, temporary things, worth preserving.
Rendered into endless “was it me’s?” Absorbed into the more-vulnerable-to-power-harm schema that if you performed differently you would not have been subject to the harm that conveniently cannot be located outside of yourself into one easy identifiable source. All of this unnamed loss. How much time, lost trying to protect yourself from harm in the workplace? How much time, lost in stories of workplace hurt being the returning stories shared from you to a loved one? How much time, lost trying to feel yourself again or at-all? How much time, lost to your body reacting to how unwell this place is? How much time, lost in the anxiety of words— the ones you feel, the ones they’re saying? Not wanting to be around those you love? Not being able to connect to your inner world? Needing a break and never getting it?
These are unfair encroachments.
Imbalance is also preserved through management culture which is primarily built on the concept that they, management, cannot feel safe unless you are unsafe. It’s a fundamental ideological organizing that allows one’s bodily autonomy to be siphoned to the maintenance of work as a chaosmaker. For you to be unsafe you must be willing to abandon your body or you must think you have no choice but to do so. It is at that point where we experience the breakdown of our health, decline of our imagination, suffering of our relationships, and deeper vulnerability to the whims of work.
Operating ethos as deployed by most forms of management, leaderships, and boards are all organized around this idea of safety scarcity— that their positionality or more succinctly power is under a constant threat— oftentimes never explicitly named, but implicitly designed to protect against. This protection is enacted through many aims including acts of surveillance, socially revoking one’s right to opacity and encouraging hyper-disclosure around one’s nonwork time, or body, or illness. The expectation of constant availability, the inferred lack of rights around your time— working or non-working, the expectation of performing performance, and the judgment and potential retaliation, whether explicitly communicated or not, of and for what you do on your non-working time is all rooted in a false understanding of what power and safety is.
Across the management class from executives to middle management, people in these roles often feel profoundly invested in the temporary performance of deference and subservience politics that these power exchanges grant them. And those who hope toward those spaces with some belief of relief often behave similarly. The sea will change beneath them. These ways of relating. Of exchanging with each other, of participating in mutual survivals— as much as many think of themselves as past it, these old forms of working and treating people will not hold. They will dissolve in our lifetime. Work will change, but we must change how we relate to work.
We must de-escalate the stakes in what it takes to stay alive.
What work gets wrong or rather what work is committed to upholding is this: that true power is control over others, themselves and itself. While this method works to fulfill its aims and presents us with actual material consequences in the current arrangement, actual power is the ability to trust others and have autonomy over ourselves. Anything beyond that is an abuse of power. So how do we begin returning autonomy over to ourselves and reducing the extent of the abuse?
We must start with understanding that any job and the concept of a job is a constant. The need for labor and the concept of work will never go away. You will though, you are not a constant, your and our time here is profoundly limited. Your relationships only exist as long as you do. It’s time to understand ourselves as sacred, temporary things, worth preserving. A job can kill you (and oftentimes does), can disable you, can sever your relationships, can kill your sense of self, and the job will keep going. You will never be thanked for your sacrifice— and even if you were, many of us come to question the value of the exchange— if we get quiet enough to hear ourselves.
Without exasperation, we have to renegotiate the terms of this exchange. What use is career, or job stability, or work if it strips you of all your meaning? If you feel impossible and without potential? Think dreams are entertainment instead of portals into your potentiality? Intuition asking you to “check-in here” and “check-out there”? We must de-escalate the stakes in what it takes to stay alive, and make the full sensory experience of aliveness immediately accessible to us.
Under that framework, it is worth it to hold the line.
Holding The Line
I’m not willing to let everything be collateral for survival.
I’ve found myself saying this recently realizing that holding the line is the choice to not sacrifice yourself, and anyone you may love to the omnipresence of chaos, the incessant demand of extraction for survival, even if you must return to it. Holding the line is the decision and distinction that no amount of what you offer to work or to anything else chaotic will ever calm the essential nature of that chaos down. I want to hold the line or else I will be sacrificed otherwise. I want to hold the line, because if I do not, I will lose ground. The ground, the foundation of our lives, is so deeply the people we commit to loving alongside with. We root each other, and we can be uprooted with enough force. Holding the line is a faith that there is more to you than what you give up. Holding the line is walking away and returning tomorrow. It is to name and practice what we’re not willing to sacrifice to be in relationship to something, anything, everything.
Holding the line requires us to say something certain in the midst of uncertainty. It requires us to acknowledge that those things are vulnerable if we don’t name them. I am sacred enough for a line. You are sacred enough for a line. Who you love is sacred enough for a line. It is not our job to make ourselves unsacred— even though we exist in conditions that are asking us to feed that impulse.
To hold the line, we must understand that each choice is a sacrifice, every action we take implies a sacrifice through the act of invoking a decision. From routines, to habits, rituals, processes and protocols, and even spontaneity. It’s critically important to understand that all choices, each decision to act, invokes a sacrifice. Personally and professionally. What is possible in the ways that we work, the ways that we preserve ourselves, and the ways we relate to each other if we become more intimate with our own agency in necessitating sacrifice? We receive and lose in ways that are socialized to be nearly imperceptible and it is our job in holding the line to attune our senses to the micro-agencies that are possible in us across each moment of choice. Sacrifice is ultimately an everyday activity and locating our agency, locating our line helps us direct ourselves away from “a kinda-sorta life” towards “a life as full as possible.” Holding the line is a firewall, a filter, a valve, a relational method that supports us in our attempts towards the latter.
Attempting our freedom is better than being a body actively extracted from not willing to even engage the concept of possibility into a dynamic otherwise.
The Room and The Risk on Both Ends
Returning to the image of the room, there’s always a desire to go toward the altar, to put something on there to calm things.
The altar looks like relief and like all altars, if you offer it something, you hope that your request will be listened to and met. But what happens when the altar is an object of theater? Necessary to the set of the chaos we find ourselves in? In that function, the altar elicits hope under desperation but cannot provide it and implies that extractive chaos needs false images of hope and abatement to sustain its extractive nature.
Stretching your hope to this externalized place, you reach towards it, I pass my energy to it. I hope I will survive the vortex, you believe the altar will give you respite. All efforts to affirm that feeling become worth it, or our only option if we think victory exists in the room. But, what happens when hope turns inwards and we refuse to stretch it outside ourselves? You leave the room. There is no victory here.
There is a risk outside too.
In holding the lines in my life and writing about it, I’ve had to become increasingly honest about the consequences of holding the line. Which is ultimately risk, loss, and dealing with the blowback from that. Holding the line is a test of your support systems and any conception of foundation that has held you together up until this point. You could lose the thing, the job, that’s also trying to make you lose yourself. And we cannot separate survival and wage as they are inexorably linked. We participate in this way of living not realizing that it was offered to us with inverse consequences. You die trying to survive, you get glimpses of life under something inherently structured as life-denying and you may very well die in the process of changing conditions so that you may live— so that you may realize a life-affirming structure for you. Holding the line is a form of death work, abandonment work, and facing loss to face yourself. It is not easy at all— to trust yourself unyieldingly when every pressure tells us to buckle and break down.
In holding the line, I’ve learned intimately that you have to lose some things to get the right things. Sometimes holding the line feels more like a loss on the upfront than any sense of gain. So much movement happening everywhere all simultaneously, the familiar getting increasingly unfamiliar it's so easy to mistake the harm that’s draining away as a type of intimate loss, like we are losing but in actuality it is a clearing and we are resetting.
Holding the line could show situations where people who wield power, particularly as it relates to your wellbeing, retaliate. It could look like being iced out in the workplace, it could look like open and subtle hostilities, it could look like peace, it could look like reconciliation, it could look like any and none of these things.
There’s always a consequence to leaving the room, not putting your body on the altar, not sacrificing yourself to the chaos. But I know there is greater consequence to putting your body on the altar, and all that you love on it too, giving in to the chaos by entering the vortex— and rarely leaving the room where the brutality exists, and that is a spirit killing. At that point, what do we have if our spirit is dead? What good is the exchange, for us?
Self-abandonment is the deepest form of body violence. I ask, what does it look like when you are no longer committed to holding the hand of harm?
Many of us need to start naming, drawing, and holding our lines because it is time. We are at an inflection point— existing in one of the greatest collective power struggles over our right to bodily autonomy, self-identification, and personal fulfillment. The most fervent, and subtle, location for this struggle rightfully exists at the location where a majority of us offer most of our living hours to, and that is work.
I want to emphasize that nothing is truly gained without holding the line. There is no bodily autonomy if you reach financial stability without holding the line. Your body will be subsumed eventually. In my own life, I realized that for too long I put my passion on the altar. I tempered my passion with pragmatism only to learn that no stability gained from pragmatism lasts. If there are those who fly too close to the sun then there are many others who haven’t yet realized the ground they live on is a sinkhole. It’s only a matter of time. You’ve got to find your wings, and fast.
Cruel Optimism is a book and term coined by the late theorist Lauren Berlant, who begins to define it as a relation that "exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing." I loved how they described Cruel Optimism in a 2013 interview in Society and Space, "A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation."