10 March, 2020

I used to watch movies that depicted the future as a sort of glowing white, Apple Mac, technology driven sort of place and often thought how that really seemed to miss the very important human factors of mess, laziness, dirt, sweat, blood and emotional turmoil. I could never see how a gently evolved primate could ever be all clean and stark on this planet and I still can’t see it. This year has been a stark contrast to the last fifteen (maybe twenty) years of my life as I move out of full time work with no real focus on where my interests lie. I’d like to say it has been a time of reflection and focus but in reality it has been a weird grasping adaptation to flexibility and an endless effort to appreciate my own worth. It has been fascinating to say the least. Apart from taking a break from the idea of a ‘job’ my focus has been to complete the renovations on the house, primarily repairing and painting the exterior and doing the small maintenance work we have had to let slide over the last decade. The cost of getting someone to paint the house was more than we would have earned comfortably in the time it will take me to do the work so financially it was a no brainer. I now get to drop my daughter off at school, pick her up again and work with her on her learning which is a first in her life and mine. Emotionally it has taken some getting used to from all involved. It’s not easy to go from being the main financial income earner (for most of your adult life) to having contract work and focusing on my own house and projects. For the first time I also have no idea what I want to focus on next so it is now up to opportunity for the next change to occur. It should be interesting if nothing else. I think I’m ready for the challenge.

As for ‘jobs’, I have become very conscious of how obsessed this nation is with the idea of a ‘job’. Work seems to have become abstracted to a point that the actual position, income and time are more important than the work itself. This feels very similar to the obsession schools have with qualifications over actual learning and skill. I recently experimented a bit with people’s reactions to unemployment by answering the “What do you do?” question with “I’m unemployed”. The results varied between low level horror and pity with some people desperately trying to find me a job. I also found that, “I am self-employed” led to further “but what do you do?” prompts and if I added where I live in this city (one of the lower socio-economic areas) things really got sad. I am increasingly aware that being employed in a job does not necessarily mean you are doing anything of value to wider society and that is okay but maybe not a good basis for ranking people’s worth. As I am now painting the house I like to refer to myself as a “Painter and Decorator in Linwood”, none of which is very accurate but the comic value is excellent. I am also doing some tutoring work at the School of Product Design at the University of Canterbury but that just attracts the job vultures and is nowhere near as fun to play with (although the work itself is quite fun).

When I visited High Tech High in San Diego last year one of the things Larry Rosenstock said was “Don’t separate hands, minds and disciplines”. It really resonated with me, partly as a Designer who believes the process should include more than just the conceptual phases and as a Teacher who believes students should bring ideas and physical work together. A lot of the ‘jobs’ out there have separated these elements too much and place too much value on the academic or management roles within work at the expense of the practical, physical and co-ordinated elements. We have in effect separated our hands, minds and disciplines in the name of specialisation and I think we are seeing some of the adverse results of this in our communities and attitudes to each other.

This year, for me, I look forward to finding ways to stay sane, figure out my next focus and area of interest (dare I say excitement) and find people I enjoy working alongside on things that feel meaningful to me. Hopefully not too much to ask of our slightly dirty, messy, tumultuous, biological World that keeps pretending to be shiny, white, structured and mechanical.