So, you're telling me my future depends on me?
precarity and the lie of self-optimization
I worked from home exclusively since March 2020 until very recently. I got a new job (yay!) where I need to be in the office 4 days a week. The commute is an hour and 15 minutes each way, so my (at minimum) 8-hour work day becomes a 10-and-a-half-hour work day. This doesn’t leave me much time to do all of the things I need and want to do. I have chores to do, friends to see, books to read, a body to feed and move and that needs 8 hours of sleep minimum to function, trips to go on, birthday parties to attend, appointments to go to, albums to listen to, parents to visit, finances to sort through, neighborhoods to explore, paychecks to save, a license that I need to get because I lost mine over a year ago and I only use my passport as an ID, and the list goes on.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the truly cursed concept of a 5 to 9. I think the term “5 to 9” was coined on tiktok but people have been doing this way before people started posting “my 5 to 9 routine” videos online. I remember in middle school, my mom told me about the morning routine of the mom of one of my brother’s classmates. She had 8 kids (Irish Catholic) and would wake up at 5 am to work out, clean, make lunches, and pray the rosary, all before she took her kids to school. She had a 5 to 9. The 5 to 9 is a routine that occurs before the traditional workday starts or after it ends and it includes a myriad of activities from meal prepping to reading to working out to journaling. As soon as these started cropping up, they were rightly called out as a productivity trap. Another instance of how the “wellness” of workers is collapsed with their increased value as workers to corporations. However, now that I have way less time, the concept of a 5 to 9 started to sound appealing. You’re telling me I can get 4 more hours in my day if I just wake up four hours earlier?
The 5 to 9 truthers will tell you that it’s hard but it’s doable. It’s hard but it’s worth it. It takes discipline. Well, it turns out I am not capable of waking up at 5 am every morning. I have virtually no “excuse” for this other than it sucks and waking up that early ruins my day no matter how many endorphins I try to pump into my veins before I arrive at the office at 9 am, but that should be excuse enough. It makes my already difficult life (for me) more difficult. The days when I manage to wake up at six to get in a 30-minute workout are truly excruciating because I am so tired by the end of the day. So then I don’t do it. And days and weeks pass and I realize I haven’t done any exercise and the majority of my life is spent sitting down. On the weekends I know I should prepare lunch for the week but I don’t because I’m catching up on the other things I need and want to do that I couldn’t do during the week because I was working or because I was exhausted from working. So then I spend money I don’t have on lunch. Which then leaves me with less money to buy groceries or pay for my health insurance or pay my rent or do things with my friends.
This cycle isn’t news to any of us but there is something the 5 to 9 is getting at outside of increased productivity for productivity’s sake. Of course, discipline as it relates to the maintenance and optimization of the body is an important mechanism by which capitalism produces more efficient workers. However, as I read about increased mortality among young people, the increased rate of early-onset cancer among young people, the decline in the quality of our food, people’s inability to access high-quality food, our increased isolation resulting in higher morbidity rates, the crisis of our healthcare system, the mental health crisis. As my doctor reminds me that I need to eat healthier and exercise more to “prevent problems down the line”, I feel an anxious pull to make these changes because my health, my body and my mind, my survival depend on it. “Health” is a fraught term but I do know that exercising is good for you, it’s good to keep stress levels down, it’s good to see your friends, you should go to a PCP every year, you should rest when you’re sick. My life as a worker makes it very hard to do these things. Which is insane to me because my life is comparatively easy to a lot of other people’s. So I end up in this cycle, and I worry about my health.
I read this great article by
where he talks about how individuals are constantly demonized and blamed for their financial situations even though the systemic conditions of industrialized capitalism prevent people from attaining basic means of survival regardless of the financial decisions they make. C-suite execs continue to get richer, politicians continue to get elected (and get richer) despite the atrocities they commit and the worsening economic conditions facing their constituents. Hill reminds us that we are not the problem. Our lack of institutional support is. As I see headlines about the discardability of human life from the relentless tirade of the US war machine against Palestinians to the attack on trans rights and trans lives to corporations’ refusal to provide livable wages to the government’s refusal to provide universal anything, I’m reminded that I really am not the problem. My ability (and the ability of others) to survive and thrive does not depend on me entirely, it depends on social, communal, economic, and political networks of support. It’s not my lack of discipline. This is Judith Butler’s thesis in her book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Both in Frames of War and her book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Butler theorizes the ideas of precarity and grievability as ontological categories that can help ground a more robust politics of support in which people understand that their survival is necessarily bound up in their relation to other people and vice versa. Butler says that:“It is not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is coextensive with birth itself (birth is, by definition, precarious), which means that it matters whether or not this infant being survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.” Frames of War, 14.
We are all precarious by virtue of the fact that we can die, and precarity is not something that can be eradicated because we can’t eradicate death. All of us are vulnerable and unfortunately, this vulnerability has been used as a justification for domination, exploitation, and genocide. Life, or certain lives more accurately, are rendered not grievable. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of precarity. I think the idea of precarity is so radical because precariousness necessarily implies a relationship to and with other people. It’s the idea that “one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other,” and this is true in the sense that my survival depends on structures that facilitate and sustain my life and those structures require other people. Babies cannot survive without other people, but neither can anyone else. The persistence of my life depends on people that I am close with but also on people that I don’t know and never will know. If I need to go to the hospital, there are many people involved in my ability to go to the hospital and receive care outside of myself. If I want to drink water, many people are implicated and necessary to my being able to do that. Conversely, we are depended upon by other people. What binds us is not proximity or similarity or even liking someone or loving someone, it’s not that we are bound by a duty of care, it’s rather that we are all precarious, and as such, we depend on each other. Our reciprocal vulnerability as people is what constitutes this ethical obligation.
As the ultra-rich continually insulate themselves from sociality through modes of exclusivity and as individuals increasingly outsource modes of sociality to technology, I worry that we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to engage in practices that remind us that our lives are interdependent, however, these modes of exclusivity and technologies that isolate us do require other people. This labor is often dehumanized and invisibilized. Thus, the reminder of our interdependence, our precarity, the absurdity of how insanely vulnerable it is to be a human being just by virtue of existing is necessary to engender any sort of coalitional movement toward reducing precarity for those who are most precarious. Butler emphasizes that while we are all precarious, our precarity is differentiated according to the absence or presence of social, economic, and political networks of support that expose people more or less to violence, injury, and death. As such, a politics based on precarity forms “the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense”, and this is what we need. Precarious is exactly how I felt when I lost my health insurance when I was laid off for no reason other than that the CEOs made some bad decisions that put the business in a tough spot financially. I felt exposed and vulnerable and if it weren’t for my own systems of support (because we don’t have governmental support), I wouldn’t have health insurance until I got another job. It’s exactly how I would describe what our governments and corporations do to individuals as they reduce or eradicate economic support for working-class people, as they make healthcare dependent on employment, as they fund a genocide (time and time again) overseas, as they exploit workers in the global south to produce cheap goods that are going to end up discarded 6 months later, as they destroy the planet for the sake of increased profits, as they hoard wealth while workers are struggling to pay their bills, etc.
I think a lot of people aren’t concerned about politics or certain issues because it “doesn’t affect” them, but the idea of precarity reminds us that policy affects all of us because we are all precarious. If we look at the history of reproductive rights in the US, women of color, Black women, native women, and migrant women have been organizing for reproductive rights for years because their reproductive rights have never been a given. They’ve always known that the US profits off of women’s increased precarity and the ability to control women’s bodies for the socialization and reproduction of the workforce and the white race. White women didn’t think they’d be vulnerable in this way, and then Roe was overturned. Conservative women didn’t think they would come for IVF, and then they did. No one is safe from forces that exacerbate precarity and therefore rather than fortifying the defenses of the self, we must locate our means of survival by insisting on the creation and strengthening of communal and institutional systems of support.
We shouldn’t blame ourselves for the fact that billionaires and politicians don’t care if we live or die and that’s why we have people doing 5 to 9s. Countless forces are making us all more precarious except for a select few, and there’s no shortage of evidence for this. The idea that we are solely responsible for our well-being is a lie but as human beings, we are owed the dignity of the possibility of well-being, which we don’t have right now. This is not to say we don’t have responsibilities to ourselves or other people, precarity reminds us that our very survival depends on our obligation to other people and other people’s obligation to us. We have to continually focus our efforts and ire on billionaires, corporations, and politicians who exacerbate precarity for those who are most precarious. So join your local tenant union, swipe the person into the subway who can’t afford it, wear your mask on the subway, call your representatives, get to know your neighbors, don’t buy things from Shein because it’s “more convenient”, don’t buy from places that are supporting genocide because you had to have a McDonald’s fountain soda, don’t get mad at the person in front of you for reclining on an airplane when the person you should direct your anger at is the billionaire CEO who keeps making the seats smaller to increase profits.
Yes, your future depends on you but it also depends on the creation and sustenance of institutions and systems that are committed to reducing precarity.
