Having and Being Had

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

“No aristocrat ever contemplated the loss of feudal privileges with more sorrow than a member of this class would regard his descent into ordinary labor where the reward was only the pay.”

They weren’t wizards, just gamblers who could tolerate major losses.

The hardest part of working isn’t the work, my mother tells me, it’s the passing. She means passing as an office worker—dressing the part, performing the rituals of office life, and acting appropriately grateful for a ten-hour shift at a computer.

It was a calling, a duty. Service was a contribution to society, heroic even. But in the home, service was care and maintenance. It was nursing the sick. It was tending to the baby. Service involved feces and food and dishwater. It was done out of love and duty and desperation. At its best, it was intensely intimate. “Service could be brutalizing a

We’re all performing, he wants us to know, but some of us are following the script more closely than others, and some of us have been given easier parts. Easier parts with better pay.

What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.