Find Your Sweetness!
A critique of Total Work in a time of COVID-19
Find Your Sweetness!
Don’t “find your bliss!” if “finding your bliss” continues, mistakenly to be sure, to lead you to hunt for that chimera, Meaningful Work.
The good news is that you don’t have to worry about finding meaningful work because meaningful work doesn’t exist. The bad news is that you’ve been looking for years or deluding yourself into believing in a phantasm for decades. I say, “Embrace your inner Newhart and — ‘Just stop it! Stop it right now!’”
Instead, find that in your life that is sweeter than work. Since work, however interesting, edifying, or socially beneficial, can never be sweet, ask yourself, “What is it that is sweeter than work?” And let your taste — cultivated and subtle — be your guide.
You’d be wrong to say that forms of consumption like eating a carton of Ben and Jerry’s, binge watching Netflix, masturbating while watching pornography, or puttering about with some hobby are sweet. None of these are. In the end, they’re all sour, even bitter, and, in their candor, they never hide this from us. We just haven’t been taking their word for it.
Sweetness, by contrast, has something of umami: this sweetness is savored without so much as a trace or a hint of anything but savory sweetness. This…
