Jobs
Paid work that isn't creative and trying to find the value in it
For most of my life, I’ve looked like Schroeder from Peanuts; he has blonde hair, a big head and like all the other characters in the comic, a short body. For the past few years, I’ve felt how he feels in this specific strip which has been conflicted by the other parts in my life, that for just over a year now, I’ve been working full time at a pub. It is a 15 minute walk away from where I live, up a hill that passes a nature reserve before trailing along the A6 road. It is not where I thought I’d find myself after graduating but after difficulty finding any sustainable creative alternative in the area and a need for money, I was lucky enough to be offered a job that was so close, offered so many hours and people to work with that would make the shifts go by very fast. All in all, it was and still is a good deal.
Throughout my time though, despite working in other creative opportunities outside of this role, it felt like I’d given up. Finishing university, you expect the ideas of ‘success’ to be as manageable and measurable as all the other institutions you have been a part of without realising that all those institutions were educational and that education is in fact the easiest measurement for success; there are grades, trophies and awards where everything can be rounded off at the end of July to begin again in September, a fresh cycle where you can work towards a given goal by the end of that academic year and if you don’t reach it, there’s always next year. Leaving that, leaving secondary school, college, university, you just feel like you’re floating, waiting for something to grasp you, reward you, tell you what to do when throughout all my time in education, I thoroughly disliked being told what to do. And now when I want guidance, I struggle to trust myself enough to offer any.
My photo library over the past year feels pretty consistent with this feeling of floating. Alongside screenshots of ideas off Pinterest, motivational Instagram posts, photos of exhibitions and directions to new places are also a number of photos from my work: boxes of passionfruits, kegs piled in the cellar and ‘late’ drinks tickets on the screen. Looking at the quantity and content of them, I realise that I, like a lot of people who work at the pub, find it difficult to separate myself from work.
I look forward to days off but when I have them, I feel relentlessly guilty that I’m being ‘unproductive’ by not working a job that’s actively earning money. Working on my portfolio, reading or writing these posts doesn’t seem to cut it the same way working at the pub does, no matter how tired I might feel after a week at work, give me a day off and I’ll be ready to go back again, powered purely by an unhealthy perspective on productivity. I’ve now arrived at a point where I feel this magnetism the pub has is not down to any magical powers but in part through the expectations set out within the hospitality industry as a whole.
Working in hospitality is often seen as an ‘inbetween’ job, something to get by that as a result regurgitates the view that working in hospitality is ‘unskilled’. It is not as skilled of course as being in a trade but that doesn’t instantly denote it as unskilled and trying to argue it as such seems pointless. I, like a lot of other people, know from working in multiple hospitality jobs that it requires skills that teeter more on emotional labour than anything. To dismiss hospitality work as work is to also consider that emotional labour is valueless. The narrative of hospitality workers’ lack of value is what makes hospitality business owners treat workers poorly; they feel they can because they can easily replace you with someone else equally ‘unskilled’. However, people still have individual choice to be better and this ‘narrative’ doesn’t excuse one of the owners of the pub from being a greedy cunt. But this isn’t the whole point I’m trying to get at.
For a while, I moaned about my job (and still continue to) until I was made to realise by someone close to me, that if I really hated it so much, why not just quit? It was a fair response and I’ve since moaned less and took more action towards making work more manageable; condensing full time hours into 4 days a week instead of 5 or 6 so I could manage my migraines more from the late nights was a good start. It felt, strangely, like I’d achieved a ‘success’, regardless of how small or slight.
I then took to understanding the reasons for my complaining, which soon arose after I began to have 3 days off every week; outside of work, I barely did anything. I would sit on my laptop, scroll through Pinterest for hours ‘researching for ideas’, watch TV, eat then go to bed feeling as though I wasn’t ‘productive’ enough. On the days where I was productive, actively writing, learning piano or working on my portfolio, it still didn’t feel like enough. Some days I would have migraines which would actively require some relaxation but the problem was, I was never giving myself time to relax. Even on my days off where I wasn’t working at the pub, I was still treating creative pursuits as ‘work’, trying to perfect my portfolio, ‘completing’ ideas through rumination instead of action. I think it got to a point where I felt that if I did enough research into something, I could get out of this slump, find a full time creative job alongside the experience I picked up from creative roles I worked outside of my job and turn my back on hospitality work as a whole. Rumination and thinking about doing creative ideas as a replacement to actually doing them, of course, leads next to nowhere and instead leaves you in the same feeling of paralytic floating found after graduation. I couldn’t escape the floating (I’m just too skinny) and so I need to find something to anchor me down.
At uni, we would have artist talks every Wednesday. As you can imagine from the title, an artist would come in and talk about their practice for around an hour before answering any questions the class might have. The blueprint was usually the same; ‘I went to uni, I graduated, then I got this great exhibition, then this residency and then this solo exhibition’. The blueprint rarely, if ever, involved any extra jobs, especially non-creative work, the artists had to take to continue with their lives, let alone their practice. It felt false at the time and still does. The only person I can remember who actively spoke about work outside of creative roles was artist and PhD researcher at the uni, John Hughes.
John shared with us his work he had been completing throughout his PhD, revolving around the ways stories are communicated through sound and audio as opposed to conventional writing. I, like his sound workshop I had participated in before, thoroughly enjoyed it; what was even more refreshing was the honesty he channeled during the Q&A portion of the talk. The stories spoken in his pieces were based on things he had seen in his work for TFL (Transport for London) on night shifts at various places across London; he paints a vast image of what these places looked like, not glamourising but documenting the in-between moments of these usually busy stations. He didn’t romanticise his work either but spoke about it in a clear way. Hughes said something that has stuck out for me since I heard it; to paraphrase him slightly as it was so long ago, the quote I have in mind is:
“The artists with jobs that have no connection to the art world are usually the most interesting / have the most interesting practices.”
Whether he did say it in that way is another story altogether, but it’s something I think about now at work. Just because I’m not working in something I dream of being in, it offers me things that at times would otherwise be difficult to pursue. To make the most of the situation I’m in and to manage the parts that I can to make room for the other parts. Being within such a constant cycle of productivity has inadvertently unearthed personal issues within me concerning my unhealthy ideas of productivity and viewing my practice as a ‘means to an end’ rather than something I enjoy and participate in. It’s taught me to confront strangers when they’re being unkind, to ask for what I need and to keep on asking even when it feels difficult. It’s also taught me that I don’t want to work in hospitality at all and instead of participating in the romantic trope of ‘working in a pub as an artist trying to make it’, I don’t want to be like Schroeder banging on his piano. I want to channel my skills and interests in creativity, even if it’s not into a fine art career of exhibiting that our course promoted, but into a sustainable creative career and seeing where that goes instead. Which in a way has made me feel like I’ve given up in trying for a creative career, which makes no logical sense. It makes me feel like I’ve gone for the safe option in commercialising the skills I do have, when working in a pub alongside an extremely empty creative practice, for me, isn’t ‘risky’ in the first place. It’s just playing into the idea that you should either be a ‘struggling artist’ or a ‘commercialised marketing person’ and that your personality and the way you’re viewed is completely based upon these binaries, which isn’t the case at all (unless you work as something like an arms dealer which speaks volumes in itself).
Google ‘famous writers jobs’ and you will find a number of writers who had jobs completely disassociated from their writing; for some time, Kurt Vonnegut worked as a car salesman, Agatha Christie was an apothecary’s assistant and Stephen King was a high school caretaker. And these are just the ones that have been noticed. The themes in their jobs are important as context of some of their work; for example Christie’s interest in crime and poison could be linked to her work in an apothecary just as King’s experience working in a high school would inform the way school hierachies operate in in Carrie. The tension between having a job completely unrelated to what you want to be doing with your time can ultimately drive the time you do have to write under the safety of a steady income. But this would also be glorifying those who do choose to have a day job who still pursue writing or another creative pursuit in their spare time as a ‘sacrifice’ or something ‘noble’; some people are pushed into these situations, into these jobs. They could be kicked out at a young age, struggle to finish their exams due to mental health problems, struggle to keep a steady job. Being able to achieve a job in the first place is an achievement in itself. It is not ‘noble’ to think of yourself as ‘woe me’, the struggling artist who is working a job alongside their practice. It is unfortunate that there isn’t enough creative work to go round and the creative work that is shared is shamed as being too ‘commercial’. Everybody has things they are interested in outside of work that they would love to pursue; just because it is artistic doesn’t make it into a romantic story, it is usually just the ones that are picked up most because of this romanticism.
Any film where the protagonist is working a job they enjoy, for me, seems like the ideal job; I watched ERIC on Netflix recently and thought ‘I could do that, I should write a kids TV show’. When I watched Civil War I thought ‘I should be a photographer’. I will change the trajectory of my career goals very quickly if I see someone else succeeding or enjoying them, even if it’s fictional because it offers the idea that that job is much better than anyone I could pick myself. It is reasserting the navigation of my own life onto someone else, onto something else, even if it’s fictionalised. Of course films will romanticise a job as you only see the good parts and popular media has conjured up many images of what work is like, especially for creatives. Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster is my favourite in deconstructing these, seeing through the smooth path that seems to be marketed into a winding uncertain road where all you’re trying to do is reach the next corner.
Auster begins with the romanticised allegory that he knew, ever since he was young that he wanted to be a writer. And from there, the book follows in his determined pursuit to fulfil this by most means; he writes erotica for a friend’s publishing company, creates and aims to sell a baseball card game at a trading card convention alongside other jobs before getting his much acclaimed series of stories, The New York Trilogy, published after all of these trials.
I find it very unromantic, and most of all, very refreshing; although it was published in 1997, it’s path rings true today, trying to pursue something you want to pursue to be able to do it full time. But doing something full time as a job doesn't always bring it the value you think it might, but just doing it anyway is important. Turning hobbies into jobs is seen as creating value out of them when they already had value in themselves because they were being done. I hate the word ‘hobbies’; it feels like when I say it, it means I wasn’t ‘good enough’ to pursue my interests as anything other than a hobby.
On the other hand, there are too many narratives going round to quit your job and go all in; this echos the same myths that Andrew Tate and his disciples follow in ‘quit your job, invest, move to Dubai’ etc etc. But if you, like me, don’t want to or can’t afford to do that, don’t feel disheartened that you aren’t going ‘all in’ by having a day job. It is an unstable world and finding some stability in it shouldn’t be shamed. Find risk where you can and go for it, your whole life and wellbeing doesn’t need to be riding on making your creative career profitable but doing the work for it anyway. The best piece of advice I received recently was ‘just do the work, it will find a home eventually’ which has made it easier to think about just doing work without getting it published by a big company, exhibited in a gallery or needing to share it on Instagram as the ‘new me’.
It’s the repetitive but hopeful view that we aren’t our jobs, which is very difficult to realise when you’re scrubbing the sticky floors of a bar or serving a person that is mimicking you when you say ‘sorry, we don’t take cash’. It’s what makes me want to go into a creative career but also what makes me not want to write full time; when I do something so much and especially when it just becomes something purely for money, I lose interest. Finding an inbetween, I realise that creativity doesn’t always need to be personal expression, especially when it’s a job. You can use the creative skills you do have to make work that has very little personal expression to make room through money, time, energy for the work that expresses you most. Pick the job that will serve you best in your pursuits of these and trust yourself enough to pick a path, even if it seems long and difficult.