Vol. 1, No. 8: Feeling Drained
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Dear Soft Labor,
About a year ago, I suffered a major health crisis that left me physically functional but emotionally, financially, and worst of all, creatively drained. Remember the infamous lore of David Bowie’s living on red peppers, milk, and cocaine? For me, it’s adrenaline, prescription meds, and Sweetgreen kale caesar salad. No fun.
I work in a small, independent, interdisciplinary agency—a very hot, in-demand shop where everyone is brilliant and ideas seem to flow like holy water. I’m the most recent hire and my colleagues (who also double as nascent friends given how closely aligned we are in the day-to-day) have no idea that I am essentially still recovering in more ways than one. By all appearances, I am fine. But I know that my health cannot hold out against brutally late nights, substance-infused parties, and the other trappings of “creative life” that once sustained me.
How do I keep doing the work that I truly adore—I love my job—without falling ill again? How do I restore my energy along the way?
From the recovery room,
Drained
Dear Drained,
While we are tempted to suggest that you hold back a bit to protect your health, it is clear to us that you are a person who dials life up, not down. Standard-issue advice about taking leaves of absence or embarking upon silent yoga retreats won’t apply here because you clearly don’t want to stop working. We suspect that work itself might be part of your healing process, in fact.
That being said, there’s another social imperative that we don’t believe you need to heed. It seems like you’re working in pretty close quarters, Drained. You mentioned that your coworkers are “nascent friends.” Be careful not to confuse them with the family, friends, and/or other associates and medical professionals whom we surmise helped guide and care for you through your initial crisis. Though you could choose to do so, you aren’t required—by law, nor by society—to disclose your health status at work, nor to make your daily recovery a group project of any sort.
Instead, we suggest that you truly focus on your own self rather than seeking external validation in your very cool, new workplace. Listen to your body and heed its calls. Don’t be afraid to be the studio enigma who goes home sometimes rather than joining in the after-work revelry. Stay off the bottle or the vape (or whatever).
That distance might “promote” you into an unexpected new leadership role amongst your colleagues, some of whom might also be secretly struggling in their own ways. And please trust that creativity doesn’t die; it simply lies dormant sometimes, seemingly especially—and always maddeningly—when we need our strength for other purposes.
We wish you a safe ongoing recovery.
Yours,
Soft Labor
Search Results
“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.
🔗 Follow Soft Labor’s research channel on are.na.
🔗 We not only enjoyed but deeply empathized with the sentiment of Elizabeth Goodspeed's recent It's Nice That piece, "Posting as Practice," which is about the tension between design-as-practice and what we'd call performing design in the world via video-driven social media and other platforms.
🔗 Ezra Klein’s recent podcast episode, How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us, is a conversation with eminent Gen Z economic pundit Kyla Scanlon of Kyla’s Newsletter. It’s one of the more succinct, provocative conversations about the attention economy, the "smoothness" of digitally-mediated experience, and related subjects that we’ve been privy to recently.
🔗 Verso just sent over the galley for Joanna Walsh's Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, which drops in September. It's tough to write about the social experience of the Internet compellingly given how personal and subjective hanging out online was and is, so we're looking forward to this one.
🔗 You might already read One Thing, Kyle Chayka and Nate Gallant's bite-sized newsletter on taste, authenticity, and "recommendation culture." Chayka recently published a smart little essay on OT about temporal "live-ness" and the cultural turn toward unmediated experience vis-a-vis the real-time, on-camera interview or intimate dinner table conversation, for example. "Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time."
🔗 Chayka's post reminded us of the philosophical concept of temporal consciousness, which resulted a nice deep-dive into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a half an hour or so of intellectual dreaminess on a Sunday afternoon. Life of the mind, people.
🔗 Thinking about the cultural precursors to today's seeming desire for temporal "realness"—and because we're on a 90s tear at the moment—we recently re-read this brief Artforum piece/interview on the infamous downtown NYC collective Art Club 2000 written by David Velasco in 2013, just as the group's work was resurfaced in the New Museum's NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star exhibition (which was awesome). Quoth original AC2K members Daniel McDonald and Patterson Beckwith: "What art succeeds or gets remembered and functions again? What has shelf life? What makes it? It’s all nostalgia. We knew we were engaging in that. History is always as close as the person you’re talking to and what they’re talking about. In New York, especially, everybody fucking fetishizes their practice and their life experience. And now that the whole culture is doing that on Facebook, people who didn’t do it on Facebook look somehow more authentic."
Progress Report
“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades.
▶️ Longtime Soft Labor comrades and husband-and-wife team Laura Kleger and Justin Schwartz just released About Friday Arts, a digital platform and nomadic, artist-run gallery for discovering and collecting contemporary art. Kleger directed digital at the Guggenheim for ages and Swartz is an award-winning filmmaker—and it shows. About Friday Arts was designed by Order, and we wish it success.
Dress Code
“Dress Code” spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.
