Sent the book to a publisher today. And to add to what I said in the previous post, I don’t exactly kill myself working. I don’t work past 3 pm. Except Wednesday when I finish at 1 pm. I haven’t graded or prepared class on weekends in years. But look at my productivity. I haven’t broken a deadline either in publishing or administratively ever. I’m editor-in-chief of an academic journal, and I’m equally effective there. Everything is graded the day of or the day after, at the latest.
I see colleagues work crazy hours and they are still stuck on that article from 2 years ago. And they are great people, very hard-working. But they aren’t doing it right. They aren’t filling the first bucket. They think that the first bucket is for whatever is left over after filling the third. But it doesn’t work like that.
You know how Ayn Rand said that before you are able to say “I love”, you need to be able to say “I”? It’s the same thing. You aren’t creating because you haven’t allowed yourself to say “I”. The I lives in the first bucket. You are feeding it leftovers and wondering why nothing satisfactory comes out of it.
Clarissa's Blog 
One thing that is, I think, not entirely obvious to the non neoliberal-brained is that the eternal process of reinvention is driven by a deep joy. The Victorian sense of duty and restraint is entirely absent here. What you do instead is have very low operating costs (no kids, no mortgage, as few possessions and external responsibilities as possible) and alternate periods of “locked in” burning-the-midnight-oil for *your* goals, not an external authority’s (10% at most of your days) with periods of coasting in, where you have enough coming in from your low-effort job or other random schemes that you can take care of yourself, and have most of the day to invest in a strange mix of very well regimented laziness. Entirely useless shit, so to say. This earns you a flexibility reserve where when something very unexpected happens that breaks down the whole status quo your moneymaker was relying on, you have very little of your identity invested in said status quo and therefore will react faster than others, and you have a diverse enough skillset that you can find something else easily. Absolutely joyful, you live a great life that way, and come floating on top no matter what happens, but it’s also pretty impossible to raise kids in such an environment.
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This is Stille btw
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Yes. That’s such an important part of it. It’s joyful. It’s absolutely freaking exhilarating. It’s addictive as a drug. People concentrate on the negative sides which are enormous but what’s lost in the discussion is why it continues to exist if it’s all bad. The reason is that it’s so extremely enjoyable and we are avoiding that conversation out of strange prissiness.
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Puritans gonna Puritan, what can I say. You and me, we both come from Orthodox environments. The root system is different.
I think, another interesting and related thing is the need for control. You made a very sharp difference between the neoliberal and the neoliberal’s slave, and it really is such a Nietzcheian mentality, isn’t it? The main class difference here is, if you lose it all, do you land on your feet? The Ideal Neoliberal does, because like 10% of their time is invested into earning their keep (a mixture of IQ, education, inner discipline and feline restfulness means they can get a shitton done in 2h/day), and the rest goes on 30 long bets, 2 of which will pay off regardless of what happens. The lumpenproletariat has nowhere to fall from. It’s the middle class that finds life extremely precarious, because they’re the only ones actively investing in the future.
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It’s lovely to talk to somebody who speaks my language. 🙂 I’d love to have a friend like you in RL, and we’d get together and talk about percentages and productivity strategies.
I have an illustrative story about all this. My sister and her husband both lost their jobs at the beginning of COVID. His was a little earlier, hers a little after the start of the lockdowns. They still had a huge mortgage, kids in private schools, and bills. But both very elegantly pivoted into much better situations because the loss of the job and the bankruptcy of the business weren’t losses. A neoliberal conceptualizes these things completely differently. These were acts of liberation, opportunities, a new level in the game. It’s a very, very different way of narrating your own life. What could be a catastrophic setback became a gift resulting in more money, more free time, and more enjoyment.
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I talked about neoliberalism in class yesterday, and two students immediately lit up like Christmas trees. They’d never heard the word but the description spoke to them. Others were confused or indifferent. A couple were clearly disturbed. I think this is very representative of people in general.
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Sure it sounds great. But what a lot of us are seeing out here that makes us react “disturbed” is stuff like this:
https://x.com/VladTheInflator/status/1973875229001986546
I trust not everyone is doing that, but from here it looks an awful lot like a whole bunch of these successful people who don’t actually do much work are… doing it with fraud, nepotism, and sketchy financial instruments that are impoverishing the rest of us.
See also:
https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/brrrr
Sounds great. How many people are actually doing it, making it work, as opposed to committing outrageous amounts of fraud and being con artists?
-ethyl
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This is my whole point. This model doesn’t scale without disastrous consequences.
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