Wages

 Like millions of other Americans, I have survived 18 months of a global public health emergency that might easily have tanked the entire U.S. economy, only to find myself with a weird and unexpected surplus of cash in my bank account. The mechanism by which it got there is still not really clear to me. All I was doing was working my regular job. My stimulus checks were chiefly sent right back in the form of donations. But somehow, the lack of travel and a pattern of sponging off my immediate family had evidently trimmed my living expenses so much that—far from facing the economic collapse we all feared at the start of this pandemic—I was flush. 

Add to that a small investment account and a trust, and I had started to regard my job as a kind of voluntary gesture. "I'll work because it's a way to help others," I loftily informed myself, "But I could leave it any time." And lo, earlier today, I decided that time had come. I was ready for the next chapter. Time to move on, maybe go back to school. Or just experiment with living for a while, free of the self-imposed burden of remunerative employment. Oh, to be sure, I knew that health insurance is costly, and I'd have other expenses. But I just looked at that unprecedentedly fat bank balance and knew I was in the clear. 

A friend suggested that I try to actually run the numbers on that assumption. I waved him aside. "Oh, it's plenty of money." He encouraged me again to actually check my current monthly living expenses, and divide my bank balance by that number in order to calculate how long I could survive without a job. I asked him how to go about such a thing. I said "I'd have to add up all my utilities, etc." It seemed like a chore. He suggested I just look at my bank statements from the last few months. Now there was a thought! I checked them out, and did the simple arithmetic required. 

12.5 months, the answer came back. Barely a year.... Wait a minute. I ran it again. Same result. 

My friend seemed to think this was perfectly encouraging. "A full year!" he said. "That's plenty of time to find another job." Another job? "Where would I find another job?" I asked "You think they just grow on trees?" "Well, this is why people spend a lot of time job searching," he said, "and why people say the job search is a full-time job in itself." "But... but..." I replied, "If what I want is a job, I should just keep doing exactly what I am doing; because it's the perfect job for me; it's in my field, I like the work, it allows me to spend my time on the things I care about... *If* I have to work, I should just stay here."

And I do have to work. Eventually. The numbers didn't lie. I stared at them again, but they wouldn't change. I was trapped. There was no way out. Here I was all this time thinking I was freer than other people. The fact had filled me with all kinds of unhealthy emotions. Guilt, shame, the feeling that I had to hide the truth of my financial situation from other people, and, creeping beneath all of this, an unattractive sense of special election, a certain noblesse oblige. Now I realized all that was irrelevant. As much truth as there was to the idea that I was privileged, I could still be both privileged and trapped. 

I was trapped just like my parents and their parents before them had been trapped. Trapped by the obligation to work for a living. "So do you see now?" my friend asked. "Do you see what AOC and all those people are talking about? About being imprisoned by the economy and all that, and how we need UBI?" I did see exactly what they meant. I thought of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Wages" and decided to pull it up. It felt like the poem we needed in this moment of direst realization. I needed the cold naturalistic consolation only it could provide:

Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage - earner is a sort of gaol-bird
Earning a salary is a prison overseer’s job,
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.

Yes, true, very true, my friend and I both agreed. "Very apropos" my friend said, of my choice of poem.

Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison

in terror lest you have to go in 

Okay, and there was my fantasy of having my year of no work right there. It would not in fact be freedom. I would be "strolling grandly outside the prison," yet in fear all the time, knowing that I was sitting on a finite pile of resources that was rapidly dwindling, and that at the end of it, I would have less than what I started with. And maybe the point of that pile of cash was that it theoretically bought me the freedom to someday spend a no-work year of just this sort. But possessing now the pile I could not think of drawing down on it or allowing it to be depleted; that seemed so unwise. 

As Lawrence says earlier in the same poem: The wages of cash is want more cash.

So the solution must be UBI after all! That's the only way to escape the need to work and generate cash and then the need for more cash. We should all just be freed of this intolerable burden of work! 

But then I told my friend: "No, it wouldn't work. Everything has a material basis somewhere. Someone would have to pay for the UBI checks." "Well," he said, "that's why it would need to be publicly funded." "But," I said, "what would incentivize the tiny handful of people who still have jobs—namely, the tech overlords—to indefinitely pay to keep the rest of us alive? They might decide they want to  cut us off." "They'd be taxed," said my friend. "But they could just have a coup and overthrow majoritarian democracy and end taxation, and we couldn't stop them because we'd have no more social power. Peter Thiel's already working on that."

I was making a sort of Tocquevillian point, you see, because functioning democracy depends on social power not getting too centralized and being spread around broadly in the population. "But why wouldn't the non–tech overlords have any more social power?" asked my friend. "Because they would have no  marketable skills and they wouldn't be producing anything of value," I said. We would just be cows, my friend and I concluded, reduced to waiting for our benefactors to fill our troughs. And those benefactors could well decide one day they want to stop filling it. That's the trouble with us all not having jobs and just living off UBI checks. 

But that means there really is no way out of the obligation to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. We're either forced to work for a living or, to D.H. Lawrence's point, we have to live under the spectral terror of one day potentially having to do so, because we could be cut off. We're trapped. And this system, as Lawrence writes, is called universal freedom.

"Okay, but isn't this actually freeing in a way though?" my friend asked. "I'd be interested in how this affects your sense of identity." He was right. It was effecting a change in me. The shame and the guilt were flooding out. The sense of being caged was certainly closing in, in their place. But, I was finally freed of the noblesse oblige and the false sense of election. I was not special. I was not free. At root, I was just like everyone else. I was just another member of society. I shared in the common plight. I was involved in solving our social problems not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it affects me. 

"I gave you skin," said my friend—being short for "skin in the game."

"Okay thanks," I said. And he said "Isn't this real freedom? Working within the parameters of your life? Living within a budget?" "Sure I guess... but easier said than done," I thought. And this just put me in mind of another poem. I turned to John Davidson's words to remember the full verse:

[... T]he difficultest go to understand, 

And the difficultest job a man can do, 

Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week, 

And feel that that's the proper thing for you.