Recently, a meme was sent around various friends’ groups that said: “If your job can’t be illustrated by an animal wearing a hat in a children’s book, it’s not a real job,” along with a whimsical drawing of a pig farmer, a sheep baker, a construction worker dog and so on. We were showing this to each other to acknowledge that, by and large, we have jobs that are not easily communicable, whose dubious use cannot be simply conveyed. They are jobs that sound frivolous to our parents and, in our deepest hearts, to ourselves; or which have needlessly convoluted titles, making it impossible for most people to parse their meaning, or which involve much co-ordinating of communications and very little material action (these we dismissively call “email jobs” and as the media continues to disintegrate and devalue its workers, many of those of us who write are desperate to return to the comparative peace of the email jobs we happily shed in our early 20s in search of creative fulfilment).
The subject must have been on my mind already, only weeks before having had a dream in which I was watching a horror film where a villain trapped hordes of people in a mansion and began to pick them off according to how useless and fanciful their jobs were; the plumber lives, the senior director of search engine optimisation dies. Work – the value of my own, the meaning of work in one’s life generally – is something I have been contemplating more and more as I enter my mid-30s and lines are becoming more concretely drawn about what sort of lives my friends and I are leading. The babies are coming, most notably.
A friend who is trying to get pregnant and I spoke about the process, and she commented that even though she was now actively trying to do so, pregnancy still seemed preposterous: “It’s okay when other people do it, but for me it is against nature, fantasy novel stuff.” I am single and have never particularly wanted children, so the defining element of my middle age is not going to be based around babies, barring an unforeseen radical shift in my desires or a tragic yet uplifting tale where a close friend is killed in a plane crash and has curiously decided to leave the care of their child to me, the irresponsible city girl, teaching me – and the kid! – a few choice life lessons along the way.
Admittedly, Americans often date in an aggressive, turbocharged fashion, which is alien and crass to me as a person from Ireland and having lived a long time in England
None of this has really impacted my life just yet as is typical of my generation and the cities I live in. I moved from London to New York this year with some awareness that it is even more difficult to buy property and raise children in New York, so I could perhaps outrun the inevitable shift a little longer here. For the moment, most people I know here are, like me, still figuring out what to prioritise and what is possible. But it’s happening, nonetheless, the lines are being drawn: do you give precedence to family and marriage, work, friends, or adventure? Only the truly wealthy can attempt to have a bit of everything.
Recently, the realities of this new era in my life became clear, chasteningly so, when I began to date a man in his late 30s. Admittedly, Americans often date in an aggressive, turbocharged fashion, which is alien and crass to me as a person from Ireland and having lived a long time in England, where emotion and relationship vagaries are not discussed with the same brutal, bureaucratic efficiency. This man and I only saw each other for six weeks or so, but we had become close quickly and things felt like they could become serious if given the chance. I brought him to my apartment with a bunch of my friends for tacos and the presidential debates, that innocent time only weeks ago when such things could be consumed as mere spectacle. We spent weekend mornings walking his dog around the Brooklyn neighbourhood he lived in, which was almost nauseatingly aesthetically pleasing in the autumn, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Halloween before all the stabbing begins. I woke up one Sunday and walked into his livingroom where he was sitting in the sunlit armchair doing a crossword while my favourite album played and thought: yes, I could see this working, I would like to make this work.
Instead, things fell apart spectacularly after a conversation in which he worried that I was not open to children and marriage. I tried to make my case – I had simply never seriously dated anyone who wanted those things before, it hadn’t come up. I am not closed off to them but I would only want them with somebody who I am in love with. I do not want them abstractly. The falling in love would have to happen before I could want them, and six weeks was not long enough for me to feel confidence about love, marriage, or children. He would also want to leave New York, a place I love more than anywhere and have only just managed to arrive after years of planning, to raise said children. Trying to be reasonable and open-minded, I asked where he might like to live if not New York.
“I don’t know ... New Jersey?” he said.
“New Jersey?” I couldn’t help but gasp back.
And that, more or less, was that.
He was right to do what was best for him, to ensure he was in with the best chance of the kids and wife and house and yard he wanted. I didn’t hold it against him, but it felt lonely and frightening to think that it is no longer possible to only be open to what may arise in life but that it may now be the case that you must enter each interaction with defined aims in mind, and if you didn’t, then tough luck.
Nowadays, for women who don’t have or want children, it is often expected culturally that you take that effort and pride, and direct it to your work. This is, obviously, a vast improvement on the situation historically when such a woman was consigned to embarrassed ignorance at best and open attack, derision and violence at worst. There are, as indicated by the deeply disturbing gender wars, which have become explicit post-Trump re-election, a sizeable contingent of men still who will publicly say that a woman’s only function is procreation, and that any other personhood or value she holds is meaningless by comparison. Even those who are not so medieval in their thinking, though, even the relatively right-on, even women ourselves, tend to look at a childless woman and think, “So what are you doing instead?”, as though we owe a dazzling and remarkably successful career in lieu of the human beings we failed to produce.
I thought this myself for a long stretch. Emerging from the first half of my 20s, which were defined entirely by the need to be domesticated and accepted and taken care of by a man, I figured, logically enough, that the only acceptable recourse was to turn the other way and refuse those desires entirely. I focused on work instead, to create what I hoped would be the stable identity I had negated through my need for love. I didn’t do this in the coherent, concentrated way that would have been more satisfying – no studying, no degree, no official stamp to tell me I had come good, in fact no employment whatsoever – but in fits and starts I cobbled together a writing career and went on to publish novels, a thing that seemed like an impossibly grandiose dream for my whole life. And there was a narrative satisfaction in the turn of events, that I had taken all the debasement and spiritual aridness of those love-addict years and digested them into something that would come to give me the means, both practically and emotionally, to see myself as a fully autonomous and independent person.
I am proud of my work, or at least I am more glad that I produced it than ashamed of its failings, and it is also true that there is little as inconsistent as writing, or any art-making, to provide you with self worth. There is also little that has demonstrated to me the arbitrary nature of evaluation as clearly as selling books. You hear of one incontrovertible genius, beloved by readers and critics, selling her short story collection for what amounts to a month or two of minimum wage, and then another person getting hundreds of thousands for a concept, which must have appeared promising, but was not underwritten by talent or experience and goes on to sell nothing. The whole experience made money itself seem fake to me, and then I realised that it is in a sense fake, an illusion we all have to commonly agree upon to keep the wheels turning. The arbitrary nature of how art work is received is similarly destabilising: when I had an office job, the amount and quality of work I did was quantifiable whether by the number of reports I finished or hours I spent on the phone or emails returned. Now, though, while some people may find value in what I do, many others don’t, so who am I to decide what is work, and how hard I have done it?
I think, too, about the way that work has changed through the generations, and how this abstraction colours the relationship to it. My grandfather John Nolan began as a labourer in Telecom Éireann. His final rank survey officer, and his son, my father, became the playwright and director Jim Nolan. After getting my not entirely technically minded father hired at Telecom Éireann(which became known as Eircom and then later Eir), my grandfather must have been alarmed to see him eventually depart to make a living out of thought and words instead of quantifiable action. And yet he had built him a shed in their garden to write in. I was moved to learn this, the thought of the physical labour of my grandfather being put to this use, facilitating a practice and a life for my father that could hardly have been more alien to his own.
Lately I stood there in the doorway of that garden so that my dad could point out the absence of a tree that had been cut down, allowing for an overly stark sightline between the house behind and my grandmother’s house – “I thought he was going to come down out of the window,” she said, of the neighbouring man she could newly see peering out across from her. Dad pointed out where the shed had been, and said his father had installed a gas heater to keep him warm, or possibly try to kill him.
All my life I have wanted nothing more than the company of other people, to care for and cook for them and make them laugh and live alongside them
I was thinking that day about a quote I like from one of my favourite books. I like it despite, or maybe because of, the fact it disquiets me, presenting a position that is, if true, in direct opposition to how I have so far lived my life. The quote is from the novel Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham, and says: “He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”
[ I bought CDs, rented videos and lost my virginity to a boy I met on MySpaceOpens in new window ]
Looking at the space my father’s shed had once been, a monument to my grandad’s faith in the possibilities of his life, I thought about how work did not have to have its own inbuilt or inherent meaning – that perhaps in my grandfather’s case, his hard work was made meaningful by allowing him such things as to build that offering to my dad, to support the people closest to him in ways both logistically and otherwise. Though what my dad and I both do is difficult to justify as hard work compared with most jobs, I think in its best moments it shares something with this notion of facilitating closeness; it is an attempt in one guise or another to recognise those around you and see them for who they are and hold them near you, be they a child, a parent, a friend, or a stranger who chances upon the words. All my life I have wanted nothing more than the company of other people, to care for and cook for them and make them laugh and live alongside them, and if the work can help me afford that time, then it has done enough for me, and I for it.