The Drift

TAM-RIM.1-04 · The Reimagined, Cluster 1: The Human Work · The Approximate Mind

Kevin is on his mother’s couch. It is 11:40 in the morning on a Wednesday. He is not asleep but he is not doing anything that requires being awake. The television is on. He is not watching it. His phone is on the cushion next to him. He checks it occasionally, not for messages, because the people who would message him are the same three people they have always been, but for something he cannot name. Some change in the feed that would tell him today is different from yesterday.

It is not different from yesterday.

He is twenty-nine. He lives with his mother in a duplex in Evansville. He has worked at a tire shop, a pizza chain, a lawn care company, and a distribution center. He left each one. He was not fired from any of them. He left the tire shop because it was boring. He left the pizza chain because the manager scheduled him for closes and he does not like closing. He left the lawn care company because it was July and he hates mowing lawns. He left the distribution center because he got a better offer at the tire shop, which had rehired him, and then he left the tire shop again.

He tells this story without embarrassment. These are facts. He does not arrange them into a narrative of failure because he does not experience them as failure. He experiences them as a sequence of things that happened, none of which were what he wanted, though he is not sure what he wants, which is the part that people seem to find most troubling about him.

The Question That Does Not Help

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What do you want to do with your life?

Kevin has been asked this question by his mother, two girlfriends, a guidance counselor in high school, and a caseworker at the unemployment office who seemed genuinely nice and completely useless. He has never had an answer. Not a bad answer. Not a secret answer he is withholding. No answer. The question assumes a want that he does not have, and his inability to produce one strikes the people asking it as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be accommodated.

He is not depressed. He went through a screening at the unemployment office and scored in the normal range. He is not anxious. He sleeps fine. He has friends, two from high school and one from the distribution center, and they play video games online three or four nights a week and talk about nothing in the comfortable way that men who have known each other a long time talk about nothing.

He is adequate. This is not a word people use about themselves, but it is the word that fits. He can do whatever is in front of him with reasonable competence. He does not excel. He does not collapse. He occupies the center of every bell curve that measures anything, and the center of the bell curve is where most people live, and the difference between Kevin and the other people who live there is that Kevin does not pretend otherwise.

The Grandfather

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His grandfather worked at a GM plant for thirty-one years. Assembly line. He did not love it. He did not hate it. He went. He worked. He came home. He watched the Reds. He drank two beers on weeknights and four on weekends. He retired with a pension and a set of lower back problems and he died at seventy-four and Kevin’s mother talks about him as though he lived a good life, which by any reasonable measure he did.

His grandfather did not have vocational gravity toward automobile assembly. He had a body and a willingness to use it and an economy that would pay him to do so. The deal was not inspiring. The deal was: show up, do the thing, go home, and in exchange the economy will give you enough for a house and a family and a truck and a pension. His grandfather kept his end. The economy kept its end. Nobody asked anyone what they wanted to do with their life because the question would have been absurd. You worked. That was what you did with your life.

Kevin cannot get the deal. Not because he is lazier than his grandfather, though some people would say that, people who mistake a structural disappearance for a personal failing. The deal is gone because the economy no longer needs Kevin’s body badly enough to build a life around it. The tire shop has a diagnostic tablet. The distribution center has robots. The pizza chain is testing automated prep. The lawn care company is still hiring, but Kevin hates mowing lawns, and the expectation that he should do work he hates because it is the only work available is an expectation that his grandfather never had to meet, because his grandfather had options.

Kevin has fewer options and more advice. Everyone has advice for Kevin. Retrain. Upskill. Learn to code. Find your passion. These suggestions come from people whose own relationship to learning and ambition has been rewarded since childhood, people who cannot imagine that the reward is the anomaly. Kevin sat in school for twelve years and the thing he learned most thoroughly was that school was not for him. Not because he was incapable. Because the version of capability that school measured was not the version he possessed.

What Adequacy Used to Buy

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The adequacy economy was not a policy. It was a condition. For roughly seventy years, from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the automation wave, the American economy could absorb average-drive, average-ability workers in large numbers and give them lives. Not remarkable lives. Lives. The absorption happened not because the economy was generous but because it was hungry, and because the work it needed done, the assembling and the driving and the stocking and the serving, required a human body in a specific place doing a specific thing, and Kevin’s body was as good as anyone else’s.

The adequacy economy did not ask you to want anything. It asked you to show up. Showing up was the whole skill, and it was enough, and it was honest.

AI does not eliminate the need for human bodies entirely. It reduces the need enough that adequacy stops being sufficient. The remaining jobs require something more: digital fluency, continuous learning, adaptability, the willingness to be retrained every few years. These are not unreasonable requirements. They are requirements that select against Kevin, not because Kevin lacks value but because Kevin’s value was showing up, and showing up is no longer a scarce resource in an economy that has machines that never leave.

I wonder whether Kevin is the person the entire reimagined conversation is least equipped to help, because every version of help begins with the question “what do you want?” and Kevin’s honest answer is the one nobody can build a program around.

Wednesday Afternoon

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Kevin will get off the couch around one. He will make a sandwich. He will take the dog out, a mutt named Carl who belongs to his mother and who is the only member of the household with a consistent daily schedule. He will check his phone again. He will consider applying for a job at the new Amazon fulfillment center that opened on the east side, and he will not apply, not today, because he applied there six months ago and did not hear back and the act of applying and not hearing back is its own kind of labor, the labor of being rejected by a system that does not know it has rejected you because it never saw you in the first place.

He is not angry. Anger is for people who expected something and did not get it. Kevin did not expect anything specific. He expected the deal, the one his grandfather had, the one that said show up and we will make room for you. The deal is gone and nothing has replaced it and Kevin is on the couch, not because the couch is where he wants to be but because the couch is where you end up when the economy cannot think of anything to do with you and you cannot think of anything to do with yourself.

He will play games with his friends tonight. He will be funny. He will go to bed around two and wake up around ten and the day will be the same shape as this one.

Kevin is not a problem to be solved. He is a person the economy has stopped needing, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a policy challenge and a human life, and the policy conversation does not know how to hold a human life, and Kevin does not know how to fit inside a policy challenge.

He is on the couch. Carl is asleep at his feet.

This is the fourth essay in The Reimagined, Cluster 1: The Human Work. It is about the large population of adequate workers whose relationship to work was transactional and whose adequacy was enough for the old economy and is not enough for the new one.

References

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Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster, 2018.

Bloodworth, James. Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Atlantic Books, 2018.

Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Pantheon Books, 1974.