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White Collar

When I first started my current job, S and I were thrown into the same project by a random quirk of fate. She in a decade younger than me and more world-weary than she should be. Fifteen years on the road will do that to a person who does not particularly love living out of a hotel Mon-Thu. That was how she lived until the pandemic struck. Suddenly she was at home and loving it.

There was time to spend with her boyfriend it was possible to get a dog as she had long wanted to. Having had a chance to take pause and stay home for weeks and months at a time changed S in the most dramatic ways. She is one of the many people who I know transformed for the better by the pandemic because they were lucky to be in professions where their skills became even more valuable because of it. S and I get together for a chat every few weeks and each meeting I see a better version of the person - calmer, more thoughtful and deliberate about what she does or chooses not to. Reading these lines from Seth Godin's Linchpin reminded me of a recent conversation we had:

Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they’re still working in the factory. They push a pencil or process an application or type on a keyboard instead of operating a drill press. The only grease they have to get off their clothes at the end of the day is the grease from the take-out food at lunch. But it’s factory work. It’s factory work because it’s planned, controlled, and measured. It’s factory work because you can optimize for productivity. These workers know what they’re going to do all day—and it’s still morning.

The forced pause in her ceaseless travels for work gave S time to process the fact that very little separated her from those workers who are commodity and therefore disposable. Its just the time of disposal varies by trade. She is fighting the tide by wanting to be an artist where the system would want her to be a skilled worker. 


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