9-to-5 or starve

Let’s talk about the 9-to-5 work structure in the US; who designed it?

This is a topic that comes to mind a lot because 1) Corporate America expects you to get up at the crack of dawn in order to make a decent living, and it’s not OK; 2) I am not a morning person, so obviously having a “normal” day job for me has always been challenging; and 3) how can anyone truly be happy doing this over and over again, until the end of their time, and then pass it on to the next generations?

“That’s just the way it is,” some would say. But I know I’m not alone when I say humans were not made to sit in a cubicle or at a desk for eight hours, go home at sunset (or later), try to run errands, make dinner, and then do the same thing all over again the next day. There’s no way we’re here for this toxic cycle, retire when we’re closer to death by natural causes, and then call it a life.

I have a lot to say about this soul-crushing structure, but it’s already been written, better than I would, by Charles Bukowski, in a letter he wrote to the man who helped him become a full-time writer. In it, he compares the 9-5 routine to slavery—and I happen to agree.

Here’s most of that letter:

They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.
Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are laid off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”
“It ain’t right…”
“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said:

“I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

How true. And as a writer who can’t seem to find enough time to write these days, this rant is actually sort of inspiring.