I’ve been working since I was 15. I’ve given my time, energy, and great portions of my life to restaurants, pizza joints, taxi companies, news companies, non-profits, and one temporarily famous strip club. I’ve worked these jobs, alone and in combination, while also going to school, raising three kids, and growing older and crankier.
The only thing I have to show for my efforts is that I didn’t die. That’s simply not enough anymore.
So that’s where I am. And that’s where this site came from. It’s bleak, yah. But work is bleak. So let’s face that, full on.
Fcuk Work, then, is an exasperation run through spell checker, an acknowledgment of things as they are, and a spit into the winds of fcukery that bind us perpetually to a system that sucks the life out of us in return for precious little, but just enough to keep us suspended, however precariously, over the promise of ruin, and not just our own, but the ruin of everyone we love.
Work plays for keeps. Shut up and get back to it, or its agents will come for you and your whole family. For generations. That’s the threat that underlies the sale of every alarm clock. No one has to pull out a gun to get you up for work. Everyone knows this threat is iron-clad.
So we get up and get to work. Not because we want to (though some may at least temporarily, or in short bursts, enjoy working, but that’s different than work as an institution. We’ll get to that later), but because we must.
We all know it’s bullshit. Republican, Democrat, communist, whatever. We’re all anarchists when it comes to work. Strip away all that ideological garbage and what you’re left with is the blind hatred of enforced drudgery that burns in all of us. Work sucks. And everyone knows it.
So why don’t we talk about it? The abolition of work–the concept, not the essay–is a topic mainly relegated to academic or anarchist circles, where it flops like a wet washcloth. It’s full of supposedly learned people writing in the bloated language of academia that almost no one other than other supposedly learned people of academia will ever give two shits about. It’s a circle jerk with footnotes. I’ve read a lot of these treaties. They suck.
I hope that Fcuk Work can expand the conversation to regular people who are forced to work against their will, which is nearly all of us. That’s what I’m trying to do here.
Did I choose an intentionally provocative name? You bet, because it cuts through the crap. Did I modify that intentionally provocative name to make it sliiightly more palatable to a wider audience? Oh yah, for obvious reasons. Also for the T-shirts, which will come later.
I want everyone to understand, however, that under the brash name and the antagonistic stance is hope. That’s what fuels this site and fuels me. Like you and like every decent human on this dumb, spinning rock, I wish that things could be different. I want old ladies to be taken care of, not forced to choose which meds to skip today because she bought some food instead. I want children to grow up safe and loved and fed, not learning ‘active shooter’ drills. I want everyone to live without the fear of what might become of them if they simply jumped off this hamster wheel for long enough to realize how fast they’ve been running their whole lives, and to stop working and start living.
And there’s no reason we can’t. No good reason, anyway. And as I see it, the straightest line to that future is the unceremonious death of work. Let’s start that conversation.
Fcuk Work.
— Keith.