Chapotraphouse

I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”

“What?” he asked.

“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”

“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.

“Most of them, yeah,” I said.

He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”