The service industry.
I’ve spent my adult life in the world of non-passion jobs that pay between $10-$20/hr. Non-passion in the sense that these are jobs people get because they are jobs, rather than jobs like “writer” or even working at a museum or whatever, that tend to be in that pay range primary because part of your paycheck is the assumption you get to do work you love. (For more on this concept, read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber—a book I know I’m annoying about, but is genuinely worth your time)
That pay scale is also, of course, relative to where I live. Des Moines has a reasonably low cost of living (we just make it expensive in other ways, like barely having a functioning public transit system), so this window of money I’m talking about might be a bit higher in a city with a high cost of living and a higher minimum wage, but I think we know the realm of job I’m talking about. It’s working class jobs, both service work and office work.
Working class office work is the stuff like data entry, insurance processing, call centers, etc. Working class service work is most service work, unless you end up owning or managing or taking on some special role that gets you into a higher pay scale. This window of jobs is what I’ve spent my life doing.
With a college degree in hand, I assumed I’d be able to get out of this type of work. All through high school and then during college, I worked these types of jobs. I worked at a Subway making shitty sandwiches; I worked at a hotel and conference center setting up weddings and meetings; I worked at a Hy-Vee bakery where I was asked to throw away multiple trashcans full of bread every night (one of those early experiences that began radicalizing my politics); I worked at a Target; Walmart; Half Priced Books; I did data entry at a Wells Fargo for a summer; I was a barista at a local coffee shop. I did all of these jobs before I finally had a Bachelor of Arts, but once I had that degree, I assumed that I’d start to find work in a higher pay range.
Then the summer of 2021, after a brief unpaid internship which I hoped would help my odds, I tried to finally take a step into the coveted Middle Class and escape this $10-$20/hr range. Hundreds of applications, hundreds of cover letters—nope, nothing. I didn’t do enough internships or extracirriculars; I didn’t make enough connections. All I had was good grades and a degree in history and philosophy, and that wasn’t enough.
This isn’t fully my fault—I needed to work paid jobs while in college, so I just didn’t have the time to do unpaid internships or really get involved outside of my coursework. I got married and then got divorced while in college. I also did my first two years at a community college to save money, meaning I also didn’t get the same level of attention and ‘formation’ that others got at the private college I transfered to afterwards. All this to say, a B.A. doesn’t make you special and the job market sucked after COVID.
Eventually, I reached out to the temp agency that got me my job at Wells Fargo all those years ago, and applied for a number of copywriting or technical writing positions they had. My thought was that getting something like that on a resume could help my odds at eventually becoming some sort of writer. But I was also desperate for work, so I told them I had data entry experience…
So for the last three years, I’ve been in the upper side of that $10-$20/hr range working as an insurance processor. I could have received this job without my degree. It was a better work environment than Wells Fargo—significantly more relaxed, eventually allowing me to work from home. I’m thankful for the stability it’s provided, but it also has made me come to grips with something.
Out of all the available $10-$20/hr work there is, I think office work is the last thing I would like to do.
This would have sounded a bit funny to me a few years back, my feet sore from those service jobs and constantly feeling overwhelmed because of the unpredictability of my schedule. I had started to long for a job where I could sit and where things weren’t as intense. I didn’t realize, though, that something worse than that is never really moving and never really feeling like anything you do matters.
On a logical level, I understand that processing insurance does produce something in the world. It’s the step after data entry. So an insurance application gets submitted, and then the data enterer takes that application and punches it into the software. After that, the processor looks at all the data that got entered, compares it to the paper application to make sure it’s all right, and either a) issues it if everything about it is okay, b) fixes the data in the software if it’s not entered right, or c) contact the insurance agent if something was done incorrectly, like it wasn’t signed or they put the wrong premium amounts on the paperwork. So all that boring explanation to say, the thing I did wasn’t technically a “bullshit job” in the Graeber sense. It’s not a completely fake position or anything; it does actually produce a good. But here’s a weird psychological thing: if things are going well, you actually don’t do anything at all.
The job is to fix issues. If the paperwork is all filled out right, there’s no issues to fix, so all I’m doing is looking over a bunch of papers and going “yup, yup, yup,” and then pressing the button that issues it. What am I doing? What am I producing? I talked to someone else who works in the insurance industry recently, and he didn’t feel the same level of despair about the work that I do, and the main reason is because he helped set up people’s accounts. This is entirely different on a psychological level—you talk to people and you create a virtual thing. It’s maybe not quite a psychologically satisfying as producing a physical product, but it does result in a thing being created via your labor.
A few weeks ago, I was informed that my contract would be up by the end of the month. See, this is another psychologically weird aspect to the job—I’ve been a temp for three years. They never hired me on, officially, so I spent all this time without PTO and with bare-minimum benefits. A little bit before the two year mark, I started trying to look for other jobs, but nothing seemed to really work out. I never got much follow-up. The job market has sucked, and no one cares about a B.A. and a few years of insurance experience—most people in Des Moines have that. Then the final blow came a few weeks ago: I was told the contract was finally wrapping up and they hadn’t found a permanent position they could put me in. The job would finish by the end of the year, so I needed to start looking for work ASAP.
I began looking for jobs like I’d been doing the whole year prior, and as I looked at identical looking insurance jobs to the one I have, I realized something: I fucking hate this work.
In the last year, I’ve caught myself fantasizing about barista work again. I thought I hated the work, but I really didn’t—I hated the low wages, I hated individual customers or coworkers, I hated feeling sore all the time. But I did not actually hate the work. Now having worked a 8:00am-4:30pm office job for three years, I realize that the unpredictability of the service work schedule actually works with my brain better than traditional office hours. Three years of waking up at 7:00am or earlier never got me any better at doing it; my brain is always most active in the evenings. The unpredictability of the schedule means, also, that you can catch up on sleep easier. Yeah, it would suck to work a 5:00am shift at the coffee shop, but you might work a night shift the next day, meaning you can sleep in and recover before you go to work. You don’t need to take time off to go to a doctor’s appointment because working non-traditional hours means you will have an open morning to go in.
But most importantly, service work is tangible work. I do work, and then I see that work produce a thing. I make a latte, and then someone drinks that latte. I use my hands to make a sandwich. It’s real. My labor creates something. If I’m having a good day at one of these types of jobs, that means it being a bit steady—not so busy that I’m overwhelmed, and enough time to do things well. I liked the feeling of making a latte that looked good. There’s an artistry to it. This is part of what was alienating about fast food work like Subway versus a coffee shop, although even then, the disappearance of the artistry is replaced by developing a level of speed that can genuinely be impressive. It felt good to be able to assemble a sandwich in under a minute. That’s labor, producing a product, done at a speed that feels like a skill.
All of this to say, I had been thinking about this for a few months already when I learned I would need to look for a new job. I tried my first hundred applications to try to get a passion job—writing, video or audio editing, etc.—and received the usual dialtone. As it became apparently I would be looking for another non-passion job in the $10-$20/hr range, I realized that I just could not bring myself to do another job like this. So I applied for service work.
I’m bartending now. I had my first two training shifts that last week. It’s a dine-in movie theater and brewery in a dying mall. I’m not giving the name just so that my Substack doesn’t come up if you Google the company, but you can probably figure the place out pretty quick with some minor online detective work. I pour beers, both for customers at the bar and for orders that come from customers in the movie theater (it’s someone else’s job to run them, thank God). My feet would hurt when I came home, but my girlfriend, Kelli, also observed that I came home more alive and energetic than she’s seen me in a while.
I use my hands, and I produce a thing. Sure, that thing is a glass of beer. But people like a glass of beer. On my second training shift, I made cocktails. It felt like barista work again. Following drink recipes—one day it’ll come so naturally I won’t need to follow a recipe—shaking drinks. God, it feels so good to use my hands again. It feels so good to assemble something. And there’s artistry and presentation to it: the salt around the rim of a margarita, the lemon or orange slice on the side of a cocktail glass. These little aesthetic things that feel really good to create. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s more dignity to this work for me. I’m less alienated from my labor.
That being said, there is still this somber tone people get when I tell them I’m moving from office work to service work again—like I’m taking a hit, like I’m falling down in rank. I find this stupid. This job has the same level of pay as the office jobs I’ve worked, and due to tips, it could sometimes pay better. A lot of people seem to automatically assume office work is all well-paid, but it’s not. This is why I was I started this by emphasizing a difference between working class office work and what would be more “white collar” office work or whatever you want to call it. You can find tons of office jobs that only pay $15/hr. So it’s not a choice between better and worse pay here; service work doesn’t represent some level of desperation that office work doesn’t.
This is ultimately a cultural problem, one that springs from an economic problem. Service work is not consider real work in the way trades or white collar work is. But why not? It’s hard work. It takes skill. You’ll sometimes hear people derisively say that someone shouldn’t make $20/hr “flipping burgers;” someone saying that has clearly never worked one of those jobs. You think all you’re doing is “flipping burgers?” No, you’re flipping 100 burgers in an hour while making sure the kitchen remains clean and also filling in at the register because someone called in, etc etc. It’s a level of skill that most white collar workers truly don’t have. Most of them could not handle it.
And I can.
That’s a skill.
I have dignity in that work.
The only lack of dignity comes from the cultural attitude surrounding this work. A notion that if someone is bartending or stocking shelves, that they’ve fucked up in life. But here’s the thing—if I can’t get a job being a writer or doing things that I’m passionate about, and I’m going to have to suck it up and work a job merely for a paycheck, then I want to work a job where I have some pride in what I’m making. Most of these resentful, weird comments you get (“if you have a college degree but you’re working here, you must have fucked up somewhere”) come from people who wouldn’t want to live in a world without service work. You enjoy the fruit of my labor. You drink the drinks I’m pouring. You eat the food I make. You shop at the stores where I stock the shelves. We clearly want this stuff in our society, and if it’s a necessary job in our society, it ought to be a career path. It ought to be seen a proper work.
Back in 2019, I attended a small event in Des Moines that was “Service Workers for Bernie.” At that event, someone said something that has stuck with me, “some of us like this work. Some of us are passionate about this work.” This was said in defense of higher wages for service workers, and it is a defense of that (the natural conclusion to “this is a job we deem necessary in our society” is “this work deserves a living wage”), but it’s also a broader ethos. It’s a declaration of dignity. I didn’t end up here simply because I fucked up, and I didn’t just end up here because no one else would take me. I like doing this work. It makes me proud.
I’ve decided that even if I end up returning to office work because I need more stability or something, I will still probably bartend or do something around those lines a night a week. Not simply because of the extra cash, but because I like the work and because it helps me from feel entirely alienated from existence as a human. When your feet hurt, you know you’re human, you know you have a body. When you sit at home and stare at a screen, only having human contact via email and only relate to your labor by a few click in a software, you forget yourself. You’re a brain in a vat.
Welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I (Josiah) tell you about everything I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
I released a new episode of the music exchange with Josh Christianson. This month, we discussed Master of Puppets by Metallica and Wide Awake! by Parquet Courts. You can find that and more on Patreon for a mere $3/hr. Here’s a link to the episode.
Film
Since this was my last week having a job where I could watch movies while working, I wanted to try to take advantage of that.
I’m also trying to get Herzog. He’s one of those directors that’s a massive name that you’re supposed to like if you like film. I’ve had a weird and embarrassing relationship to his work where I haven’t seen a lot of the big ones, and I want to try to fix that.
When I tried to get into Herzog, a bunch of his stuff wasn’t on streaming. This was back in 2017/2018 or so, and so I was limited to a weird catalogue of some of his documentaries. I watched Lessons of Darkness (1992), which I didn’t really get at the time, but which has wormed it’s way into my brain over the years. I watched Lo and Behold which was brand new at the time, and I was a bit mixed on. A few other random documentaries. A couple years ago, I watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which was my first journey into his narrative work. I liked it, but didn’t feel too strongly about it at the time. I also watched Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009) because of the Nicolas Cage performance. I liked it a lot, but it’s more of an outlier in Herzog’s style, I’ve gathered.
This week, I watched three of his movies: Grizzly Man (2005), Heart of Glass (1976), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010).
I was definitely too sleepy for Heart of Glass, and I’ll need to rewach it when I’m in a different headspace. It was beautiful and dreamy and slow, which meant it was hard to watch while tired. I’ve struggled with Herzog’s narrative stuff thus far, and I’m not sure why. I’m hoping that will change when I’ve seen enough of them and feel like I’ve started to figure him out.
His documentary stuff, though, is captivating. I have not struggled with it at all, and even the one I did struggle with (Lessons of Darkness) had a huge, long-term impact on me. I still think about the final scene in that movie frequently.
Grizzly Man is kind of the Herzog film for a lot of people, and I see why. It’s an incredible character study, and every piece of information is introduced in such a careful and intentional order. He does an incredible job not shying away from the uglier and more pathetic sides of Timothy Treadwell, while remaining deeply sympathetic to him and finding a lot of beauty in his life story. It would be very easy for the film to either mock him relentless or to tell his story in a hagiographic mode. Herzog wisely avoids both of those tempations. I found the whole thing really compelling, and I’m glad I finally got around to it. Everyone who told me I needed to watch it was right.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams was also incredible. Over the past year or two, I’ve become really interested in prehistoric human history and the slow development of “civilization.” The film explores that academic space with the sort of transcendant, spiritual component that’s also a big part of my interest in the subject. The distance of the deep past, and the unknowability of what these ancient humans were like, combined with the glimmers of humanity that we can recognize, all combine into something emotionally potent. I was stunned by this scene where a scientist realized he could play the Star-Spangled Banner on a paleolithic flute. There’s something incredible about bringing the past to the present like that.
If you haven’t gotten around to either of those films, I highly recommend them. I’m hoping to continue this little Herzog kick in the coming weeks. Maybe I’ll finally watch Fitzcarraldo.
On that note, I’ll see you next Friday.
Technically not a Herzog movie, but I enjoyed the found footage-esque mockumentary "Incident at Loch Ness" starring Herzog who is acting as himself making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster, with the mockumentary being a faux behind-the-scenes experience.