By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Frantic is the word for it. I sat on the back porch Saturday morning and watched through the yards a wellbuilt neighbor in his late 50s or early 60s with a pickup truck or two, a surfeit of energy and no way to show industry. He strode across his walkway, got in his pickup and moved it five feet. Then he got out and went back in his house. Five minutes later he was outside to move the truck again, more or less replacing it, then some lingering then back in the house.
Ten minutes later he was outside again, this time pulling his pickup out the driveway to station it on the street. Then to the cellphone. Then a couple laps round the pickup and back in the house. Ten minutes later someone, a coworker or familiar in a similar truck, arrived, and there was a blessed excuse to drive somewhere, and off they went.
It hadn’t been four days since the mayor ordered citizens to stay in their homes. Nothing herculean there. Just stay home. Unless you have an emergency, just stay in your home and wait for this to blow over. Don’t be a vector. Two-thirds of us, to judge by traffic patterns, heeded his counsel. But there’s always an anxious third that just can’t help itself – folks who can no more stand their own company than a dog can resist barking.
Someday, I imagined, stories written about this time will make what inevitable sickness or death visit my neighbor like a mountain of coincidences, mischief of the diabolus ex machina; had only he just resisted that final urge to run to Wal-Mart to buy an extension cord, why, he’d be with us today. And those stories will be wrong.
The energy such men are taught to show is a consuming anxiety. Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” – a gnawing need to show they can provide. Those who fancy themselves leaders are worst in crises like this one. They can weather any storm and giddily sacrifice themselves for the smallest mission but cannot sit still. The one torture they cannot withstand is their own company, the misery of being by themselves. When they’re not leading often as not they are drinking. The alcohol makes them ornery and gives their fidgety trip to the corner store a heroic sheen.
This is where hustle culture abandons us. When there’s nothing to hustle for. When the environment we self-optimized for changes into something new and as yet unknowable and unpredictable. Time to learn a new language! time to start a new business! time to get up an hour earlier! For what? for what? for what?
And so on in a tightening spiral of dread. And that’s before the imagination even gets warmed up.
Now is a capital time for relaxation. For doing nothing. For showing complacency. For catching-up on lost naps. For reading whatever amuses you, regardless its nutrients. For doing whatever mindless thing you fancy (for me it’s watching videos of men shaving with Merkur slant-blade safety razors, silver-tipped badger-hair brushes and artisan soaps). For conserving calories.
For many American men that’s a treasonous suggestion, still. But if you were working really hard three weeks ago, is there any chance your working a touch harder might’ve precluded your restaurant’s closure, your 401K’s ruin, your corporation’s market cap being sawed in half?
An amateur boxer self-optimizes differently in camp for three, two-minute rounds than a defending champion self-optimizes for 12, three-minute rounds, and both self-optimize differently than what predecessors of theirs kept fighting till one could no longer toe the line. How much different would their training camps be, too, if some fights arbitrarily ended with a bell after 35 seconds and others went the duration of cricket matches?
Even that analogy assumes a fight would be done with gloves or at least combat of some sort and that there would be a fight. No such assumptions be trustworthy now. Supply and demand aren’t supposed to crash together. A hundred men will make 100 different predictions for what the world’ll look like a year from now, and one will be right, and we’ll hail him like an oracle (and hale his 99 peers like witlings), but none of us knows. None of us knows.
It’s good to be unafraid, as always, but not cocksure. If you are in an essential trade like garbage-collection, by all means go to work and stay safe as possible. If you’re in an inessential trade, though, like accounting or sales or data analytics, don’t convince yourself otherwise; heed your mayor’s counsel and stay in your home and husband your energy for whatever happens on the other side. It’s going to be harder than you think.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
