How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
— William Gaddis, born in 1922
“When you feel small and invisible
or stretched-too-thin-and-all-used up,
when life feels too hard to live
and pain feels too much to bear,
when guilt and shame and
self-condemnation feel too heavy to carry,
go outside and stand barefoot
in the stardust-speckled dirt
with your face tilted up to the universe
and whisper to your wounded heart,
'This is not how my story ends.
There is so much more to life than this moment,
these hours, this day, this season of my life.
It's my story. I get to choose.
It doesn't end here;'
And then take your pen in hand
and write the rest of your gorgeous,
shredded, pasted-back-together story
however you choose to write it.
And remember, you're not alone.
We're all writing our own jacked up stories
our own way, too.
Welcome to our tribe of misfits and outcasts
and rebels and dreamers.
We are the story-weavers.
And we're all on this ride through the galaxy together.”
―
Brian Cox examines the wealth divide and meets people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. He also tells his own story, from growing up in poverty to becoming a highly paid Hollywood actor.
It takes a moment to realise why the two-part Channel 5 docuseries Brian Cox: How the Other Half Live feels so special. The premise is simple: the Succession actor looks into the wealth divide in the US and UK to find out what money (too much/too little) does to you, with Cox, as he drily puts it, “swapping the role of foul-mouthed billionaire for intrepid reporter”.
Now based in the US, the 76-year-old declares himself comfortably off – “I’m notLogan Roy” – but says he’s only interested in survival. Having lost his father, he grew up “destitute”, the youngest of five, in Dundee. Thus, money became a lifelong “personal demon, something I’ve avoided confronting”.
This accounts for his sensitivity when dealing with the struggling people he meets, whether they’re buying cut-price groceries in Dundee or homeless in New York. It explains his rawness too. After an encounter with a mother facing eviction in Miami, he explodes. “It’s fucked,” he rages. “Well and truly fucked. This whole financial thing is completely nuts.” Beat that for analysis, Martin Lewis.
How the Other Half Live isn’t perfect: Cox’s energy tangibly slumps as he politely potters through the mindsets of the mega-wealthy, including Phones 4u billionaire entrepreneur John Caudwell, who arrives in a helicopter. Elsewhere, money graphics keep barging on to the screen like a middle-management PowerPoint session, lowering the tone.
The documentary’s strength is of course Cox: a self-made man who refrains from spouting drivel about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps; who knows how childhood poverty becomes lifelong scar tissue; who worries, on screen, about speaking out (“there’s a fine line”), but worries even more about not doing so. At heart, this is a programme about empathy, memory, kinship; a tour of Cox’s soul. It’s really rather lovely.
New Yorker [read free]: After successive waves of post-pandemic change, worn-out knowledge workers need a fresh start. “It’s been almost four years since the coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a period of sustained upheaval for knowledge workers. The first wave of change came in early 2021, with the Great Resignation—a mass exodus from the workforce that saw, at its peak, millions of Americans quitting their jobs each month.
Then, in 2022, we got the Remote-Work Wars, in which bosses who’d thought of working from home as a temporary measure were surprised when employees claimed it as a right…Eventually, in many organizations, the fervor of the Remote-Work Wars settled into an uneasy truce that was based on hybrid schedules. But then, last summer, a third wave of disruption emerged. “I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting,” the narrator of a viral TikTok video began. “You’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”
Many young professionals embraced the idea, filling social platforms with sympathetic declarations before they, in turn, weathered a derisive backlash. The over-all impression, throughout these years of turbulence, was that knowledge work was broken: somehow, its expectations, rhythms, and burdens needed to be redefined. Today, at the close of 2023, there no longer seems to be a revolutionary project roiling the knowledge sector. The business-news cycle is dominated by coverage of A.I. or old-fashioned labor strikes, with little apparent excitement left for reforming knowledge work as a whole.
Office workers seem to have retreated into a pervasive atmosphere of fatigue…The most notable change of these tumultuous years, the ability to spend more time working from home, hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still wrong, above and beyond the usual challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired. What started with the Great Resignation has become the Great Exhaustion.”