The Prestige oracles
early last month, after rendering myself thoroughly unemployed, I decided to re-organise my wardrobe. The former action garnered me instant pariah status in the eyes of my wonderfully judgemental and industrious parents. The latter garnered me new friends looking to expand their wardrobe options as I thinned mine.
Oddly enough, I discovered two things unemployment and my wardrobe have in common. Firstly, both suck my savings dry like how a leech steadily drains its host of blood — it expands in presence while leaving the host numb with a mild and rather pleasant lightheadness. Secondly, both have flipped my life grey.
Unemployment blurs the lines of judgement when it comes to past and future work opportunities. That’s especially if you’re in the 99-percent segment of society. You need a job to pay the bills. Things you saw in black and white while employed become much less definitive once the financial incentive to swing one way or the other is removed. Things we felt compelled to do become far less compelling when you’re one step removed from that pressure.
There’s an old Chinese saying I regularly quoted to my excolleagues, “When you take someone’s money, you solve his disasters”. But in the opposite vein, if the only reason you’d take on said disaster was because of the hunk of gold waiting, it doesn’t seem as admirable.
It’s one reason why I find superrich superheroes so annoying. Sure, they have the sad backstory that brings out their lionheart. But wealth can diminish the value of their loss and sacrifice. Spiderman would be very different if Uncle Ben had a big life insurance policy Aunt May cashed out on. (On that note, why do the significant majority of single-parent superheroes lose the father figure?)
Unemployment also renders my social, political and privileged opinions moot. When you go from mattering in some way or other to being absolutely unimportant, it makes you question a lot of things.
What I’m really saying is: Everyone should try being unemployed and financially worried at some point in his life. Or failing that, gain citizenship in the Northern European countries. Their egalitarian ideas of society seem designed to offer a citizen as much dignity as possible in life, rather than the opposite.
Like my opinions, my former wardrobe was mostly black and white. Clear, stark and demarcated dressing made sense when I was younger. As I aged, the lines blurred. Black and white gave way to greys, blues, browns and the occasional mustard yellow. Athleisure blended with smart casual, while bathrobes have wandered into office dressing (yes, it’s happened).
It’s no coincidence black and white are called two ends of the spectrum. The entire range of colours lie between them. Yet often in life, if you don’t make a choice between black and white, you don’t matter.
Which is exactly what happens as we age or lose our jobs: We stop mattering. But all that “grey” is what makes our lives so much more interesting than absolutism. Some like to term that as apathetic. It’s less clear to me now. When you are given two options, neither of which is appealing, do you pick one or just ignore both altogether?
Society is, in some way, like an anthill. Most of us are worker ants, constantly looking out for sources of food and hoarding it like older folk hoard plastic bags.
And sure, in every society, there are a few worker ants who loaf around and there are others who pretend to be busy.
In truth, ants are better than most people. They exercise eusociality and their non-reproductive members don’t turn into murderers because they are involuntarily celibate.
The difference is, ants have absolutism imprinted in their DNA. We don’t, yet we demand that on a societal level. And that needs to change. But then again, I’m currently a loafing worker ant, so my opinions, like my bank account, are pretty much moot.