frey

My post from the other day seems to have struck a chord, so I might run with it… People on the dole don’t hove no problems getting work; instead, they place a high value on living rather than working.

Almost everyone I know on the dole is on the dole because the options that current (capitalist/monetarist/etc) society offer to make money suck donkey arse. Skilled part time work is practically non-existent: as someone with high-level IT skills I’m finding it impossible to get work part time. Given that there’s no way I want to sell 40 hours of my life every week to someone else when I can make enough money to be more than happy in 10 hours, the dole is the best option for my continued happiness. I’m probably going to supplement it with fruit-picking work over summer, as well as what I can make busking and gigging, and that is by and large how many of my friends who are on the dole organise their lives as well.

Sol said: Let me get this straight, you want to force those of us who have no problems getting work to NOT work, so we learn what it’s like to be poor, and bored, and incapable of getting a job no matter how much I want

Yes. Being poor teaches one to think about money. Being bored combined with being poor teaches one the value of time, and how to entertain oneself. As to your third point, jobs are very easy to get. If you were to walk down Lambton Quay with CVs asking in all the retail or food outlets you’d find a job in half an hour. But they’d be really shitty jobs. You’d get treated like crap for minimum wage, and if it was in retail, selling useless rubbish to people so that someone you probably don’t like can get rich off your efforts. This leads to unhappiness. Unhappiness makes people unproductive. Unproductive and unhappy people are bad for the economy. They tend to do things like consume lots of alcohol, the social effects of which cost the country $1 billion to $4 billion per year.

Being bored, combined with having the freedom to do what you want, means that you are able to find out what you want to do with your life. The only way to be truly free in a capitalist economy is to be your own boss, which means you have to find out what you want to employ yourself to do. I put it to you that if you’re selling 40+ hours of your life every week, ie, being a wage slave, then there’s no time left to sort out who you are.

The main reason for my shift from addict.net.nz to here has been a realisation (brought about via an ARMS workshop I attended run by Mark Cubey and Michael Lockhart) that as a musician I can make a good living if I manage my life as though I’m a self-employed business person. This weblog is part of that. Making five year plans and revenue stream documents and other boring business things has meant that I can see that, when my time investment starts pays off, I’ll be in a position to support myself. It seems that I’ll realistically be able to make $100,000 in five years via my music if I do it properly, which is what the boring business documentation will help me do.

And it took being on the dole for a while for me to figure out that that’s what I wanted to do with my life. Not only has this been a relentlessly positive realisation for me, it’s driving me to make more and better music than before, and to share it with more people. The function of a musician in society is a whole different topic altogether, but with the shift in the social standing of music that technology seems to bringing about, what with downloading stuff off the internet, I think we’re going to see the role of the musician moving back to the travelling minstrel idea that we had pre recording technology.

The product of the music industry will cease being the music itself (which is why I give mine away) and will become the music experience – seeing someone play live, in other words, and having the kind of connection to the musician that the social networking revolution seems to be making available. Warren Ellis has known this for some time, I think. He gets 11,000-15,000 visitors per day. If he says ‘this t-shirt has snakes on a plane, and they’re cool, so you should buy it’, people will.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 3:34 pm and is filed under culture, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.