The Daily: 24 November 2023

This weekend, Jupiter and the nearly full moon are together in the eastern sky. They will be high in the sky around midnight. If you’re really lucky you might see the remnants of 2023’s Andromedid meteor shower which peaked earlier in the month but will last until early December.

This debris field is associated with Comet Biela. Late in the 18th century, this debris field could produce hundreds of meteors in an hour, with explosions that could be heard on Earth as popping and banging. Portrayals of the Andromedids from this time period look like fireworks. Meteor activity was substantially reduced in the 20th century, but there have been years with high activity — 2023 is one of them. So there may still be meteors flying around the Moon and Jupiter at midnight, though they are very faint. If you have dark skies, it might be pretty.

The Leonids are just past peak on the 18th, however there are still bright meteors in south skies before dawn. This debris field is associated with Comet Tempel-Tuttle. It is another dispersing field, but it still reliably produces a dozen or so meteorites per hour. When the comet returns in 2031, it may generate rates closer to 100 per hour, and perhaps even a meteor storm like the Andromedids of the 18th century.

One of the disadvantages of ringing the Earth in satellites is that meteor-generating debris doesn’t make it through the gauntlet of metal and plastic to hit the atmosphere and light up the night. It seems that all our meteor showers are diminished these days. But there is a scarier problem. If Earth passes through a rich debris field with chunks larger than dust particles, it wouldn’t take much to accelerate the Kessler Syndrome — which is what astronomers call rapid, cascading collisions between man-made satellites that create their own debris fields and vectors. It would be really beautiful… until you realize that the outer atmosphere is on fire.

---

I wrote this essay a while ago and altered it for this blog in 2021.

Since I am working, I decided to update it and run it again this year.

---

I make some broad statements about work. These are my opinions generally, but most of my opinions are based in recorded — and therefore verifiable — fact and direct experience. To say how I arrived at these statements would take up a library of books and perhaps a good deal of “walking in my shoes”. But there are some generalities that I can address in an essay. I have not because I think most of my readers thus far have reached similar conclusions in their experienced lives, so I feel like we’re all on the same page. But now it may be that I am beginning to reach a larger swath of people, many of whom have not shared in these experiences, most of whom have not even had the time to do so in their young lives. I suspect some have formed the opinion that I’m just a crazy old bat with yet another blog of dubious advice. So I’d like to address that. I’d like to talk about the waste of work today. Today seems a good time to do so, given the enormous waste work is unleashing on the world in the form of holiday shopping.

I’m going to start with that. I used to own a kid’s bookstore. Like most small retail business owners, I did an outsized part of my sales in the last weeks of the year. I did little to accommodate or encourage that. It is just how the industry works. There are more books released in the autumn than at any other time of the year, and this is especially true for the children’s and young adult markets. I never counted, but catalog listings for books released in the fourth quarter are easily as numerous as all the rest of the year combined. A bookseller organizes the entire year around these big release dates. And not just of new general books. There are thousands of book titles printed each year that are explicitly and strictly tied to the holidays from Halloween to New Year’s Day. Most of these are new titles, not merely reprints, though repackaging of classics accounts for a large portion. There are so many versions of Dickens’ Christmas Carol you might literally (ha…) build a comfortable house out of them.

You can’t sell these holiday books at any other time of the year, not even at deep discount (I tried…). But you also can’t not have them in your store during the holidays if you expect to make your customers happy — and therefore, you know, have customers. Many of these holiday titles end up as returns, which is the industry term for unsold books that are sent back to the publisher or distributor. Returns get dumped into huge bins that are then resold as remainders for pennies a book. As a bookseller, you buy a remainders bin for some small price, but you get no choice over what is in the bin beyond maybe the option to buy a bin that does not contain soft porn or other “adult-market” books. If you buy a bin of remainders in February, it is almost all filled with holiday books. And they are in your store until you decide to throw them away. No returning the returns; they are yours to keep. These are the piles of books you see in Barnes & Noble on the discount tables and up by the register at discount stores like Costco and the Dollar Store. They have already been in a store somewhere else and nobody bought them. Most of them are never purchased even at deep discount. This is a long explanation to say that nearly all the holiday titles you see teetering in sparkling piles in every bookstore this time of year are destined for the trash — along with a good number of the other books released in the gluttonous cornucopia that is fourth quarter publishing.

It is hard to make peace with that. 

And yet the work done in my store and work done to support my store did produce tangible outcomes. A book. A child that can read. A literate society. Reading may not be a biophysical need, and there is some indication from recent psychological and sociological research that it may not be an entirely beneficial skill. But in our culture, if you can’t read, you are deeply disadvantaged in many ways, and not merely job-related ways. If you can’t read, it is very difficult to navigate life. Warnings, directions, instructions, basic information, and all the endless form-filling that is involved in all aspects of our bureaucratic society — all this is unmanageable if you can’t read, and most of it is unmanageable if you can’t read English, specifically. Moreover, those who can’t read in this culture have, at best, tenuous ties to this culture. History, art, music, religion, ideas, story, all are mediated. We are not an oral culture, not even a screen culture despite the media industry’s best efforts to infantilize narrative into emojis and onomatopoeia and soundbites (whatever that means…). We are a literate culture. And I sold the keys to literacy. So I believe reading is essential; and producing and purveying reading tools — books — are beneficial endeavors. But I began to think that maybe, on balance, the benefits were being swamped in the remainders and other waste streams involved in bookselling. I began to feel that my job was producing more harm than good. 

So as I began to question the benefits of this job that is partly beneficial and produces access to something I consider a personal and societal requirement, I began to analyze other jobs — especially those that don’t produce anything at all. I had already come to the conclusion that vast portions of the employment world were worse than useless — most were harmful. Not merely on balance, but comprehensively harmful, producing no benefit at all. And then I encountered David Graeber’s “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. (Which was later expanded into the book, Bullshit Jobs.)

I think this pushed me over the edge, and I kept going beyond Graeber. He talked about specific kinds of jobs, not entire industries. I applied his criteria to qualify as bullshit to work generally and found most of the things we are paid to do, and especially the things that generate the greatest monetary gain, are bullshit — with a good number of industries going beyond bullshit, well into the realm of biophysical harm. I began to see that many industries are destructive and wasteful with no redeeming qualities at all, save for that stream of monetary flow and power accumulation for a very few individuals. My opinion of work degenerated from there.

I’ve found it difficult to find a job that does not produce more waste than goods, that does not contribute to pollution and degradation of our planet, and that does not perpetuate social systems of domination and violence. I’ve talked a bit about the harm entailed even in writing this blog, but now let’s look at my wage job. Today, if you are reading this, then you are probably not at work. You may be recovering from Thanksgiving. You very well may be one of the millions of people who are shopping today. I am not. I am one of the billions who is at work in the service sector on this Black Friday. I’m on the other side of the counter from all those shoppers.

In 2021, I was the greenhouse manager in a small town farm market and garden center. One might think that this is a job that does not generate much harm. I did when I took the job. What could it be hurting? But then, books hurt and I think books are sacred… So I was not surprised to find that even a garden center is destructive.

There are so many problems that can’t be resolved, messes that can’t be cleaned up, waste streams that are never stoppered. Consider how you buy a greenhouse plant. I can think of not one example that does not have some plastic waste involved. Many of the most waste-conscious nurseries are shipping things in elaborate cardboard origami these days, and there are attempts to use plastics that aren’t petroleum based; but there is not one plant transported between a nursery and your home that does not produce some plastic trash. For each plant. And most plastic pots — for reasons I don’t understand — are not recyclable.

In the greenhouse where I worked, we bought all our plants, and they all came in encased in plastic. Plastic encased in plastic. We got bedding plants in plastic pots that were nestled in plastic trays that were sometimes even bagged in more plastic for shipping. There was a row of piles of trays behind the store that were stacked up taller than I am (and I’m nearly 6’ tall) — because we had no idea what to do with them other than hope a use would present itself someday. We tossed the pots into the recycling bin, but I’m fairly certain they all ended up in the trash. We filled up both trash and recycling bins to over-flowing every week. Mind you, this was a small garden center in a small town, and it generated several cubic meters of waste every week.

I will say that this is not the object of selling plants. The remainder waste at bookstores is intentional. Those books are printed, shipped, and reshipped all around the globe, knowing that they will end up as remainders and eventually trash. At the garden center, the inordinate waste flow is completely unwanted — and yet it can’t be stopped. It is that endemic to how business is done in our culture. There is no alternative. Even if garden centers have farmland and greenhouses (itself a plastic nightmare) and grow their own stock, there are still no pots that are not plastic of dubious recyclability. You would still go into that garden shop and buy a plastic-potted plant, and the world has to deal with that permanent toxic waste essentially forever. To make a garden! An enterprise that should be good for the world! This is how messed up all our systems are.

Most jobs today are the same. If you are at work today, you are selling waste. If you are shopping, you are buying waste. Almost nothing but waste. That may not be the specific intent, but that is the unalterable outcome of going to work today or going into any store to buy what is on sale in this holiday season. Because that is what this season is — a waste stream that generates revenue (you buying into it) for some people (mostly the people who produce plastic). It is taking the earth’s resources and human labor and pouring it into the manufacture and shipping and selling of trash. With maybe a few weeks of use in between sale and dump. And this is true even in jobs that are ostensibly beneficial.

This year, I have a new job because the garden center job is long gone. (In fact, I’ve gone through two eliminated positions in as many years, because that’s how well our economy is working…) Today, I am not selling anything. One would think this is an improvement on the waste flow. I did when I started this position last March. I work in a bank. I help people open accounts and figure out arcane things like certificates of deposit and health savings accounts. (No… don’t ask… I’m not explaining here…) Most of my job is trying to keep the scammers from taking money and identification information from kids and old people. To show you the magnitude, my small branch of a small community bank generates at least a dozen disputes a day. But trash? That shouldn’t be part of the work, right?

Wrong. For starters, those disputes are usually of fraudulent debit card charges, meaning there are a dozen or so pieces of really toxic plastic tossed into the shred bin for every dispute filed. Similarly, there are many single use plastic deposit bags from commercial customers also tossed into the shred pile every day. The shred bin — a can that is about 16 cubic feet in capacity — is filled biweekly. None of this can be recycled because it is a jumble of paper and plastic. This is much less than the pot waste in a garden center or a table full of holiday books, but it is still substantial.

However, there is far more waste of energy in my current job than in the garden center or the bookstore. It’s not as bad as a television station, where the numbers on the electricity meter are continuously whirling so fast that they are illegible, but a bank is bad enough. In my branch, there are several dozen machines that are never powered down. These talk to thousands of other machines that are similarly never powered down. In my company — a fairly small regional bank — there are rooms of machines that are so full of electrical flow that they need air conditioning year-round because the waste heat the machines generate would melt them down — in Vermont. And this is a very small drop in the vast ocean of banking energy use. All these networks are constantly sucking up electrons — mostly fossil fuel generated — so that money will flow constantly.

And yet the worst of the waste is the work itself. Never mind the hour or so today that I’ll spend trying to stay ahead of scams — which is certainly a waste of my time and the customer’s time and probably the scammer’s time too — nothing I will do today is necessary to any living body. It may be essential in this economy — if I don’t show up for work, people in my community lose income — but it does nothing necessary toward keeping the world functioning. It does not feed or shelter anybody, nor does it do much to even pay for actual material needs. My job is almost purely focused on maintaining the flow of money and commerce. That is, my job is the lubricant on the waste stream.

If you visited an ATM on the way to the mall, someone like me had to load that machine this morning, balance it, and make sure all its parts were functional. Every time you swipe your card or tap your phone, someone like me has to review that transaction to make sure it is not fraud. If you are taking out your annual HSA distribution so you can pay for all these gifts, someone like me has to fill out a pile of actual paperwork, much of which eventually ends up in a landfill. Someone like me will spend about an hour or so on this project, an hour that will never be reclaimed for more productive work, an hour that does nothing to feed or shelter the person who did that labor and does nothing for you either — except allow you to spend money on future trash.

I am not best pleased. I am also of the opinion that if this is the best that can be done in our system of work, if these are all jobs that have merit and yet still are destructive, then we need to scrap our entire work system and start over. Because this is not working.

This is a waste. And we are never going to be able to clean it up.

---

One last note…

Yesterday, in my country, we celebrated a harvest festival when no harvest is possible in most of the Northern Hemisphere. You know that this bothers me… I mean even Puritans weren’t so stupid as to create a harvest festival at the end of November.

It may be that the thanksgiving festival was held earlier in the year, around the actual harvest time. Only this doesn’t make much sense with what the Native Americans brought to the table. I doubt any experienced hunter would kill deer going into the breeding season. That means no deer next year. You hunt deer after the rut, and you kill only the ones with antlers, not the hopefully pregnant does. However, the list of foods very explicitly included several whole deer and numerous waterfowl — another animal you don’t kill until the youngsters are mature enough to survive without parents. So it doesn’t feel right to date this to September or earlier when the main grain harvests were just ending.

But knowing what we do of Puritans and their disdain for all sorts of celebration, particularly honoring the land with feasting, there is good reason to believe that the first thanksgiving was not food-based. The Pilgrims seem to have provided little food, in any case…

But what did happen at around this time — an event that they would have been very keen to mark with ritual observance — was that the Mayflower made it to Plimouth. The Pilgrims first landed on Cape Cod on 11 November 1620. A few weeks later they felt recovered enough from their seafaring — after digging up the local corn stores — to move to a more permanent settlement. They landed at Plymouth Rock after a short trip across Cape Cod Bay.

All those speeches thanking their god for providence, if they are not completely manufacture fancies, were very likely aimed at the “empty land” they then proceeded to claim — with substantial help from the surviving locals.

Puts the feast in a new light, no?

---

©Elizabeth Anker 2023