Selfish Leisure
The answer is that when I work full time, I don’t do creative work. Call me lazy, low energy, or bad at hustling, but my body and brain needs the shut down times or else I rapidly burn out.
Discussions of ones own creative routine and especially ones situation regarding finances and career can tend towards the self-indulgent if not the outright maudlin and self-pitying. It’s can be depressing stuff.
Thankfully though Dane Benko here has found the perfect balance between being personal and genuine on the one hand while not succumbing to the pitfalls that such self-examination can lead to when not handled correctly.
Honestly, I didn’t expect anything less. This is an important essay and I am convinced that it is going to hit at least one person reading like a bolt of lightning. Not to oversell but this could very well lead to a real eureka moment for some of you artists out there. At least I hope so.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Over the past couple years I’ve had a very good schedule: a permalance, part-time position Wednesdays through Fridays while I spend Mondays and Tuesdays doing the bulk of my creative professional development and work. Under this schedule I have
written two feature length script rough drafts,
ran a successful Kickstarter campaign,
made 1 narrative and 12 experimental short films, and
written 11 short stories and 21 newsletter posts right here on Substack.
I also finally created a website.1 I removed my Ambient Geometries project from Instagram and over to Cara. I’ve put my attention to applying to residencies and production opportunities for narrative film production.
Later starting hours on my part-time gig means I have the space in the morning to journal, have coffee, eat when I have an appetite2.
Cool, right? So obviously when my job gave me an offer to switch to full time staff about a month ago, I said no.
However, saying no was difficult for me, and doesn’t come without my own interior Sliding Doors freak-out. The fact is that my wife and I make “enough”… now. While we’re renting. And childless. Two things we want to change.
Furthermore, I’m barrelling toward the so-called ‘peak earning years.’ So if I’m not earning much now, does that mean my peak isn’t ever gonna be much higher?
The work I’m doing on Mondays and Tuesdays isn’t guaranteed. The film industry is an expensive hassle to move forward in. That successful Kickstarter campaign has yet to get produced as I had location issues during the first shoot. The next one is scheduled for September, almost a year later. It should take at least a year after that to edit and finalize the film. I don’t really want to spend three years making just a short film – if I’m spending multiple years working on a film project I don’t see why it shouldn’t be for a commercial feature.
The plain emotional truth is that choosing to work less and get paid less at this time of my life feels selfish. I have the support of my family and encouragement from friends, but it doesn’t change the fact that sometimes waking up on Monday and puttering around before writing something like this post or a rough draft of a script I can never guarantee will get produced feels like I’m really just taking extended weekends.
This begs the question, why don’t I do all this creative development on evenings and weekends? The answer is that when I work full time, I don’t do creative work. Call me lazy, low energy, or bad at hustling, but my body and brain needs the shut down times or else I rapidly burn out. Between 2013 and 2021, when I worked full time, I only made about a dozen experimental videos – as many as I have made the last two years – and only completed one single feature length script — during a two-month unemployment.
The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist actually encourages this sort of relationship to work as you’re developing your artistic career: find flexible or part-time work that can pay the bills while you put in the full-time work on your art3.
This approach is predicated on the idea that you’re attempting to make a living with your art, which puts a lot of pressure on the art being monetized and intended for commercial platforms and audiences. It means that I can’t just type shit out and throw it on Substack and consider myself fulfilled: I actually need to be intending to sell something for a price that will pay off the investment of my efforts and time. It means the creative work has to be supported with networking and outreach and salesmanship. It means I have to put myself out there in a lot of ways that are uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear that the part-time job will last. My managers and colleagues are enthusiastic to keep me around regardless of the various pivots and swings the department does, I am happy to feel appreciated, but I’m necessarily sticking with an unstable job, and it’s really run a course far longer than I expected it would. Gigs tend not to last more than a couple years in the media and entertainment industry.
All of the creative work may be for naught. I’m well aware of the Pareto curves and its thinning under digital distribution platforms. I’m taking this risk during the rollout of AI tools, declining film viewership, likely permanently reduced film production, and higher costs of capital. These are areas where I’m Schroedinger’s Artist: I both try to be attentive and realistic and understand the market for what it is; and yet I know if I don’t try to do my own thing my own way I’ll always regret it, so why let the current state of the industry drive my decisions as an individual artist?
Here’s the rub: if it doesn’t work out, I need an explanation for what I’ve spent this time doing and the results I actually turned out. I mean need in the sense of my own emotional comfort and mental sanity – I’m not overly concerned about justifying myself to other people. Rather, there’s an impish little demon called Uncertainty who lives in my stomach and likes to kick my guts with its hoofed feet. Though I’ve learned to live with the little fucker, it hungers for a periodic feeding of mental and emotional accounting. When Uncertainty reaches its slithery, spindly arm up my throat and starts jabbing at my amygdala, my rational prefrontal cortex gets irritated and cries, “OKAY! I’ll think about what this all means.”
So, I’ve started considering what life would look like if I just worked part-time selfishly.
If I don’t somehow find a foothold for my professional ambitions, then these Mondays and Tuesdays are really just leisure time rather than work time.
By “leisure time” I’m referring to the Industrial Revolution late-19th century / early 20th century political belief in hours spent at at-will self-betterment newly available to the middle and working classes off of the expanded economic productivity increases promised by automation. I fell in love with the concept of leisure in eighth grade history class, and it’s affected my relationship to work consciously and unconsciously ever since.
The promise, the premise, the pretense… is that as an individual is able to make more resources for everyone else with less effort and time, they can either work less for the same amount of output, and thus have more free time; or they can output more for the same amount of work, and thus earn more money.
What an elegant and fair idea! my eighth-grade brain thought. Maybe work will be reduced in my lifetime, I hoped. How will society look when people have more time to indulge in whatever they please? I wondered, images of people in public parks playing catch, reading under shady trees, and strumming guitars dancing in my head.
How precious. I’ll be the one human being in the entire United States to admit that a political ideal that seemed great when I was 13 didn’t turn out the way I expected.
Unwrapping the economic, historical, philosophical, sociological, and cultural discussions of labor vs. leisure is a monumental task best put into a book written out of careful consideration, exploration, and study. For the purposes of this meager post, I sit at the intersection of a point where my main source of skills and income over the past ten years have come from a service job that is highly automatable, thus has had flatlining and even decreasing earnings potential during the whole time I’ve been in the career.
The majority of the conversation, on my side of the computer, with fellow video editors and associated creative industry workers, is a mix of anxiety (am I going to lose my job?), special pleading (but you can’t get rid of the human touch!), resentfulness (corporations are just seeking easy profits over human ingenuity and endeavors), and oftentimes even outright denial (yes this tool can do this thing I used to spend eight hours doing in fifteen minutes, but it still needs two hours to fix its mistakes so HA it’s not as good as my eight hours of manual labor!).
I’m not making fun of them, I have a lot of these thoughts and feelings too. However, oftentimes these conversations leave me thinking, “Who cares?”
I have a very specific example of a process that’s already automated away countless jobs: transcription services.
A few years ago I held a financial media job that published hour-long interviews almost daily. Previous to Premiere’s auto-transcribe function, creating captions for those hour-longs required:
exporting a full proxy version of the interview,
sending it to a third-party company,
paying hundreds of dollars to a person to transcribe it,
importing that transcription back into Premiere,
then fixing it and syncing it line by line.
This turnaround took about 2-3 days if you had a good transcription service, or overnight if you paid even more for a rush job. If you needed the transcription within hours, it would cost thousands of dollars.
Premiere’s auto-transcribe does an hour-long interview transcription in ten minutes. It takes a bit longer to fix the mistakes, but we’re talking the difference between an hour to fix AI mistakes instead of a half hour to fix human mistakes, not counting the syncing issues humans leave. The benefit of automating transcriptions for reducing bullshit, meaningless work on my end as an editor is incalculable.
This means that my clients can produce far more video interviews far faster than ever before. This means even as my clients produce far more video interviews for me to edit than I had before, I am still spending less time editing captions across multiple videos than I used to with a single video.
This also means a solid bunch of my friends, who worked as transcriptionists, lost their jobs completely. Custom human transcription still exists, but it’s usually for extremely specific technical fields, interviews or dialog with heavy accents, language translation, or possibly a few little indie shops that somehow both have a budget for transcription and also a fear of their content being sucked up into Adobe’s AI algorithms.
Those friends who worked as transcriptionists most often came from an interest in documentary work. Once they lost the transcription jobs, they had to find other jobs to get them further into documentary work. Some of them succeeded or at least found documentary-adjacent work.
A few did not. They may come back into the documentary industry, but at this point they’re out of the pool.
This is the center of a larger debate on the consequences of automation. On the one hand, uncountable worker-hours were expended on transcribing interviews using time and resources that could better be spent making new or even better content. On the other hand, workers invested in delivering high quality media production lost not only stabilizing income but entryways into a career they were interested in. Some of them even just enjoyed the challenge and the process of transcribing, enjoyed listening to the speakers’ voices and stories, “found meaning” in the work.
So should I argue that we need, culturally, to re-evaluate the lost values and humanistic personal touch of transcriptionists in the age of auto-transcription?
Um….
No.
To be honest, even though I know it was an enjoyable, dependable job that gave some people meaning, for 99% of transcriptions, it’s just not needed. No shouting at clouds, or the cloud, returns human transcriptionists to most major post-production workflows.
So should I encourage my ex-transcriptionist friends to compete to become one of the <.1% of human transcriptionists still needed in the world? I guess if it means that much to them, they can do as they please. But the need for that work is very shallow and doesn’t even peak in the six figures territory. Nobody’s a world-renowned transcriptionist.
However,a lot of commentary on this issue says one of two things. The pro-automation crowd says, “Yeah but that’s the thing! Now that the cost of transcriptions is zero, those former transcriptionists can finally make the documentaries they want to make themselves, because they don’t need to hire transcriptionists!” The anti-automation crowd says something along the lines of, “But transcription is a necessary part of documentary filmmaking that helps create opportunity to network and develop an ear for oral storytelling and how to really listen to people. Now documentaries will be made by people with a less-trained ear.”
Both are wrong. Eventually there’s no more additional audience to squeeze out of another deluge of documentaries, and there’s nothing special in transcribing you can’t learn from doing other things.
This issue affects me because as editing gets more and more automated, in the short term it means I just edit more videos per hour I work, but eventually it may just mean I’m not needed anymore. Many videos, in fact most videos, can just be auto-edited.
Oh boy, that last fact is controversial, but it’s true. I definitely work with a lot of editors who get very shifty-eyed and angry when I admit it, but let me be clear that most ‘video content’ uploaded to most digital platforms do not need an experienced, talented human being to create. That’s ridiculous. Too many of my jobs have pretty much been the equivalent of concatenating clips together or merely converting them to different formats; there’s been about three different jobs I’ve had where I’ve literally tried figuring out how to code my own automations just so that I didn’t have to bother doing the actual work myself, most of which involved watching render bars.
In fact one of the reasons I’ve edited so few narrative short films is because editing is now so easy that many indie directors just do it themselves, and do it much more competently than historically. Producers still bristle at directors editing their own work, but I think that relationship has changed and we’re not going back.
Thus a lot of the narrative work I’m developing myself is so that I can edit more narrative work. This is why I have to make a play at the <.1% of filmmakers that make a living creating original narrative films, or I have to accept my dreams are a hobby and look honestly at what options leave me employable into the future.
The options I’d prefer is something more akin to my eighth-grade-brained idea of automation: now, instead of spending a full 45-hour week editing interviews, my cohort and I could spend just 20 hours a week editing interviews. No editor should have to suffer a 16 hour day “for the love of the job” anymore. Relative number of editors declines steadily, their pay stays pretty much par minus the downward pressure of inflation, as with newfound free time the editors develop better skills to do more interesting and meaningful work…
Which raises the question of what “meaningful work” is really out there, and how much of it.
OR!!!!!
Just stay at home reading books and enjoying life, which raises the question of whether that’s valid too.
The other day, my job added a new task for me to do in order to send the show out to third party distributors. The workflow they created for it was ludicrous – we have to wait for the live captions to be returned from when the show aired to send out to the third party distributors, even if those human-made live captions are terrible, despite the fact that we’ve already created error-free captions for digital release before the show even aired.
I was arguing this point with both the people requesting the task and my colleague who was responsible for putting together the workflow for it. Both of them were clear that since the third party clients had already requested it be sent this way even though the both easier AND BETTER QUALITY workflow resulted in completely technically equivalent assets that work exactly the same way.
After I gave up the argument because a) I don’t care that much, I’m not gonna bang my head against anyone’s wall; and b) if the third party clients want shit captions, that’s on them; one of my editing colleagues turned to me and said, “Hey, at least you get more hours. That’s good, right?”
No! Not right! Those are hours of my life. I have things I want to do with those hours. I don't care that there’s income attached, I’d rather do the things I’d like to do than earn the income not doing them.
The point of earning the income is to enable me to do the things I want to do. It’s completely backwards to sacrifice those things to attain more income.
This gets into that weird Western notion about the concept that people “like to work” and “find meaning in work.” I mean, sometimes. It definitely helps if the work is aligned with activities the person really enjoys doing and have the skill to do, that the person finds challenging, values the output of, and where the person can get involved in the community.
However, I bristle against the notion that the general populace on par actually prefers or enjoys their bullshit jobs, and anyway even when they enjoy activities, the human animal isn’t all that fond of effort and labor. People want to keep active and engaged; that’s a different notion than “enjoying work.”
Since people a) enjoy keeping their minds active and b) need income to make do, the argument concludes that c) people inherently enjoy working for a living. A + B = C. This is a syllogism. Hobbies and entertainment prove people will actively spend money, rather than earn it, to keep their minds going, and my experiences abroad in a country that had a job guarantee for ethnic citizens showed they’re very happy to take the income without actually showing up to exert effort toward the responsibilities the job entails.
People like activity and they like money, it doesn’t mean they like jobs. What a ludicrous notion. A generalized theory of capitalism insists the idea is that people can best exert the activities they most want to do toward earning an income, but in practice the arts are not valued at a high enough price by enough customers for enough people who want to make art earn enough to make a living.
Capitalism may be an elegant method of distributing labor, but it still results in many people having to do things they don’t want to do and lacking the opportunities to do what they want to do.
My thing is, if I’m earning ‘enough’ on a part time gig, then additional income isn’t helping me achieve my goals. The artwork comes either way. It’s the future goals that are at stake: raising children and owning a large enough space for them.
To be honest, working more hours might not actually help on the raising children front. I might actually save more money caring for them myself than I’d earn while paying a stranger to do it.
This calculation is similar to when I first moved to New York City and was surprised that it wasn’t costing me as much as I thought. When I looked into my budget, I realized it was because I no longer owned a car. Yes, living out here without a car is more expensive than living in New Mexico with a car, but the difference was closer than I think many people realize: it’s not just a weekly MTA pass vs. the cost of a full tank of gas, but also the maintenance, insurance, and the cost of purchasing the car divided by the length of time you own it. The pay out here is better than in New Mexico, so I made up the difference quickly.
I’m getting a similar sense from childcare costs. I think people across the nation may be overworking to pay for the child care they’re also overpaying for. We talk about this in terms of women’s rights to work versus child care but it doesn’t even have to be gendered. Anyone can and should consider whether the bullshit they deal with at work is worth the time missed taking their kid to a park. That’s an actual calculation you can make financially, but there’s room for personal values and soul in it.
I’ve also gotten used to doing the chores, self- and home-maintenance, and errands of adult life with this expanded time, and it’s now hard to consider the weekend an appropriate time to do it. When you’re home more often and feeding yourself from a refrigerator instead of a deli and going to the laundromat and supermarket during regular business hours, everything is cheaper, easier, and takes less time.
That really leaves the real estate issue. At our income level my wife and I do have options, though I wish this country didn’t have a shortfall of affordable housing from 50+ years of bipartisan NIMBY policy making.
This is all to say as the part-time job keeps protracting longer, I’m finding it more and more difficult to justify finding full time work rather than finding it harder to justify settling for part-time work. What was a “for now” thing meant to get some specific projects done is starting to become a lifestyle I’d like to protect.
When most of this automation-vs-employment, work-vs-leisure stuff is debated, it’s usually a top-down conflict: how do we write policies to enable more part-time work, more creative work, more meaningful work? How do we change the culture of work to value more creative space and rest time? How do WE yadda yadda….
I’m wondering what the current capacity is for people to just choose for themselves to work less. I’m wondering if I am a sustainable example for it4. I’m wondering if instead of trying to change anyone’s mind about expanding leisure over work, individuals shouldn’t just elect to do it themselves. I’m wondering in what range of income ‘cost of living’ is really more of a decision than an angrily debated and distrusted economic measure. I’m wondering why shouldn’t people in prime working age just say they don’t feel like working more if they can afford their lifestyles with what work they have.
I’m wondering. It’s helping me tie up that Uncertainty demon with the lasso of FAFO.
So here I stand, rejecting higher income even as I see opportunities in my field compressing. When thinking about what finding and doing more work entails, I find I’m largely more interested in eliminating the grunt stuff entirely than finding more to do. And the investments I am making have very little chance of paying off. In the end I probably won’t change my decision until I lose the job.
Tally-ho then.
With thanks to Vita from the Soaring Twenties Social Club for technical and design.
I can’t stomach more’n a light breakfast on a good day, whoever said that meal is the most important one must have different gut bacteria than me.
I found this book in a free box and read it after starting my part-time gig, but it helped give me a stronger idea of the opportunity I had stumbled into.
This is where some people might start working up a tizzy about healthcare, retirement, and other insurance costs, but actually my budget is solid on that, thanks for your concern.
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Great piece. I've tried all sorts. The problem is, creative work is a more than full-time job. Even though I've been an artist all my life, I feel like I'm only now REALLY doing it. I choose time over money, and I don't have children.
One other thing I would say, though, is that as a non-American looking in, these things seem particularly heightened in the U.S.A. for very logical reasons: the paying-for-healthcare thing, and the lack of accessible unemployment support. The way that Americans have to work so relentlessly all the time at multiple jobs is not universal.
I enjoyed your article and as an artist share your thoughts. I taught college which helped me afford to have a studio and create. Our culture must rethink the work and personal time imbalance that has enslaved us to the almighty dollar. As you say, working for more instead of taking your child to the park. Really? There are ways we can live within our means and make more time for "leisure" or other creative pursuits. Our mental and physical health depends on it.