Unnecessary Labour And The Phrase "Creating Jobs"

The phrase "creating jobs" sounds like it refers to creating work that did not particularly need to be done: unnecessary labour. It sounds like a way of saying, "We'd like these people to get the money that they need to have a decent standard of living, but we don't want to feel like they're not working for it." The term seems to refer to deliberate inefficiency. "Let's not find a way to spread the existing work around. Let's make it feel equal by creating more of it. Let's create more factory jobs and retail jobs and other repetitive things. The people who already had jobs won't have any less work but they'll be okay with it as long as the other people are being put to work somewhere too."

"There are two babies and three nannies, so we'll get the third nanny to carry a bag of rocks to make it 'fair.'"

"Let's make products less hard-wearing so that we can keep being paid to make things."

"Let's make people forget the difference between need and want, so that there will be an everlasting amount of labour that feels compulsory."

As we're told, the cycle goes "work, buy, consume," ("die," if you think about it, is not actually part of the cycle at all, so let's not be needlessly morbid) but we probably don't need to cycle so fast; if we slow down the buying/consumption, we can slow down the working (whether this means personally consuming less so that you need less money, or on a larger scale - everyone slowing down so that companies/countries/other are not having to work more and more to compete).

But then, even if we do not have financial problems, we're conditioned to feel guilty about not being "productive." Often people seem to feel a certain level of regret if they sleep in, or relax a bit "too much," regardless of whether or not they actually had something else that they intended to do. And people who feel they've escaped the so-called "rat race" and are providing for themselves without working excessively are dismissed as being "country bumpkins."

Ignoring the financial side of things, there's probably a balance to be achieved between feeling useful/fulfilled and feeling relaxed. It's just a shame that people often mistake the need to do something productive/fulfilling for the idea that relaxation is something to feel guilty about.

(We're all assigned an arbitrary length of time on earth anyway, so why would that amount of time specifically also be the amount of time that we would "need" to fill? That implies filling the time for the sake of filling the time, not for the sake of getting something necessary done. See, unnecessary labour...)

Thoughts On Decorative Crafts

Purposes include:

- "filling time," the implication being that there are no necessary tasks left to do (e.g. gathering food, creating shelter) - to what extent do MOST actions resemble this? are most of our actions meaningless? or is it wrong to suggest that actions that are not strictly "functional" are useless? (probably - no part of existence is compulsory, and fulfillment can be seen [by those who do not believe in an afterlife or a similar idea] as the only purpose of living)

- showing off wealth: person A has spare money; person B needs money and has time; person B invests the time into the creation of a decorative object; person A trades money for this object - to what extent is this a little bit sadistic? does person A effectively have a chunk of person B's time crystallised into a decorative trophy? is this less appropriate an observation now that a person buying a handcrafted object is not necessarily richer than the person making it (in the Western world, anyway)? (and yes, probably)

Post-Formative Review, Part 2

After reading the feedback:

- I need to evaluate whether or not the fact that the "unnecessary labour" piece is unfinished actually adds to the work or says something that is worth saying, as opposed to being a flaw I need to correct.

- Striking a balance between: 1) an amount of labour small enough that it doesn't feel like "labour," and 2) an amount large enough that it is impressive and doesn't seem "unnecessary," seems like the best way to communicate the point, but I will experiment further.

- I should "revalue futility" / question views on labour and futility.

Habits To Kick

More stress:

more time spent trying to split the workload into tasks, remind self it's all okay, make sure all pieces of work are listed somewhere so they won't be forgotten, make sure there isn't anything I'll forget to do,

less time spent getting stuck into work.

I Should Write Fortune Cookies

Cross-stitching is like life; it's too hard to keep going because of the fear of making a mistake.

Kerning

While embroidering a text piece, I realised that I wasn't sure whether to measure the spaces between the letters as being between the very edges of each letter, or ignoring the 'overhanging' bits. I was doing the former (I figured it was fine as long as I was consistent), then remembered that the latter was probably what 'kerning' was, and that I should probably look that up. The former option seems more consistent, while kerning looks more consistent. Consistency is important to me, so it's a dilemma.

Post-Formative Review, Part 1

I was feeling pretty ill on the morning of the crit, so I missed half of it and then felt that it would be rude to ask to discuss my work anyway. Naturally (or not), I am now plagued with the idea that if I had been present through the whole thing, maybe someone would have said something that would have turned out to be somehow vitally important and/or life-changing. I may just have to settle for guessing what that thing could have been.

"Did you choose the colours for a reason?"
The colours are not in some way symbolic, but follow the (arbitrarily chosen) rule that no colour is used more than once (if we are being pedantic here, I guess I mean "shades" - no specific shade of a colour is used more than once). I could make up a reason why the colour choices are somehow significant or meaningful, but I feel that that would go against the intention of the piece. The colours end up being meaningless; each is chosen with aesthetics in mind and goes with the colour next to it, but all together they make up a muddled selection of unplanned-looking rainbow colours arranged in a pattern that to me conveys both monotony and chaos, and well as being kind of ugly but also kind of pretty. I guess the idea is that you'd ask, 'What exactly are you going for here?' and the answer would be, 'Nothing, but it took some time.'

"Should there be more contrast between the pink letters and the orange surrounding them?"
Aiming for readability would imply that the piece was created for a purpose, and then it would not be 'unnecessary.'

"Does the piece's setting matter?"
I think it's best taken out of context, so that it doesn't refer as specifically to a certain type of person or lifestyle. The way it's presented currently creates an ambiguity that I like. It's folded up, and there is a lot of unused fabric behind the embroidered pattern; it makes an effort to be neat and finished, but gently fails. It looks soft, like a cushion or quilt, but it does not have a function. Putting the piece in some sort of context risks upsetting the balance.

"Should it be bigger?"
A smaller amount of unnecessary labour is as unnecessary as a larger amount of unnecessary labour. It is either unnecessary or necessary, and the quantity does not affect this.

I may have to come back to this with further made-up questions, but I feel as though the nature of the piece leads me to answer every question, even those posed by myself, with some variation of, "This is all inconsequential."