Ghost apples, library foxes, and useless jobs
Our banana harvester, Dave, is under the weather this week, so he passed me a basket of unripe bananas and let me pick three to share with you all.
Socially Useless Jobs. That’s the blunt title of a December 2018 academic article, which found that approximately 8 percent of 100,000 workers in 47 countries strongly disagreed with the statement, “My job is useful to society.” Another 17 percent were on the fence, which probably means they prefer not to think about it.
Curiously, 22 percent of “artistic, cultural and culinary artistic professionals” did not think their jobs were useful. Other high-ranking groups – PR pros, finance managers, economists – were less surprising, but what strikes me is the contrast. To say that both economists and artists are useless to society is to define usefulness in two very different ways. And you have to wonder how the survey’s results would differ in 2020, when every new crisis ushers in new ways to be useful to society.
Maybe we need to upend the notion that the way we earn money should be the same as the way we benefit society. I’m reminded of this paragraph from a 2015 Atlantic piece, which posits one alternative:
This story underlines an effective-altruist principle called “earning to give,” which is like tithing on steroids. Earning to give argues for maximizing the amount of money you can make and donating a large share of it to charity. What attracted me to the story wasn’t the specific advice (I have not yet sent a resume to Wall Street) but rather the philosophical approach to pursuing good in the world—counterintuitive, and yet deeply moral and logical. It was like pinpointing a secret corpus callosum connecting the right-brain interest in being a good person with a left-brain inclination to think dispassionately about goodness.
Ghost apples. Here’s a neat photo from February 2019 in Michigan. Freezing rain coated rotting apples on a tree. Apples have a lower freezing point than water, so the rotten apple mush eventually fell out, leaving the icy shell behind. It’s like a frame: the absence of a socially useless apple.
Library fox. This one is simple: a fox came through this guy’s window and hid behind his bookcase.
What I love is the absolute confidence with which Robinson codifies the term “library fox,” as if it were an idiom with which we all were raised. And why not? Library fox is canon now.
Thanks for giving me a chance as your interim banana harvester. If you’d like to read more from me, I’ve got a blog where I chase my favorite whims about gender, pop culture, and theater. And you can hit reply to send your best wishes to Dave.