D and I watched Crime Stories: India Detectives on Netflix a few days after it was released. The episode that saddened both of us was “Dying for Protection”, which was based on the murder of a sex worker. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be the subject of discussion on a Saturday late evening, which these days are spent on the balcony, in the company of spirits, watching the sun and the world part ways. Yes, that is privilege.
I wondered how these poor women must feel about themselves – objectification and the complete loss of agency, the loathing with which society views them, and the near impossibility of having a normal life even after they quit. A typical professional’s gripes about work – unfair boss, poor compensation, lack of job satisfaction and so on – seem so trivial compared to this. But yes, while fully cognisant of the privilege of a salary hike vs the money for the next meal, one could think of this as the loss of agency of the mind.
In that context, we talked about how even though we despise the rat race and the ‘mind on hire’, it is our participation in it that has given us the quality of life we enjoy now. How do we frame this and offer perspectives when we mentor young folks starting their careers? I was reminded of three themes that have been recurring in my recent posts – the representation of the self in everyday life, the relentless drive for efficiency and what it’s costing us, and how the self is being quantified for external consumption. In a world where the Joneses have been replaced by everyone on the internet, we are in a race to conspicuously display measurable tokens of value and success. Faster, better, greater towards a continuously optimised abstraction of a human life that anyone else can use to evaluate us. To quote Roger L. Martin, ‘We have created a world where we reward the manipulation of quantities more than the appreciation of qualities.’ (via)
A further (fantastic) framing of this can be found in Arthur C. Brooks’ column A profession is not a personality. He traces different forms of objectification, from physical to what happens in the work context and then self-objectification. ‘Just as our entertainment culture encourages us to self-objectify physically, our work culture pushes us to self-objectify professionally.’ Physical objectification has been shown to lower self-confidence, increase depression, and reduce competence. Imagine what an objectifying self narrative can do!
When D and I talked about the rat race, most of my exasperation was at how we have normalised this self-objectification at a cognitive level. So ingrained is the optimisation mindset and its markers of success that I now find it very difficult to think of an alternative, my own mind does an #smh if I veer, and if I somehow begin to imagine a different narrative, my mind tags it as an excuse! What happens when a self objects to its own objectification? Can the mind even handle it?
Meanwhile, the difference between the unfortunate women and the average professional is probably based on the hierarchy of needs, and runs parallel to what Rebecca Goldstein said about the species, “The will to survive evolves, in a higher creature like us, into the will to matter.” It says a lot about the species (and me) that some still have to fight for survival daily, while I type this out.
P.S. Today is World Mental Health Day