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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
So many jobs are a laughable waste of time. The greater part of any job is learning to look busy
Lately I've been thinking about Sartre's waiter. You might know the story. The philosopher is sitting in a Parisian cafe sometime in the early 1940s, watching a waiter glide from table to table. There's something creepy about him, Sartre decides, but what? He watches a little longer. It's this: the man is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. It's a memorable observation, like something so obvious it requires an alien observer to notice it. Once seen, it passes into the brain as truth. You see it everywhere: people performing their functions like actors who've learned their parts a little too well. It's a psychotic but undeniably catchy worldview. In Being and Nothingness, where this anecdote appears, the waiter's exaggerated waiterliness becomes a case study in what Sartre calls bad faith: the act of denying one's full, complex, and ever-changing selfhood by overidentifying with a preassigned role. The man isn't just working as a waiter, he has become a waiter. Sartre argues it's more comforting to take refuge in a familiar script than to confront the ongoing anxiety of having to choose, moment by moment, who and what we are. [ How Sartre's theory of 'self' can explain all of humanity - even Elon Musk Opens in new window ] It's easy to criticise Sartre's use of the waiter. Here's a guy who, when not experimenting with polyamory or taking amphetamines to fuel his lengthy philosophical treatises, spends his days in Parisian cafes critiquing the man bringing him coffee for failing to confront the abyss of his radical existential freedom. It's true the waiter could, at any moment, throw his tray like a frisbee, tear off his apron, and walk out into the unknown – but it's also possible he has a family to feed, and that living in good faith might still mean having to find another identical job down the line. READ MORE It's also possible, more importantly, that the waiter's exaggerated waiterliness isn't evidence of a collapsed identity at all, but rather a protective mask. A way of drawing a line between the role he is paid to perform and the person he actually is in the off hours. The reason I've been thinking about Sartre's waiter is that I have a new job. When I'm working, I often have the strange sense that I'm only pretending to work, or pretending to be the kind of person I imagine would be good at the job. Maybe boredom just breeds dissociation. I won't punish anyone with the unspectacular details of my employment, except to say that its meaninglessness boggles the mind, it really does. I can't complain, though; after all, I sought this job out, applied for it, politely accepted when it was offered to me, and now there's nothing left to do but get on with it. The greater part of any job is learning to look busy. In a hotel, you're hired not just to stand behind a desk, but to act like a receptionist. We understand it instinctively and so we develop professional selves that may resemble us but aren't quite us. We do this not only to protect our real selves, but because turning it into a performance helps to pass the hours. My first job was a weekend shift in a jeweller's when I was 15, and at the time, it felt like something close to freedom. Proof that I could rely on myself, that the money I earned, however modest, might translate into real independence. The exciting feeling that it was possible to make my own way in the adult world. More than that, I liked the sense of being a spinning cog in the great, whirring city. Of being a shopgirl in a shop. One of the multitudes making little things happen, pushing forward into the future. I think I approached it enthusiastically because school seemed so irredeemably awful that I wasn't especially concerned about what I was running toward, only what I was trying to escape. It took a while for it to dawn on me that this whole work thing wasn't just a fun little side plot, but something I'd be doing, in one form or another, for the rest of my life. Ruby Eastwood: 'The social contract is falling apart; everybody knows it' Of course, there are all sorts of jobs, and many of them are worthwhile and even ennobling, but the idea that there's any inherent virtue in work for its own sake falls away pretty quickly. It only takes working a few jobs to dispel that myth. I'm reminded of that famous story from the Soviet Union. In an effort to meet productivity quotas, a nail factory was told to maximise output by weight. The factory responded by producing a small number of large, heavy nails; useless for construction but perfect for hitting the target. When the quota shifted to the number of units instead, they switched to making thousands of tiny, fragile pins. Again: useless. The workers did exactly what was asked of them, but none of it amounted to anything. Under capitalism there are perhaps more sophisticated ways of obscuring our futility, but we still find out eventually. The truth is, so many jobs are such a laughable waste of time it's tempting to think dread is what keeps the whole system running. There's always something worse, something more degrading just a rung below, and it's that fear of sliding downward, not any real belief in upward mobility, that keeps everyone stuck where they are. I read an article once about line standers: people who get paid to stand in queues for other people. It's a real job. Apparently it happens a lot in the US, and it's mostly homeless people and students doing it. The article was fascinating because of this one story that happened in Poland. It was actually a kind of beautiful story. During the 1980s, in the late communist era, shortages were so bad that people would queue for hours, sometimes days, for basic goods. A small economy sprang up around this reality. People who didn't have time to stand in line would pay someone else to do it for them. One man had turned it into a profession. In the article the man was talking about the job with real sincerity, talking about the qualities it required: honesty, reliability, patience. He said he once queued for 40 hours straight. He particularly liked queuing in hospitals, holding spots to make sure people could get in-demand specialist care at a time when the healthcare system was overloaded. He saw himself as providing a little bit of security for people who were already struggling with illness. The social contract is falling apart; everybody knows it; you don't need me to tell you What happened was that this man's business eventually collapsed because there was some reform, and he was left facing the threat of destitution. But it turned out that he had become famous through his humanistic work in line standing for all those years, maybe even decades, and that the people knew and loved him, so he ended up having this bizarre odyssey where he became part of a theatre company and someone cast him in an opera and even made a marionette with his likeness. At this late stage in the article they mentioned the fact that the man happened to be a dwarf, and that his distinctive appearance may have contributed to his iconic status as a Polish folk hero. After the stint in theatre he went on to politics, running for mayor in his hometown. All of this happened in the real world. Which proves that it is possible to escape from under the crushing banality of your circumstances and reclaim your radical existential freedom, but it takes a certain alignment of the stars and lots of chutzpah. Anyway, I've always been interested in the things people do to make money, but I also understand the question 'What do you do?' can provoke hostility. We've inherited this strange cultural hangover from better times, the idea that the thing you do to survive should also double as your identity and source of pride. Stable, long-term employment is becoming rarer. Entire industries are being gutted or automated. Many people are cobbling together an income from gigs and freelance scraps, and young people, even ones with degrees, can't seem to secure proper work. Every so often something comes along (Covid, the anti-work movement, quiet quitting, the rise of AI) that seems poised to change the future of work, or to bring the whole thing crashing down. But the moment passes, and things stay more or less the same. And after all our fruitless toil, we hand over more than half of our paycheck to a landlord who's probably chilling with a rum and coke somewhere in the Bahamas. In short, the social contract is falling apart; everybody knows it; you don't need me to tell you. What actually interests me are the quiet, almost heroic ways people carry on as if this weren't the case, and the small psychological tricks we use to get through the working day. I had a drink a few months ago with a friend who was about to start a new job at an AI training company. His role, as it was described to him, would be to interact with a chatbot in order to help it censor harmful content. The example they gave was Romeo and Juliet. Juliet is 13. Say, hypothetically, a paedophile wanted to engage the chatbot in a discussion that drew on the text, citing Juliet's age, the sexual nature of her relationship with Romeo, and so on, as a way to access inappropriate material under the guise of literature. My friend's task would be to think like this hypothetical user, coming up with ever more inventive ways to outwit the filters, so that those filters could then be adjusted accordingly. In essence: he was being hired to think like a paedophile, from nine to five. [ Life as a Facebook moderator: 'People are awful. This is what my job has taught me' Opens in new window ] He was, understandably, disturbed by this, and concerned about what effect it might have on his mental health. It's a good idea to look after one's capacity to see beauty in the world, to preserve hope that life can be fun. Jobs like this pose a serious threat. I agreed with him that the situation sounded far from ideal, pretty bleak really. Then we fell into silence, because what else can you say? A few weeks later I bumped into him again and asked how the job was going. He seemed sort of surprised I'd remembered, as if he himself had already forgotten. It turned out it didn't bother him at all once he'd reconciled himself to doing it. You compartmentalise. You show up. You do whatever weird thing is required of you. You clock out. A job is a job, he'd decided, and there are many worse jobs.
Telegraph
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Tim Franks: How I realised that being Jewish really does affect my Middle East reporting at the BBC
This should not be about me. I understand that. The turmoil in the Middle East that we are witnessing – partially witnessing – supersedes anything of interest about me and my convictions. That should always be true of BBC journalists. But as philosophers have pointed out: Jews can be useful to think with. So this is one Jew's attempt to be useful. On one level, it's dead easy. All BBC journalists know the price of entry: when you come to work, you leave your proclivities at the door. That's the blood oath, tattooed across our chests. What I have come to realise, in a selectively quotable phrase that will be catnip to the conspiracists, is that my Jewishness is informing my journalism. And, perhaps more strangely to some, my journalism is informing my Jewish identity. This, I grant, is a change. These are words I never thought I'd think, let alone utter. What's changed is that I've changed. Back in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a short book on anti-Semitism. It's at times brilliantly incisive, at others clankingly off. One of his more penetrating observations is that Jews can be 'over-determined'. He meant that their motives are always under scrutiny. And that, in itself, can be disabling: Jews can feel trapped in the cage of others' preconceptions. When I started my tour of duty as the BBC's Middle East correspondent almost 20 years ago, I was extremely dubious about the gig. I felt profoundly unprepared and ignorant. Up to that point, I hadn't really tried to navigate the raging currents of opinion across the region; I'd just tried to bypass them. Even if, somehow, I could reach a point where I might think myself sufficiently well-informed, could I trust my subconscious tendencies? Lots of people very publicly offered their own answers to this question even before I took up the role. They said that it was inevitable I'd be biased one way or another, tilting the balance either for good or for ill. Or that I was on a mission impossible: trying to occupy simultaneous states of Jew and journalist. In 2008 I was a year or so into my posting and hoovering down lunch at the back of our old, scruffy bureau on Jaffa Street. I heard screaming outside and looked out of the third floor window. A front-loader tractor appeared to have hit a bus. A moment later, it was clear it was no accident. I watched the tractor reverse and then smash back into the bus, so that it tipped over. A colleague and I raced down the stairs and out onto the street. We pursued the tractor, against the fleeing crowds, as it careened into, and even over, cars and pedestrians. Eventually, a passer-by managed to climb on to the outside of the cab and shoot the driver at point-blank range. We filmed the killing, close up. Back in the bureau, I drew breath and started broadcasting. 'So Tim,' asked one presenter down the line from London. 'Was this terrorism?' 'I don't know if the man in that tractor cab belonged to a militant group,' I said. 'But what I can say is that what just happened on the street outside sowed terror among those who were there.' So far, so unexceptional. Except that within hours, there was both condemnation that the BBC – that I – had failed to call it 'terrorISM', and also condemnation that we were giving this one deadly incident disproportionate airtime because it happened to take place on our doorstep. In other words, I was taking flak from both sides. For my critics the report simply added to what, in their minds, was the substantial body of evidence that – as they took pains to tell me – I was either a self-hating Jew with obvious political proclivities, or, in the message from one listener, a hook-nosed parasite erupting from the bowels of honest journalism. I was more than willing to engage with audience criticism of what I was covering and how I was covering it. Often there could be a reasonable doubt to address – a context I had failed to make clear, a shorthand that had been too short. But often that criticism had first to be picked out of a slagheap of causation: that my choice of words, the story I had chosen to report had betrayed my filthy prejudices. In response, I chose simply to deflect, not to engage, to meet the rage with a neutral glance. As far as I was concerned, my Jewishness and my journalism were like two sets of kosher cutlery: one for the meat, one for the milk; different drawers, never mixed – and that was vital, given the toxic brew of identity politics, blood-letting in the Middle East, and boiling fury over the BBC. This strategy seemed to work, at least for me, then and in the years since, as I repeatedly returned to the region, and in my current role as presenter of Newshour, the main news and current affairs programme on the BBC World Service. Recently, however, I've had a revelation: I've been deluding myself. This revelation came as I scuffed away at a hitherto unknown family history. As I discovered forebears of mine scattered across centuries and continents, the reporter within me started to interrogate them, and the Jew within me realised I was no dispassionate observer. Why had cousin Diz – you may know him as Benjamin Disraeli – apparently faked his familial back-story so that, outrageously, my rather more mundane family line had not been included in his genealogy? What did it say about the place of Jews in the lands where they have settled, and the evergreen lure of fantasies about Jewish power? In an 1890s political pamphlet Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro (pictured above on a stamp) wrote: 'Where is it written that all Jews think the same?' And while it was quite right that, decades after his unremarked death, another cousin – Abraham Mendes Chumaceiro – was celebrated for his championing of black civil rights with a bust, a stamp and a street-name, I found myself drawn to a throwaway sentence he wrote in an 1890s political pamphlet: 'Where is it written that all Jews think the same?' That remains a question for the ages. I have always known that I am blessed that I do a job I love in a country where I can openly practise my faith. It's a given that neither was always the case for my ancestors from Lisbon to Amsterdam, from Lithuania to Curaçao. But unshrouding this family history made me see that what fuels the Jew within me also fuels the journalist within me, and vice versa: the struggle to understand, a sense of injustice, of wonder, of humility about how much we know and how much we are almost certainly getting wrong, and a certain base level of set-jawed bloody-mindedness. So: I'm a Jewish journalist at the BBC, and this is what I think. My job is to be questioning, and self-questioning. It may not be easy. But it is that simple. Tim Franks's book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, The Jew And An Argument About Identity, is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
Barnama
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Barnama
Anwar In Paris: Recalibrating The Terms Of Engagement
Woven with references to Sartre and Montesquieu, Camus and Tocqueville, and the Pirenne thesis to boot, it was a tour de force in intellectual diplomacy – at once appreciative and unsparing, gracious, yet audacious. KUALA LUMPUR, July 7 (Bernama) -- If the French were expecting a deferential guest, they did not get one. When Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim rose to speak at the Sorbonne on 4 July, his address was both a nod to France's intellectual tradition and a measured challenge to its strategic assumptions. If Europe wants to be present in the Indo-Pacific, it must learn to listen. There were new Airbus orders, deeper energy cooperation with PETRONAS, joint ventures in artificial intelligence (AI) and carbon capture, and warm nods to rising student exchanges. But the real significance lay in Anwar's message, and its subtext: Southeast Asia is done being spoken for, let alone spoken down to. The visit, the first by a Malaysian leader to France in 15 years, was a success by most diplomatic metrics. 'We are used to being described,' the Prime Minister said. The Sorbonne speech was neither anti-Western nor triumphalist in nature. It was something rarer: calibrated, with measured cadence. Anwar is no stranger to rhetorical flourish. But behind it was a sharp proposition: Europe must stop seeing Southeast Asia as a theatre for its anxieties – about China, about global disorder, about the fraying of Pax Americana – and start engaging it as a self-assured, diplomatically agile region that neither courts conflict nor shirks complexity. 'We are less accustomed to being heard.' In one line, he captured decades of misapprehension. From colonial missions civilisatrices to the strategic templates of today's think tanks, Southeast Asia has often appeared in Europe's imagination as either a developmental ward or a geopolitical flank. Yet ASEAN, as Anwar reminded his audience, is the world's fifth-largest economy and a laboratory of democratic metamorphosis – not perfect, but incrementally improving. The Prime Minister did not shy away from hard topics. On Ukraine, he upheld international law but cautioned that 'our region – and ASEAN in particular – is not a geopolitical mirror to be held up to another's crisis.' On Gaza, he called the war a 'collapse of conscience' and criticised the selective application of humanitarian concern. On Iran, he backed non-proliferation but insisted that dialogues - not double standards - must anchor global order. French President Emmanuel Macron received the message with composure. At their joint press conference, he echoed Anwar's call for a ceasefire in Gaza, reaffirmed France's support for a two-state solution, and condemned Israeli strikes on Iran as lacking legal basis. He also nodded to the broader point: that universal values must not be applied selectively. Sure, not all that glitters is gold but it was still a rare moment of moral convergence, if not full alignment. But it was in trade – not war – where Anwar delivered his firmest message. Europe, he implied, cannot ask for deeper economic ties while clinging to regulatory structures that feel increasingly skewed. For many in Southeast Asia, the European Union's (EU) standards – however well-intentioned – function less as neutral guardrails and more as protectionist obstacles. Agricultural exports, processed foods, and pharmaceuticals face layers of certification and restrictions. European negotiators tend to arrive assuming their standards are not just high, but self-evidently the model for others to adopt. That presumption is now being met with measured resistance. Malaysia, like many of its peers, is not asking for lower standards. It is asking for honest conversation about the practical effects of high ones. Patent terms, for example, are contentious. The EU seeks longer periods of exclusivity. In developing countries, this affects access to life-saving medicines. And that we cannot, and must not, do. The imbalance goes deeper. Southeast Asian nations are expected to meet stringent environmental, labour and governance criteria, yet often find little flexibility in return. There is little allowance for differences in legal systems, social compacts or development stages. The European position thus begins to resemble leverage masquerading as principle. 'That means seeing regulation as dialogue to come to a formula for mutual gain, not fiat pointed at the head for capitulation. 'Let us be clear: we do not ask for indulgence. We ask only that Europe meet us where we are, not where its models presume we ought to be,' Anwar said. Europe hopes that bilateral deals – like the one still under negotiation with Malaysia – will evolve into a full ASEAN-EU free trade agreement. But that ambition may remain stalled if the substance of the relationship lags behind its symbolism. 'Consensus ad idem is as crucial in geoeconomics as it is in geopolitics, and some say even more,' Anwar quipped, invoking a legal phrase meaning meeting of minds. Still, the mood in Southeast Asia is shifting. Engagement will remain strong – but deference is no longer part of the deal. Condescending collocutors, vous n'êtes pas le bienvenu. Anwar said, 'We welcome partners. But we welcome them as equals.' Europe should take note. In an increasingly multipolar world, engagement is not a favour bestowed but a partnership earned. If the after-dinner tête-à-tête, originally set for 10 minutes, but which lasted three-fold longer, is anything to go by, then somewhere along the way, Anwar and Macron must have struck the right chords. Tocqueville once wrote that democracy is not just a system of rules but also a habit of the heart. And so, increasingly, is diplomacy. -- BERNAMA * Datuk Prof Dr Mohd Faiz Abdullah is Chairman of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia BERNAMA provides up-to-date authentic and comprehensive news and information which are disseminated via BERNAMA Wires; BERNAMA TV on Astro 502, unifi TV 631 and MYTV 121 channels and BERNAMA Radio on FM93.9 (Klang Valley), FM107.5 (Johor Bahru), FM107.9 (Kota Kinabalu) and FM100.9 (Kuching) frequencies. Follow us on social media : Facebook : @bernamaofficial, @bernamatv, @bernamaradio Twitter : @ @BernamaTV, @bernamaradio Instagram : @bernamaofficial, @bernamatvofficial, @bernamaradioofficial TikTok : @bernamaofficial
Express Tribune
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
What can they read?
A bookseller recently suggested that I read Incorrigible Optimists Club by Jean-Michel Guenassia (translated by Euan Cameron). It is a book about coming of age of a young boy in Paris in the late 1950s. This is an extraordinary time in the country. There is terrible violence in Algeria and conflicting opinions and strong emotions in France about the unfolding tragedy there - the post-war France is unsettled by the memories of the Nazi occupation; there are deep divisions among the youth and their parents about political order and global alliances; notions of liberty and freedom are being debated fiercely; and new ideas through extraordinary writings on existentialism from people like Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Camus are reaching a wide audience. The nearly 700-page book beautifully captures these threads from the perspective of a young boy, who is dealing with love, loss and family disputes - while playing foosball at a local bistro, reading compulsively and being in the presence of exiles from Soviet states and giants of modern French literature like Sartre and Kessel. I have enjoyed the book immensely. But there was something else about the book that got me thinking. The book was widely praised by critics, but it also won a particular award, the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. This particular literary award is voted for by French high school students. Each year, members of the Academie Goncourt (that dates back to 1882 and awards the Prix Gocourt, one of the most prestigious literary prize of French literature) choose 12 literary works, which are then discussed, debated, analysed and voted on by nearly two thousand high school students. The books that are chosen by the members of the academy are not necessarily targeted for young adults, but cover a range of genres in literature. The award is organised by the French Ministry of National Education in partnership with Fnac (a French media company that distributes the works of fiction). The French Ministry of National Education, describing the prize, says that "the high school students have approximately two months to read the novels with the help of their teachers. During this intense reading period, regional meetings are organized between authors and high school students. The Prix Goncourt des Lycéens is awarded by high school students themselves." I wondered what it would take for something like this to take off in Pakistan. For the sake of argument, if we were to choose two thousand students from within the country, and similar to the rules set by the French ministry, so no school could participate for two years in a row, and somehow found a benefactor to buy two thousand copies of serious books of literature written by contemporary authors, would we still be able to do it? I was less convinced by the typical argument given that 'our kids are too busy on Instagram or TikTok' and hence do not read anymore. I think our youth are just as busy as high school students in France or Colombia or Kenya are. My conclusion was that the reason something like this is unlikely to take off not because of the youth, but because of the adults. The problem is that many of us (teachers included) are uncomfortable with literature and unsettled by the difficult, provocative and complex questions that literature asks us to confront. We are more interested in universal conformity than questions. If we pick up a textbook of English or Urdu literature, what kind of literature do we see there? Is it one that asks us deep questions about our past or present, our preconceived notions or worldview? Does it allow us to challenge the status quo? Or is it predictable and increasingly narrow in its intellectual and literary scope? What books (if any) do we ask our students in high school to read? Looking in the mirror, we may find that we are actually afraid of them having questions for us, and for the society at large. It is easy to think about the 'great days' of the past and talk about how the kids these days are less 'cultured', but maybe the problem is somewhere else.
Wall Street Journal
16-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Why Is Everything an Existential Crisis?
So-called existential risks seem to be everywhere. Climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and more threaten to return us to nothingness. Most people using this term aren't consciously evoking the philosophy of Sartre or Camus. Still, they may be drawing on associations with existentialism more than they realize and unconsciously expressing deeper concerns about morality and meaning. In psychoanalysis, it isn't unusual for a word to have an unconscious double meaning. For example, a patient in therapy might say that she can't 'bear' children. She could consciously mean that she's unable to get pregnant, while also unconsciously communicating that she can't stand children. Or a grieving patient who's struggling to find the right word might say, 'I'm at a loss.'
