- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 07/07/2024 07:43

The un-working class

A long time ago I told someone I loved work. I loved the act of doing the job or jobs to which I had committed myself. This statement was greeted with no small degree of surprise and, indeed, sheer horror. A person might love a good fete. They could love football or art or spending time looking at the sunset. No one loved to work. Work, according to the acquaintance, was what you did because your parents said you had to do something after you left school. You did it so you did not give in to the sin of sloth. Or it allowed you to pursue the things actually worth loving. Apart from the unoriginality of the sentiment (nothing worse than a boring idea delivered as a eureka moment) I was disappointed. In one sentence, the person went from being a friend to someone-I-know. I thought they knew me better. Not everyone loves to work. It’s not a necessity. No one will hold it against you if you don’t. But for some, it is cherished. Some people fundamentally define themselves by their work – it is their identity. That is a different category of worker, but I see overlaps. So here I am, thinking about work, jobs, callings and the way people make their livings, mostly because I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and bobo-headed. I find myself wanting to understand impulses and impetuses. Then I flipped everything around. I started to think about people who simply do not work. Or, more precisely, they never seem able to. Not that they can’t work because they have some other medical issue. Rather, I wondered if there was a condition characterised by a loss of willingness to or focus on work. Coming up with zilch, this became the string in which I got all tangled. Sometimes people hit a wall and they just can’t do it. Can’t work, can’t produce, can’t show up. They done. For some, this can be a sign of burnout. Burnout is terrible, but it tends to come after a period of doing too much and arriving at a stage of overwhelmedness. There was too much responsibility. No mental rest. Sleep deprivation. It’s a little bit like starving yourself of regular life and existing only on a diet of your job. Not what I was looking for, but it’s a knot I’m happy I tried to unravel. One down, how many more to go? There are too many illnesses of both mind and body that can render you unable to work to fit into my wordcount. Fibromyalgia is high on the list. So too heart disease and a slew of mental health conditions. But such matters render you unable to work; they are not in and of themselves the why of it. If I broke both my wrists, I would not be able to type. It’s the result, it’s not that I didn’t feel like writing (“Has she not heard of speech-to-text?” you ask). The whole thought expedition was not an absolute waste of everyone’s time. Late in the game, I found something. Still not the answer for which I was searching, but yet more string. The first was the term “avolition.” Medical News Today, quoting a reference in the DSM 5, succinctly describes avolition as “an inability to initiate and persist in goal-directed activities.” They go on to describe the avolitionist (I just made that up) as lacking in enthusiasm for their work, not meeting deadlines and being disorganised. There are also descriptions for how they are at home and in relationships. This skirts close to what I was thinking of, but all the material I found paired it with something else. Usually schizophrenia. That’s way out of my league and I won’t pretend to know how to isolate avolition if it can, in fact, be addressed on its own. I found a few other tempting words and descriptions. Things that spoke of loss of will, direction, purpose. Things that spoke of apathy in a clinical sense. But tempting is all they were. I know there are people out there who want to work, but something they cannot define (and I’ve been no help) stops them. It’s not that they don’t know how. They may have opportunities. Maybe they once worked and something in them broke. Maybe they never worked a day in their lives. The ones I’m thinking about have a picture of themselves as people who can work. Except they’re stuck. They’re out the door but, in mid-stride, they are cast in stone, forever going nowhere. What is it? Why is it? Is there help? Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition. The post The un-working class appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.