Bio-break
To work in modern American society is to be a robot. We are the strangest robots ever created. Some of us are robots that still make things in factories but a lot of us, “knowledge workers,” are robots that, as best I can tell, generate a certain number of pounds of email per month. Email is the product we create. It must have some kind of intrinsic value, for how much of it we make. How we toil day in and day out to make more of it. Always emailing, responding to emails, reviewing more emails, sending email blasts, “just following up” on that email from last week with another email.
The primary way I interface with people now is words and images on a screen. I do that for approximately ten to twelve hours a day, conservatively. It’s not just work. It’s the text messages and pictures I send and surfing social media and the broader internet, plus work. I exist in binary, through the things I send out over the ether. I can’t run without internet. When I woke up this morning thinking about what we as a work culture are producing, before I landed on email, my initial thought was “content” or “analysis.” But we don’t create content. This piece is some of the only content I’ve created all year, and it’s August. I don’t even know what it would mean to create analysis. The only thing I’m analyzing, perhaps, is email.
One of my earliest mentors, the writer Tedra Osell, used to always say that humans are not “brains on sticks.” I remember this idea coming up in the concept of abortion restrictions. I don’t think I fundamentally understood it then, as a woman in my twenties who had not yet entered the era when I and many of my peers were having babies, trying to have babies, nursing babies, taking care of babies, having miscarriages, needing surgeries or abortions or both. At that point motherhood still seemed like a lifestyle choice, rather than a biological thing that happens to humans because we are animals who have sex.
But this isn’t just about being a parent, not really. The coronavirus pandemic is the “clash of civilizations” moment where we really saw how very much we are not brains on sticks. We get sick. We die. We emit bodily fluids and spew germs even through the simple act of breathing. Humans are a massive organism covering the planet, and this organism is having some serious problems the same way that the tomato plants in your manicured garden might be tragically afflicted with Southern Blight.
And yet, in our everyday white-collar work lives we attempt to root even more firmly into our unyielding commitment to being brains on sticks. Now I’m not just a brain on a stick, I’m a 10,000 pound dumpster of binary code that represents a brain on a stick.
It is assumed that I will keep producing and responding to emails, one after the other, and man my station here in front of the computer waiting for data that needs to be processed and turned into another series of emails.
Perhaps occasionally we will take a “bio-break.” Because in the moments before the bio-break, we were temporarily suspended in formaldehyde, non-biological, data only. It should be noted that bio-breaks are usually five minutes. It’s the sanitized way of subtly acknowledging — without saying so — that someone on your Zoom call might really, really need to take a shit.
From the perspective of the engine of American work culture, we are supposed to hide and erase our essential biology. It is a distraction and an impediment to the enterprise of producing, to do the biological things like have children, eat, piss and shit, menstruate, get sick, breastfeed, have sick family members who need care. To have “health issues” that demand attention and “medical procedures” on the calendar. To be tired, to be depressed, to be horny, to be hungry, to want to self-adorn, to move our bodies, to feel fresh air, to have sex. And now, to be a potential disease vector everywhere we go.
Shame is what keeps us inside the robot suit. If we were perfectly self-controlled brains on sticks, we would manage to conduct the business of being human without any of our co-workers or bosses knowing. We would seamlessly schedule all that pent-up human-ing into a week-long vacation where we produced enough pictures documenting that we were having a good time to make our employers (and ourselves) feel the virtue high of self-congratulation. We let, no, encourage, our employees to take vacations.
But do we encourage each other to be human? The biological kind?
