Michael Palamountain | An appreciation of labor and a critique of leisure

Stranger Than Fiction | Reflections on the consumer-centric lifestyle at Penn

By Michael Palamountain 02/06/17 9:12pm

Despite the title, this article will not serve as some sort of rallying cry to raise the minimum wage, nor will it attempt to explain the complicated nature of universal basic income. Discussions like these, even with the best intentions, manage to reduce workers and people to numbers on spreadsheets and ledgers.

We, as Penn students and as human beings, exist in a society that constrains us in certain subconscious ways. The two constraints I’d like to highlight in this article are our modern conceptions of labor and leisure with respect to the Penn experience. I developed my opinion about these constraints based on two personal realizations.

The first: To truly appreciate labor is to understand it.

This is becoming increasingly difficult in a world where many of our most essentially human behaviors have been captured and re-marketed to us as services or products. Our food, education, transportation and entertainment are all marketed to us in more easily consumable ways. This acceleration of marketization has certainly been aided by advancing technologies that allow advertisers to literally reach into the pockets of their consumers.

But wait, why on earth is this relevant at Penn?

This realization came to me when I opened my refrigerator to find a handful of tupperware containers filled with food that my mom had cooked for me before break. Despite all the work she put into cooking up what would have proved to be a delicious meal, I allowed it to rot in the fridge.

The truth is, this was not the first time I had done this. Yet, this incident felt more significant because I had just spent much of my winter break helping my mom cook and prepare food. Because I had engaged in the labor of preparing a meal, I could appreciate how terrible it was to let that previous food go to waste.

This is just one personal example, but I could apply this lesson to a whole host of daily activities of many students at Penn. We pay for our food to be made and delivered to us. We pay for transportation to pick us up and drop us off anywhere we’d like to go. And often when we pay for these products and services, we pay a premium so that we don’t have to be involved in the labor of their production. For instance, we pay delivery fees so we don’t have to walk to pick up our food.

What happens when we consume products or services without giving any thought to how they are produced? We lose the ability to value their worth outside of abstract monetary terms, and in doing so, lose empathy or regard for the human element of the labor. We do this because the labor is replaceable. It seems to me a slippery slope, one where eventually we will consume everything and value nothing.

This brings me to my second personal realization: I constantly grapple with the urge to use leisure time as a form of escapism rather than a time to be productive.

This gradual devaluation or alienation from productive forces even creeps into our leisure time. Consider two popular and easily consumable forms of entertainment: social media and television/video content. Rather than engaging in self expansive activities, like reading, conversing or playing instruments with friends that I know I would find more enjoyable and meaningful, I find myself retracting from my community and engaging in more escapist forms of entertainment like Netflix and social media.

Though these are personal struggles, I am sure I am not alone. Reports have shown that college students in particular are vastly connected to both social media and video streaming platforms. And the truth is that we could be spending the time we use on social media and television on more productive things, like reading books.

We can begin appreciating the labor that is done for us by beginning to re-engage in it ourselves. We, as students, should take the opportunity of being part of an academic community to be co-producers rather than just consumers.

We should not only labor to be able to buy things — we should labor for love, for the benefit of our communities. In doing so, we may find life that much more rewarding. And, when indeed we find our lives more rewarding, we may be able to reclaim our leisure time. Leisure need not be used to escape our everyday realities, but to immerse ourselves in them even more in novel, diverse, constructive and productive ways.

MICHAEL PALAMOUNTAIN is a College senior from Philadelphia, studying psychology. His email address is mpal@sas.upenn.edu. “Stranger Than Fiction” usually appears every other Tuesday.