On Precarity

What does it even mean anyway?

Good morning.

This is a long essay but some ideas I’ve been trying to work through. If you don’t make it all the way to the end, there’s no hard feelings.

Thank you as always for subscribing

I.

I’ve been thinking about the word precarity for a while now. And that’s because upon re-reading Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had last fall, the section where she reflects on the word precarity stood out to me.

The first section of the book is called “Consumption” and the chapter where Biss discusses the word precarity is called “Capitalism.” In the chapter I’m referring to, she talks about a book she and an old friend of hers are reading at the same time. The name of the book is The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) by Anna Tsing.

Biss explains how she marked every passage in the book about precarity. The two she calls out in her own book are the following:

“What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is right for is sensing precarity.”

“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others.”

In the rest of the chapter, Biss talks about one of her first jobs when she lived in New York, which was working for the parks department. She had to document empty lots that the city wanted to sell because they had increased in value since they had been abandoned—except that most of the lots were registered as gardens. 

Biss photographed the gardens to show “that there were gardens there, and gardeners who would chain themselves to concrete blocks buried in the ground when the bulldozers came. The gardeners had cleared those lots of bricks and needles, and they had planted roses. They had invested in zero-value property.”

Biss tells her friend that perhaps she needs more precarity in her life. “Maybe I’ve become too comfortable,” she says. Her friend tells her no—not to think that way. “[P]recarity has a price. And a person can be too vulnerable.”

II.

Precarity is the state of precariousness; and precariousness is a state or condition of being precarious, which is a way to describe something uncertain or reliant on chance.

I’ve been thinking about Eula Biss’s notes on precarity and the definition of precarity and whether or not I have enough precarity in my life.

I’m getting older. And, I think, aging is conducive to seeing precarity where previously it was hidden. Knowledge has been gained, love and children, status and achievements. All of those things can topple and fall at any moment.

These things, I think, define my life now in no particular order: my fiance and the love we share; the home I rent and live in with my fiance; my mental health and general physical well-being; my strength and agility and mobility; my job and the salary it pays me; my job and the industry and professional set it places me in; my love for my family—in particular my nieces who are five years and one year old, respectively; my passion for sports, movies, music, books, and other assorted pop culture; my desire to have my fiction published.

To be able to “have” those things already suggests a sense of luck or chance. So many things could have been different. They are not, so things are as they are. And I “have” so much and want so little.

But, as I get older, I feel the precarity around me grow. And I try to decide if it is simply me getting older or if, as Biss wondered, it's that this time currently is the right one for sensing precarity. I also wonder too if precarity truly is being vulnerable to others and how vulnerable to others I currently am or have ever let myself be.

III.

From the age of 22 through 37, I hardly ever drove. That’s because I lived in Brooklyn. Driving was not a part of my life. Because of that, I created no true muscle memory for driving. No real reflexes.

Now that I live in Austin, I drive basically every day. Not much each day, but I drive each day. My fiance and I “purchased” a new car together last November. (Purchase is in quotes because we don’t own the car—Honda Financial Services owns the car.)

I have learned that I don’t like driving. Or rather, I don’t really like driving in Austin. It’s not because Austin drivers are bad. As Reddit has taught us, basically every single city in the world believes the drivers in their city are the worst.

No, I don’t like driving in Austin because I don’t like driving in cities. I grew up on Long Island which is one winding, long, continuous suburban town that deltas into one of the biggest cities in the world. Most of my driving was either pastoral roads that led to beaches or highways where the speed limit was 55 or 60. I hated driving in and around New York City whenever I had to. 

The city loop in Austin (known as MoPac) has an official speed limit of 65 and an unofficial speed limit of 75. Austin neighborhoods can feel like suburbs, but then you are suddenly right in the middle of a city with a growing population whose urban planning and infrastructure aren’t quite ready for all the people who now live here.

I’m simply not equipped for this. My mind is slow-moving. I am ponderous and need to focus on one thing at a time. I’m getting better at driving here, but I do not like it and it stresses me out.

What driving makes me realize most of all is how precarious the act of driving is. The general idea of driving is predicated on trust. You are vulnerable every second you are in the car. How can you trust that someone isn’t going to fly through a protected left turn that’s just gone red? How can you really ever be sure that someone won’t try to run a red light going north at the intersection of Lamar and 34th when you’re just about to cross heading east? You ever lived in a city with lots of four-way stops? Now that’s a trust exercise.

I was walking my future in-laws’ border collie the other week on a quiet street near their home. As I was walking the dog, I watched as a guy—maybe 20, maybe 24 or 25—drove a huge raised black truck right past me. He was behind the wheel, driving this large machine, looking at his phone.

Driving is precarious.

IV.

This year, two four hour documentaries on major cultural figures from the 20th century came out. One was on Paul Simon and it was called In Relentless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon. The documentary was released on MGM+. The other was on Steve Martin and it was called Steve! (Martin) A Documentary In Two Pieces.

I don’t think I saw anyone talking about these documentaries online. No one in my life mentioned them to me.

Now, I don’t spend much time on social media (what is it for?) anymore. And I don’t talk to my friends as often as I once did. A casualty of growing older I suppose. But this strikes me as meaningful.

Steve Martin was one of the biggest actors of my childhood. He was one of those figures who, when you discovered them, made you realize there was so much more to life and to this world than you knew. He had the full head of whitish-gray hair, so he suggested age—but his face didn’t look that old. He was the Father of the Bride but he was also The Jerk and the evil dentist from Little Shop of Horrors. And then you realized he was one of The Three Amigos and the star of one of the best road movies ever made. And then you understood that all of that was possible because he was the biggest comedian in the world for about five years. They even told you so on Freaks and Geeks.

Paul Simon didn’t reveal himself as easily. In fact, you didn’t really care about him. That is, you didn’t until you went over to your friend Erik’s house after school one day, during that time between soccer season ending and basketball season starting, to smoke pot. When you got there, you heard music. Erik opened the door in his socks, his hat turned backwards, his blonde hair curling behind his ears. The music was loud and there was bass and lots of accordian. He had his record player on—hooked up to large speakers. It was a warm afternoon so you went upstairs to his room and sat in the window and smoked pot. What is this album? You don’t know Graceland?

And that’s how it started. Then there was learning more about Simon and Garfunkel and not quite loving them but understanding them. Then there was realizing that Bridge Over Troubled Water was really that good, so there must be more. And then you had an epiphany: Paul Simon solo was a completely different thing altogether and his self-titled album from 1972 was maybe the best thing he ever did—even better than Graceland. But, god, did he ever write anything better and more timeless than “America?” And then all of a sudden you’re 38 and in bed with the flu and Paul Simon spends some of his days in Wimberley and you live in Austin—about an hour away—and he’s going deaf and you really never did know much about him and his very specific kind of 20th century upbringing.

But how much longer will anyone care about Steve Martin and Paul Simon? Both of these men are over 75 years old so they aren’t necessarily “relevant.” But what I mean is—how much longer will they and their work serve as even small sign posts for people on their way to understanding the world?

In rewatching the Steve Martin documentary, I kind of understood why there is a precarity to his legacy. His comedy is too silly. I understand that’s the point, but it feels very much like you had to be there. He wanted to make you laugh like your friends make you laugh—but by the very nature of that philosophy it means you kind of have had to be there. He clearly made things work extraordinarily well for a time. But all that was 50 years ago and it feels even more ancient.

Paul Simon’s music may have a chance. There is something strange about his songwriting, familiar as it is. But I didn't even know there was a four hour documentary about him. I learned about it on a podcast last month. Ten years ago I would've been counting down the days.

I’m not picking on Simon and Martin. They’re just two recent examples. I think the same thing about Neil Young and Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. Most of the signs and symbols that I used to situate myself in time, history, and culture are most likely completely foreign to someone who is sixteen now. So little is able to last for so long.

V.

In case you haven’t heard, the media business is a precarious field to work in. It exists, seemingly, in constant precarity.

I work in media and I make money working in media. But I don’t know for how long.

My life is comfortable and made comfortable from my work in media. This is rare. But that’s because I’m not a writer or an editor. I am a strategist. An audience development professional. I don’t know why the math works the way it does, but it does.

And despite the, uh, non-ideal circumstances at the company for which I work, I don’t fear for my job every day. Maybe I should.

I don’t know what it’s like to be unemployed for a long period of time. I've had the fortune and the chance to never have to look for a job for more than a month. That’s not a brag. I’ve been at jobs that I wanted to leave for years and done dozens of interviews before getting hired away. I’m not some amazing candidate.

A lot of fields exist in constant precariity. Most jobs in fact seem to. As Anne Helen Peterson wrote about in her book Can’t Even, ever since the 1980s, when companies began to use consultants to find efficiencies to drive up their stock value for shareholder profits the world in which an employer looked out for its employees began to disappear. Call it the death of the pension plan.

Mass layoffs, as they seem to happen so often, are fairly new. And there are always lots of reasons for them.

So at some point, I will be laid off. Most of us will. Jobs are precarious.

VI.

I do most of the grocery shopping for my fiance and I. That’s mainly because I do most of the cooking. It could be because I like a certain level of control and order over my weeks. It could be that I got used to doing all of that for myself because I was single for so long. Or it could just be the way my fiance and I naturally balance the work in our relationship. Probably all of those things.

Most of the time I get to the grocery store in Austin, I’m scared.

Austin is a safe town but it is legal to carry handguns in the state of Texas without a permit. And shootings at grocery stores are not uncommon these days. There is a guard with a gun at the grocery store we go to. Didn’t see one of those in Brooklyn.

Sometimes the guard rides a segway around the parking lot. The grocery store also has live music most nights of the week. People go there for fun. The parking lot is always packed.

My fiance and I made the decision to move to Texas and we don’t regret it. And my fiance doesn’t feel these fears in the same ways that I do. I’m the one who is afraid when he goes to the grocery store. I’m more of the coward in our relationship.

Whenever I shop, I feel a sense of precarity. Especially when I’m at the register. I’ve forgotten to use several $10 off coupons that way.

VII.

My nuclear family and most of my extended family have lived on Long Island for the better part of 80 years. And branches of my family have reached to parts of northern New Jersey. For a brief time, my family and I lived outside of Philadelphia.

Part of my family is Italian-American and the other part is Greek-American. There is a Hungarian quarter in there too but I didn’t spend much time with them.

Growing up, The Godfather was a big symbol in my life. My great uncle had a VHS box set of The Godfather trilogy on the large, white, built-in bookshelf around the TV at his house in New Jersey. My family would talk about the movie in reverent tones. But I was too young to watch it.

A lot of my Italian relatives didn’t like The Godfather. They felt it gave Italians a bad name. I could never really relate to that. The Godfather always seemed to be more about gangsters than Italians to me but I wasn’t around back when the movie came out so I don’t really know what it felt like.

When I could finally watch The Godfather I mapped it onto my own life and my own extended family. Because I was more bookish than a lot of my cousins, I identified with Michael. And my Nana, my grandmother and grandfather, my uncles and aunts and great aunts and great uncles, my parents they all served as my Corleone family. We had big gatherings and we had branches of the family: the Long Island branch and the Jersey branch.

After watching The Godfather Part II, I learned that Michael Corleone is perhaps one of the most tragic characters in movie history and that the second Godfather film was a better piece of art than the first one. But I missed the feeling the first Godfather gave you—that feeling of being around a big family, relatives who had so many parties and memories before you were even born that you can only hope to catch up to and learn about.

The Godfather Part II is about all of that going away. Michael has moved the family to Lake Tahoe. They aren’t on Long Island anymore, going back and forth to New York City. They are out in the West doing business in Las Vegas. Slowly the Coreleone family becomes only Michael and whoever his close associates are. It’s not personal, it's business.

I’m not a gangster. My family is not the mob. But these days I get that feeling I first had after watching Godfather Part II for the first time. My extended family is getting older and slowly dying. Our holidays are sparse. Each part of the family has started to close in on itself. It is rare for us all to get together anymore. More members of the family are moving to other states because they can not afford to get old and die on Long Island.

My family once was a certain kind of 20th century family on Long Island. I see it in flashes sometimes. Wood-paneled walls. White, orange, and blue Islander jerseys. Exit 40 on the Northern State for Route 110 to Huntington or Amityville. Billy Joel’s Glass Houses album cover. Couches with big cushions that always fall off. Easter mornings that start cloudy but then give way to sun and small flowers breaking through soddish, pale green grass. I was barely alive for that world and the way it looked. But it is slowly passing forever away into history—and it is almost very nearly gone.

VIII.

This may read as a list of all my fears. And perhaps it is. But really it's more to say that I agree with Eula Biss’s friend. I don’t need more precarity in my life.

My life is stable. I live in a house, I can afford food, I can afford to keep my home warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I am truly loved by another person and have learned to accept that love over time. I am loved by a family and by parents even if it is hard to understand the unconditional and unending nature of their love.

Despite all that, I feel precarity all around me. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t meant to see and know all of the things I see and know each day. And I don’t look at a fraction of the stuff you could look at on the internet. My stomach’s too weak for too many things.

Perhaps because I am getting older and am seeing more than I was ever meant to see and have more than I ever knew I could have, that’s the reason why I see and sense precarity more than ever. Maybe this time is indeed especially right for sensing precarity.

But If you were living in Swabia in the 9th century that was probably a time of great precarity. I imagine life in Mycenae wasn’t stable, considering the entire Mycenaean society collapsed and disappeared for seemingly no clear reason. You all watched Shogun. Life in 17th century Japan seemed pretty precarious. They didn’t have TikTok though (as far as I understand) so it probably felt different. 

I’m not a vulnerable person by nature, though it may seem that way based on what I share here. But I’m getting older and I feel more vulnerable than ever. (And my vulnerability starts with my hips and my hip mobility.) I see there is more to lose than I ever knew. And I have so much, have had so much, so I fear the loss. 

I say all this too as someone without children. I’m not sure how my parents—or any parents at all—come to grips with the precarity that is raising children. That’s probably why I can rewatch Manchester by the Sea like I did when I had the flu last month.

But life is chance. Being reliant on chance means you are in a condition that is precarious, which is precariousness and precarity is the state of precariousness. And, I suppose, that’s just the way life is. I was simply too young and too lucky for too many years to even know.