Doing manual labor...

People tend to assume that my YouTube ad revenue and Patreon money is enough for me to live off of, but it's nowhere near enough for monthly rent and groceries. I would probably be able to make a living off YouTube if I started taking sponsorships, but I'm too stubborn because recommending some product or service solely for money would make me feel ashamed of myself. So instead, I'm currently supplementing my income by doing unskilled manual labor at a chicken factory, a hellish place to work, though last year I worked at a fish factory, and that was actually quite pleasant.

Wittgenstein actually used to recommend his philosophy students to do manual labor, and he once even attempted to move to the Soviet Union so he could do farm work there (he was rejected because the Soviet Union only wanted him as a teacher). He favored more "tangible" forms of work because, after all, for him, philosophy was largely something to be overcome and made obsolete.

I don't think manual work should be fetishized as some measure of "real" worth or some kind of process of purification, and to the people who are forced to perform it non-stop their whole lives, it tends to do more harm than good; but I have found it to be a healthy break from reading philosophy, which sometimes can feel vague and nebulous to the point of frustration. It can be a pleasant feeling to touch and transform physical things with your own hands. I also value the social aspect, as work leads you to meet people outside of your regular social circles, and luckily the factories I've worked at have employed mainly immigrants, which allows me to meet people from a whole host of different countries and cultural backgrounds. It can also be quite educational, as a Marxist, to see materialized the mechanisms and relations laid out in Capital directly in your own practical experience and flesh, and to experience first-hand the process of Value-creation that lies behind a shelf of commodities at the supermarket, which we typically glance at only on the surface.

I guess the lesson from all this is that work that is often considered inherently undesirable can actually be personally valuable if it widens the horizons of your life-experience. The important distinction is that between variety and monotony, and it is precisely the rigidity of the capitalist division of labor which pushes all our livelihoods towards monotony. Life-long restriction to repetitive manual labor can destroy the pleasure of physical work, just as a life-long academic life in conditions of publish-or-perish can destroy the joys of intellectual labor. This is why the critique of the division of labor is so important. Marx wrote that modern industry compels society "to replace the detail-worker of today, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

Lastly, I'd like to assure everyone that I'm working on my next video, which will be about Bergson's theory of the comic. I've been quite busy the past 2 weeks because I held a lecture on Nietzsche and Marx in Lithuanian for students of Vilnius University, but I'm back into researching Bergson now.

Thank you for reading. See you!