At job interviews, when I am asked that standard question about my greatest weakness, I reply with the standard responses that many of us have been coached to give: ‘I am too much of a perfectionist!’, ‘I have trouble saying no!’, ‘I get too absorbed in my job to have work-life balance’.

These admissions of weakness are designed to communicate something very particular to a potential employer–that my ‘weakness’ is to your advantage. But our veiled brag actually points to something deeply troubling about the way we have been taught to approach work and life. What we’re really saying is: ‘I will obsess unhealthily over an unrealistic standard’, ‘I lack boundaries. I will keep doing things even when I feel I am at capacity’, ‘I don’t rest enough’. Psychological studies have shown that perfectionism, lack of boundaries, and inadequate rest are antithetical to productivity. So why is it so ingrained in working culture?

Hetero-patriarchal binaries in capitalist culture

The root, I argue, is in capitalist hetero-patriachal structure that underpins contemporary work culture.

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In the weeks following my father’s death I stayed in an old caravan that was parked amid the horse stables on my father’s property. I couldn’t sleep and so I’d find myself awake late into the evening, leafing through the books that, in daze and under some fundamental misunderstanding that grief might lend itself to productivity, I had taken from my office the day after I had gotten the news that my father had died.

These books were Michael Jackson’s The varieties of temporal experience: travels in philosophical, historical, and ethnographic time, and Renato Rosaldo’s The day of Shelly’s death: the poetry and ethnography of grief.

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This is a piece I wrote in 2013 that never found a home in print. I recently uncovered in the jumble of thoughts and images that is my computer hardrive. It is interesting to see how my interest in presence and absence–central themes of current PhD thesis–have preoccupied my thoughts for so many years! As always when looking back on old work, I found parts of this rather cringy (I was going through an experimental writing phase), but I hope it is of interest to some. A huge thankyou to Dr Stuart Glover for his feedback and mentorship on this piece. 

PART I

Bianca Jane Insane’s had her eye on a few places for a while now. She knows what she’s looking for. The long grass. The decay. The public notice for development.

She weaves her BMX through the Fortitude Valley traffic, threads around pedestrians and the midday drunks. You follow at some distance. Your bike clatters with every inch forward, screeches when it should stop.

Bianca shouts a running commentary on the buildings you pass, a tangle of things she’s learned from textbooks and from spending a lot of time stoned in derelict buildings. Her words catch on the wind, fragment, float back to you as part of the city’s synesthesic song. A tapestry of heat ripples, jasmine flowers, requests for ciggies, and the guttural wrench of beat-up Fords.

There’s an awesome…seventies style…used to go there a lot…art deco windows… a squat, man…

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On a Saturday in June 2020, as I was drawing together the disparate themes of my PhD thesis, I took a break from my writing to stand with some 30,000 other people in Brisbane’s King George Square. The protest against structural racism and Black and Indigenous deaths in custody was part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which, on the crest of social media, had swept the globe in the weeks following the death of African American man George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

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