No. 46: Can You Explain Your Job to a Monkey?

Keeping Art Grounded When Life Isn’t

I’ve long held a secret theory —

That if you cannot explain your job to a monkey, there is trouble afoot.

This is presuming a scenario where you are a monkey too, alone in the wilderness, and come upon a monkey troop, who ask you a single question if they’re going to accept you into their tribe:

What do you do?

A lawyer would say: I defend other monkeys from accusations and seek justice for monkeys that have been harmed.

The monkeys would all nod and let him in.

A doctor: I heal sick monkeys. An accountant: I keep track of your valuable things. A construction worker: I build your treehouses. A UPS driver: I deliver things from one tree to the next. A mechanic: I fix broken swinging vines. A garbage collector: I pick up the banana skins.

Simple, clear, necessary. The monkeys welcome them all. (Garbage collector gets a rousing cheer.)

What’s my pitch, then? I tell good stories.

Hmm. I thiiiiiiink I’d make the cut. If only to keep the kids busy while the adult monkeys do their thing.

But then I start thinking of so many jobs proliferating in 2024: brand ambassador, social media manager, crypto trader, AI content curator, fintech specialist… And I can see the monkeys stiffening their spines.

As to what got me thinking about this today —

The grim murder of a United Health CEO, a large health insurance company, which should have been greeted with horror and sympathy… but instead was declared ‘karma’ by the internet for the job he had chosen to take.

It was this phenomenon — a collective celebration of murder — that made me pull out my computer and start typing this. The victim had a family. He had committed no legal crime.

To celebrate his death seems distinctly unhuman. Which means there must be a reason for it.

So let’s go back to the monkeys.

Any health insurance CEO seeking acceptance by the troop would face difficulty:

“You give me bananas each month and in return, based on the number of bananas you’ve given, I decide how much care you get when you are sick.”

You can feel the monkeys narrowing their eyes to cold, little slits.

I think this is where the trouble begins — when we lose primal connection to what it is we are as humans and what it is we exist to do. And in its place, create some mind maze or cerebral jungle to profit off our shared condition.

(Influencer monkey: “I get bananas because I’m a hot monkey and I make videos of myself being hot so that you’ll buy the things they give me bananas to sell you…”)

This has been on my mind in YOUNG WORLD, the New Novel (95% done!), where the youth absolutely obliterate the old world order. Which never seemed like much of a reach because today’s teenagers are already asking the questions to deconstruct it. Why would you leave the jungle and go work in an… office? Just to get more bananas? How many bananas do I really need to survive? And is it worth working 8 hours a day to bank more and more? When you could be swinging trees and exploring the forest?

These questions can lead to all kinds of places. To entrepreneurship. To creativity. To inner purpose. To… OnlyFans.

A word about the last —

I remember being set up on a date once, where the guy didn’t have any social media or online presence, and I was curious as to why. His response was that he had zero affinity for “digital sexiness.”

The date didn’t go anywhere, but that term stayed with me. Because I wonder what the monkey tribe would make of the notion that a more advanced species has committed its time, energy, resources to a digital facsimile of life, instead of the real one.

Photo by Marsel van Oosten.

Because let’s face it, if YOUNG WORLD was going to be a carbon-copy of modern life, it would feature a whole lot of kids — and adults — hunched over with poor posture, focused entirely on their phones. Conversations would happen at least 80% in text message and meme. It would be hugely unreadable, or at the very least, dispiriting. But this is what humanity has become, for the most part. Siloed identities of algorithm, which has made the new generation aspire not to work that has primal seeds in humanity… but rather to careers that involve personal branding. Tiktoker. Youtuber. Influencer. Guru. Content Curator. None of these exist in the real world. But when the greatest value you have and will ever have is on your phone, it’s only natural that the life we aspire to pulls us deeper and deeper into its pixels.

Sometimes too deep. The phone can be an alluring place to experiment with identity.

Apps and social media are filled with anonymous or nom de plum accounts. I’ve enjoyed my own. To audition fictional voices. To explore my identity. To be my whole self without being ‘myself’. Valuable, in doses, but overall not the most productive use of time. Because in the phone world, everything is controlled to your desires and when something pushes back against it, you simply swipe left or close app or move to a forum with less resistance. Your world doesn’t just become an echo chamber. It becomes a crystal-clear reflection of you.

In fact, I don’t think it’s far away when each of us has the power to create a whole other digital human. An AI version or avatar of who we wish we were. That is indistinguishable from a real person, at least in digital form. That Alt-Me could do any number of things: sell products, sell a lifestyle, sell sex… Or simply give us a chance to do life over in another body, even if that body does not exist. One day soon, you’ll open up your phone and it’ll be nothing but fake people selling real things. Fake people who are attached to Real People, who prefer to live as their Fake Selves. The Kingdom of Vicarious Paradise.

And yet in all of it, we’re getting further and further away from that monkey tribe, which takes one look at what we’ve become… at all these things we’re peddling… and goes bounding back to their trees.

A last story about all of this.

My partner and I know a young, 22-year-old kid who is a brilliant thinker, deeply impressive and wants a future in finance to achieve a life of comfort and means. This is not a life my partner has lived, who is a farmer in the rural Midwest. So when I asked the kid how he would explain his job to a monkey, my partner paid keen attention.

The young man furrowed and said “Let me think about that.” An hour later, he came back: “I’d tell the monkeys that their banana stands are not being run optimally, and I’d like to come in and optimize their growth by purchasing out some of the banana stands and then using that to pressure others into more efficiency and sales. Then ultimately, I could see those stands back to the monkeys and see a profit of bananas for myself but also give the monkeys back a better, streamlined system of banana sales.” He frowned again. “Why? What would you say?”

Farmer Partner stared right at him. “I’d say I grow your f---- bananas.”

All hail the Monkey King!

Your turn. How would you explain your job to a monkey?

Until next week —