Lately I’ve been thinking about Sartre’s waiter. You might know the story. The philosopher is sitting in a Parisian cafe sometime in the early 1940s, watching a waiter glide from table to table. There’s something creepy about him, Sartre decides, but what? He watches a little longer. It’s this: the man is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.
It’s a memorable observation, like something so obvious it requires an alien observer to notice it. Once seen, it passes into the brain as truth. You see it everywhere: people performing their functions like actors who’ve learned their parts a little too well. It’s a psychotic but undeniably catchy worldview.
In Being and Nothingness, where this anecdote appears, the waiter’s exaggerated waiterliness becomes a case study in what Sartre calls bad faith: the act of denying one’s full, complex, and ever-changing selfhood by overidentifying with a preassigned role. The man isn’t just working as a waiter, he has become a waiter. Sartre argues it’s more comforting to take refuge in a familiar script than to confront the ongoing anxiety of having to choose, moment by moment, who and what we are.
[ How Sartre’s theory of ‘self’ can explain all of humanity - even Elon MuskOpens in new window ]
It’s easy to criticise Sartre’s use of the waiter. Here’s a guy who, when not experimenting with polyamory or taking amphetamines to fuel his lengthy philosophical treatises, spends his days in Parisian cafes critiquing the man bringing him coffee for failing to confront the abyss of his radical existential freedom. It’s true the waiter could, at any moment, throw his tray like a frisbee, tear off his apron, and walk out into the unknown – but it’s also possible he has a family to feed, and that living in good faith might still mean having to find another identical job down the line.
READ MORE
It’s also possible, more importantly, that the waiter’s exaggerated waiterliness isn’t evidence of a collapsed identity at all, but rather a protective mask. A way of drawing a line between the role he is paid to perform and the person he actually is in the off hours.
The reason I’ve been thinking about Sartre’s waiter is that I have a new job. When I’m working, I often have the strange sense that I’m only pretending to work, or pretending to be the kind of person I imagine would be good at the job. Maybe boredom just breeds dissociation. I won’t punish anyone with the unspectacular details of my employment, except to say that its meaninglessness boggles the mind, it really does. I can’t complain, though; after all, I sought this job out, applied for it, politely accepted when it was offered to me, and now there’s nothing left to do but get on with it.
The greater part of any job is learning to look busy. In a hotel, you’re hired not just to stand behind a desk, but to act like a receptionist. We understand it instinctively and so we develop professional selves that may resemble us but aren’t quite us. We do this not only to protect our real selves, but because turning it into a performance helps to pass the hours.
My first job was a weekend shift in a jeweller’s when I was 15, and at the time, it felt like something close to freedom. Proof that I could rely on myself, that the money I earned, however modest, might translate into real independence. The exciting feeling that it was possible to make my own way in the adult world. More than that, I liked the sense of being a spinning cog in the great, whirring city. Of being a shopgirl in a shop. One of the multitudes making little things happen, pushing forward into the future.
I think I approached it enthusiastically because school seemed so irredeemably awful that I wasn’t especially concerned about what I was running toward, only what I was trying to escape. It took a while for it to dawn on me that this whole work thing wasn’t just a fun little side plot, but something I’d be doing, in one form or another, for the rest of my life.
Of course, there are all sorts of jobs, and many of them are worthwhile and even ennobling, but the idea that there’s any inherent virtue in work for its own sake falls away pretty quickly. It only takes working a few jobs to dispel that myth.
I’m reminded of that famous story from the Soviet Union. In an effort to meet productivity quotas, a nail factory was told to maximise output by weight. The factory responded by producing a small number of large, heavy nails; useless for construction but perfect for hitting the target. When the quota shifted to the number of units instead, they switched to making thousands of tiny, fragile pins. Again: useless. The workers did exactly what was asked of them, but none of it amounted to anything.
Under capitalism there are perhaps more sophisticated ways of obscuring our futility, but we still find out eventually. The truth is, so many jobs are such a laughable waste of time it’s tempting to think dread is what keeps the whole system running. There’s always something worse, something more degrading just a rung below, and it’s that fear of sliding downward, not any real belief in upward mobility, that keeps everyone stuck where they are.
I read an article once about line standers: people who get paid to stand in queues for other people. It’s a real job. Apparently it happens a lot in the US, and it’s mostly homeless people and students doing it.
The article was fascinating because of this one story that happened in Poland. It was actually a kind of beautiful story. During the 1980s, in the late communist era, shortages were so bad that people would queue for hours, sometimes days, for basic goods. A small economy sprang up around this reality. People who didn’t have time to stand in line would pay someone else to do it for them. One man had turned it into a profession.
In the article the man was talking about the job with real sincerity, talking about the qualities it required: honesty, reliability, patience. He said he once queued for 40 hours straight. He particularly liked queuing in hospitals, holding spots to make sure people could get in-demand specialist care at a time when the healthcare system was overloaded. He saw himself as providing a little bit of security for people who were already struggling with illness.
The social contract is falling apart; everybody knows it; you don’t need me to tell you
What happened was that this man’s business eventually collapsed because there was some reform, and he was left facing the threat of destitution. But it turned out that he had become famous through his humanistic work in line standing for all those years, maybe even decades, and that the people knew and loved him, so he ended up having this bizarre odyssey where he became part of a theatre company and someone cast him in an opera and even made a marionette with his likeness. At this late stage in the article they mentioned the fact that the man happened to be a dwarf, and that his distinctive appearance may have contributed to his iconic status as a Polish folk hero.
After the stint in theatre he went on to politics, running for mayor in his hometown. All of this happened in the real world. Which proves that it is possible to escape from under the crushing banality of your circumstances and reclaim your radical existential freedom, but it takes a certain alignment of the stars and lots of chutzpah.
Anyway, I’ve always been interested in the things people do to make money, but I also understand the question “What do you do?” can provoke hostility. We’ve inherited this strange cultural hangover from better times, the idea that the thing you do to survive should also double as your identity and source of pride.
Stable, long-term employment is becoming rarer. Entire industries are being gutted or automated. Many people are cobbling together an income from gigs and freelance scraps, and young people, even ones with degrees, can’t seem to secure proper work. Every so often something comes along (Covid, the anti-work movement, quiet quitting, the rise of AI) that seems poised to change the future of work, or to bring the whole thing crashing down. But the moment passes, and things stay more or less the same. And after all our fruitless toil, we hand over more than half of our paycheck to a landlord who’s probably chilling with a rum and coke somewhere in the Bahamas.
In short, the social contract is falling apart; everybody knows it; you don’t need me to tell you. What actually interests me are the quiet, almost heroic ways people carry on as if this weren’t the case, and the small psychological tricks we use to get through the working day.
I had a drink a few months ago with a friend who was about to start a new job at an AI training company. His role, as it was described to him, would be to interact with a chatbot in order to help it censor harmful content. The example they gave was Romeo and Juliet. Juliet is 13. Say, hypothetically, a paedophile wanted to engage the chatbot in a discussion that drew on the text, citing Juliet’s age, the sexual nature of her relationship with Romeo, and so on, as a way to access inappropriate material under the guise of literature.
My friend’s task would be to think like this hypothetical user, coming up with ever more inventive ways to outwit the filters, so that those filters could then be adjusted accordingly. In essence: he was being hired to think like a paedophile, from nine to five.
He was, understandably, disturbed by this, and concerned about what effect it might have on his mental health. It’s a good idea to look after one’s capacity to see beauty in the world, to preserve hope that life can be fun. Jobs like this pose a serious threat. I agreed with him that the situation sounded far from ideal, pretty bleak really. Then we fell into silence, because what else can you say?
A few weeks later I bumped into him again and asked how the job was going. He seemed sort of surprised I’d remembered, as if he himself had already forgotten. It turned out it didn’t bother him at all once he’d reconciled himself to doing it. You compartmentalise. You show up. You do whatever weird thing is required of you. You clock out. A job is a job, he’d decided, and there are many worse jobs.
