Say Something About Nothing

Remember Dr Cai Mingjie, the molecular biology researcher who became a taxi driver?  I spent some time reading his blog at http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/, and what struck me was not so much the quality of his writing as the fact that he was sufficiently interested in and inspired by his job, to set down in detail the daily events he encountered.  Compare the working lives of most other people out there – how many people are stimulated enough to record their workplace events?

I can think of three reasons, right off the top of my head, why people are generally not inclined to write about the things that happen at work, and that’s not including the inability to do so.

One: they simply don’t encounter anything interesting to write about.  This particularly goes for office workers.  While I was working full time as an editor, I occasionally tried to keep a record of things that happened in the office.  Ninety percent of my days were spent sitting at my desk, either reading through proofs, doing research for articles or sending/answering routine emails.  The few times I was not at the desk, I was on leave pursuing my freelance work.  Without the freelance work, I had no external interaction beyond a small circle of colleagues and friends I occasionally caught up to online.  I never learned anything new, because even the publications I was doing “research” for covered their topics so shallowly, from such a narrow viewpoint, that I had no opportunity to look or think any deeper than the surface.  I never went anywhere or saw anything.  What was there to write about?

Two: even when there are interesting things to write about, they are too mentally flatlined to put events in words.  People do get jaded after a while spent sitting in a cubicle, and when shallow thought is the norm for one’s work – which it often is – it becomes a habit.  The average workplace simply does not encourage the kind of deep thought and incisive observation required to turn everyday incidents into an article of any interest.  Research has concluded that the best way to stimulate the intellect is to allow the brain some downtime, but how much downtime do people get at work?  (This can lead to an indictment of office practices, which I won’t go into.)  I can state from experience that my best and deepest ideas came when I was staring out of the bus window during a long journey, or just peering vacantly at something random with no task at hand.  Even my best work-related ideas came not while I was at work, but when I was doing something else entirely (usually something mindless).  Granted that there was something to write about, would I have had anything to write about it?

And three: given that there is something to write about and people have something to write about it, would they get in trouble for doing so?  This is a consideration that will probably hit many people where it hurts.  One can get in serious trouble, including and not limited to lawsuits and summary termination, for disclosing company information, even if it’s on a personal blog and chronicles nothing more than office politics.  Nothing more?  People have gotten fired for less.  This consideration looms doubly large for those whose work involves confidential information and triply large for those whose work involves writing.  I recall a friend whose contract with a publisher here stated that the copyright of everything she wrote while in that publisher’s employ belonged to the company – up to blog posts.  Or those who are paid to write – there is a smell of conflict of interest if a journalist decides to independently start a blog which will be available to the public for free.  (The use of blogs as a marketing tool will not be covered here.)  Yes – if I write about something at my workplace, am I going to get sued for it?

It never struck me as odd that in all my writing, I hardly ever blogged about my workplace except to bitch about this and that condition.  Until I came across Dr Cai’s blog and saw how involved and keenly observational he was of his daily encounters.  Then I noticed that since quitting my job, my written productivity has gone up by about three hundred percent and the concepts I’ve touched on have also deepened (which may or may not say a lot).  And that got me thinking.  Can it be that a steady job, whether one enjoys it or not, is actually detrimental to personal development and creativity?  My personal experience seems to concur.  But not all jobs can be bad.  Is it a matter of self-management and attitude adjustment?  Very likely.  Or is it a matter of comfort zones, the familiar and the unfamiliar and how we deal with either by ignoring it or trying to fit our perceptions around it through rephrasing it in our own terms?

I’ll leave the answer to the psychologists and the researchers.  What I do know is that it takes intellectual stimulation to be able to say anything about anything else, and intellectual stimulation does not necessarily come from outside.  Much of the time it comes from within, when the brain’s processing power doesn’t need to deal with the immediate exigencies of working life and can start doodling pictures in the clouds.  I bet da Vinci was daydreaming when he thought of drawing the Vitruvian Man.