My Father’s Work Ethic

“How did your father’s work ethic impact yours?” 
This prompt came out of the Therapy Game, a card game from The School of Life.  It opened a stream of thought that I had never considered. How did my father’s work ethic impact mine? I can’t tell. I mainly remember my father as unemployed. How can I comment on his work ethic when I can’t even remember him working? 
My father was sick, idle, and shrinking in his final years, the years I remember him most. He collapsed and died in front of me when he was fifty-eight. After he fell sick and became unemployed, he soon became emaciated and socially forgotten. 
The dominant image I have of him is sitting on the couch in front of the TV, day in and day out. He would get up only to eat, use the bathroom, call his family members, or take afternoon naps. 
Early on in his illness, he wrote (poetry and musings, which I could not find post-mortem) and read the newspaper (typically Al-Akhbar). He stopped this little intellectual exertion in his last two, three years. 
In his final years, he was highly dependent on others, including my brother and my grandmother (his mom). He was mostly dependent on domestic workers (who, without warning, suddenly became in-house nurses): to eat (they blended his food to mush and spoon fed him) and to walk (he often needed to physically lean on whoever was around). I cannot remember him ever leaving the house in those years. Speaking was also a challenge for him. He could not emote and typically mumbled. I often felt guilty and frustrated after trying to have a conversation, in an attempt to connect when I was visiting home from boarding school. I wanted to connect in hope to also ease his pain. I wondered if he exerted himself more than he should have, if I tired him in the process. But I also felt impatient and frustrated that my father was not granting me the parental support that I so badly needed as a child and teenager.

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What he became in his final years was far from his original self. 
After he died, whenever my aunt (his sister)  talked about him through tears of grief, she always started with ”Faziʿ shu kan mahdum. Mahdum, mahdum, mahdum.” Before getting sick, my father was a bright giant, filling every room with laughter. The documented evidence of his rich personality is well-reflected in short home videos, in which he stars. Sitting in our living room surrounded by family, he comes off as an intelligent, lighthearted jokester, sarcastically commenting on current events. In the videos, he spoke in Arabic (his native tongue) and Russian (which he learned from his time studying in the Soviet Union as an escape from the Lebanese Civil War). I did not comprehend half of what he was saying because I did not get the chance to learn Russian from him, but I understood that people in the footage were feeding off his energy, cackling at every word he said.   
By profession, he was a dentist. My aunt told me he always gave his patients discounts, in some cases not charging them at all. She nicknamed him the “Socialist Dentist” because his priority was the patients’ health, not how much they were able to pay. This was noble and needed in the harsh profit-driven health care system in Lebanon. It unfortunately also meant wavering financial security as a family. Upkeeping the practice was not feasible for too long.   Shortly after those home videos were taken, my father became a shadow of his former self. He shrank to his bare skin and bones. He was alone, severely depressed, and neglected by the larger community. The friends he would see on the daily in his good days were nowhere to be found. When my own friends asked me how he died, I would tell them that he was sick with a degenerative neurological disorder, although I mentally would think, Actually, he died over time because he simply had no interest in living.
I wish I could fill in the blanks about how my happy, intellectual, and loving father so quickly disappeared and died. I was too naive to ask the right questions, but I did wonder which preceded the other: his unemployment or his sickness?
In their book Laziness Does Not Exist, Dr. Devon Price writes about the struggle and suffering that comes with people who are unemployed or physically unable to work. Price writes about how unemployed or impoverished people die at much younger ages than their employed or middle-class peers. “In a world structured around work, not working can leave a person socially isolated, exacerbating whatever mental and physical health problems they might be dealing with. The stakes of not being productive are dire.”^[1]Price, Devon. Laziness Does Not Exist. Atria Books, 2022. Despite the intensity of my father’s physical and mental state, the self-involved preteen version of me witnessing my father’s day-to-day would internally accuse him of not caring for me and of “being lazy.”  Laziness was a shameful stamp. I did not want to be associated with laziness through my father.  However, laziness soon became a stamp and internalized value I would have about myself for most of my adult life.

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In an attempt to answer the School of Life prompt, I looked back at my professional career and wondered about my “laziness” in relation to my varied jobs. For the past 10 years, I have consistently been behind a computer doing some form of research. 
I started off doing “refugee research” during my first year out of college. I spent a full year contributing to policy research that truly went nowhere and just documented more of the same deep injustices and marginalization of the exploited, impoverished, and forcibly displaced people across Lebanon that everyone already knew.  I then moved on to work in development consulting firms for three years. The hope was that the research and framing for these small-scale projects funded by donors abroad could be some form of reparation on the local level for the damage those same donor governments have done to our region. That obviously was not the case. The projects consulted on were an absurd waste of resources, slow moving, mostly unsustainable, and did not address the root economic causes of the issues at hand that these projects wanted to solve. My colleagues and I at the consulting firms would be writing different background context analyses on Lebanon's socioeconomic situation with the sarcastic instructions that “it can’t be like the 50 other backgrounders we’ve done in the past year.” 
I was deeply disinterested in all this work. I exerted the bare minimum. I rarely cared to take initiative. It didn’t help that all this work existed in a space so removed from reality that severe environmental degradation and the changing climate decreed every.single.part. of the work irrelevant. Was this me mirroring my father’s “work ethic”? Was I replaying the minimum exertion I witnessed from his final years? Or was it the debilitating question about “what the fuck is the point?” weighing on my body every single work day? 
In 2022, after completing my masters in climate policy in New York, I unsurprisingly found myself again behind a laptop doing research. But this time, it was with an organization that does research for movements and campaigns, including climate and environmental justice groups. It was the first job I applied to with actual excitement. Finally! Some research that was not removed from the urgent sociopolitical realities on the ground.  
Unfortunately, by the fourth month, I was slowly but surely back to feeling unenergetic, low, and completely disinterested. I would open my laptop to work and feel my body’s deep resistance in the forms of anxiety attacks, intestinal aches, and chronic nausea. “Sorry I’m not feeling well,” I would type on the company Slack before submitting yet another sick day and going back home to sleep. I would zone out on the work zooms. Speak only when absolutely necessary. Mumble incomplete ideas, not too far from how my father would communicate. Rightfully so, I got feedback on my work ethic from my employer that I was too slow in the research tasks. Assignments that I had the intellectual capacity to flawlessly do in a few days would take me weeks to complete, and the outputs were not up to my standards. Damn. This intense lethargy in relation to paid labor was still there. My inability to give a fuck about work was still potent. What if I was just intrinsically lazy?  Maybe it was not influenced by my father’s sickness? 
When I opened up to my friends about my energy struggle with work, they reminded me that this depiction of myself is inaccurate. They said that I am energetic, sometimes overwhelmingly so. They reminded me of how physically active I am and how early I wake up to jumpstart my day. They reminded me of the many instances when I happily “inconvenienced myself” for others. Intellectually, graduate school in my late twenties was another form of external validation I needed that sloth was indeed separable to my being. I always did my assignments on time, took extremely detailed notes, and even made the extra effort to share them with my classmates. My grades and feedback from professors I admired were also part of changing this self-imposed narrative. The love of learning and absorbing the intricacies of just climate policy making upon the return to Beirut fueled me throughout graduate school. 
The weight of meaningless labor also lifted when the work I partook in was related to system change, work with the active intention to change material realities that do not have to be the way they are. It was mostly for political movements that outlined alternative economies and just futures. I was also always happy doing care work in all its different forms. I definitely was not “lazy” in the non-professional parts of my life. Still lacking confidence in my voice, sure. But lazy? Most definitely not. 

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It still sounds derogatory when I use the word lazy here. It sounds like I am suggesting that being lazy is something to stray far away from. It sounds like one must remove any personal connections or associations to laziness, especially if one is able and healthy.  Laziness as one of the seven deadly sins. Laziness as a vice. 
But my own understanding of laziness evolved, especially when there is so much unjust and unnecessary labor being done the world over, typically for accumulation of short-term profit regardless of its implication of the people and the planet doing the laboring. Laziness can be a form of resistance. The climate catastrophe is another deafening non-economic message from the living world to slow down and get lazy! The climate crisis is a radical force demanding we reevaluate the collective priorities, in the way we organize ourselves, how we produce, consume, but also value the dynamics in our life. The dominant economic order extracts much faster than the rate of regeneration, while also not considering how said extraction impacts and irreversibly disrupts the ecosystems. 
This capitalist-driven hyper-extraction is a root cause for the crisis. As Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing, “Doing nothing is the antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In nature, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous.”^[2]Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (Melville House, 2019). In other words, “laziness” is a form of resistance to parasitic growth. That’s the thing about anti-work politics. The implication that no one will be working is incorrect. Of course there is lots of work that needs to be done every day. It is simply about re-designing systems that do not revolve around work and extraction, but around life and well-being. In this system, someone like my dad who cared for his patients would be incentivized to continue doing so without worrying about the ability to maintain his practice and be valued based on his financial income.  
By bearing witness to my father’s end of life, I felt the debilitating weight of existing in a political and economic system that shows that no matter how much time, effort, and service you invest, you are still not guaranteed rest in your final or sick years. This message may have been subconsciously ingrained in my formative years. However, as Price says, maybe “the feelings we write off as ‘laziness’ are some of humanity’s most important instincts, a core part of how we stay alive and thrive in the long term.”

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So what was happening to me at the new political research job in New York that I was once “excited by”? It turned out that I was deeply burnt out. Price writes and validates that running out of energy or motivation, getting burnt out, comes due to good cause. It comes as a result of the struggle to survive in an overly demanding, workaholic culture. A culture that reprimands people for having basic needs, like rest. People deny themselves the need to unwind due to the chronic stressful condition of worrying about their financial futures. 
I was burnt out and anxious about paying off the loans I took that allowed me the privilege to study and live in the most expensive city in the world. I was anxious about rent that was more than half my full-time salary. I was working multiple jobs while also not knowing if my work visa would even be extended. I was isolated in the environment of remote work, something I explicitly communicated with my colleagues on multiple occasions. My body and mind had nothing more to give – they were “playing dead” to stay alive. I was chronically tired.  I could not ideate. I slacked in every area of my life.
However, I do think that at the core of my lethargic patterns is a continued dissonance. The lethargy reflected the severe mismatch between the day-to-day labor with the political urgency of the current moment. The residue from this mismatch weighed heavily on my soul. I always wanted to live and die in Beirut and a free Eastern Mediterranean with my loved ones, albeit a more prosperous and just one, where the physical ability to merely breathe clean air is possible. That weighed on my soul just as heavily. 
It was in the period of chronic physical resistance to work that I found Price’s book. I decided to quit soon after reading that I was just another burnt cog in the system. I sent my termination email and I felt okay and energized again. It was at that moment that I suddenly couldn't care less about my visa situation or the uncertainty of income. I felt free and sovereign over my sacred time and energy again, even if short-lived.

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I can’t be sure my father’s work ethic impacted mine, but the helplessness I felt being a witness to his struggle has lodged in my body on some level. I might have been observing, internalizing, and mimicking the idle behavior.

Generally, my father’s last years on Earth had me feel the violent systemic indignities on those we care for. We are at a point in time where material access is more than enough to feed, house, and care for the living beings on the planet, including its sick. It is the economic greed and political disinterest that keeps the scales in deep imbalance, odds stacked against those not born into some form of wealth. The day-to-day labor is bound to find resistance, fatigue, and disinterest in the bodies that maintain its upkeep. What mostly impacted my work ethic was the knowledge that the daily injustices of life do not have to be this way. This Earth’s beings have the right to tinker joyfully in the rich prosperities of life, as slowly and lazily as they want.