Gigs, Jobs, Craft, and Vocation
One morning in January 2007, people passing through Washington D.C.’s L’Enfant Plaza train station heard a free solo performance by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell. The forty-three minute program included pieces by Bach, Massenet, Schubert, and Ponce, which Bell played on his 1713 Stradivarius violin, an instrument estimated to be worth millions. Bell—wearing a t-shirt, jeans, baseball cap—announced neither himself nor his program; he laid down his instrument case for tips and busked as people made their way in and out of the station.
The Washington Post had planned the busking performance as an experiment and documented it in video and an article by Gene Weingarten. Conductor Leonard Slatkin, when asked ahead of the experiment for a prediction, thought that of about a thousand expected passersby, some 75 to 100 would stop to listen briefly, and of those 35 or 40 would recognize the quality of the performance. He estimated Bell would earn about $100 in tips. Slatkin overestimated. After a little more than forty minutes, Bell had made fifty-two dollars and change from twenty-seven people, about seven of whom stopped to listen (one being a woman who recognized Bell and tipped twenty dollars).
During the time I studied with my first guitar mentor, Neal, at Oregon State, he would frequently tell some version of the story about Joshua Bell busking in the subway (although with more colorful derogatory language for the people who don’t get it—the unhip, the squares, the philistines). Neal said the experiment illustrated a principle he called perception of value, meaning that people evaluate something based on its presentation and their own preconceptions rather than on its actual merits. In the Bell experiment, most of the passersby failed to notice Bell’s excellent playing, let alone that he was there at all, because they did not expect good music in the train station or greatness from someone lacking the trappings of greatness. To paraphrase Neal, they listened with their eyes, because most people do not know how to listen with their ears.
Many of Neal’s anecdotes were in one way or another about perceived value. He would talk about the importance of musical skills such as memorization and improvisation, but he also emphasized the importance of presentation, of having the right look and bearing for the context. He told us stories about doing the kinds of gigs for which reading sheet music was one of the expected elements, so he and the rest of the performers would set up music stands but have nothing on them and only pretend to read. For other kinds of gigs, Neal would wear grungy clothes, use beat-up gear, and make a point of having a drink onstage, even though the audience wouldn’t know it was nonalcoholic. Neal would even use a pseudonym when playing drums or bass in a country band, as opposed to using his real name at his jazz gigs, because most people, unable to understand how someone could be good at seemingly unrelated things, would become confused and become all the more difficult to win over.
What Neal wanted us to learn was how to discern actual value while also being able to present ourselves so audiences would perceive value. Becoming a good musician (as Neal would say, a killer player, or, in traditional jazz lingo, a real motherfucker) requires learning from the greats, which you can do only if you can tell who the greats are and what makes them great—that is, if you can recognize and understand actual value. Making a living as a musician, however, also requires navigating the complexities of perceived value: how to present yourself in different situations (onstage, of course, but really any time you’re interacting with people because they expect you to be in character), how to win over chosen listeners (the people who, with or without an understanding of music, project an assurance such that the rest of the audience follows in their reactions), all the skills of a showman that are distinct from the skills of the craftsman. A successful musician therefore has to be able to provide greatness while also using all manner of cues to direct the audience to perceive greatness. Although I never quite got the hang of showmanship, and focused most of my effort on technical proficiency since it’s easier to practice scales or études than to practice a presence, I saw many times how important it was to be perceived as good, maybe even more important than being good.
The difference between craft and show holds in other jobs, too. In music, being a great player doesn’t much matter if nobody wants to watch you perform (and, more to the point, if no music director or wedding planner wants to hire you), and it’s similar in most fields of work, where the most important skill is not performing the job well but getting the right people to believe that you perform the job well. Those who fail to learn this lesson—or, like me, stubbornly persist in perfecting craft and ignoring show—will find no end of frustration in the gulf between the quality of what they do and the quality others perceive.
In considering how real and perceived value relate to work, it’s worth defining what the term work means. In physics, work is a force exerted over a distance. There is no moral or spiritual or economic component in this mechanical definition of work, only a way of describing certain kinds of motion. In most contexts, though, the term work encompasses much more than it does in physics. A more useful way to think of work is as effort expended to attain a certain goal, which still includes work in its mechanical form as well as mental action. All forms of work benefit from practice, but some, which might classed as crafts, can continue being refined to higher levels; someone’s guitar playing or essay writing, for example, can, with diligent practice, continue improving over a lifetime, whereas one’s skill with clearing dishes, mowing lawns, scanning books, or taking out garbage reaches its peak early on (as I can attest).
No matter how fulfilling to the practitioner or useful to the community one’s craft is, it may not (and very likely does not) pay well enough to survive on. It may be your life’s work, but you’ll probably have to do something else to survive, or, as the familiar phrase has it, make a living. This is a straight job, what people usually mean by work, which is not one’s vocation but hourly or salaried employment, where one acts at the boss’s (or worse, bosses’) bidding for scheduled stretches of time on particular days. Only rarely is a straight job also one’s vocation, and in such cases, it’s perhaps no longer a straight job but a vocation practiced within the trappings of the straight job—a vocation in spirit, but a straight job in appearance. Joshua Bell, for example, plies his craft within his current position as music director at the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, requiring him to go to meetings, attend events for rich donors, do photo shoots, manage schedules—all the tasks outside the craft required of his position.
Although the straight job and its most salient characteristic—equating time with money, and then selling that time to an employer—are now the predominant ways of understanding and classifying work, this has not always been the case. In the 1967 article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E.P. Thompson describes how advances in horology (the science of measuring time and craft of making timepieces) from roughly 1300 through 1650 helped make possible the organizing principles of industrial labor, namely “time-discipline.” Previously, small communities of fishers, farmers, fletchers, forgers, farriers, and the like lived and worked according to a “task-orientation,” ordering their days around what needed to be done and making little distinction between life and work. The pattern was therefore one of “alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness,” the rhythm determined by the seasons, the tides, the sun, the moon, crops, fish, and game. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the advent of large-scale machine-powered industry and the factory system helped shift work from being defined in terms of tasks (performed according to the variable cycles of the natural world) to being defined in terms of time (which now belonged to the employer and his clock rather than God and his earth). Time thus became a resource that needed to be “consumed, marketed, put to use.”
Even as advances in technology have improved work capacity and efficiency, the convention of measuring by time (the eight-hour day, the five-day week) remains. Reducing the amount of time needed to complete a task thus does not reduce the number of hours expected of you, thereby giving rise to a problem unimaginable in the early industrial period—the requirement to appear busy. This goes a long way in explaining why most organizations perform their ostensible functions poorly and, further, why most are unpleasant to deal with or work for. There are many jokes about incompetence and inefficiency at the DMV or in the government generally, but anyone who has ever dealt with (or been employed by) tech support, a major bank, an insurance company, an internet service provider, or a utility company knows that inefficiency and incompetence are not occasional irritations or flukes but the modus operandi. Such waste—of the customer’s time, but also the company’s—is a consequence of the straight job ethos, which is to appear busy and curry favor.
After finishing college in 2012, I moved to Portland to make my way as a musician. For the first three years I lived in Portland, I did just about any gig that would have me, thinking that keeping a full schedule on my website, building out the list of venues where I had performed, and getting practice at performing itself, would all help advance my career. Without realizing it, I had come to believe in the value of endless busyness, thinking that somehow all these piddling gigs would lead somewhere.
The venues for many of those early gigs paid little or nothing, their only compensation being two drink tickets, a meal, or a certain amount of credit, but others were so miserly they wouldn’t even comp a cup of tea. Tips were thus your only hope of earning any money, and tips at such establishments tended to be low. Then there was tip theft, from both employees and customers, in which I had learned some harsh lessons at my earliest gigs. It took all I had to scrape by, with no time or money for anything other than trying to get the next gig. The thought of living like this for years, of turning thirty, then forty, in a dingy basement, always anxious about practicing enough, about extracting as much from myself as possible just to eke out enough to get to the next month, was more than I could bear. It couldn’t go on like this.
Less than a year into my time in Portland, in the winter of 2013, I was at one such coffee shop gig, playing old country blues tunes, music that had emerged about a century earlier from the violence of the Deep South. Into these instrumental arrangements, I put all the frustration of my own life. More than halfway through the two-hour gig, with no tips yet, one guy sat near me, though without seeming to notice me as anything other than part of the furniture. This made me angrier, and I tried to channel that anger into the music, to inflict on him some of the pain that I felt. Near the end of my set, he got up from his table by the window and came over.
“I want to thank you for the beautiful music,” he said as he pulled out his wallet. He dropped a ten into the jar that had only the two singles I left in there to seed it. He said hearing me had lifted his spirits and made him feel better about his life. He had been depressed, feeling as if nobody cared about what he did and that none of it made a difference. It sounded like the artist’s struggle, but it came out that he was high up at the nationally ranked university hospital a few miles away.
Back at home, when I entered the day’s earnings (ten dollars), mileage, and expenses in my logbook, I thought again about value and how to measure it. The doctor had intimated that my playing had made it possible for him to go on with all the responsibilities his job entailed, meaning that what I had provided functioned as more than entertainment. If that were so, if I had improved his ability to do his job, what share of responsibility did I have for his successes and the successes of those he managed, and what remuneration should there be for me?
Even if it is true that artists create much more economic value than is reflected in their earnings—and it seems clear that it is true—evaluating art’s worth solely in economic terms neglects to account for its nonmonetary value. In arguing that my music benefited the doctor’s work, I’m making another version of the arguments often made in defense of arts funding of various kinds, which is that art should be judged by its utility, like any other commodity. Part of the reason the defenders of the arts often lose such arguments—and why my own suggestion that I should share in the doctor’s financial success fails—is that art has little utility because its value is as an end in itself, not as a means, and because that value, having little to offer the market and market-dominated thinking, is therefore generally considered not to exist.
Even before markets or money existed, there was work. In Genesis 2, God forms the first man and shortly thereafter plants “a garden eastward in Eden,” where every tree “is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.” God puts this first man in the garden and charges him to “dress it and keep it,” with the help of the woman, later named Eve. Life for Adam and Eve in this earthly paradise is idyllic but not indolent, for Adam must tend the garden. He thus has a responsibility to work, but this work appears to be a vocation rather than a form of toil or punishment, a part of the cosmic order rather than an economic necessity. In this original state of existence, both labor and ease have their proper place. Even God himself works and rests, working for six days to create “the heavens and the earth,” then resting on the seventh day.
Things change in Genesis 3. The serpent convinces Eve, who in turn convinces Adam, to eat of the tree forbidden them. After discovering the transgression, God curses the ground to bring forth “thorns also and thistles,” and he curses Adam to eat his bread “in the sweat of [his] face” and “the herb of the field” in “sorrow … all the days of [his] life.” What appears to have changed is not the tasks—since, both before and after the curse, Adam’s work is essentially gardening and farming—but the character of those tasks, how it feels to do the work. Adam’s curse, then, is work, in its sense of toil—pain, futility, frustration, hardship.
It would be a strange modern workplace that quoted any of Genesis in a contract or an ostensibly motivational flyer, but our present ideas about work derive from this first curse: You’re supposed to be busy, and what you’re busy doing is supposed to suck; if it doesn’t suck, then it’s not work. This moral attitude toward work helps explain why professions such as music—which provide a service and product nearly everyone likes in some form—pay so little. The lingering influence of the curse also explains why, even as technology advances and productivity increases, the expectation remains that people spend most of their waking lives in toil, sweating among the thorns and thistles.
The hardships of the first year in Portland eased somewhat, but in the late winter and early spring of 2018, when I had been in Portland for almost six years, things slowed down, and I had to pick up a straight job at Starbucks. I started in April of that year, and, after two weeks of watching corporate training videos in the back alcove where we stored dry goods and piled our backpacks, I was out front, tapping orders on the POS system (which certainly earned that acronym) and mixing up recipes for the vast array of drinks.
It didn’t take long for Starbucks’s affected bohemianism to wear thin, and to understand the use of terms such as team and team member instead of company and employee belie its factory operation. Every movement, every step, in making drinks was choreographed, including the requirement to make more than one drink at a time. Because of the fast churn, I found the job frustrating and never quite got a handle on it. It wasn’t that making drinks was repulsive or physically taxing but that mechanized and corporatized movement made it so that the company controlled not only our time but our bodies. The best parts of the job were taking out the garbage and cleaning the bathrooms, tasks that got me away from the counter, away from the screen, away from the customers, and provided an opportunity to delight silently in physical work done well.
I wasn’t sure how Starbucks would shake out (and ultimately it didn’t because I never got the recipes straight), so at about the same time I also took my brief and less than illustrious turn as a caterer. The catering job was wherever the event was, which could be anywhere in a big swath of western Oregon and southwest Washington. That meant a one-way commute between 2 and 90 miles, with transportation neither provided nor paid for. Working the event presented yet another set of costly hazards. People at the kinds of events with expensive catering tend to drink heavily, meaning that there is a lot of movement of alcohol and that the carelessness of the social class we served only worsened over the course of an evening as they became more drunk. It was therefore inevitable that at some point in the night, a customer would spill wine on you. This happened at least once each shift, which meant that the next day I had to spend money I had not yet been paid to have my shirt and pants dry-cleaned (so they would be clean in time to have wine dumped on them at the next event). It took fewer than five shifts to see the catering gig was not going to work out.
Starbucks and the catering job, like many precarious jobs, appear to offer the employee or the contractor freedom and the chance at a stable base income while advancing other endeavors but actually function as traps. The unpredictable schedules make it difficult to plan and thus to pursue another craft (or even another straight job), while the expenses one incurs are enough that one comes out barely ahead, not enough to really save or improve one’s long-term financial situation, but enough to still need the job.
I first heard about musician gigs on cruise ships in college when a drummer had signed a contract to go out to sea right after graduation. It sounded impressive at the time, a way to make decent money and travel the world while playing music. I made it a long-term goal to get into cruise gigs, which would naturally lead to the next tier up for performing musicians, a show in Las Vegas or on Broadway. That’s what I thought, anyway. It took me a few years of practicing, failing auditions, and practicing more before I landed a contract of my own.
Within the first day, I learned that the gig would not be what I had anticipated. I was hired, based on my sightreading ability, to play guitar in the showband. I thought we would be doing something like musical theatre on a ship, but most of what we did in the theatre was play along to recorded tracks. One of the regular theatre shows we did was known among musicians as “Broken Dreams,” and that about summed it up. Other cruise lines had cut live music entirely, and the industry as a whole seemed to be steering in that direction. Then, there was the worrying trend toward assigning musicians additional duties. Ours was to greet passengers on the gangway at every embarkation, but most often meant answering their most common questions—Can you upgrade my drink package? (We couldn’t.) For years I had dreamed of being able to travel the world while getting paid decently to play music, but the vicissitudes of life on a ship disabused those dreams right away. There were lifers who stuck with cruise contracts year after year because, as they said, at least it was performing, but the vision of going old and gray while washing my socks in the cabin sink and hanging them to dry on a bunk was not the one I had for my life.
At the end of the contract, I was no farther ahead financially than before, but I was a significantly more bitter player. Even so, I had not yet given up on making it out of Portland as a musician. Thinking Broadway was now within reach, I contacted a well-known guitarist, hoping to understand how to land a contract. Over coffee, Jeffrey told me how he had dropped out of music school and moved to Manhattan in the eighties. He worked at a concession stand at one of the big Broadway theatres and picked up whatever gigs he could—subbing on shows, recording, bar bands, weddings—until he got hired to tour with Sting, who, after an earlier tour with star sidemen had gone over budget, was now hiring unknowns like Jeffrey.
So Jeffrey toured the world with Sting and came back to Manhattan, where Broadway shows gradually became his main thing. In the old days, Jeffrey said, Broadway had been considered a bad gig, what you did as a musician if you couldn’t hack it with touring or recording, which offered greater musical interest and pay. Many of these better gigs either ceased to exist or paid progressively less over time, partly a consequence of reduced revenue from streaming compared to sales of physical media. Each such contraction of the music industry thus made the remaining gigs more competitive as players now tried to eke out a livelihood on the next tier down. And so, over a few generations, gigs that had once been regarded with some disdain, such as my own cruise contract, became the few steady gigs that were still around.
Jeffrey said that today, even if, by the mix of chance and skill and favoritism that begets all success, you managed to get on a tour with a big name, that didn’t mean you would get paid well. He knew some young players—younger than I was—who had been paid only slightly more for Taylor Swift’s tours than what I had made as a cruise ship musician, still well under thirty thousand dollars a year, and that was the maximum, from which there were deductions during months with fewer shows. Even then, the players were still responsible for some of the expenses of touring, such as a certain percentage of their lodging and all of their food. You would have it on your résumé, and you would have the experience, but you couldn’t make a sustainable career of touring.
Jeffrey summed it up in a phrase that stuck with me.
“You can make a killing in music, but you can’t make a living.”
In retrospect, the New York trip marked the end of music for me. I did gigs after that, but far fewer and only for those who called me, rather than hustling for gigs as I had done in years past. I was a pretty good guitar player, but I wasn’t in the same league as the really successful players I met. I couldn’t memorize huge swaths of repertoire or transcribe every part in a song after a few listens. I couldn’t invent alternate tunings and write beautiful music in them, nor could I casually play astonishing solos at a moment’s notice. I was pretty good, but I didn’t think I would ever be great. Perhaps I could have gone on doing the occasional theatre gig in Portland, but the music life that lay ahead would be the same, always less than what I wanted, less than I could achieve. Eventually, the craft and the business of music had gotten so tangled up for me that I no longer wanted to perform, and then no longer felt a desire to play.
What does all this work amount to?
It’s not an idle question. As Ecclesiastes has it, “All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied.” This is true in the literal sense that the need to eat nags at us until death, but it is also true of a host of other hungers that might be subsumed under “man’s envy of his neighbor.” All this work, whatever hunger drives it, is only “vanity and striving after wind,” an attempt to accumulate what is ultimately meaningless and impermanent.
So Ecclesiastes keeps with the curse in Genesis: toil, sweat, strife. It even seems to go further, denying that man is “a living soul” made in the image of God. But surely a human life is in some way greater and more noble than that of an animal? Ecclesiastes disagrees, asserting instead that “man has no advantage over the beasts” for “all have the same breath.” Then, at the end of the few and short days allotted to man, he dies: “As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and take nothing for his toil.”
Life is short and hard; man is no better than an animal; and, at the end of his life, he dies with nothing to show for it. Is that all there is? What’s the point?
In late August of 2023, after several months of applying for jobs, after hundreds of applications, after dozens of calls with recruiters, after many interviews, the one job I was able to get was as an AmeriCorps member in the youth programs at Gonzaga University’s Center for Community Engagement, which would require me to serve 1700 hours over 10.5 months, during which time I would receive a stipend of $1,190 every two weeks. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was the only thing I could get, so in early September I moved to a fluorescent-lit basement in Spokane.
What was not explained thoroughly before I signed on, but which managers often brought up later, was that AmeriCorps is not employment but national service, like the military or the Peace Corps. The federal and state laws regulating employment conditions—including minimum wage, required breaks, time off, overtime pay, and workplace safety—did not apply to us. As near as I could tell, money from various funding organizations was disbursed based on the number of service hours reported, not outcomes for those ostensibly being served, and as such, management’s objective was to create as much busywork as possible to keep us occupied. Improving efficiency in any area would reduce service hours logged and thus potentially affect funding.
This gets at one of the contradictions at the heart of measuring work by time. When the goal is to remain busy rather than produce a useful result, then anything that improves productivity will be avoided. CCE surveyed youth in the programs and the college students who mentored them at the beginning and end of the programming year, and some of the managers spent many days entering this information in spreadsheets and producing assorted graphics, but the results from one year were not used in planning the next year. And since the results had no way of tracking particular youth or volunteers from year to year, there was no way to determine what result, if any, the programs had individually or collectively. The surveys therefore served no purpose other than to make the department and its upper managers seem important for moving a bunch of paper and information around.
It was the same for meetings. We had all kinds of regular weekly, semi-weekly, biweekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings, plus those that didn’t happen on any fixed schedule. By convention, all meetings last an hour, even if most could be half that or even just an email. But at Gonzaga, the purpose of meetings was not to learn or improve; it was to have a meeting. The big divisional meetings were the least awful because at least I could get away from my computer screen and sit in the back of the auditorium, tallying each speaker’s clichés.
The point is not that the job was unpleasant (which it certainly was) but that much of the work was not directed towards the organization’s stated objectives, and even ran counter to those objectives. David Graeber’s essay “Bullshit Jobs” describes this kind of pointless work, which, he writes, makes it seem “as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.” To Graeber, the proliferation of pointless work makes sense as a form of social control, keeping the populace busy to prevent social uprising or even reform, made possible partly by perpetuating the notion that “work is a moral value in itself” and that “anyone not willing to submit … for most of their waking hours deserves nothing.” There even arises an inverse correlation of perceived and actual value, such that the more meaningful and useful the work is, the less it is likely to pay and the more likely it is to be resented for providing “undeniable social value.” In Graeber’s view (and in my experience), this inverse correlation goes a long way in explaining why musicians or teachers receive so little money and often have to justify why their work counts as work at all.
Graeber’s observations about the bullshit job help us understand the influence the curse of Genesis still has in the modern world. We are, it seems, so beholden to filling our lives with drudgery that we invent meaningless work just to remain occupied. Compared to the curse of Genesis, though, the curse of the bullshit job is arguably worse, since Adam’s contending with the earth to bring forth crops at least had food as its outcome, whereas the bullshit job has no useful aim other than to keep the money flowing to those at the top. Because the bullshit job withholds even the basic satisfaction of doing something useful, it is thus a particularly pernicious form of the straight job, an antithesis of the craftsman’s ethos.
Neal had a lot of pithy sayings, but there was one that best summed up everything he taught us: “Embrace the struggle.” Practicing the craft never gets easier, and there’s always suffering. To refuse to accept this makes for a life of misery. To accept—and more than that, to embrace, to welcome—the struggle makes possible a joyful life. Ecclesiastes actually arrives at a similar conclusion, arguing there is “nothing better for a man” than to “find enjoyment in his toil,” for this is “from the hand of God.” Even though we can never return to life as it was before the Fall, dressing and keeping the garden without any toil, we can find useful work to do and delight in it.
When I was starting out as a musician, my goal was to eliminate everything that got in the way of music so I could live as a craftsman all the time—all vocation, no toil. It didn’t work out for me. The music opportunities I wanted either never came or were not what I expected when they did come. I eventually decided, for reasons hard to explain, that my future as an artist lay in writing and not music. With writing, too, my goal of living by craft alone failed, and there were some hard years when the jobs I had to do made it almost impossible to practice my vocation at all. As I slogged through this period, I told myself that if things ever got better, then all the hard times would have been worth it if they provided good writing material. That is, even if the jobs sucked, and even if a lot of the work served no real purpose, the meaningless would become meaningful by applying the craft to it, by making of it a subject.
And things did get better, mainly because of the job that got me out of the hard years and allowed for more time to think and to write. My work as a paralegal demands some skill and has plenty of opportunity to learn and improve, so even if it’s not an art, at least it has some skill to it. While it’s true that I don’t make enough money as a writer to live entirely a life of vocation, I’ve even found that a measure of toil—but not too much—helps me value all the more the time I have to practice the craft. Waking up before dawn, staying up late, struggling through the weekend to improve an essay—it’s not easy, but it means that I have to repeatedly choose to practice and thus continually renew my dedication. And when it feels as if I can’t get anything right on the page, having another kind of work to take me away from writing gives me something to think and care about beyond my own immediate concerns. At long last, I learned how to embrace the struggle, to see less of a distinction between art and the rest of life. An artist will always be at odds with the market, but if he can find useful work that still leaves time for his vocation, he can, in the work he does as an artist and also as an employee, heed the exhortation of Ecclesiastes: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.”
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