Tug Life
Sometimes I fantasize about working on a tugboat. I’m serious.
My imagination regularly takes me to the wheelhouse of a tug. I’m pushing around big ships, catching lines and taking trips to the engine room. I guess this is my escapist career fantasy.
It comes to mind a lot when I’m on the subway, when I’m sick of sitting in an office, when I’m thinking I’m no good at my job, when I’m creatively zapped and when I feel like all my ideas are shit.
It turns out, one of my media heroes Robert Krulwich of NPR and RadioLab fame has similar thoughts, except, when he’s in these low points, he thinks about “valet parking or some vocation more suited to my actual abilities.”
I can relate.
My tugboat dream is about the fantasy of doing something more physical with my days. The most physical part of my job today is walking up the stairs from the R Train. It’s not human to be so sedentary. We want to run. We want to hunt. We want to gather.
Our modern existence has undoubtedly subtracted some of the more rewarding physical parts of the human experience from our lives. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the agricultural revolution, which happened some 12,000 years ago, actually had some negative impact on human’s quality of life. Instead of trekking around hunting and gathering food, we became locked into one geographic place, repeating a task over and over again. While there certainly were benefits - our population exploded - they came with costs too.
Today, this is happening again with the digital revolution. The promise of the internet and tech jobs, which were supposed to liberate us from offices and work hours, have ultimately made us even more busy, and more sedentary.
A few companies have realized that this new model isn’t working, and maybe even hurting the bottom line, which is of course always how companies will decide to take action. A company in Portland asks employees to work smarter not harder with a four-date workweek and reports that it’s going very well. And Microsoft got a lot of press last week for testing a four day work week in Japan. The result: 40 percent productivity gains.
None of this is shocking to those of us who fantasize about working on tugboats.
Go for a walk whenever you need to.
Fair winds,
John
LINKS
Where the Five-Day Workweek Came From (The Atlantic)
Photographs: Tug Life (The New York Times)
John McPhee’s Tight-Assed River. Still one of my favorite reads. (The New Yorker)
WATCH
A concise history of how we got here from the author of Sapiens.
FOLLOW
@boat_aesthetics for all your shipboard needs. Not just tugs.
GEAR
If ship life style isn’t a thing, it should be. Just kidding, of course it is. Watch out #vanlife.
Finisterre watch cap FTW.
LISTEN
Robert Krulwich Talking Story, The First Third Coast on the Kitchen Sisters podcast.
Listen on iTunes and Kitchensisters.org.