Stained to perfection

A 996 AI job in the Silicon Valley. A slow life on a farm, tending to goats. What explains the rise of these polar opposite attitudes towards work? Are these the only models we can imagine?

It is a still life. In the foreground, oriental lilies emerge from the neck of a plastic Sanpellegrino water bottle, filled slightly more than halfway. There are reasons to believe that it is a vase, repurposed in the same way that restaurants use empty wine bottles as decor. The water looks flat. Condensation on the inside, rather than the outside, of the water bottle clouds the empty top. The bottle has been sitting out—warmed by the daylight that reflects across the water now, making the surface shine white as the outer edges of the lily petals—for a while.

The oriental lilies are known as “Dizzy.” Look up at the picture again. Is it a vase, a plastic vessel for beauty, lifted by protruding lily stems into the plane of the beautiful in its own right? Or is it just a forgotten water bottle, half-drunk and left out on the reclaimed wooden side table—without a coaster, cap, or anything—to sit, fizzle, flatten, and get disgustingly tepid, a cesspool of microplastics. A mess. Something to bicker about—why is it that you always open a new bottle of Sanpellegrino, take a few sips, and then forget about it? Those things aren’t cheap, you know. And please use a coaster. And please pick up after yourself. And and and.

There are no stems inside of the water bottle. The lilies are planted in a pot behind the table, behind the water bottle. Transcendence is a trompe l'oeil.¹

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Vincenzo Latronico’s novel, Perfection, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, opens just like this: a perfect image:

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud.

It is not until the second paragraph—“The next picture…”—that we discover that the image is just that: an image: not a living scene, not even a work of art—just a lifeless photograph, an advertisement for a short-term rental on some platform like Airbnb. It is a still life:

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.

The next chapter, “Imperfect,” then sullies the image of the apartment with evidence of life: “And then there were the things. Things absolutely everywhere: the chargers, the receipts, the bicycle pump,” and so on.

Appearances are a quicksand; reality cannot bear the weight of perfection; step in it, and you sink; it drags and drags and drags.

Transcendence, as I said: a trompe l'oeil.

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And yet we strive for it. We spend our lives cleaning up the mess, sanitizing the image, making it perfect, like taxidermy. When we stuff all of our miscellany into drawers and closets before our guests arrive; when we need to buy something totally mundane and spend multiple hours typing some variant of “best [iPhone case, chapstick, yoga mat carrier]” into Google even though all of the search results are paid for and pretend; when we remove strangers from the backgrounds of our Instagram pictures with new artificial intelligence features, because people, not just things, pollute the perfect, too; when we move across the country for a fresh start, or cut our hair to reinvent ourselves, or maybe just clear our browser history to experience vicariously the lightening of our computers’ load; when we pay more than $1,000 for the latest iPhone model—even though ours works perfectly well but now, by comparison, has taken on the fatal tinge of trash—for a camera that promises to pick up our blemishes in 4K resolution, and about 500 other features that we will never use; when we buy a $799 Apple Watch, a $499 Oura ring, a $499/year Function Health membership—when together in the U.S. we spend $500 billion annually on wellness on top of the $5+ trillion annually we spend on health, as if those two weren’t the same thing—to optimize the machines that are our bodies, to make them run forever, perfectly frictionless objects in motion.

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Perfection is an absolute thing. It means, etymologically, to be done through and through. It makes no compromises, it accepts no middle ground, it radicalizes as it demands.

Our society’s obsession with perfection—in tech, this word is “optimum”—might then explain the curious, and untenable, polarization in attitudes towards work that has emerged in the news and on social media, lately.

On one end of the spectrum, there is the ostensible spread of China’s “996” work culture (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) in the Silicon Valley tech industry, once looked to as the future of work-life balance, with reasonable hours, luxurious perks, remote work, holistic health and wellness benefits, and high pay to boot. The headlines—and, yes, the dreaded LinkedIn posts—are everywhere:

From WIRED

“You’re either in or you’re out.” You either build a $10 billion dollar company in 10 years, or you’re a loser.

“No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun…20-somethings…give up everything but their laptops.” 20-somethings revive the ethos of prohibition: the ascetic life is the godly life. Self-denying devotion to capital: this is how Silicon Valley finds Nirvana.

Or so they want investors to believe. Certainly, many AI startup founders are working these hours, and let us all pray that their Apple Watches and Oura Rings and Function Health subscriptions save them—or at least visualize their physiological decline in beautiful dashboards. A beautiful dashboard is always a solace.

But if you look more closely at the graphic published by Ramp that has been making the rounds on LinkedIn as evidence that the rise of 996 in Silicon Valley is “quantifiably true,” the percent change in “corporate card transactions for restaurant, delivery, and takeout by employees at San Francisco-based businesses” on Saturdays hovers around a meteoric 0.4%. More the ripple of a skipped rock than the wave of a sea change.

And yet, I can assure you, unfortunately for my weary eyes, that the percent change in LinkedIn posts by employees at San Francisco-based businesses about eating at their desks on Saturdays is much greater than a measly 0.4%.

And so the tech-obsessives toil—or at least talk about toiling—as though work-hours alone were the sufficient condition for mind-boggling success (and there is only this kind of success), as though 10,000 hours put in by ten 10x engineers on a problem that doesn’t need solving will make the problem bigger.

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And because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, on the other end of the spectrum, there is the apparent converse rise of the “tradwife,” and generally the tradlife, on social media.

In stark contrast to the mythology of the Silicon Valley AI startup founder, the fantasy of the tradlife involves the complete disavowal of the ever-accelerating rat race of modernity in favor of living a simple, slow life in a small, rural town that is somehow still affluent, gorgeous, and ideal.

You wake up with the sun and the croak of the rooster. Birds dress you head-to-toe in delicate linens pulled from your heavy, wooden antique armoire. The smell of freshly baked sourdough bread intermingles with that of freshly cut grass and wafts through your bright, naturally lit rooms.

Today you’ll journal, as you do every morning, and maybe paint a little. A still life. Edited for hours on the computer and uploaded to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. You live off the fat of the land, and your brand partnerships.

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But I suppose we should not be surprised by the appeal of these two illusory models of perfection. Both are caricatures of the early American pioneer, who, too, fell for the fantasy of a fresh start, on fresh land, fertile with opportunity. Cross the Sierras to San Francisco with nothing but your laptop. Cross the Rockies to Montana with everything except your laptop.

Do we never stop looking for Eden, yearning to return to a pre-fallen place that we’ve never known? Paradise is lost, has been lost, can’t we see that—can’t we accept it?

If to be perfect is to be done through and through, the only perfect, the only transcendent form that we will inhabit is a corpse. A still life.

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Love, then, the aesthetics of the alive, of the imperfect, of the lost, of the beauty that is truth, not trompe l'oeil.

As William Wordsworth writes,

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

Utopia is not an option. Nor are subterranean fields, nor some secreted island, nor—and I’m talking to you, Musk—outer space. It is here, where we are, from this moment forward, with no alternatives, that we have any chance of finding happiness.

And as Seamus Heaney writes, “my umber one / you are stained, stained to perfection.”

I have scars all over my body, including one prominent one on the knuckle of my left big toe. I got it running barefoot in the dark through the streets where I grew up, a race with my first love. Flat ground gave way to a driveway, and I tumbled on the concrete sidewalk, which tore from my toe knuckle a chunk of skin the shape and size of a coat button. Each time I look at that scar, I am reminded that I was once, am still loved. One of my favorite etymological facts is that the word blessing comes from the word for blood. To be blessed is to be wounded. To fall down, get up, stained, stained to perfection.

1. French term, meaning: “Deception of the eye, an illusion, spec. in Art with regard to the material reality of the object(s) represented, a (usually still-life) painting, plaster ornament, etc., intended to give an illusion of reality.” (OED)