215. IT’S OK TO END THINGS - On Saying No Under Capitalism
Early last week US podcaster, Marc Maron, shocked listeners by announcing the end of his podcast, WTF, which has been putting out two episodes a week, every week, since 2009. Sixteen years. But he and his producer felt it was time to bring it to an end. “It’s ok to end things,” said Maron.
As a listener for all of those sixteen years the announcement left me feeling a little bereft. At least three hours a week, every week, Marc Maron has been a dependable voice in my ear, introducing me to lots of interesting comics, writers, thinkers and actors and sharing his navigation of the world. But I agreed with his decision to end things completely. I had lived before in a pre-WTF world; I will live again in one. The sense of bereftness will pass. And Maron doesn’t owe me anything. He deserves to get his life back after sixteen years of service.
The announcement did, however, make me think about endings, and how good they can be. How knowing when to call time on something, and doing it, is something we should be doing more of, especially under capitalism, where the economic incentive is always to keep producing more and more of something if you can. Squeeze every penny out of your market and milk it for all it is worth. Yet it also made me think that under capitalism that ability to end something becomes a privilege instead of the right for everybody that it should be.
It made me think of when I “quit teaching forever” in 2022. Although my break only lasted four months in the end, and by January of 2023 I was back in a classroom, the delightful mental break that came from handing in my resignation and knowing it was over in the job I had been working at for a decade was the only reason I was able to return to teaching the following January. I could have stayed on at that place forever, but it wouldn’t have been good for me, or for my students. I was done. I needed the sabbatical. The rest and reset. And when it came, so too came perspective. A reminder of what I loved and what was missing. A newly open set of eyes to ensure the next job was a better fit. A reminder that I actually loved teaching, even if I no longer loved that particular school.
Ever since then I have advocated the rejuvenating power of the sabbatical to anyone who can afford to take one. However the idea that you might not be able to afford such a necessary break points to one of the many injustices at the heart of capitalism’s exploitation. Maron can end his podcast now - the podcast he started in 2009 because he had no other options at the time - because the podcast itself has opened up many other avenues of income for him. I was able to quit my job in 2022 with no other job lined up to go to because I was in the fortunate financial position of having a partner with an income who could ensure our bills still got paid when I had nothing to contribute for a few months. Many people are burned out, in all kinds of professions, and they want nothing more than to end things…but they simply cannot afford that comforting release of saying no and calling time.
“I’d prefer not to” - the catchphrase of Melville’s scrivener, Bartleby, is a slogan of privilege. And yet it shouldn’t be. “It’s ok to end things”. And yet for many under capitalism, ending some things are impossible.
If there is no possibility of exit by choice, then we are stuck with coercion. Coercion from those we are in debt to, coercion from clients and sponsors, coercion from dependants and investors… Coercion is the currency of capitalism’s ostensible “free” market.
In the last few years, sadly several of my married friends have announced separations or divorce. They decided that, despite all the vows, it was “ok to end things” - even those things that were promised once to last forever. I say sadly in the same way Maron’s announcement left me “bereft”. Sad for me, because I liked the image of their nuptial happiness I had in my head, but not sad for them. They have obviously made a different decision, made on the reality of their actual married life and not the fantasy of it I have in my head. However, their divorces or departures are a constant reminder in my own marriage that ending things is always a possibility. It just - happily - isn’t one either myself or my wife would like to bring into being. Not currently, and hopefully not ever. We love each other, we love being married, and in the momentary reassessment of our own relationship that inevitably comes in the wake of friends sharing their reasons for ending their own, we find ourselves pleased with our choices, reaffirming them and not regretting them. The ability to do that - to know you could end things any day but everyday, instead, choose not to - is what ultimately makes the relationship truly free. The commitment isn’t a constraint, it is a choice, freely imposed. Non-coercive. But even this, we know, is a privilege. A site of further injustice under capitalism. Many couples stay together not out of love, but out of financial necessity. Or out of fear mixed with that financial dependency. Coercion, domestic abuse, a sense escape is not realistic or possible. My friends calling time on their relationships that were no good for them are friends, despite the difficulty of divorce, who are privileged enough to be able to invite that difficulty into their lives. A difficulty many people yearn for but have no capacity to bring into being. Under capitalism - and never forget, marriage has its origins in property arrangements and distribution of capital - saying no and bringing things to an end that are harmful to you is a privilege, not a right.
Perhaps it’s time to take a look at your own life and see what it might be time to end, and find gratitude in knowing that many things you could end, you don’t want to? Find anger and inspiration to resist when you discover things you want to end but can’t?
So many of my favourite punk bands from when I was a kid are still going all these decades later precisely because they opted to reject the coercions of capitalism. DIY means doing things on your own terms, so you avoid all the pressures of label economics and economic coercion. You just make things when you want to make them and go out and play when you can get it all together to do that. If you don’t want to play anymore, you just stop. Another privilege of independence under capitalism: art as hobby instead of a career. Having other means to pay the bills. Means that sadly aren’t available to everyone.
Lack of success here is what affords me that privilege too. This blog doesn’t pay the bills. It costs me money rather than earns me anything. So I can afford to choose if it lives and dies. If it was my only source of income I would be churning posts out whether I had something to say or not. That’s why regular columnists in your favourite newspapers always reach a point of mind-numbing tedium eventually. A deadline which must be met or else the paycheque won’t be arriving. Sitting staring alternately at their laptop’s screen and the room around them until they can squeeze out a few hundred words about something in front of them. The problem with modern television sets. How annoying are my kids? Why my visit to the dentist was so life-changing. Etc… You’ll never believe how much I got paid to write this!
Those of you who have read this blog every week since its inception in 2019 will have noticed that I have “ended” the blog several times in the last six years. At least announced that I will not be posting every Monday anymore. And that, eventually, I come back to doing it again. Like Maron’s podcast, this blog is something I started because there was nothing like it at the time. A place for people to think philosophically outside of academia, about everyday life, where students could access some easy to read ideas that were hopefully inspiring enough that they might like to write their own. It is entirely my own thing. No bosses. No obligations. No subscriptions. No one to care if it exists or it doesn’t. And it’s a big commitment of time each week in a week during the school term which is inevitably already pressed for time. So occasionally I decide enough is enough. I’m not going to post one this week. Maybe not ever again. But then I get an idea…and then another…and Sunday comes and I realise it might be fun to get one done for tomorrow… But I’m doing it for me, not because I have to do it, and that’s difference is everything.
This blog won’t last forever. At some point I will grow tired of it. “It’s ok to end things”. But for today at least, it is Sunday afternoon and I am on a train home from a weekend in London. Instead of reading the excellent John Irving novel I’m enjoying, I’m here on my phone writing this. Choosing to meet another arbitrary deadline I set for myself instead of preferring not to. As long as that’s the choice I want to make, the blog will continue.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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