#11 - Breakfast Chow Mein and Busted Kidneys.
Why self-blame is good for business.
Hey! 👋🏼
This newsletter is part of a longer discussion on the difficult tension between longing for freedom and longing to be held in community.
Today I continue to unpack the idea of “third order suffering”, which might help us make sense of why we find it so hard to ask for help. You can read more about this in #10 - Bridging Islands.
Where do we begin?
It was a fresh start. After over a decade of a pretty serious job (as serious as wrangling ratbag youngsters can be), I was ready for something fun with a lot less responsibility.
I’d been into coffee since I was a kid. I begged my parents to let me drink it in a bid to appear more mature. At 12, they finally relented, and I mustered every ounce of sophistication my pre-pubescent frame could manage as I pretended to enjoy Nescafe Gold. Despite some part of me threatening to crack and just ask for a Milo instead, I persisted and continued to drink coffee throughout my teens.
At 14, I spent my first supermarket paycheck taking a friend for a coffee at Ronnies Cafe.1 He broke and got a Hot Chocolate. For my 21st birthday, I got my first espresso machine and drank so many shots I spewed my guts out when I got to work that afternoon and had to go home.2
So, when I landed in Melbourne — Australia’s home of specialty coffee — I committed to finding a job as a barista. Through sheer pluck, determination, and an abundance of cultural privilege, I landed a gig at an esteemed and busy specialty joint with tens of thousands of dollars of the world’s best equipment. My heart was aflutter at the sight.
Make no mistake — I’m an optimist at heart. I walked into this world with starry eyes. I rolled up my sleeves and got ready to learn from the best.
Under the pump.
The first thing you need to know is that this place was busy. Like, seriously busy.
Situated in a bustling market, there were two lines out the door for hours on end, placing orders on two registers and waiting in a mob for the finest coffee in the fastest time. Two machines running flat tack. To this day, I’ve still never seen a system built for production quite like this one.3
Once you’d worked your way to the pointy end of shots, milk or pass, you’d be strapped in, and hours would fly by as you pushed your body and mind to keep up. I can still count how many tasks I manage to complete with my left hand (put three fresh dockets on the rail, move two cups along the pass, two cups to the pass, stir sugar in a takeaway, wipe the pass and drip tray…) in the 13 seconds my right hand waited for the grinder to dose a porterfilter.
It was exhilarating, exhausting and stressful. And it hummed. At the end of a shift, your brain was mush, and body surprisingly sore. I have close friends who work in emergency departments, so I know how low the stakes were in reality, but for us, when we survived a day without it all falling apart or someone cracking, it felt like we’d really achieved something.4 Every shift, we knew we’d get into the weeds, and we’d have to dig our way out of them together.
Our team was quick. Real quick. We had each other’s backs. And we took pride in what we could put ourselves through to stay ahead of the waiting pack.
And that pride was great. Until it wasn’t.
For the team.
A shift would start at 6:30, open at 7:30, and by 8:30, the pace would begin to pick up. By 9:30, it was full blast, and despite being 20 orders deep, we’d be aiming to keep wait times under 9 minutes. Most days, the rush didn’t let up until 2:30.
Keeping up this pace meant “having each other’s backs”, “taking one for the team”, and a whole bunch of hokey but somehow convincing mantras.
To survive the rush meant having all hands on deck. “We can’t send people on break when we’re in the weeds, so we need to get through them as early as possible,” my manager explained. “Technically, you’re allowed 30 minutes, but if we all take that long, someone’s not getting a break until after 2:30, and the next person until 3:00. So I really need you back in 20 if we’re going to look after everyone.”
Which is how I found myself eating pork chow-mein for lunch at 8:40 each Saturday morning. After ordering at the shop 3 doors down, I knew I had 8 minutes to load in as many carbs as my still-waking stomach could tolerate before swapping out the next coworker. I wouldn’t get to pause again for at least 5 hours, so ideally, I’d get to the toilet in that time too.
Either way, my stomach would be in knots, my bladder bursting, and I’d be starving by the time I got to finish my shift.
I didn’t love it, but we’re all on the same team, right?
Doctor’s note.
One of the dynamics of working in a busy market meant the facilities were a bit of a hike. Because of this, while it was never explicitly banned, bathroom trips outside of breaks were openly discouraged and often commented on.
I would always try to take one just before a rush because abandoning your post over those hours was a sign of frailty that might lose you your spot in the pecking order. It was often met with a barb. “Bathroom again, Shane?” Which always irked me. In part because it felt petty, but if I’m honest, mainly because it made me feel weak.
“Lucy” had missed more shifts recently. She was one of my fav’s. At after work drinks, we’d always find ourselves in hysterics about something. She was kind, whip-smart, and deeply caring, but in the bolshy world of hospo she could also appear timid.
I messaged her to find out where she’d been, only to find out she’d had a UTI which turned into a kidney infection. Something snapped in me when she told me her doctor had given explicit instructions that she needed to stop holding on at work. Here we were in the same boat, both feeling inadequate, and it embarrassed me how hard I’d found it to fight for the right to meet a basic bodily need just to avoid a little workplace scorn.5
Suddenly, it hit me that this was madness. Everyone was fighting to keep up, and everyone was scared of getting called out or left behind. Everyone must have wondered why they struggled when others managed to pull through.
I loved coffee, and being part of the barista scene in Melbourne made you a nominally interesting person to talk to at parties, but how the fuck could anyone justify us doing this to our bodies for a $5 beverage?
The fix.
It’s not like it was difficult to solve: hiring a couple more staff to cover breaks and provide a buffer for the rush would mean that we could actually respond to our bodily signals and reduce the time we were in high-stress situations.
So why hadn’t I realised this before?
Simple: the context that management had provided for us framed it as an issue of individual capacity and moral goodness:
Were we tough enough to keep up?
Did we care enough about our colleagues to put ourselves through the mill for them?
This was paired with constant talk of efficiency, waste reduction, and cost savings. But I cashed up most nights and knew this place was well and truly covering overheads. My manager, who was a co-owner, had bought an apartment. The business wasn’t a chain or franchise but continued to open new venues.
Guess who weren’t buying apartments? So what was the real reason we were pushing our bodies to the limit each shift for very modest pay?
Profit, of course!
Hiring enough staff to run a functional shift was both reasonable and effective. But there was no way in hell the owners would walk away with less money when there was a much cheaper solution: making it our problem, not theirs.6
“Personal failure” is a systemic win.
In my last newsletter, I discussed Bruce Rogers-Vaughn’s observation of increasing levels of self-blame in his therapeutic clients. I would never think of myself as the kind of person particularly susceptible to this. Yet, my cafe experience revealed how difficult it is to discern between personal failure and systemic dynamics.
I was going to say systemic failure, but that’s only true if the model is based on human flourishing and the common good — which it’s not. It’s based on infinite growth, maximised profits, and a “free” market where one side brings a bazooka to an arm-wrestle.
In truth, self-blame is a systemic success. Because when we’re busy blaming ourselves, we’re not blaming the people who have created a world where this is possible:
This isn’t a tale where the moral is that people shouldn’t work hard, that all jobs will suit everyone, or that business owners are always to blame — obviously, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Trust me, I would not employ myself for plenty of tasks! It’s not really even about workplace abuse and shitty conditions.
Instead, it illustrates how easily we can be distracted from examining complex systems when we’re given much easier answers that threaten to shame us by questioning our personal capacity or moral goodness.7 It shows how easily our gaze is drawn inward rather than outward when we feel like we’re not keeping up.
Why is it easier to ask how everyone else manages not to use the bathroom for hours on the end than whether we should be denied access to it in the first place?
Why is it easier to ask what’s wrong with us when everyone else is doing just fine than it is to ask whether everyone else actually is doing just fine?
Why is it easier to ask why we don’t measure up and can’t keep up than it is to ask who determines the measures of success that we live by and whether they’re compatible with human flourishing?
There are a multiplicity of interconnected answers to these questions, but they all lead to the same place — a culture of self-blame where our instinctive reaction is to assume that there’s something wrong with us when our prospects look grim in the land of opportunity. Remember, this newsletter is as much about how capitalism shapes our imagination and self-understanding as it is about economic systems.
This is how we get unemployed people to blame themselves even when the overall level of unemployment is often a policy decision. (Even better, get everyone else to blame them, too).
This is what third order suffering looks like in practice - isolated competing individuals chastising themselves for not keeping up with a system built to simply extract from them. Their existence cut off from the kinds of connection that can name the source of their suffering and support them in finding a way forward.
Bad news, better news.
My team was given the option of sacrificing ourselves or sacrificing our colleagues. We weren’t given the option of sacrificing profits or consumer discretionary spending.
The bad news is there are much more sophisticated versions of this story. Neoliberalism is playing 4D chess with the political, economic, and cultural spheres that twist and morph just enough to stay ahead of widespread critique.
One “genius” move discussed by Rogers-Vaughn is its capacity to zero ruthlessly in on individual actions to signal that profit makers are taking these issues seriously while changing little about who benefits from said profit, position and power.
In this neoliberal utopia, easily identifiable incidents of discrimination are emphasised in ways that mask and legitimate deeper systemic forms of inequality and leave those marginalised wondering whether it’s all in their head. By co-opting the language of resistance, such as “equality”, “diversity”, “inclusion”, and “multiculturalism”, neoliberalism focuses on the actions of individuals within the system while often failing to address the power dynamics of the system itself.
Corporations have rightly cracked down on employees engaging in racist jokes in the workplace, sexual assault by the photocopier, and homophobic slurs. Yet, the classic “boys club” network still reigns supreme, CEOs are still more likely to be white men called John, and taking time off to care for families still disproportionately impacts women’s careers.8
Promoting International Women’s Day is great, but when the very foundations of the enterprise is founded on the premise of infinite growth for shareholders, it will never truly allow women’s experiences and voices to radically reshape how work might function in ways that serve a broader vision of life.
Instead, it’ll try to convince us that the systemic issues that we thought existed have now been solved, so we shouldn’t blame them if capitalism doesn’t work for us. And as illustrated by
it will continue to pit us against each other, lest we turn our attention to the profit makers:The better news is that once we become aware of the narratives of capitalism and begin to pick them apart, we realise that there are far better stories to invest our lives in. As twee as it sounds, if we can convince enough people to join us, we might actually be able to create a better world. It’s been done before.
What if more people in management meetings, boardrooms, and union meetings were asking whether shareholder profit is what we truly want to be giving our lives to? Does the way we work allows us to create lives of goodness and care for those we love?
This post has been heavily work-centric, but it ties into so many other facets of our lives. Are we creating a world where we have time, space and energy to tend to human needs? Is there room for beauty and love? Do we have enough margins to care for each other in crisis? Are the expectations set so high and the pace so fast that when we stumble, our instinct is to turn on ourselves, knowing our “competitors” are still winning and will show no mercy?
Personal responsibility matters. But so does creating a world where being human is not punishable by abandonment or paralyzing shame.
We deserve to be wrapped in care.
We deserve not to be left in the lurch when it’s more profitable for someone to no longer employ us or our bodies cannot keep up.9
We deserve to live in a world where we’re not stretched so thin by “infinite growth” eating away at every margin in our lives.
We deserve to wee when we need to and eat at a pace that doesn’t give us stomach cramps. More on this soon.
Take care,
Shane.
P.s. Are these too long? Would you prefer them broken into smaller chunks?
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Can anyone from Matamata/Hobbiton/the NZ judicial system confirm the rumours about Ronnie?!? 😬
How was I not diagnosed with ADHD earlier with this complete lack of impulse control?
The manufacturers of our machines even came to film us to show others that they could handle this kind of volume.
If you’ve never been screamed at by a Scotsman for having a messy section, count yourself lucky.
It used to amaze me that this culture held so much power even though I was 30, had been in management myself for over 10 years and should have been immune to such high-school nonsense. Yet, my study of coercive dynamics in religious systems has shown me that the cocktail of desirable goals (in my case, learning specialty coffee), high-stress conditions, and a reward structure that utilises fear, shame and competition to shape team dynamics becomes its own potent ecosystem and is incredibly difficult to resist.
The other option, of course, is for coffee prices to go up. But what’s “fair” in this system is that someone else should work in terrible conditions for insufficient income so that we don’t have to pay more. Let’s not even get into coffee prices for growers…
Or threaten our livelihood for the audacity to have a human body: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/11/amazon-delivery-drivers-bathroom-breaks-unions.
Rogers-Vaughn claims that neoliberalism pre-emptively “silences voices that would claim they are being oppressed because of their gender” by reducing “equality” to “equal opportunity”. Women are free to compete as isolated individuals but lack the collective resources to name and resist systems that continue to keep the vast majority of the power, capital and opportunity in the hands of men. More on this in future newsletters!
And everyone else does, too, even if it dampens our dreams of becoming an oligarch.
Re. your question at the end - I don't think they're too long. Your newsletters are always a good read :)
At the same time unions are weakening here in Oz where we have a strong tradition of them.
Also, is that a picture if Elliot Smith drinking coffee (how you pictured yourself)? If so, that might be a redflag for your mental health 😄.