Just here to fart around
Kurt Vonnegut's earthly reminder and flirting with burnout because of work
As per the topic of this week’s post, work life has gotten a little busier so I’m trying to stay ahead of the writing better. And as always, Good Marrow is a reader-supported newsletter. If you enjoy it, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to get each post delivered direct to your inbox. And to new subscribers— welcome!
There is a Kurt Vonnegut quote that circulates around social media every now and then that ends with his capstone declaration that, “We are here on Earth to fart around and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
It is from a lecture he gave at Case Western University in 2004 in which he tells an amusing story about his journey to mail an envelope full of typewritten pages and all of the humorous and wonderful minutiae he encounters along the way.
To exist to fart around is a rebellious sentiment that stands in the face of all those rules of modern living. It laughs in the face of productivity, the specific use of “fart” tactfully employed to also laugh in the face of a culture that Vonnegut maybe saw coming— one of slow isolation, abject productivity, wayward attention spans, and hemmed in schedules that neuter our abilities to be sporadic.
The truth is that this post came about as Vonnegut’s quote once again came across my timeline as I wolfed down lunch during a break between Zoom meetings for a job I have recently started.
Now more fully in the weekly workforce, I emerge from my home office in a grateful haze, as I stumble into the last hours of sunlight wondering where the day went. I go for a quick walk around the neighborhood and then begin to make dinner for me and my wife, who has been working from before the sun came up until after it went down. Somehow it becomes nine o’clock and realistically, my soul-warming “farting around” is done via my phone, four inches from my face, until I tell myself I need to go to sleep.
Vonnegut’s quote is sticky in its playfulness and serves as a wonderful bit of wish fulfillment— how many of us have been told to stop farting around and get back to work? If not directly, the mantra has been rubber stamped into our subconscious— don’t dawdle, do something. Get back to doing your job. The extension of which is— get back to making (us) money.
My brother sent this New Yorker article into a group thread and was met with a chorus of “yeah, that’s me”. The article covers the burnout of “knowledge” workers who are being increasingly tethered to work despite the promise of working from home (a perk no doubt). But it hints at the ever encroaching rise of “burnout”, a term that I first associated with healthcare workers— the cost associated with the grind of life-saving care— which has now seeped into office, blue collar, and service jobs.
My wife has a list of colleagues who have burned out working in patient care and I checked in with my friend who manages construction in Montana and he returned with similar but different concerns. In a small pool, no one appears immune.
Surely this point in time is not the only generation to feel like life is moving too fast (or slow, depending on your flavor of exhaustion), but I can’t help but ask around, see how many articles have been written on the topic, and now that I’m back on the clock— wonder if we’re all slowly boiling.
So much of being sick is wanting to get back to normal. And a normal part of life is working. But given the elevated stakes of cancer and all of the wishes you make to yourself should you beat it— the truth about real life can be an odd reminder when it’s time to actually go about it. Undergirded by victorious stories of cancer survivor’s full-adoption of a YOLO existence, I have personally found it twice as hard to do half the amount of things that I have wanted to do in our one precious life.
I have great admiration (and a touch of jealousy) for those who are able to do whatever the hell they want after cancer. Maybe retirement is or was around the corner or they’re simply dedicated to living on their terms— so they spend the rest of their earned years traveling or tearing through a bucket list. If anyone has a twelve-step guide, I might be interested.
But there are some of us who would be happy having a “normal” life back. It can creep ever closer, and I have been blessed to return to much of my former self— but there is a strange juxtaposition to getting a glimpse at the precarious nature of life and then having to hustle back into the hamster wheel (a seemingly evergreen predicament across generations).
For those who have not had it, cancer can look like a fantastical wake up call— that if it happened, things would of course be different afterwards. But once again, I have found expectations and reality to diverge. In the context of getting back to work, cancer patients can face mounting reasons as to why they may need accommodations or have difficulty finding work and keeping it.
But besides the very real and necessary physical difficulties, truthfully— for me, there’s also a mental chasm there. I try to frame it less as entitlement and more as cosmic absurdity— A peek behind the curtain begging, “What’s the point?”
Similar to the quandary of The Matrix, the truth about reality (and work) and the idea of having to debate how many exclamation marks to use in an email begins to feel annoyingly inconsequential. (But here we are!)
But I can see it now. Vonnegut’s advice to fart around with whatever time we have on Earth was never clearer than when I was sick. I couldn’t actually do much, but the ability to do nothing was, in some way, the simplest form of existence I had known in my adult life. It was a perverse way to learn the lesson, and I was fortunate enough to be in a situation that allowed such, but both the re-ordering of priorities and the lessening of responsibility gave me the chance to meaningfully think.
I don’t want to make cancer sound like a vacation— it is it’s own mini-production of hospital scheduling and near death— but in the pockets of calm in which I could allow my brain to wrap itself around my existence, my place in time, and think about who I was and what I was going through… While hanging out with a random bobcat that I found at an animal sanctuary… I feel guilty saying it, but it felt kinda nice.
Stumbling into that headspace is probably a lot of the reason that I have started writing this newsletter. As strange as it sounds (because I like having hair), it might be an attempt to get back to that place.
Vonnegut’s story also serves as an absurdist journey. In it, he wanders through New York City, his home of forty years, though the way he tells it, it feels like a small town from years past— an interesting point of view on how a big world can be made small— and notices and interacts with all sorts of characters. He notices a post office worker’s frizzy hair, the diversity of people in line and the world history that their skin tone might imply, and stops and asks what kind of crazy dog someone’s walking. It’s kooky, old guy behavior— and its wonderful.
Maybe it could only happen in a walkable city, and maybe the tableau feels harder here in the car-culture of Los Angeles, but I also can’t help but draw a line between his story and all the reports (and personal sense) of increasing social isolation. Dependency on technology and social media has given us a strange, new way to fart around— in fact, it’s probably my primary way of farting around.
touches on this in a different way in her most recent Culture Study post on the The Great Babysitter Shortage, which ties together ideas about learning from the monotony of babysitting and a parents’ need for/reliance on screen time. It makes more sense in context but this part felt especially relatable to my own thinking:“We are who we are because we had to wait to check our email or didn’t have it at all. We are who we are because not every song was available to us at age 16. We are who we are because we spent hours babysitting, or working shit after-school jobs, or staring at the ceiling.
But we are also so very bad at working to recreate the cherished parts of that experience for our children — because we are very bad at letting go of our own bad habits and broken thinking.”
For myself, lying in bed, I get sucked into one algorithm or another, whisked away to someone else walking through their life or eating some food I would want to eat — I am a fart-around voyeur, getting the digital fumes of life itself. It’s all pros and cons, and I’d be a fool to admonish social media entirely, especially as someone writing a digital publication fueled by likes, subscriptions, and views... And in fact, this digital farting oftentimes becomes the reward for my day— yet I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not getting the same experience as when I imagine myself living Vonnegut’s journey.
When I was in isolation for my stem cell transplant, all I could think about was getting back out into the world. To anyplace beyond those four bland walls and all of its antiseptic mechanisms. But so many years later, I find myself backsliding into my own four walls.
It’s too easy to stay in. It’s too much work to go to place X, there’s plenty to do inside, it’s too expensive— or maybe its because the small absurdities we can encounter in our modern world are getting (or appear to be) more cautionary and less curious. Nowadays it’s easy to imagine Vonnegut’s trip to the post office positioned as not just a thankless task, but an old-fashioned redundancy— why not find some automated or contact-less way to accomplish the same thing in less time?
It’s sort of sad to say, but yeah, that sounds like a compelling solution.
I know this post sounds like a whole lot of words stating the obvious: No one likes or wants to work. But we all have to. Or some of us do. Or more likely, most of us do. Some of us even like our jobs. I kind of do.
As a brutally-Capricorn individual (again, my wife’s words, stuck in my head), I know that I’m not really that good at farting around. We tried a vacation to a pool-side resort and I got bored a couple hours in. Whether perk or flaw, it does beg the question if I am just romanticized by the idea of farting around or if I would actually do it.
To this I would argue that the mental head-space of true “fart-around-ness” is a place in which the mind is allowed to go where it wants, less about corporeal geography and more about allowing mental bandwidth to not be characterized as “bandwidth” or operate in a reactionary nature—did you see this? did you hear this? did you do this?— just good ol’ thoughts and ideas that I stumble upon myself. It’s messy logic, and I’m linking out and exacerbating the “did you read this” notion— but I perhaps there is middle ground to be found.
They tell you that you should have calls to action or provide solutions to whatever you just wrote at the end of articles like this… But I’m sure everyone already has their own. Boundaries at work, five or ten year plans to scale back or move somewhere less busy, structured mental health vacations to fully disconnect or reconnect… But I’m not sure that gets us to fart-around levels of life experience.
Prior to Vonnegut’s capstone fart line, he calls us “curious animals”. As someone trying to hold on to a lifetime of curiosity, it feels like there is a promise of a world that exists, that there is a distance that can be crossed between our busy reality and Vonnegut’s fart-filled life of quotidian wanderlust. I’m not sure how we get there, but I know that for me, his quote always strikes a chord, and that’s probably why it’s passed around so much— which is why I am doing my part and circulating the reminder once more.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
As a primarily cancer-focused newsletter, I went hunting through Substack to see what I could find regarding burnout in the medical field and boy was this a recent, sobering read. From
, it’s a long but good one, filled with statistical wincing that shows that the American healthcare industry may be getting hit the hardest, and with people who you really don’t want to be burning out.For this readership specifically, the post cites a 2024 Medscape study that has oncology tied for second as the specialty with the highest burnout rate (below Emergency Medicine, tied with OB/GYN). I have personal stakes in the matter (both as patient and husband to an oncology provider), so I wanted to link and shine some light on the burning issues that healthcare professionals are struggling with to help people like me.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, please Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. But most of all, I would love to hear from whoever is reading.
I've become the queen of farting around since my transplant. I've thought about going back to work but then I think, naw, we'll make do. It's too much work to go back to work. So I write to give me a something to do. But I still find myself playing cards online.
fyi, I think this Vonnegut speech took place at Case Western when my sister (cousin Michelle/B) was a student there... keep up the great work!