The Grime

Text: Gayatri Srikant

Image: Alžbeta Szabová

A few months ago, I had the honor of receiving The Grand Tour of my beloved’s Steam account. As a non-gamer, my jaw dropped at the sheer amount of time he spent on this platform. The game he had just paused was Europa Universalis IV, where one plays as a nation-state to explore alternate histories from 1444-1821. A staggering 400 hours had gone into this game, a fact that flooded me with awe. This man had spent 400 hours learning about global history, political and economic strategy, and the leadership styles and personalities of the chiefs, dukes, kings, and emperors that shaped our present. Good practice for a politician in spe, no doubt about it. I, on the other hand — a fellow aspiring changemaker— hadn’t. And so, faced with a gaping knowledge deficit, awe turned into jealousy, which turned into fear. I had also spent my 400 hours, just unknowingly. That begs the question, where did my 400 hours go?

Vignette: 

7 pm on a Friday, time for the infamous ‘everything shower’. Shave my beard, my mustache, pluck my brows. Head into the shower, shampoo twice, condition once, shave the rest of my body, bodywash, scrub, leave-in hair mask. Exit the shower, skincare, blackhead extraction, body lotion, curly girl routine: section, curl cream, gel one, gel two, squish squish, section again, five times over. Diffuse. Exit the bathroom, cigarette break,, demolish my cuticles, polish my nails, and with the last stroke, sigh. 

It’s done. I am cleansed, I am once again, a woman.

In bed, I got to thinking. This man is miles ahead while I’m still contemplating running shoes! I know this is not all my fault. As De Beauvoir writes “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”; and a woman’s existence in society is conditional on their femininity. The consequence however, 400 hours of political strategy as opposed to 400 hours hunched over my belly, fishing the same ingrown hair out of my happy trail for the nth time, is both an infuriating and humiliating contrast. The truly feminist thing would be to stop caring, get a buzz cut, rock the unibrow, and eventually develop a sense of beauty uniquely my own and of trivial importance. However, after having spent 400 (give or take a zero) hours here, I’ve grown attached to this version of femininity, and parting from it would feel like parting from my womanhood. What then?

I came to Christ. To De Homem Christo to be precise, and as the helmeted prophet (better known as the gold-helmeted legend of the visionary French House band: Daft Punk) hath declared: I worked it harder, better, and faster. Perhaps I could optimise my grooming routines to simultaneously enhance my knowledge bases. It’d be a challenge, but challenge accepted. Step one was to incessantly bathe myself in enriching podcasts. I shunned Emma Chamberlain’s podcast from the everything shower; nothing goes anymore (her podcast is called “anything goes”), and as I did my chores or took my daily commute you could find me listening to the BBC world news, Philosophize This! or De Correspondent, learning all about current affairs, the great Thinkers of history, and the problems of Dutch society. The second step was to eliminate all time I spent “dilly-dallying”. No more bedrotting, no more taking hours to boot up, and definitely no more maladaptive chain smoking hour after work. Upgrades people, upgrades! (A quote you might know from the animated film “Robots” https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/upgrades-people-upgrades) Lightning speed ahead- we have a lot of catching up to do!

The first few months of this new routine were exhilarating. I was a well-oiled machine, the definition of efficiency, gaining new neural pathways by the second. Lavished with new-found knowledge, I joined in speculations on Camus’s “fifth cycle” at the de Rode Hoed (At event space De Rode Hoed, “Bucketlist Filosofie” is a series where each event explores a famous philosopher. Recommend!), I finally was able to contribute to the discussions of my smartest friends on the place of the individual in mass society, using Karl Popper’s insights on the Open Society, and most importantly, I no longer felt as humiliated and furious as I did that one night. In fact, I felt a winner. 

After those initial months however, my brain could no longer handle the sheer amount of input fired at it every day. Every thinker I’d studied blurred into a singular amalgam of contradicting and dizzying thought, devoid of historical context. And because I did nothing with that knowledge—created nothing, applied nothing—it never became mine to keep. I was exhausted, nay, burnt out.

Gazing upon the dirty dishes, a chairdrobe the size of Mount Everest, and though only visible to myself, eyebrows plucked into the face crack of the century (Drag culture expression meaning “record scratch moment”), I was confronted once more with the shortcomings of the meritocratic ideal. I cannot work hard enough, I can never be woman enough, and I can never catch up, because “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. 

But what about my career?

Unable to accept the part of my mixed feelings I labeled “failure”, I got back on my grind, sweeping my floors to the Philosophize This! podcast. The episode on play explored Byung Chul Han’s commentary on the Achievement Society. He argues that psychopolitics —an updated version of Foucault’s biopower— govern the Achievement Society we live in today. The telos of the commodified human being is limitless in modern Neoliberal societies. Thus, the only way to “be enough” (i. e. realize one’s telos) in such a society is through infinite work on the ego. Not only does such an Achievement Society lead to mass egocentrism, but the inevitable burn-out feels like a personal failure to become who I myself set out to be. Well, I’m tired, and I set out to rest. In the wise words of Tricia Hersey (performance artist, activist, and author of the book “rest is resistance”), rest is resistance. 

My dishes, eyebrows, and market value can go fuck themselves. I’m going to watch paint dry.