Drift and the Working Man

A man who cannot answer “what do you do” in one sentence used to be suspicious. Now he’s just current.

The sentence that used to hold

For most of the twentieth century, a certain kind of man answered the question what do you do with a noun. Machinist. Accountant. Teamster. Foreman. The noun carried a shape: a schedule, a wage, a uniform, a posture of the body at the end of the day. The noun was a floor. You stood on it. Other things — being a father, a husband, a neighbor, a churchgoer — were rooms built on top of the floor. If the floor held, the rooms held.

Hollis watched the floor give way. Mead had already said the floor was constructed — no culture inherits manhood, every culture builds it — but the construction, in the industrial era, was at least stable enough to finish raising a person inside. The provisional personality Hollis describes is what happens when a boy learns the face that gets him approval and then spends forty years mistaking the face for himself. That trick worked better when the face had a job title stapled to it. The job title was the face’s alibi.

The floor is gone now, for a lot of men. Not because work disappeared — work is everywhere, all the time — but because the nouns stopped holding. The job retitles itself every eighteen months. The company gets acquired. The skill is automated, or nearly. The resume becomes a list of projects I was adjacent to. The sentence what do you do no longer has a one-word answer, and the absence of the one-word answer is felt, by men of a certain formation, as a small failure of being.

Drift as condition, drift as labor

Drift is the word for what happens when the floor stops holding but the walking has to continue. It is not laziness and it is not vacation. It is the navigation a person does when the map has been revised underneath them and they still have to get somewhere — or at least have to keep moving, because stopping costs more than moving.

There is a version of drift that is pure loss: the man who loses the job, loses the title, loses the schedule, and cannot assemble a new shape because the old shape was the only shape he was taught. The provisional personality with nothing to project onto. This is the drift Hollis writes about — the depression, the affairs, the quiet second life, the refusal to feel.

There is another version. Drift as a practice. The man who learns to move laterally through work because the work itself will not hold still. He takes the contract, learns the stack, ships the thing, the company pivots, he leaves, the skill becomes legible as a different skill in a different room, he begins again. Seen from outside this looks like a resume. Seen from inside it is a labor — the labor of repeatedly constructing a self that can be employed, dissolving it, constructing again. This labor is mostly invisible. It does not appear on the paycheck. It appears in the exhaustion.

The first kind of drift is what happens to masculinity when its old scaffolding is removed and no new scaffolding is offered. The second kind is what some men are learning to do with the absence of scaffolding. Both are labor. Only one of them gets called labor.

The noun and the verb

A useful distinction: the old masculine work-identity was a noun. I am a welder. The emerging one is a verb, and the verb is often drifting. I am between things. I am learning. I am seeing what sticks. The verb is harder to say out loud because it sounds, to the ear trained on nouns, like an admission of failure. It is not. It is the honest shape of current work. But a man raised on nouns does not know how to wear a verb without shame.

Part of what has to happen — is happening, slowly, unevenly — is the construction of masculine forms that can hold a verb without collapsing. Ways of being a man that do not require the job title to be the load-bearing beam. This is hard. The cultures that Mead studied built their initiations around stable adult roles: hunter, warrior, elder. An initiation into drifting has no ethnographic precedent she would have recognized. It would have to be invented. Arguably it is being invented, badly, in real time, mostly without elders.

What the work feels like

The labor of drifting is specific. It is the work of being legible to a new room every few months. It is the work of not letting the last room’s vocabulary calcify into the only vocabulary. It is the work of keeping one’s competence porous — not so porous it dissolves, not so closed it can’t accept the next shape. It is also, quietly, the work of grieving the noun that never arrived, or arrived and left.

For men, there is an additional layer: the cultural script says a man provides, and providing is easier to narrate when the providing has a noun attached. Drifting-as-work looks, to a certain internalized audience (a father, a grandfather, a version of oneself), like not-providing. Even when the bills are paid. Even when the family is fed. The money arrives but the shape does not, and the shape was part of what the providing was for.

49/50

The 49/50 doctrine says: you do not need the last one percent of closure to call the thing done. Applied here: a man does not need the noun to call his labor real. The verb is enough. The drifting is the work. The construction-and-reconstruction of an employable self is labor whether or not it produces a title that fits on a business card. The crack in the closure — the missing noun — is exactly where the next room enters. It was always going to be a crack. The men who were told otherwise were told a lie that worked for about sixty years.

What persists

What survives the end of the noun is not nothing. It is: the specific attention the man learned to pay, the specific care he took, the specific refusal to fake competence he did not have. These travel. They are not tied to a title. They are, in fact, the only things that were ever really his — the noun was borrowed, and the economy took it back.

A man who can say I am currently drifting, and the drifting is my work, and I am paying attention while I drift has done something his grandfather could not have been asked to do. It is not a failure of masculinity. It is, possibly, what the next masculinity will be made out of. Or one of the materials. The initiation has not been written yet. That is part of what there is to do.