The novelist Rachel Cusk, in an unflattering anecdote in The New York Times Magazine, enters "an odd tangent" while speaking at a literary event: "She envied those who perform menial work. Bus drivers, for example. Imagine the simplicity of those lives, I recall her saying — 'to go home and be done with work for the day.'"
It's patronizing, of course, to think that a bus driver's life is any less complicated than a writer's. And yet I recognize myself in Cusk's desire to have the freedom to leave work at work. In 2014, I quit my job as the cops-and-courts reporter at a small daily newspaper, attained by dint of an expensive bachelor's degree and a few clips from my college paper, and went to work in a warehouse for a major shipping and distribution company. As a reporter, I had problems with what we would now call "work-life balance." I had other problems at the time, too, some familiar to workers throughout history (asshole boss) and some familiar to newspaper reporters to the point of cliche (drinking).
Mostly, though, I was sick of going to the scenes of late-night fires and homicides, of listening to the crackly chatter of a police scanner as I fell asleep, of calling cops and victims and attorneys at odd hours. I was sick of thinking about work so much. Even my dreams took place at work. I wanted to be a writer, not a reporter, and I figured that I couldn't write what I wanted to because I was so busy worrying about writing what I had to. The warehouse gig would pay the bills while I spent my nights and weekends engaged in pure artistic production, free of the crushing weight of a day job that occupied so much of my mind.
That's what I envisioned. In reality, after long shifts hauling around packages, I had no desire to do anything else resembling work, creative or otherwise. Worse, to me, was how much I now thought about package handling. I don't know why I was surprised. I was a package handler. The terrain of my dreams was different, a warehouse instead of a newsroom, and my self-definition had changed, but only from one job to the other. And my new boss? Also a jerk.
Like Cusk, my mistake, which I have made again and again, was imagining that anyone can ever be "done with work for the day." The novelist spends even her free time in her novels, and the bus driver goes home and imagines her bus. So what does the garbageman dream of?
Trash! is a memoir of Simon Paré-Poupart's 20-plus years working in waste management in Montreal. Paré-Poupart began running behind a truck as a sensitive 18-year-old interested in books and Dungeons and Dragons, inspired by his stepfather's suggestion to do something that would toughen him up. He stuck with it even after he earned two master's degrees, which we learn little about.
The book is instead hyperfocused on his work, on the world of Montreal garbage and its garbagemen, a term he favors over the more euphemistic "sanitation workers," preferred by his more unionized and (Paré-Poupart says) less hard-working colleagues in France.
Like all of us, he has his complaints. Garbage is hard work, rewarded with a measly paycheck and the sniffs of bourgeois homeowners. (Kids, of course, recognize the heroism involved in "scrubbing clean the stains of our consumer society" by tossing bins around behind a big loud truck). Garbagemen get injured, often, and their bodies break down. Those bins are heavy. The days after snowstorms, when the wheelies are no good, are especially brutal. In the summer, it is hot and there are maggots.
Paré-Poupart, however, loves his job, describing it in nearly ecstatic tones: "The joy of throwing trash finds its expression in the beauty and simplicity of our art form." He likes the exercise and the intensity of the challenge, and he takes pride in doing such essential, unglamorous work. He enjoys the camaraderie with his fellow garbagemen, outcasts and wild men with rough backgrounds and lives more complicated than Rachel Cusk can imagine.
"The world of garbage is a Wild West, and that's exactly what I love about it," he writes, his French translated by Pablo Strauss. "I love straddling the fine line between dirty and clean. I love the joyful chaos of garbagemen, our anarchic spirit and vague desperation."
Paré-Poupart writes that, if he was told he had one day left to live, he'd go on one more garbage run. Is there a brand manager alive who, diagnosed with an extremely terminal illness, would spend 8 of their remaining 24 hours building a strategy deck and grinding out social media copy?
Trash! is littered with references to anthropologists and sociologists, and Paré-Poupart has clearly thought quite a lot about the type of economy and society that creates so much waste. While his education is on display, he is not a writer with a day job, or a grad student slumming it for his master's thesis. He is a garbageman, and this is a book about the experience of being a garbageman. It's an experience that involves a lot of stink and swearing (I wish the translator had left intact whatever the French word for "dickhead" may be), and he loves it anyway.
This work made Paré-Poupart who he is. It's shaped his philosophy and his "freeganism," an anti-consumerist approach to preservation and reuse, as much as it seems to have informed his experience of the world as something untameable and overflowing with potential. "I love the chaos of the garbage truck for its own sake," he writes. "It gives me a space of freedom I can't find anywhere else."
I worked in the warehouse for a few months before I got hired full-time at a magazine. It was not the first or last time I would quit a job in search of something like authenticity. You can — and probably should — look for sources of meaning outside of work. But you also are your job, if only a little bit. You might as well try to find something authentic and beautiful in it.
Many so-called "knowledge workers" are polite enough to be vaguely embarrassed about what we do, and we know that there's often an inverse relationship between social usefulness and compensation. I couldn't explain to you why I make more money now than I did when I was a package handler or a dishwasher, not without blushing. White-collar guilt and a kind of blinkered blue-collar envy often go hand in hand, and I worry that I am falling into the same trap as Cusk when I tell you that I envy the garbageman. Not for his job. I wouldn't make it one day throwing garbage.
What I envy is the way his "joyful chaos," his "anarchic spirit and vague desperation," his philosophy of life, have been nurtured by his work. I envy the fact that he seems to have recognized, long before me, that you always take it home with you. Maybe this truth is easier to recognize running behind the truck. It's a recurring chapter title in Paré-Poupart's book: Garbage doesn't lie.