Fellow life-admin phobes, gather round

Enough is enough. How do we reclaim meaning and our power in the face of faceless bureaucracy?

What the landscape of bureaucracy looks like to me. Painting by Xul Solar.

I have lost weeks, months, maybe years of my life to my dread of life admin. In every year’s tax-return season, my productivity drops radically, because I have to spend so much time psyching myself up to open the frickin tax program. Every time a brown envelope drops through the letterbox, my stomach lurches. If I have an admin-heavy day ahead of me, I’ll often sit on my bed in a towel, post-shower, for up to an hour, unable to make myself get to work.

But why am I talking about this here? Isn’t this a newsletter about the imaginal realm and about the mystics who learned how to access it? And what could be less mystical than a tax return?

Yes, and nothing, and yet: we are multifaceted beings, and nobody escapes bureaucracy forever. More importantly: I am sick of feeling so frozen and blocked by car insurance and business expenses and all the other mundane minutiae of life that they arrest the more vital parts of my purpose. And I feel sad and scared every time I think of how this frozenness might be playing out on a larger scale.

Because I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve been carrying out some informal research over the last few months (while I’ve been in tax-return hell as a dual citizen), and so many people in my life have told me that they share this cold dread of life admin. That it sometimes holds them up, freezes them, keeps them from the more important things in their lives. That they don’t know what to do about it.

This can’t go on. The world needs us in our power, bringing our souls’ gifts to fruition, not paralyzed in front of mindless forms and listening to the same loop of muzak over and over.

Which means we need a plan.

Below, I’m going to offer some ideas about why life admin can be so terrifying, and then I’m going to begin to offer some solutions. If you’re afflicted by this dread too, I hope you’ll join this conversation, and also join any offerings or gatherings that come from it. My goal here is to make us all feel less alone in this, and more empowered.

Why is life admin so scary?

The best writing I know about the peculiar tyranny of bureaucracy is the late, great David Graeber’s essay/lecture “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labour.” Graeber wrote this piece shortly after his mother had a series of strokes and then died—a period in which he spent endless hours having documents notarized, trying to secure Medicaid for her, trying to secure Medicaid without making her ineligible for other benefits, and generally getting passed from pillar to post in a series of bureaucracies.

As all this was unfolding, he was struck by how little attention his fellow anthropologists had given to the topic of bureaucracy, even though at this point of the world’s unfolding, most living societies mark rites of passage and bring an event into socially accepted reality via not ritual (which anthropologists so love to study) but, rather, paperwork.

Why would this be so? Why the paucity of deep thought on paperwork despite its centrality to our lives? Essentially, he concluded, because paperwork is so intellectually unfruitful—a dead zone of the imagination. But this very deadness is also what has allowed it to obscure its own deeper and very dark functioning.

Graeber observes that in addition to being simply infuriating, bureaucracy seemed to make him more stupid. Why? Because of the power structures that underpin the bureaucratic system:

The problem, I realized, was that most of [my] energy was going into a continual attempt to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me—when all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and a correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions.

He goes on to say:

It is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.

We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not epistemic. It’s quite concrete. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force,” in turn, is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence.

All of this is obvious enough. What’s of ethnographic interest, perhaps, is how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life, without ever reflecting on the fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would indeed be summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required. It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

When you look at it this way, why wouldn’t we be terrified of bureaucracy?

It’s also worth making explicit something that’s implicit in Graeber’s critique: that the history of bureaucracy is intertwined with the violent history of the loss of traditional and animist ways of life. In my country, England, bureaucracy came in with the Roman Empire, which is to say it was imposed by a colonizing regime that decimated the existing communities on this island, along with their social and worship practices. Having been severed from those traditional ways of life, the English would, of course, go on to inflict horrifying damage on the rest of the world, most famously but not solely through the British Empire—a murderous regime run by, yes, civil servants.

For the vast majority of human history, and across the vast majority of the globe, animism has been the dominant belief and religious practice. It comes naturally to us as humans to honour other living beings as sentient, and to want to relate to the world around us in an attitude of respect and reciprocity. That’s how we evolved. And life admin is the opposite of that. It reduces relations to a system of profit and loss; the stories of our lives to a series of monetary values; and humans ourselves to our Social Security or Taxpayer Reference numbers.

No wonder it can feel like a form of violence to the soul.

[I want to be clear, by the way, that I am not opposed to actually paying tax. I want to pay tax! I wish it were spent better, or that there were a more human way to make public services readily available and wealth equally distributed, but things being what they are, I am enthusiastic about paying my taxes. It’s filling in the bloody form that draws out my dread.]

So what can we do about it?

As far as I can tell, the violence of bureaucracy is intensified by three factors:

• The fact that, as Graeber observes, we don’t really talk about how fucking awful and dehumanizing it is. This means that anyone dealing with dread or dysfunction around paperwork typically experiences it as a secret shame.

• The fact that we tend to do this stuff in private. Who ever attends a paperwork party? No: it gets us alone, atomizes us into its own deadening system of separation—and that’s when we’re most vulnerable, least likely to remember the life-giving truth that relationships will always be more powerful and alive than paperwork.

• The weird way it’s both intricate and mind-numbingly boring. It requires that we pay attention—on pain of penalty—while also entirely switching off our imaginations. Essentially, it demands that we turn ourselves into computers, and who wants to do that?

Bearing these factors in mind, I have a suggestion and a few questions:

The suggestion:

• I would like to offer a weekly hour-long admin-zapping Zoom call. It will be free to attend, and you’re free to attend only when you need to (though I have a suspicion that making life admin a weekly routine rather than an occasional nightmare might make it more manageable).
  

  For me at least, doing this shit together on Zoom will help already. But let’s go further. I want to play around with practices to bring us back into our humanity while we tackle our paperwork. Maybe we’ll have a little dance together (cameras off is fine). Maybe we’ll get our glad-rags on so we feel fabulous. Maybe we’ll all have a little collective scream. I love a little collective scream. We can decide together what works. The key thing is to gather and to anchor ourselves in our humanity while we tackle these tasks.

The questions:

• Would you be interested in attending something like this? If so, please drop a comment on this post and let me know your time zone and which times would work best for you.

• Any ideas about what might make the calls most fruitful (maybe even enjoyable?) and least dread-inspiring for you?

• If you’re also in this phobic boat, is there anything else you need? Anything you can think of that would help you with the dread? For instance, I’m thinking that if there are enough of us, we might be able to get experts in to equip us with more tools for navigating all this shit. But maybe you have other ideas. If so, I want to hear them!

OK, that’s all for now. Thank you for bearing with me on this one. I know it seems like a deviation from our standard topics of conversation here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually a major unspoken block to an expanded experience of joy and the infinite. Let’s see if I’m right about that.

Love,

xx Ellie