The Revolutionary Act of Doing a Job

For whatever reason, I have been feeling ground down by the gears of a massive, impersonal system designed to giddily destroy humanity to benefit, I guess, a few unhappy, insecure rich people.

At times like this, there are worse things to do than to watch Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru.

Ikiru asks the question of what it means to be human within an impersonal bureaucracy. Our protagonist, Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), has been a functionary do-nothing in a Tokyo government office for most of his life. When he learns he is going to die, he sets out, zombie-like, to suck the life out of anyone still living.

The movie takes a narrative swerve halfway through that I won’t spoil. (It is, in its way, as bold a pivot as Psycho.) If the first half of Ikiru is a zombie movie, the story of an empty man desperately trying to fill himself with life, then the second half is a ghost story. Watanabe’s co-workers are tortured by the face of the one man among them who helped people. Tortured by the idea that they might actually do something. They choose not to because they are afraid. They choose to make excuses instead.

How do you live a human life in an impersonal bureaucratic system? The answer for Watanabe is honest, small, not capital-r revolutionary — he simply does his job. Sometimes doing your job is a radical act. As a result of Watanabe’s efforts, a dangerous, disease-causing empty lot becomes a neighborhood playground. Watanabe didn’t build it. Didn’t design it. Didn’t do anything, really, except go from office to office insisting it ought to be built.

I have worked within academic systems my whole life. (Not nearly as byzantine as Ikiru’s Tokyo city government, but give us time.) I am embarrassed to share what I did once in my own Watanabe-like way. It’s so small.

Anyway, here goes: Once, I served briefly as a conduit between two smart Afghan women and a private college. I was doing my job: supporting international students. Having taken Ikiru into my bones at a young age (I can’t remember the first time I saw it), I emulated Watanabe. To secure funding for the education of these women, I made myself a nuisance in various offices: provost, president, dean, CFO, board member, faculty, retired professor, chaplain, state senator… lurked in corners, asked for meetings, wrote e-mails, cajoled, hectored, pestered. Maybe I spent an hour a day doing this for a month. I thought, well, the objects of my small act have lived through wars and refugee camps. They did the difficult work of staying alive and getting an education. All I had to do was smile at bemused administrative assistants until I could get a meeting, then another, then another.

Like Watanabe swinging alone on a swing set, I lurk on Instagram. I search for the Afghan students. There they are: driving in the New Mexico desert, heading to work in San Francisco, a weekend picnic at Golden Gate Park… so lively!

How can a single act be so embarrassingly small that I can hardly bring myself to write the details and yet, somehow, be the sort of act that gives life meaning? Perhaps it is the nature of bureaucratic systems to reward inaction so that, comparatively, action feels radically human?

For all the stifling bureaucratic nonsense the office workers in Ikiru exhibit, their jobs are not bullshit. Bullshit jobs have no reason to exist. Those entombed in them understand the lucrative pointlessness of their position. Their emptiness causes psychological damage such that they may begin to despise those who do things (teachers, cooks, plumbers, musicians, etc.). In the perverse logic that David Graeber lays out in his book and essay Bullshit Jobs, “the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”

Mr. Watanabe, in his revolutionary way, shows us that government bureaucracy does not have to be bullshit. Often it may have the effect of helping people. And, one can be paid a living wage to do it. No wonder people, especially if they are doing essentially nothing for the benefit of no one, can’t stand government workers. We (for I, dear reader, am a state employee) get paid to do things: research diseases, bring your mail, clean your rivers, help settle refugees, collect taxes, issue your passport, teach English language classes, assist in a disaster. Maybe the 100th corporate lawyer on a team working to secure a merger between multinational corporations understands that they are not benefitting society. Maybe. What they certainly understand is that when “efficiency” goes hunting for victims, it will be the mail carriers, the teachers, and the researchers who are cut. Those do-gooder scientists should have gone to law school!

It’s worth making a distinction between government bureaucracy and our metastasizing private bureaucracy of healthcare, phone companies, smart appliance purveyors, etc. where the ultimate goal is to deny service in the pursuit of profit. It makes sense, in the cattywampus logic of our era, that government workers (who do things) are hated while private BS workers (who do not do things) are the avatars of efficiency. Efficiency means removing people like Mr. Watanabe, and therefore the chance of a human response, and replacing them with an endless carousel of pre-recorded messages and chatbots. The most efficient system would be one where I send a bot to “talk” to another bot that ultimately denies me, say, healthcare. And then I just go off and efficiently die. The ideal government (in this ideology) is a government purged of any person who dares to do their job.

Dear Watanabe is the hero we need. The hero of small, meaningful things.

That’s all we can do.

Small, meaningful, human actions gum up the workings of impersonal systems.

True, it is more efficient to deny the neighborhood committee when they ask to replace a dangerous empty lot with a playground. It’s more efficient to not help students from Afghanistan (or wherever) get an education. It’s more efficient to die of diseases instead of studying them. It’s more efficient to not get mail anymore. It’s more efficient to not be human. It would be most efficient, preferable really, if we did not bother to live at all.

It’s reasonable to ask who benefits from our bullshit oligarchy. Bullshit money (crypto). Bullshit art (generative AI). Bullshit government (DOGE). Who is it for? It’s reasonable to ask and it would probably take another essay to consider a full answer — but for now, it sure seems like those who benefit are rich assholes who not only never helped a person in their lives but who find such a notion absurd.

Here’s something I did recently: assisted one immigrant in making one, clean, error-free, accurate, good-looking resume. That’s my job. I’ll keep doing it until the funding is cut and I am replaced by an online module or, more likely, nothing at all. For now, it’s a privilege. Rare, in our age, to be able to do a thing and help a person. A rather quaint, old-fashioned notion.

Have you ever had to call your health insurance provider? Or the phone company? Or HR in an office of some many-tentacled multi-national corporation that has grown to kaiju-proportions? (BTW Ikiru’s Takashi Shimura also starred in Mothra.) Maybe you had some idiosyncratic question that could not be stated briefly to the listening computer. And you went through layers of bots and found some nice person on the other end, and that person was a whole human being who was overseen by a modern Watanabe, whose purview it was to always stay one layer of private bureaucracy away from you, to make it easier to send you to another office and another Watanabe and another and another… until you give up. Imagine one Watanabe decided to actually do something to help. In fact, made it a personal crusade to ensure that you were heard. Took your issues to office after office until they wore down the bureaucracy. That is the Watanabe in Ikiru and what he gets out of it, what any of us get out of it, is simple: to live.

All screengrabs were grabbed from the Criterion Channel’s excellent Kurosawa collection, of which Ikiru is but one of many beautiful films you can view. If you want to know about the two Afghan women who earned a free ride to college in the US, I wrote about them here. Thanks to The Morning News for keeping the article up all this time. (Thirteen years?!!?) Update on them, via lurking on the socials: They are doing well and paying more taxes than I am these days. And they certainly ski better than I do.

Next time in Desire Paths: Remember when the obscure Jungian poet became super famous and caused all the dudes to go to the woods and confront their failed masculinity? The 1990s: what a time!