Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Have you ever caught yourself doing your own job — I mean really caught yourself, from the outside, the way you would notice a stranger? The voice you use on the phone that is not quite your voice. The thing you say in meetings that you have said four hundred times.
And somewhere underneath it, very quietly: is anybody actually in here?
You are standing in a line at the post office. You are holding a package and looking at the number on the screen. You are thinking about a decision you made last week. You are thinking about a mistake you made at work.
You are thinking about a dinner you are going to have later. The person in front of you is counting the change in their wallet. They are speaking slowly. They are choosing coins.
The line behind you is moving forward. The man behind you sighs. You shift your weight on your feet. You are not just standing there.
You are thinking about yourself. You are thinking about being an adult. You are thinking about responsibility. You are thinking about being a good citizen.
You are thinking about how you should act. You are thinking about what is expected of you. You are thinking about what is expected of you at this moment, in this line, in this building. You stop looking at the number on the screen.
You look at the man in front of you. You see him counting the change. You see him speaking slowly. You see the line behind you sighing.
You see the man behind you shift his weight. You see the package in your hands. You see yourself. You see yourself standing there.
You see yourself thinking about being an adult. You see yourself thinking about responsibility. You see yourself thinking about what is expected of you. You see yourself watching yourself.
You see yourself standing there, but you also see yourself watching yourself.
Jean-Paul Sartre sat in a café in Paris and watched a waiter who was doing his job too perfectly, and it bothered him for the rest of his life. He called this bad faith. It is the way we pretend to be just a cog in a machine, a role we were assigned, because looking at your own freedom is terrifying. If you are only a waiter, you do not have to choose anything.
You just exist. But Sartre saw that the waiter was not just serving coffee; he was performing the role of the waiter on a stage, and the more he acted, the less human he seemed. It's, as The School of Life puts it, living without taking into account the very essence of human being, which is to be free. For existentialist, the most immoral crime one could have committed isn't the similar kinds of crime, say that deontologists or consequentialists would condemn, such as killing (yourself or others), lying, etc.
You are probably thinking, "Wait, isn't lying worse than just liking your job?" Yes. But if you lie to protect yourself from the truth, you are still alive and aware. Bad faith is a deeper, colder murder. It is the murder of your own spirit because you are too afraid to be the person standing in front of the mirror.
I brought my bicycle to a shop and found a man who was not just a mechanic. He identified the problem instantly and looked for the root of it. He took apart my back wheel, the core of the machine, and placed every tiny piece on the wall in perfect order. He was beautiful to watch.
Then he saw the flat tire. Under the rule book, his boss would want him to throw the tire away and sell me a new one, because that makes money. But he decided to fix it himself, using his own tool, asking me questions about how it worked as he worked. He was asking me to help him understand the bike, not telling me to follow the boss's rule.
He was alert and responded to my request a little too quick. He came to me almost too eagerly, and his eyes and his voice were a bit too solicitous. This bike technician probably thought of himself as being modeled after Michael Jordan of bicycle fixing, if there's such a sport. He was leaving no option for himself to be a freelance designer, a pianist, an artist, a philosopher.
He told me that he enjoys coming to work because his job is a "dream job" — he gets to fix bikes every day which is what he likes. Can we say that this kind of person has a bad faith, Mr. Sartre? I can.
He has built a wall around himself. He has decided that he is only this person, this worker, and he cannot be anything else. He has locked the door to his freedom and thrown away the key. He tells himself that he is lucky to have this dream job, but really, he has made himself a prisoner of a title.
This waiter was "too much" like a waiter, both in the ways that he held his body and responded to the requests of his customers, and how he saw himself in that situation -- as a waiter. Period. What Sartre saw in this waiter wasn't the hard-working work ethics, but the senseless emotion of this being who believes that he himself was in the position of, pretty much, a servant because he had no other choice.
But I want to look at the bicycle technician. He was "too much" like a waiter. Sartre said the waiter believes he is in the position of a servant because he had no other choice. This technician was the same.
He was fast, eager, and polite. He said he enjoyed coming to work because fixing bikes was his "dream job." He took a role so completely that there was nobody left inside it to make a judgment. This is what we call bad faith. It is a lie you tell yourself about who you are so that you do not have to feel the weight of being free.
The sentence he told me was, "He could identify the kind of bike that I was took to the shop... and the moment he saw the problem, he could identify how to fix it within seconds." He did this so well that I almost forgot he was a person. I just saw the role. He was the mechanic.
He was not a man who could decide otherwise. But then, he did something that broke his own role. The boss wanted a new tire. It would make money.
But the tire was not broken. He fixed it with his own tools. He did not do what the role demanded. He acted like a person who cares about the bike, not just the machine.
He asked me questions. He was curious. He was not just an object in a uniform. The job title is the most common hiding place for a person who has stopped making judgments.
We are all tempted. When you are a teacher, you can just enforce the rules. When you are a doctor, you can just follow the book. When you are a manager, you can just follow the numbers.
The title saves you from the trouble of deciding what to do. You say, "This is who I am." You say, "This is what I do." The technician almost did this too. He was so good at being a technician that he forgot he was a person. He hid himself in the job.
You might be thinking he was just happy. Perhaps he was. But when you enjoy a role so much that you forget you have a body and a mind and a choice, you have stopped being honest. You have accepted the role as your whole world.
Sartre would say you are lying to yourself. You are refusing to see that you made a choice to be there. You are refusing to see that you could leave. You are hiding behind the title.
The technician almost let the job become his whole life. But he almost caught himself. He almost looked at the bike and not just the part that needed fixing. He almost looked at me and not just the customer.
That is the danger. We all walk around with titles that protect us. We hide inside them to keep from feeling the cold wind of freedom.
Fair enough. You might be right. The man in the shop is just working. He is being kind.
He is doing his best. But look at how hard he tries to be a waiter. He is too eager. His voice is too nice.
He acts like a waiter so much that there is no one left inside to be the person. That is what Sartre calls bad faith — telling yourself you are just a job title, that you have no choice but to be a servant. My Brompton bike, I thought, had a complicated bike with a complicated gear system, but only until I saw this technician removed everything from the core spinning wheel of the back wheel one by one, placing them on the moving cabinet very systematically so that he would remember the sequence of which parts to be put back before which parts. For a bike that one had never seen before, and he was honest about that, I must admit that his skill was stunning, and was a joy to watch.
He says he loves his job because he is just a bike fixer. Is that the truth? Or is that just a story he tells himself to stay warm?