CALL: Working is tiring

The playlist starts: Pedro Pastor sings Sacar la Rabia, right on a day when I felt it rise within me, during the protest against the eviction of Espai sot al control popular Antiga Massana in the Raval neighborhood (Barcelona, where I live, en), suddenly seeing not only that injustice, but all the others around me, both near and far; alas, mine is not the brave activism of protests, but the cowardly activism of writing. However, I do like stepping out of my comfort zone and lending a hand to those on the other front, the one of anger. At the protest, there was pink everywhere, the Antiga Massana is indeed Barbie pink; I thought that if they can make a revolution with that color, then they can burn this whole city down: they are the same Catalan anarchists as always, in the irreducible Rosa de foc.
Beware, the time will come. The time will come when we crush you.
My thoughts scatter in the crowd as I blend into one large collective thought, but I still end up asking myself: what will each person do when alone? Perhaps it is in those moments that art and revolution are born: while brushing your teeth or approaching the mirror to inspect a pimple, reflecting (yourself).
It’s not just collective thought, it’s collective feeling; in this anger, I pour in mine as well, like gasoline on fire: I want a job where I don’t have to lie. About anything. I’m not lazy, I want to work to feel that my work is useful, but truly useful, work meant as a service to the world - to thank it for my existence - and not as a debt to be repaid.

Cesare Pavese published, in 1936, Lavorare stanca: a collection of poems with a strong anti-lyricism, a typical trait of the Piedmontese writer. When we studied it in high school, I couldn’t understand the urgency of such a trivial title, and I continued for a long time to not grasp it, despite those verses by Pavese accompanying me throughout my adolescence.
After university, or perhaps even before - spotting the approaching danger - I began to realize that, indeed, working tires you out. A lot, I might add.
For a while, I synchronously blamed and justified myself, saying I was born on a Saturday, and because of that - as my mother always told me when I was a child - I was an incurable layabout; then I started to sense a general discontent around me, my Instagram feed kept feeding me articles from pop magazines and statistical data that validated my discomfort, I smelled the burning stench of our anger finally ignited by the spark of a short circuit: we’re tired of volunteer work disguised as internships, of ridiculous salaries, therefore, of being underpaid and frustrated - to quote the italian musician Rino Gaetano - and being told that “it was like this in their day,” because in their day, it was not like that at all.