HOW EVER DID WE GET HERE?

I will be the first one to admit here, that the last two years has been an exercise in depression, anxiety, and stress…all following a mix of a Testicular Cancer diagnosis, treatment and possibly the worst working environment i’ve experienced in my career. So imagine my surprise when, news reports will say…”No One in America wants to work anymore!” The projection of a reality where meritocracy no longer governs our ability to make it ahead in this world is so incredibly distressing in 2026, considering that all I have ever wanted to do is work, and have that work be considered a valuable addition to the success of any project. For over twenty years, however, Ive been repeating this cycle of work hard, harder than before, seek to improve process, establish realistic procedure…get fired. New York is a free will employment state, which unfortunately means employers are allowed to dismiss employees at any point, for any reason, and never have to justify those decisions in the eyes of the government.

All to say, is it really that noone wants to work anymore? Or is it more like everyone is so exhausted with contributing to work only to achieve dismissal, while the folks around you doing the dismissal get to pass GO and collect 200$.

As an effort to progress, and truly focus on my mental health, I will try to tell a few of these stories every so often and pair them with some of the more sketchy illustrations ive been working on lately. Don’t ask for it to make complete sense, I just have to believe that if any of the things I write about can help or change the mind of one person…my work will be well worth it.

So this first deep dive takes us back to one of my first ‘official’ jobs coming out of college. I joined a couple carpenters in Brooklyn making custom fixtures and fashion sets out of a small borrowed basement workshop. We were on dayrates back then, and I recall a habit of our boss to add rush jobs at 4 or 5 pm. So so many 10 hour days, turned into 14 hour days without any equivalent payment for the extra time. I remember thinking that that’s just how things were, but needless to say, I was considerably happy when the bosses transitioned to hourly pay.

I felt like my life was starting anew, that the investment of our time was resulting in the companies ability to scale…and scale it did; quickly moving from out of the shared basement shop, to a space down the road. We went from having to build 8’ flats on the street (the basement ceiling was slightly to low for operation) to having a space where multiple jobs could coexist…and as the teams grew, I was under the impression I was allowed to grow with the company. In 2008, with the recession, my bosses asked me to take a ‘temporary paycut’ in order for the shop to stay functional. But then it scaled up again and moved up the road, into another larger space.

It was my first encounter with the capitalistic ‘Do More With Less’ but the jobs kept coming, and I kept getting work. Where in the past i might have a table on which to build, then it was ‘Hey just set up a small table on sawhorses, because we can’t give you a full table. More with less…I think at that point I realized the things I was building were passively making way more for the company than I was actually getting paid. I didn’t ever think anything of it, because i trusted my bosses vision and still had some modicum of faith of rising tides.

And then they scaled AGAIN, teams grew, and I was pushed farther to the side, for reasons unbeknownst to me…and yet I kept wanting to work. The Christmas season was always our quietest time of year, and i remember barely eking out those times, modestly able to buy gifts for friends and family, scrape by with the rent, and fall asleep every night thinking the phone would ring the next day with the promise of a next job. What I received way more at this time, was a constant bait and switch of jobs. On a number of occasions, my availibility for the next week would be marked, and sunday night, I would get a call saying: “Hey, sorry the job fell through, but we might be able to use you next next week, are you down?”

When I look back on it now, with who I am today, I’m sure I would have walked away sooner if nothing else for self-preservation…but I stayed and worked, and worked, and worked, because for some reason I still was of the mind, that all I would need to do is prove my worth again, to be seen as valuable in the eyes of management. Around this time, however, two memories pop out, which are perfect examples of what was to come of this employment.

At one point, our company was hired to make props for ‘Kanye West and 2Chainz’ birthday song music video…and I allowed the shop to ‘rent’ my bike for the video. I was never paid for the rental, and when I got it back, the seatpost was carved up due to having a trailer mechanically attached to the thing. I was never paid, but ‘ADRIAAN, how cool is it that your bike is in the video!?’ It was a consolation prize to be sure, but it left me so hollowed out. As if to say, ‘thanks again for your contribution to the cause…but we’re running a business, so we can’t really pay you like that’…the mental gymnastics involved with coping with a message like that I pushed aside, and i believed that in some way their success would be mine as well…when in fact it was just another nail in the coffin.

The second anecdote that comes to mind (be aware this is 5-6 years in my employment at this company) was when a coworker’s father had been diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. As a good faith expression, my boss made shirts with all the employees names on a scrabble board…words with friends was huge at the time and with this particular coworker’s family, and so it was a fitting message of compassion and empathy. When i received my shirt, I noticed that my name somehow was not on there. I went the boss and said hey, did you know my name wasn’t on the shirt too? He told me oh there was no place to put your name Adriaan, despite more than two places i could see where my name would fit into the grid. I remember thinking to myself, “Adriaan its not about you, this is about raising someone’s hopes who just got one of the worst cancer diagnoses someone can get”, and yet there was also a smaller echo saying “they didn’t bother adding you, because they didn’t see you as part of the team. Nails go in the coffin, and yet I worked and worked and worked.

By the seventh year, the company had scaled for the fourth time in relatively quick succession, teams grew even more, projects became larger, and responsibilites were greater than ever before. Honestly, I felt like my life was starting anew. I felt I had finally proven my value to the company, and they were beginning to see me as a resource for successful projects. And then shortly after bumping into my boss walking through a park with a model at 9pm (not his wife) the guy gave me a gut punch out-of-the-blue by saying, ‘Adriaan, you know you’re expendable right?’ Seven long years of holding myself accountable for every failure and being truly proud of every success, and learning, and teaching and managing new crews, and really feeling like it was reaching sustainability despite all of the repeated abuses of power by unqualified management…and I was the one who was named expendable. The rejection was a hard one to bare, but I felt at long last like there was nothing I could do to BE seen or valued in any way, and there was basically nothing I could do about it.

Seven years down, nothing so much as a kind word, just a gentle passive nudge out the door.

If this were you, how do you put that on a resume? How would you synopsize the experience so that next time you work you can avoid such an occasion. Hell, if winners are the ones who make sales, what are the on-paper-losers supposed to do? Ive never lost my affinity for building, and developing community around art and fabrication. The nature of that caring has changed, sure, but the thing itself is intuitive to who I am; and I refuse to think that there’s no room for responsibilty and ethics in productive industries.

So to try to answer the president’s statement about work ethics…its not that noone wants to work. I think thats a extremely reductive perspective that , in my mind, is nothing more than an attempt to get workers to turn again on other workers. Maybe, just maybe (naive as it is) the separation of workers and the means of production has created this duality where managers reserve the privelege to be annoyed, and workers are potentially branded as useful tools. I reckon a wiser man than me once said however…only a bad carpenter blames their tools.

I’ve opted to omit any names of people or places or things, because its not about that really. I’m just over the silence that allows folks like this to succeed in life unwarranted. More stories to come, this is just me trying to get out of my head. Thanks for reading, enjoy the trump art.