• linden, rose and betony •

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

Being a people pleaser is not a positive quality. It's unhealthy and it doesn't make you a nice person.

This isn't a callout or an attack on people who habitually engage in people-pleasing behavior, it's a call for you to bring the behavior to your awareness, to suss out what the behavior stems from and what you're afraid will happen if you let it go, and to look for ways that you can start reclaiming your agency.

If you habitually shove your needs out of the way to make room for other people, it's likely that you will become resentful and harm your relationships in other ways, whether it's through sudden outbursts of bottled-up emotions or sabotage. That is because people pleasing is exhausting and you will naturally start to seek relief wherever you can get it.

The healthier thing to do is watch for that behavior and give yourself permission to defy it.

find pride in protecting your community in the midst of the pandemic that never went away. pride not being accessible to disabled and marginalized people isn’t new. one simple step you can take this year to change that is to wear a mask. trans and queer folks are disproportionately affected by long covid—the folks you share spaces with every day. so put “we keep us safe” into action and find free masks and tests near you at covidactionmap.org or maskbloc.org! . . Photo ID: A doodled 2-panel comic. The top panel has four different shape characters, all smiling big. A square is holding a pink and blue sign with text that reads “We keep us safe”. A triangle is holding up a rainbow. An octagon and trapezoid are both holding a long colorful sign with text that reads “Protect trans & queer youth.” The bottom panel is filled in with gray. In the background are the four shapes from the top panel, but they are now silhouettes in the distance. A circle character stands in the foreground, looking towards the other shapes with a blank expression. They’re wearing a face mask and are holding a tiny pride flag that’s lowered to the ground.

Bartholomew

Dolores

Norman

Harold

Magnolia

Names that are normal for babies but weird when you're old:

Maddison

Tanner

Skylar

Mckenzie

Logan

Names that are normal for old people and normal for babies:

Elizabeth

Mary

Michael

Finnegan

Peter

Names that are weird when you're a baby and weird when you're old:

Radish

Kerosene

Australopithecus

Anthill

Hegemony

Names that are weird when you're normal:

Balthazar

Romulus

Clandestia

Persephone

Kremulon

Names that are normal when you're weird:

“What techniques do you use to practice moving your consciousness?”

The techniques I personally use are ones I learned through many different contexts, ranging from improv theater, to therapy, to Eastern philosophies, to witchcraft, to psychological manipulation. People tend to stumble across this stuff independently, and while they may call it different things, it all uses the same mechanic: You use your mind to move and change the ideas impacting your reality.

Worried about something in the future? Pantomime sticking that future scenario in an invisible bottle and putting it away.

Bored at work? Pretend you’re a little kid who’s pretending to do your job.

Don’t like the vibes of a place? Literally pick up a broom and brush the energy out the door.

As an acquaintance of mine once said, “If your problem is invisible snakes, your solution is to create an invisible mongoose.”

This does require allowing ourselves to do things we consider nonsensical, but it’s only by doing this that we gain the understanding of how magic works and that it works.

Take care though: Moving the consciousness first requires becoming aware of how it’s already moving in your immediate reality. This is gained through Mindfulness, which is the practice of observing your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and self without judgement or correction as you go about your life.

Not being aware of how your mind’s already moving means you might interpret any attempts at moving it as the work of another force (e.g. God, deities, the Devil, hexes or curse laid upon you, etc). Since moving the mind is also done through playing out stories, you’d also run the risk of not realizing you’re telling a story and might end up confusing it for reality (though generally speaking, expanding your awareness just allows you to become aware of the stories you’re already telling yourself).

Always remember that growing awareness goes hand-in-hand with learning the techniques.

“How do you discern if you’ve gained enough awareness to use a certain technique?”

This is very simple, actually: Techniques that evade your awareness will always sound very esoteric, abstract, and even poetic when described to you. You may understand bits and pieces of the explanation, but you won’t understand their meaning, and you definitely won’t “get” the overall picture. They’ll just seem highly mysterious and philosophical.

When people encounter techniques that evade their awareness, they tend to react in one of a few ways:

Their logical minds try to interpret the mysterious information to complete the picture. The conclusion will always be incorrect.

They’ll interpret this “air of mystery” as what makes magic “magic.”

Their brains will straight-up delete the information they can’t parse, so they only experience and absorb the information that makes sense.

They’ll have a very negative reaction and reject it entirely.

When a technique does exist within your realm of awareness, the way it works will be obvious to you. This knowledge will take the form of intuitive understanding, as opposed to logical reasoning. At the very least, the technique will make sense enough for you to try it, which means the intuition will come to you once you do.

“Why are things like blessings, enchantments, and intentions safer?”

These are safer because they don’t require access to greater awareness.

Awareness is a bit like vision. Some activities (like driving or skiing) require good vision to do safely because you need to be able to tell where you’re going. Other activities (like riding a bus or doodling) don’t. Sure, having good vision helps you do these better, but it’s not required in order to do them safely.

The same can be said about magic. Some magic requires the ability to course-correct based on immediate feedback, which can’t be done if you don’t have enough awareness of what your mind’s doing. Other magic doesn’t require this.

“Are [blessings, enchantments, and intentions] also forms of passive magic, a lower level of active magic, or something else entirely?”

I used “passive” and “active” as arbitrary designations. Really, the difference is whether you’re automating your magic (i.e. sending things into your expanded conscious for it to take care of in the background) or doing it manually (assuming control of the process and moving your conscious intentionally). These are just different modalities and don’t represent “higher” or “lower” forms of magic.

Plenty of magic actually uses a combination of automated and manual processes, the same way moving our body does. Additionally, advanced magic can and does use automated processes, and basic magic can and does use manual ones.