This is my take on the viral Matt Bors comic. Though Bors is depicting a caricature of obnoxious reply guys on Twitter, a surprisingly large collection of random people on Tumblr actually said this to me recently in response to an offhand post that the world wouldn’t end any faster if I didn’t reply to work emails on Saturday evening. Their reasoning seemed to be that it was hypocritical of me to push back against the neoliberal demands of constant work from the “privileged” position of someone who actually has a job.

Since then, their comments have been living in my head rent-free. With this comic I hereby evict that unpleasantness and release it back into the wild.

As I drew this comic, however, I made a decision to limit the negativity I post on social media, which includes this very comic itself. To be honest, most of the experiences that have had a major impact on my life during the pandemic have been negative, but I’m not sure there’s any real use or meaning in representing them directly through autobiographical essays and comics. Instead, I’ve found much more satisfaction in constructing analogies through the medium of fiction.

In addition, I get the feeling that there are many people in the world (including the “yet you participate in society” commenters I encountered on Tumblr) who will aggressively seek out and latch onto negativity specifically in order to make bad-faith arguments about topics that could benefit from more nuance. Now that I’m at a stage of my life where I’ve started to work on more collaborative creative projects, I’d prefer to keep that sort of socially networked negativity out of my space.

Still, even though I do in fact have a job, I’m not wrong. Fuck capitalism.