At the Sydney Gleebooks launch of Graeme Turner’s new book Broken, an audience member said:
I spend more time on admin than doing my job.
I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. Look at how I’ve grown. Well. Sometimes.
Before I explain, let us go back a few years.
It was one of those Covid lockdowns. Like many others, we built nice rituals. Checking on the garden. De-slugging, by hand in the evenings (ok that was less nice). Bushwalks with such silence that the swishing of the trees seemed very loud. A drink while watching the sunset after a day of zoom meetings – sometimes from the empty outdoor cafe at the eerily abandoned theme park called Scenic World1.
And I was writing Virtue Capitalists.