I was musing to myself at work a few days ago. I realized that much of the time I’m working, the job I do requires absolutely no thinking. When it gets busy, I need to think how to prioritize tasks, but that’s it. Aside from that bit of thinking, the work I do most days can all be done on autopilot.
Now, certainly, this leaves lots of time for thinking, which is useful to have. I don’t seem to have enough of that these days. But then again, it also gives me the feeling of being a human cog in a machine to get a job done. I’ve felt this way about having a job for a long time, though I’m attempting to find a way of dealing with that problem. One way I’m doing this is to find a new job that feels a bit more meaningful. The other is by working on my websites, attempting to build them up to the point that I don’t need a job in the first place. I love writing, and fiddling with technical stuff, so it’s lots of fun to do this.
That’s a little off topic though. The point is, this feeling about being a cog in a machine is a fairly common feeling among the employed, though it’s by no means universal. Some people have their dream jobs, and they’ll never have cause to feel this way. Some people are being cogs, and just haven’t woken up to that yet. And some are in my position, aware, but not sure how to fix it, other than look for a new way that will help meet their needs. How did we get to this point though?
The truth is, we’ve always needed to do some work. Everything living needs to do some work in order to live. We need food and shelter from the elements simply to survive, so the work to obtain that is the minimum needed. Procreation also requires work (though we can probably classify some aspects of that as fun), and that is also required if we’ll live on as a species. Beyond that, we don’t need anything else.
These days, we do a lot more work, because we look to have a lot more stuff. Some of this stuff is really cool, and serves a useful or entertaining pupose. Some of it is neither cool, useful, or entertaining. We need to manufacture it somehow, and while machines can do some of that work, people need to do the rest. This means we need fewer people to provide all the food, so other people can provide all the toys. This makes more work for everyone, since we provide for ourselves and a bunch of other people. Someday, perhaps machinery will take over doing any work necessary for our survival, but that may come with it’s own problems, such as deciding on distribution of goods, and how to deal with the machinery breaking down.
Either way, we need a way to break free of the machine, and that’s where finding a job you love or getting your own business started comes in. It’s not foolproof, and obviously I’m still working on getting any one of those to work out for me. You can also look for ways to live minimally in order to work less as well, leaving you with more time to pursue living life.
It feels absolutely crazy to spend so much of life just working, and not living. We go to school for six hours a day for 13 years, do at least an hour a night of homework for four of them, then work eight hours a day for another 45 years. Some tack on four or more extra years of schooling to that as well. Where does it end? When do we get to live? Do we not get to enjoy our youth without worrying about how to pay the bills?
I’m not taking that path. I know it’s possible to do otherwise, and I’m going to do everyhing I can to work less and play more while meeting my needs and those of any family I may need to support along the way. I haven’t found the solution that works for me yet, but I’ll get there. Perhaps this very site will be it, perhaps it won’t. I don’t know yet. But I’m not doing a 40, 50, 60 hour workweek for the next 40 years, unless I find something I can really enjoy for that time, and that allows good vacation time.
The one thing I’ve learned is there are a lot of strategies out there, and some work for some people better than for others. You really do need find your own way if you want it to work. That doesn’t mean there won’t be useful tools and learning experiences to be gained from others. For instance, the blogging software I use is created and maintained by WordPress, and the inspiration to try blogging came from 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. But I’m finding out how to make this all work for me, and I may come to find out I need another strategy if this doesn’t work out in the end. My original site, Gaming My Way, was my first foray into blogging, and also a manifestation of my childhood dream to work with video games in some way. It’s been going for a year now, and I still work on it sometimes, but I’m also still experimenting with other ideas for now.
In any case, I’m not going to be a robot at my job forever. I will move on, and I will find the time to live my life, and not just work it all away.
Related Posts:
- The Importance of Money
- Do Work You Love or Do Work You Need
- Establishing a New Habit the Lazy Way
- Paranormal Experiences I’ve Had
- Don’t Rely on The Paranormal to Pull You Out Of Your Mess
