imagine that you wake up at 6:30AM, leave for work at 7:30, and arrive at 8. you take an hour lunch and leave the office at 5PM, arriving home at 5:30. you go to bed at 11:30, affording yourself 7 hours of sleep. on this, an average day, you’ve spent 7 hours sleeping, 10 hours working, driving to work, or preparing for work, and 7 hours doing whatever it is you do in your spare time. it’s been my experience that most people like or tolerate their job to some degree, but i don’t know many who love it, believe in it, or are inspired by it. they don’t wake up in the morning with the knowledge that they’re going to spend their workday creating something beautiful, or helping others, or whatever is meaningful to them specifically. if most of us are spending 60% of our waking hours during the work week doing something that doesn’t really matter to us, what are we all doing? in other words, what’s the bloody point?
i think about this a lot lately, in my current quest for a new apartment (our sublease is up this month) and a new job (my summer work ends next month). job search II (the return!) is of course not going well. i’m not qualified for any of the jobs i want, and the jobs i am qualified for make me want to throw myself off the nearest suburban two-story professional building. the fall wouldn’t even kill me, since i’d probably just land in the well-maintained shrubbery.
what’s the point of having a job? it’s not going to be fun. it’s not going to make me happy. i’m going to die anyway, and then people just like me will be born and they’ll have jobs and then they’ll die and more people will be born and have jobs and die and by that time no one will remember me at all, let alone whether i had a job or not.
“you do need a job to live comfortably,” ryan said.
“so, what? the whole point of life is to be as comfortable as possible until you die?”
i think my problem is that i’m smart enough for something as mundane as the average work week to make me contemplate the relative pointlessness of my own existence, but i’m not smart enough for someone rich to pay me to spend all day in a studio making things in the hopes that i’ll come up with something really cool. i’m not smart enough to be so distracted by my own ideas that i can ignore how stupid everything is, but i’m too smart not to notice it.