While currency, our human-crafted God, consumes our souls and reigns as the ultimate sovereign over our species - I’ve come to believe Time is the true marrow of Life. As a Naturalist and Humanist, my existence isn’t practice for what comes after loved ones offer my rotting body as nourishment to the biosphere. THIS is it! No,“Take two!” With this incomplete intro as a backdrop, I long to step off the hamster wheel and move through life intentionally, feeling real earth between my toes. I hope the same for you.
This requires a mental adjustment. I’m going to say a word and let’s see what comes to mind. Ready?
WORK.
My guess...you thought of what you were hired to do this week in exchange for monetary compensation - your job, profession, career, employment. Work is more than your 9-5...your paycheck. Google defines work as “an activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” The result might well be money, but it could be a fresh loaf of bread, one you smear with butter and wash down with a cup of hot coffee.
But employment has hijacked the word, taken it hostage. Even Miriam Webster reveals our captivity: “To perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary.” And as Americans we respect a strong work ethic. No, scratch that, we worship it! God forbid someone calls you Lazy. We’d rather be caught cheating on our taxes than labeled “Lazy.” We can forgive a cheater. Under employment’s control, a strong work ethic means the hours I put in a week, being available outside work hours, returning texts on a Sunday morning, an eagerness to work overtime, and making my job a life priority. Hustle! Right, Mr. Musk? “People who worked 40 hours a week never changed the world.” Blah, blah, blah Tesla, blah, blah! Mr. Musk could crush my entire existence with his prefrontal cortex, but maybe I don’t want to change the world. Maybe I want to savor it.
Fuck work if that’s all it is...selling my hours, my time, in short...my life in exchange for wages at best or even better to feed some corporate monstrosity’s insatiable hunger for more. If lazy means I’d rather tend my garden, play with my kids, hike a trail, build a chicken coop, or keep my body healthy by not sitting at a desk all day...then dammit call me lazy. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been for zero cashola - running 50 miles, raising kids, remodeling a home - and none of it motivated by money nor having anything to do with work in exchange for wages.
So, reframing #1: Your job does not have a monopoly on work. Quit letting society shame you with its bullshit notions of a strong work ethic. Now that I feel less guilty, let’s move on to rethinking jobs, employment and careers.
For some deranged individuals (picture me winking at you here) their job is a source of energy, passion and love - perhaps even the focal point of their life. In that case, drink from the fat straw, friend!
But my guess and experience, for the average Joe and Josephine their job doesn’t get them out of bed in the morning. Okay...actually it does, because it has them by the testes, but you know what I mean: it’s not what motivates them - not the arena where they feel most alive. In our concrete, mechanized and monetary system our survival demands our employment. We hunt and gather dollar bills which we magically exchange for chicken nuggets, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. Very, very few humans manage to live outside the magnetic forcefield of money and the ones that have are my true heroes, the truly liberated.
This being said, for many of us, money’s morphed into a virus infiltrating our happy souls where it no longer serves as the middle man between “the hunter and the deer” so to speak, but it has become the purpose of existence. My personal opinion...that might be the main problem of the human problem. But, if compiling shit is what you really want in life, then money is not about survival. It’s about Jeff Bezos. Congrats sir! Blue Ribbon!
On the other hand, if money is just the middleman of survival then the question I want to ask, “What is the least amount of job I can do to secure the amount of money I need to ensure survival?” You mean, you don’t believe in the 40-hour work week! Does, “Hell, no!” answer that question?
Picture a group of hunter-gatherers who, on one particularly lucky day, manage to score an elk 30 minutes into a hunt. Upon returning to the village they find a murmur of disappointment emanating from the tribe, “You were only out there for 30 minutes! The day isn’t over. Get back out there. We’ll see you at 5:00!” What? Nope! There was an elk party!
I’ve heard of Boomers complaining about The Damn Millennial working six months a year and then managing to travel on the cheap the other six, “Lazy bastards!” Ha! The Millennial wins! Ten thousand points to that young punk!
All this silly ranting to tell you: don’t let the Industrial Age residue or Hustle Culture guilt you into drinking the Kool Aid...into selling your life to the system. Don’t start with a job, a profession, a career. Start with a level of survival you find comfortable and go from there.
[In the next two posts I hope to explore: 1) What can you (me too) do to free yourself from the tyranny of a job, and 2) What can employers do to build autonomy and freedom for those who are enslaved to the system. Does the dominant metaphor have to be a hamster wheel?]
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