April 30th, 2007

After a few days of vacation, I am back to work starting today. Far from complaining about it, I am happy to be back in my familiar seat looking at the familiar desktop paraphernalia(1). IM-ing the same friends, etc. (ahem).

But, I thought this as I settled down with my familiar coffee cup in my familiar chair: "I did not miss any of this even 1%, but I am not even slightly unhappy that I am back here. Am I just captor-bonded?"

And, of course, the answer I can hardly escape is, "yes". There is work that feels like work, then there is work that you want to do (and so, doesn't feel like work). And though I am happy to take pride in the work I do do, I also realise that there is other "work" that I would much rather be doing. Strange, isn't it?

I don't mean to say something pithy like, "The worst day fishing is better than the best day working"—a bumper-sticker that I sometimes see plastered onto the bumpers of pickup trucks and jeeps. But I do mean to say that the work I do brings me so little palpable feedback that I have to wonder about its value. And the work I wish I could find time to do more of yields such satisfying (to me) results ... but it doesn't culminate in food on the table.

We say it so often that we don't really hear it any more: "If I didn't have to eat, I wouldn't have to work." But it's true, isn't it? We would do something else, perhaps. Something that might look from the outside like work ... but it's only work when you are not absorbed by it, isn't it? Now, I can sometimes get that way with the work I do—I can become so caught up in what I am doing that I hardly notice the passing hours or my growing hunger. But that is because the edges of my resistance to non-self-motivated work have been sanded smooth over the years, starting with my first jobs (working menial bindery jobs in my dad's print shop and grilling hamburgers in a cafeteria). Just like nearly everyone else's, my resistance has been ground away ... just as it should have been. It is a lesson of life that all children of our culture start to discover on the first day of Grade 1 when they suddenly realise, "Wow, I've been here most of the day doing stuff I probably wouldn't have chosen to do. And there'll be more tomorrow ... and tomorrow ... and tomorrow ..."

We call it productive and mature. We call it a "fact of life" and a "necessary evil", and certainly it looks like we can't escape it from being that way. We dismiss those who reject the workaday world as slackers. We call them lazy, unmotivated, societal leeches. We marginalize them, we ostracize them. We hardly need bother, though: They are on their way down to the street and homelessness thanks to the world we perpetuate.

I don't know about you, but I plan to keep up the fight to work and eat and buy clothes. (And I insist on bringing some expensive toys along for the ride too.) But I sometimes wonder if I am not being honest, hard-working, and "corporate" so much as being a coward for refusing to see if there is another way I could live.

Captor-bonded.

(1) Items that my desktop paraphernalia consists of:

Read more rants - Top Blogs - Comment on this rant - Email me