What’s the Point of Going to Work?

Why Do We Work? Where Are We Going?

This is similar to a conversation that I had earlier this week with one of my daughter’s friend’s mom. I asked her what she does for work and told me she’s an administrator at a hospital, and immediately followed that with the clarification “I fucking hate it.” I feel you, mama. I don’t like my job either. In fact, my boss has lately been talking about why I like my job… not actually asking me why – or even if – I like my job, but just talking about how I like it so much, and it drives me crazy because I don’t like it. I’m a good, hard worker with a basic work ethic that includes not serving attitude or showing how much I hate everything, because that’s just the way I approach work (and how most other people out there do too), so she doesn’t know how much I don’t like my job, or her, because I have the common decency not to mention it. What I do genuinely like about my job is that it allows me to work the hours I work around my daughter’s schedule, and take a lot of days off. Same as my mom friend who I was talking to.

A common theme emerged from these conversations: We’re working these jobs we don’t like, because we want to be around as much as possible for our kids’ lives. We recognize that these jobs we don’t like are interchangeable with other jobs we could be working, and still not like. And we want a better alternative, but aren’t finding it for whatever reason. Does a better alternative not exist? Is it really the result of our perhaps misguided life choices? (The answer to that, I believe, is that our life choices were all meant to be and meant to lead us somewhere “destined” at the end of the road… perhaps we just can’t see it yet.)

I don’t have a tidy resolution to this post. Just sharing some thoughts. It would be great if I could get a stroke of insight telling me what to do to live my dream life. My dream life would be working from home, or wherever I like, on my own time – which would line up with my daughter’s school schedule. I would have more than enough money to comfortably live the lifestyle we have now, plus extra to do fun things as a family – trips to Disneyland throughout the year. Family vacations to somewhere out of state or overseas once a year. And enough money to eat out when we feel like it. Ideally, I’d love to work for myself or with people who I love and respect, like my best friend. I like to think about running a business with my best friend sometimes, but both of us are struggling just to keep ourselves afloat in the lives we’ve built for ourselves. We know we can do so much better, but are just in the midst of getting through each day right now. Part of this blog project is to document my attempts at getting my shit together so that I can get closer to that dream life every day.

If I do have a conclusion to this post, I guess it would be that there are a lot of us who are unhappy with our current situations and feel stuck. It doesn’t just happen to parents, people with low-income, women, etc. We all have something that we’re unhappy about. But we can get closer to the life we want by 1) shifting our perspective to get through the little moments and 2) taking action to get somewhere new.

Regarding perspective, gratitude is probably the best and most practical move. Everyone talks about gratitude, but its effects are real: when I feel bad about what I don’t have, or something I don’t like, I try to remember to think of something that I do have, and feel into a genuine sense of gratitude. It’s real – even if it doesn’t change my situation, it does give me something to be at peace with. For example, when I’m really frustrated at my job I remind myself that I’m grateful for the paycheck that I get – even if I wish it were bigger, it’s something that I can look forward to receiving.

When it comes to taking action, it’s like they say:

“Just do it.” – Nike

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Chinese proverb

“A year from now you may wish had started today.” – Karen Lamb

The only way to get to where you want to go is to start moving in that direction. The problem for me is that I don’t always know where I want to go. Even now, I don’t have a 1 year, 5 year, 10 year plan. I’ve tried to think of it, put it down on paper, feel into it, and it’s all fuzzy. I’ll obviously keep trying, but I mean, I’ve been trying for quite some time now. Actually, my whole life has always been a matter of me just putting one foot in front of the other and finding myself wherever I end up. It’s been great for the most part, but I’ve been subject to the sadness and feeling of being lost that I think a lot of us get. I even got to the point in graduate school where I had gotten there by continuing on the path I was on all throughout college, then realized I wasn’t really in the place I was supposed to be, even though I had “made it” to where I wanted to go. I ended up getting pregnant in my first year, which resulted in me dropping out of my program, which worked out because I can’t even imagine me finishing that program and I honestly wouldn’t have dropped out of it unless something drastic happened (like me popping a human being out of my body).

Point is, sometimes I wish I had a road map laid out clearly for me telling me where my destination is, and how to get there. I know I’m responsible for planning my own destination, and the journey – the steps, the directions – would become clearer, knowing what end I am going to. But the truth is, I can get so much farther by just taking action. The action I need to take first might be for me to first figure out where I want to go (working on it). But even if I don’t know where I’m going, I can still take action and figure things out from that. For example, do I want to go back to school? I’m not sure, but I can look at programs and see how I feel looking at the applications, or even filling them out – if I hate it, I know it’s not for me. If I’m feeling excited about it, it’s for me! But action tells me more than thinking about it.

That’s a big part of why I’m working on this project – I’ve thought about a ton of ideas for posts and what my website could look like, and I filled tons of notebooks with these “great” ideas, but never put them online and published. Recently I’ve been feeling a bigger push to get these ideas out into the world (largely because of how unhappy I am at work), and so I committed to just taking action, however small or inconsistent it is! The more I do it, the more I enjoy doing it, the more I continue to get satisfaction and personal joy out of it. I’m writing this right now at 1:55am while everyone else at home is sleeping, but I feel wide awake because I’m excited to be working on this! I’m not getting paid, and I could be doing work and get paid for that at this time, but this is what makes me happy right now. The joy of working on this project is enough standalone motivation for me to keep doing this, and that’s worth something. So in taking action, your likes and dislikes will become illuminated. The direction that is right for you will become clearer through you taking action. I obviously can’t quit my job (right now), because then I’d lose all of my income, but I know that personal creative writing is something that feeds me, and the more I do it, the better I will get (at least that’s the hope), and maybe I can find an alternative job in this field that makes me happy, makes me feel fulfilled, and pays me for it.

So… that’s all for now. Drop a comment if you get what I’m saying. And if you’re in the same boat of being unhappy and wanting something better but not knowing what that thing is, or how to get there… come back and I’ll try to have some better advice or new insights into it in a later post.

Peace.