January 9, 2008
…for the last couple of years, I’ve been repeating the trope that elsewhere in the world, when you ask somebody “Tell me about yourself,” they will start off with something like “I’m from Tokyo,” or “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m a Celtic supporter,” or “I love to knit,” or something like that, but that in America, they will inevitably lead off with what it is they do for a living. I don’t know where I heard this or I would cite it properly.
However, I was doing some rough math earlier while out on a walk. Figure the alarms start going off between 6:30 and 7 AM – let’s call it 7, because both phones and both wristwatches are bleating their hellish symphony while those chuckleheads on the tube are clucking away at the latest doings of that Spears whore, and if you can sleep through all that, you probably need to check into rehab yourself. So 7 AM. Figure you’re in the office by 8:30, but it’s not exactly quality personal time in between – shower, get dressed, try to figure out where you’re supposed to be this morning, maybe take five minutes personal time getting your coffee on the way in. Then 8 hours on the job, plus an hour lunch, which let’s face it, unless you’re out with the Rifles of the EUS at the pizza place, isn’t really quality personal time either. So home somewhere between 5:30 and 6. All in all, let’s call it roughly 10 hours a day sucked up with work, or at the very least, where work is looming unavoidably.
So home between 5:30 and 6, nothing to do for tomorrow. Now what? Figure about five hours to yourself, for your home life, for your lovely bride and a nice dinner and whatever TiVo caught for you, and occasionally you have folks over for a nice dinner or maybe you run out to an Adult Bible Study class (stop laughing. STOP IT) or who knows, maybe you just park yourself on the porch and smoke and make fun of people trying to parallel park in your street. Then off to bed sometime between 10:30 and 11 and thrash about trying to fall asleep knowing that in 7 hours, the cacophony is going to strike up again.
So on a typical weekday, work rules about 2/3 of your waking life. Weekends are better; you generally get the whole thing, which is nice. But in a typical six-days-and-on-the-seventh-he-rested, you’re putting in 50 hours for work and taking 55 hours for yourself, with 49 in sleep mode. (49-and-a-half if the priest is really droning at Mass.) So if work is taking up…calculator widget…47.62% of your waking life as an adult every week, it stands to reason that your job will be a pretty big part of who you are, right? I mean, being a Redskins fan is normally what, 4 hours on gameday plus maybe 10 or 15 minutes of website and news reading other days? Say 6 hours a week during the season when you’re really being a fan to the exclusion of all else, and in the off-season, probably 2 hours a week max unless you’re watching the draft, and if you’re watching the draft, you are a sad, sad little man. But even during the regular season, the Redskins, your pride and joy and a huge chunk of your life for the last, oh, 18 years (good GOD how has it been 18 years?) – the Skins take up right about 12% of the time that your job does.
So in the final analysis, your job cannot be something that contributes to your net total of misery. Maybe you have to cut the grass, which is godawful and is 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Maybe you have to meet with the tax attorney – another 2 hours of misery. Maybe you screwed up and wandered into a theater showing The Thin Red Line – THREE hours you’ll never get back AND they fleeced you our of twenty bones in the process. But if your job is making you miserable, that’s almost half your waking life and two-thirds of your weekday pounding away at your soul.
So at the very least, you have to find a job that doesn’t make you wake up every morning going “Oh God, not again.” It doesn’t have to be your life’s purpose, it doesn’t have to fill your heart with joy, but at the very least, it has to be something you can just do without sinking into misery…