Read: you’re lucky to have a job. It is not a question; it is a challenge meant to pacify your restlessness.

I am, I don’t deny it: I am lucky to have a job. This soothing banality does, however, hide a sad and infinitely damaging lie. I will pose a question: do you like your job?

You will spend about one whole third of your life working i.e. doing something for money to live. To buy food, to pay rent, to survive. I would venture a guess that very few people in this world enjoy their work. We have ‘evolved’ so far that we no longer have to hunt and gather to survive. Nor do we necessarily have to tend crops year in year out. No, now we are expected to sit in front of bright screens manipulating information for entities greater, in size and worth, than we, as individuals, will ever be.

Some people (certain professional rugby players come to mind) are very happy to tend farms to make a living, and I respect these people enormously. They know what exactly it is they want to do and they are very happy to do it. Their professional sporting careers seem more an interlude – an obligation to province and country – than a career. When age tells and the caps have accumulated, they return to the earth and to their happiness.

Very few of us seize this opportunity. Most often, we simply fall into a position wherein we earn enough money to live, or to exist only. We do not like what we do; there is no enjoyment in it. Perhaps in the beginning there is motivation and idealism, but it soon becomes lost in the mire of spreadsheets, memos and meetings about meetings. Where there is no passion there is only tedium. This is as true for an office job as for any other; manual labourers, craftsmen, lawyers and teachers are all in the same boat here.

I put it to you that this is not how things should be. I do not believe that we must hunt and gather or sit and Excel in order to live. I do not mean Excel as in ‘to do extremely well’, but refer rather to the manipulation of mind-numbing spreadsheets; yes, I’m attempting to coin a new verb. Example: ‘I’m Excelling the shit out of this information, Ted.’ For my money, Excel causes more depression than reading Waiting for Godot while listening to Nirvana in a dark room (not to be recommended).

Never-ending mindless tasks are the surest fountains of unhappiness.

Few people do what they want to do. There are traps we fall into which make us think that we want a job that pays well, and so we learn whatever skills will make us the most money. IT, engineering, insurance; our ancestors are laughing at us. From their warm and happy campfires they laugh at our poor posture and straining eyes.

What do you do? Did your five year old self want to do that? Your ten year old self? Probably not. But look, you were five and ten, and not to blame you for your lack of focus. Very few people truly want to or indeed end up becoming astronauts, cowboys or ballerinas.

But still, what says your inner voice now? (I will not call it your inner ‘child’, for it is certainly not that. It is wiser than you or I, in all our pubescent development, will ever be). Children: perhaps they are our future.

What you are reading right now is my stab at breaking out of this trap, at breaking out of the sickening circle of debt and consumerism.

Writing.

That is what I want to do. I want to study and research and read and write. I want to do a PhD in literature, but I do not want to deal, day in day out, with mindless technical documents while I work – and save – towards this goal.

Writing: that is why I have started this blog and why I will continue it.

Tell me, what do you want to do with yourself?