The Meaning of Work

Today I am on the verge of leaving my retail job, a drab pain-in-the-face (from all the fake smiling) and capitalism-in-your-face experience, for good. This will be the fourth or fifth time I have left a job in a year. But before you think I am a shitty employee and not worth hiring again, please hear me out.

The reason I have left so many jobs and might continue to do so is because I don't want to work; at least not retail jobs where all the experience you need is the ability to bring a plaster face everyday. And definitely not jobs where I am not finding any meaning to wake up and show up. We don't always care about the paycheck. I am okay doing a lesser paying job with some iota of fulfillment rather than a higher paying one where its a chore just to clock into the 8-hour shift. But we as workers (the so-called 'essential' ones) don't always have a choice. For example, in my college town in the North West region of the US, the soul-killing retail job I am about to say bye to is the only one with a decent pay for someone with only a high school degree. For alternative opportunities, I have to pack up and relocate, which is what I am thinking of doing.

Why didn't I get a college degree then? Some of you may ask this. It's a good question but also one which I am not going to answer here because it is irrelevant. Think of it this way: if all of us had college degrees you would be walking into supermarkets with robots instead of humans since robots are the only ones willing to make a career in low-level retail jobs with a college degree in the US (or without one, as in most cases).

But then I did mention earlier that I don't want to work. What's with that, right? I don't want to work because working makes me soulless and uncreative. It drains away my sense of looking at life and the world with originality, clarity and empathy. It makes me a robot. Not all kinds of work though. Just the routine ones that happen to employ automatons.

I envy (but I shouldn't) my co-workers who sail through the long shifts acting normal and smiling and doing everyday people things while I look at the watch over and over to track my next breaks and finally the end of the shift. I sometimes feel these are machines with a human coating or humans who have become unwilling cogs in a giant dystopian wheel of life. I cannot fathom why they don't feel like me, how they are so satisfied in this daily existence of being away from family and loved ones even for 8 hours a day. It is possibly the biggest unsolved mystery that needs attention.

You know something isn't right when you're nervous about being home on your days off. When you feel that you may lose your job, your boss may think negatively of your dedication to the job and that you're missing out on making extra money. Your brain has been coded by the job to the point that it feels it is your entire existence, the food that replenishes your body. It makes you feel guilty when you are not working, when you are spending time with family and friends, when you are just sitting around idly. Your job is now part of your bloodstream, a parasite of sorts, toxic to your life and its true meaning.

What can I do then, instead of working, as in how do I make a living? Pay my bills and other expenses? The immediate answer that comes to mind is to go live in an intentional community; like Auroville in South India or make one of your own. There you downgrade to a simpler life, closer to utopia, but not quite. Nevertheless, something more meaningful than your modern-day slogging experience. You can till the land and live off its produce, sell them, start a small business selling tea and snacks and still be able to survive because in an intentional community your money goes into a collective fund that pays for all the members' food and other necessities. It's worth giving up a little control of your finances so you are not constantly worrying about money going in and out of your bank account. Let go of your mundane draining relationships and embrace free-love. Your stagnant 'office-policy-is-king' type 9 to 5 did not afford you the kind of mindset required to experience love and intimacy like you would have had you not been thinking about work and money while copulating with your sex partner. Now you can do that and feel pleasure and the beauty of intercourse coursing through you on a truly different level - the way it was meant to be experienced (in IMAX). Don't mind the french women, who, in a Harris Interactive Poll, said that chocolate is better than sex. That must have been some pricey chocolate bar which you have to work to earn money to buy. Either that, or those women were doing sex wrong the whole time.

That being said, let me touch base on one of the most salient dilemmas facing humankind since the dawn of soul-crushing work: Do we eat to live or live to eat? I don't have a concrete answer for this but living to eat is what most of us are doing today. It is at the center of our materialistic opaque lives and it fuels our hopes for staying alive. And when those reasons are exhausted, which will happen since a life built around the idea of acquiring things and achieving status and recognition is a transitory one, the meaning of surviving to see the next day is extinguished. And no matter what dreams and wishes we are constantly trying to achieve, on an underlying level the trajectory of our lives is quietly heading towards discontent and hopelessness.

Besides workaholics and others who find solace and meaning in their jobs, most of us are working to put food on our table, pay bills and rent, car loan payments etc., everything that keeps one living a comfortable life and in other words just to survive on the face of this planet. If unborn babies knew this in advance of their birth, not many of them would have opted to be born (if they had a choice), some of the adventurous ones would have come anyways and find out they were destined to the cycle of survival, regardless. Where I am going with this is: what's the point of living like this? What alternatives do we have or are we doomed to this mechanical existence forever?

Isn't there a more truer way of living or finding meaning without working or make ends meet without going through the routine of shutting off our brains and lives for eight hours in a workplace and then resume our individual lives only to come back to the same the next day?

I am still pondering this while I realize my funds are running out and that I need to find another stupid job as soon as possible. If you have worked some ideas out, please share them with me through the contact form on this site. Until then, ladies and gentlemen, we are fucked.