Working in General SUCKS!

It’s 3:00pm and do you know what that means? It means I have mentally checked out, although I am still here in body. My brain has stopped working, even though I am still at work. Why are we forced to work suck long hours anyway? I don’t think my boss is some kind of slave driver, but I do think that an 8-9 hour work day is some form of cruel and unjust punishment. No one actually stays productive through that whole time. In fact, I get less motivated to even try to stay productive the more hours I spend at a job.

I think I have memorized the sound of productive vs. unproductive key strokes on everyone’s computer now. The faster we type, the less worried about mistakes we are and that means internet social networking is afoot. Around this time, I tend to see more earphones and keyboard finger flurries than earlier in the day. I’m not too sure why we aren’t simply made to work 6 hours, why has 8 become the norm?

I would be willing to bet that businesses would find themselves more productive if we were simply working less hours. When something feels like a torture that is perhaps because it is. There is little question that this mode of work is unnatural, cubicle feeders and offices, solo desks. Still this is the way most of us work. I think we all dream, when we are young, of working in a different way. Children never fantasize about being a desk jockey for a company that they questionably care about. They dream of doing something engaging and fun that they are passionate about. As an adult, you get to take the dream and try to slot it into reality – a.k.a. – taking that dream and shoving it.

Of course I am simply not the most mature adult so I am still following my dream. It has been altered, I can’t be empress of the world, but I can try to find something that doesn’t suck my soul away through my asshole (insert image here of dirty withered soul after years of working feeder job).

When it really comes down to it I don’t think I want to work at all. I do it because I must. I need money to survive life, it trying to kill us after all. I need something to do each day so I don’t become overtly hedonistic and hasten my own death. There also a vague sense of needing purpose, but a job rarely fulfils this. For a select few it may, but most of don’t feel that we are saving or contributing to the world through toiling at retail or paperwork. We know better.

I think I need to work though. Leisure, even with an enormous budget, would eventually weigh on me. I might run out of things I wanted to do or see. A job provides that regimentation though it usually feels more like being in an army than a welcome diversion. I think we need the structure. Perhaps that is why the economy exists.

At any rate, tomorrow is the final day of my magazine internship. I will be sad to leave, but also relieved at having a break from the office routine. I would love to stay here, in Thailand, at this job for a long time. I love it in comparison to other jobs that I could do. In comparison to being empress of the world, I suppose it may be a distant second, but this is the best I have done at maintaining interest in a position since I began working, oh too long ago.