Work is Stupid

It is time for me to pay up one half of my bargain that comes with whoring myself out for the sake of juvenile diabetes research. A lovely lady who shall remain unnamed {Because, well, you'll find out shortly.} was the sole donor of a cool hundred bones. Which was way more than I was expecting. Also, you have just a bit over a week to enter Vince Wilfork's raffle to win some Patriots tickets as well as a barbeque. And who doesn't love a barbeque?

Without further ado, here's the guest post. Do not be intimidated by the lack of Y chromosome, big words, logical thought process and presence of maths. Enjoy.

Yeah, I said it! Work is totally stupid. Not only is it stupid, but the entire concept of working in general is absurdly mind boggling. Here’s Pulitzer Prize Winner Ellen Goodman to explain this a bit more eloquently.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

Bam! There you have it -- the epitome of absurdity. What’s worse is that we spend half our lives repeating this vicious cycle, setting the same bass-ackwards example that previous generations did before us.

You’ll have to forgive my rather jaded demeanor. Perhaps I’m having trouble transitioning from the college-induced Hedonistic lifestyle that seemed to suit me so well to the fun-sucking, mind-squandering, humanity-deficient, politically-charged wasteland that is “Corporate America.” It’s a bitch!

Nonetheless, I’m not completely oblivious to the fact that, were I to create a movement that resulted in much of the population opting to wander aimlessly through life like nomads rather than get a job, the earth, if not the entire Milky Way, would certainly implode. Employment is necessary to sustaining a workable society. Without employees how would I get my Nachos Bell Grande and a cab ride home from the bar? What’s even worse is I wouldn’t have a bar to stumble from or a home to stumble to. So yeah, I get it. Work is necessary. What gets me isn’t the idea of doing something productive to benefit society. It’s the fact that work isn’t supplemental to a happy life, instead its life-consuming nature forces people to sacrifice a greater portion of themselves than I’m prepared to part with. Quite the conundrum.

Let’s do the math. Eight hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year (I subtracted four weeks for vacations, sick leave, etc.) for 40 years equals approximately 65,600 hours of your life spent working.

If you’re going to spend 65,600 hours of your time doing something, you should love it. Right? Then again, I can’t think of a single thing that I love (outside of sleeping) that I would be willing to do with such frequency. I mean, who wants to take something they truly enjoy and twist it, exhaust it, extort it until the enjoyment has completely faded?

The older I get, the less I feel I understand about life. But one thing I know is true--work is stupid.

This post further reaffirms my quest to go through life without having anything resembling a 'normal job'.