We all want a philosophy to make sense of the world. To rationalise our behaviour. Sometimes, we even risk living our philosophy briefly. For the longest time, I have cultivated a very anti-work attitude, and around it, I have my own little philosophy on work. I have always believed work, to be precise, a job, to be some kind of prison. My biggest problem with work though is not the hard work but what it does to our essential character. Who you become as a person has a lot to do with what values, behaviours and temperament your work rewards.
For instance, I observed the cashier at the canteen I eat very closely for almost a week. He and his son take turns in managing the place. They talk exactly in the same way. There is not a moment’s respite in their life. For the whole time, they run the canteen on a war footing, giving directions on multiple verticals at the same time. The son has learnt the trick of the trade from his father — it’s evident. The father is always grouchy — picking up fights with customers and the employees. The son, though, is yet to become as annoying as the father. One must admit that they do run the canteen very efficiently.
Despite the high decibel shouting matches happening around, you get tasty warm, home-cooked food at a cheap rate, with little waiting time. If he didn’t keep a tight watch on everything, didn’t shout at every little slip, didn’t ask the customers to leave as soon as they finished their food, would his business be so successful? Probably not. And, these essentials of his job, have now become a deeply ingrained part of his personality. As if he doesn’t exist outside of his work.
All managerial work requires us to shout, control and keep a check on every little movement of the team. Accounting for time, money and other resources is a manager’s primary work. And, most jobs are managerial in nature, at least the ones that pay a half-decent salary. The more senior you become, the more managerial your work becomes. And that’s the kind of work I fear the most. Managing becomes a part of your personality. And, you tend to lose the softness, your humanity. You refuse to accept flaws and give a long rope to someone who might have made a genuine mistake.
I was barred from entering the kitchen at my parents' place because my father was obsessed with cleanliness and perfectionism that he picked up during his training in the hospitality industry. I love cooking but I mess up the kitchen. That was also the primary reason why I started living by myself despite living in the same city as my parents. Just to be able to cook my own food in my own kitchen without my father’s nagging and supervision. My father’s training in the hospitality industry had made him perfection obsessed, taking a toll on my relationship with him because of my tendency to be more of a clutter-friendly person.
Our work also tends to imprison us in an unnatural routine. I resent the idea of working on a rainy day as it makes me gloomy, on a windy day as it makes me want to sit and read a book in the garden, on a sunny winter morning when I feel like taking a walk, on a dry autumn evening when I feel like going for a ride or listening to sad songs. Seasons pass by, climates change — and you still have to stick to doing the same work routine. One of my bosses in my first job told me he was successful because he hadn’t seen the sunset for five years. He worked late in the night. He didn’t know what evenings looked like. He bragged about it. I dreaded such a prospect. I wanted to quit right then if work meant trading away my evenings for the next five years.
I deeply resonate with poet Charles Bukowski when he says: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Or when Russian philosopher and writer Fyodor Dostoevsky says: “To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.”
The nature of modern work is such that it is a necessary evil. We have to do it for small pleasures while cancelling on the big pleasures in our life. But there is no escape. We have those sabbaticals where we go to the mountains, take up work with an NGO, do some charity work. But we always end up coming back to money and working in big cities with toxic air. These are powerful forces. Then what do we do? Stop fighting the urge to quit constantly and continue to do it till we figure out more sustainable ways of living and thriving. But most importantly, keep a watch on what our job is doing to our being and behaviour while we are at it.
(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found as @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter.)
