Although I feel uninspired, I feel compelled to write in this blog. After all, it has been a few days and I want to write in this blog often so that strangers and friends will eventually become regular readers. I like to think someone out there is interested in what I think and write. It's a part of my emotional needs to be wanted and genuinely cared about... yet I don't know how genuine a reader is. I would just like to think that, as a reader, he or she will care about the writer, as I do.
Having said all of this (unnecessary stuff), something has been plaguing my thoughts about the "grown-up," or business world. It has been on my mind ever since I started playing dress-up not for myself or because I felt like looking nice, but for an institution (thank you, Education Department). Do we all have to play that game? It's the game we play in order, we claim, to get success in the business world. My father, for example, is a good example. He started with night shifts at a well-known southern lumber company. He worked in the mills and did the dirty work and the shitty hours. He also worked in the mills before they had certain safety regulations (which explains his early partial hearing-loss and why, up until three years ago or so, my mother had to translate what I said to him because I was so timid and soft-spoken). If I had to guess, he was in this early stage for about five to six years. He was then in a good place for the company to move him and my mother around to a couple of different places. This perhaps happened three times within four to five years. Finally, my father worked his way up the corporate ladder all the way to a office on the whatever-th floor in a building located in Downtown Atlanta. We were able to move to some average, middle-class suburb and into a (pardon my gasp) two-story house with a big foyer, a basement, and a huge master bathroom.
Warning! Tangent: Two-story houses are nice and grand and all, but eventually you will grow old and weary of climbing stairs all the time and long for those one-story houses you lived in when you were young and not so wealthy. Then you'll retire and probably decide to move to a one-story house near the beach somewhere. If you had thought about it, you could have moved into your one-story beach dream house twenty years ago when houses near the beach weren't so damn expensive.
Did my father end up doing what he loved, or was he just a man that happened to be good at his job? A man who, after some twenty-five years of working for a certain lumber company, got thrown away as though he were some sort of Willy Loman? (he's not) Luckily, after the certain lumber company tossed him and decided my father's days as a juicy orange were spent, he went on to find another job at another southern lumber company (which relocated us to Statesboro, and my personal hell for a few years).
I appreciate my father doing all of this, playing the game, because he has given our family so much security. I have never really had to worry about where my next meal was coming from, new clothes for school, or getting a car when I turned sixteen... or a college education. I appreciate him doing all of this, but I always wonder if he is appreciative of what he has done with himself. Did the game satisfy him, or was it all just for the end result (and it hasn't ended yet, so I wonder, when it does come to the end...)?
Will it satisfy me?
I need to find a career where you get hired and are appreciated for what you do and not how you dress or how easily you are pushed around by the company. A career I do because I love it, not because I need it to satisfy some sort of end result. Like that'll happen. Any ideas?
Finally... a customer! Back to work.
3 comments:
I was just having such a conversation today. I ran with the idea that perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world who are aware of The Game and realize it sucks.
The first come close to refusing to play it. They move from one dead-end job to the next. They may move to bigger and better, more exciting cities or countries, but in the end, they are still in dead-end service jobs. They may go so far as to believe they are experiencing and living some higher, abstract philosophy that we (the other Game Players) can't understand. But in the end, whatever enlightenment they may have gained has not helped them beat The Game.
The second group know how The Game is played... and they know how to beat it. They know they have to stack the odds in their own favor, whether through education or some other means. They know The Game is bullshit, but gain what experience they need from societal institutions in order to triumph over it. In the end, they are opposite from the first group of people in that they don't need the job half as much as the job needs them.
Does this make any sense?
Yes, it makes sense. I just don't want to spend my life in a career that I do not find fulfilling. If I find a career that I am happy with, I will play The Game. I do not want to find something in which I so happen to excel and do it just because it is a safe bet; I want something I am good at doing and happy doing therefore, hopefully, beating out the feelings I have about The Game.
I think the feelings I have about The Game come from a fear of growing up and responsibility. Peter Pan and all that, I guess.
We discussed that as well - beating the system by doing something you love. And perhaps those who love moving from one dead-end job to the next are indeed beating the system.
Peter Pan was happy because he lacked responsibility. You could argue he was afraid of it as well. He let fear rule his life. So in essence, Peter Pan was happy because he was afraid. That's one way of looking at Peter Pan... I guess.
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