I'm so ready to retire. I know, Aren't we all? Just wanna give up on the whole 7 til 3 thing. But I've got another 30 years to go before I reach that point. That's just it. There's no break in this tedium for another 30 years. I like my job well enough. I could do a lot worse and I have. If I have to work it might as well be here. But I'd rather not even be here.
Remember school? Grade school, high school, college? We could struggle through semester after semester largely because we always knew that the semester would end. There was hope. Not sometime in the distant future, either. The semester would end sometime in a time period we could visualize. We'd get several weeks off around year end and a few months off in the summer. It was something to look forward to. It was a point where all the work and projects would end. Pass or fail it would be over. Sure you'd have to jump back in soon, but you'd get time to recover and then there'd be something new. Same coworkers but a new boss with different work.
We don't get that anymore. Sure, we take the occasional week off for vacation but it's not nearly the same. We go back in to the same people and the same projects. There's no end in sight except for the oh so distant promise of retirement once you live the span of your life over again except with mortgage payments this time.
What do we have to look forward to now? Unemployment.
When my friends get fired or quit their jobs we congratulate them. They finally have some real time off. Weeks or more likely months where they finally get to do all those things they've been wanting to do. They can catch up on their reading, learn a new programming language, work on that script they've had rattling around in their head. The constant beat down of work lifts long enough to give you the energy to do that thing you've been wanting to do. Sure, there's that job hunt stuff, too, but that's only a minor part in their new life and when they get that job it still won't be that old job.
You know it's been five and a half years since I've been unemployed? Think of that. Think of a semester of school that lasts 286 weeks instead of 18.
Some time it'll end and I'll get that break. Then I'll take three months off and land another job. I could quit and do it now but it's a safe bet that the new workplace would be worse and the pay would be less. I really do have it good here. I just need a sabbatical. Being stuck at home with a cold doesn't count.
1 comment:
Good observations. One of the nice things about school other than the reachable time limits was the range of things we did - it wasn't just the same thing over and over again but a variety of subjects. Sure, we may have hated some of them (gym), but at least we were challenged in several different ways.
In college, we had that as well, and one reason I took a lot of Spanish (other than all the Paraguayan hotties) was to give my brain a rest from the math, physics, and programming. That's what balloon twisting and magic does for me now - it gives me another income but works a different part of my brain.
Two friends of mine and I tried to start up a freelance website/computer maintenance business a few years ago, but I started to get burned out doing the same thing for it that I did for my normal job. The hardware guy felt it as well since that's his normal job (he does a lot of work building props for plays and making furniture during his downtime). The only one who wasn't getting burned out was the third guy, but that's because while a solid programmer, he had never advanced that far with database-website programming and was excited to be learning it from me.
I guess balloon twisting/magic is my Spanish class (college) or band class (high school).
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