Note: This rant is targeted more at teenagers rather than adults. “Work” refers to arbitrary unpaid projects instead of paid jobs that people need to sustain a living.

I’m so tired of working and thinking about work. I ask myself constantly whether I am doing enough. Am I lazy for thinking that the eight-hour workday sounds dreadful?

How is it even possible that someone can work productively for eight hours? If it’s unsustainable, as I have suspected, then why is it the corporate norm?

There is a difference between coming to work and working.

If this fact is so common, why aren’t work schedules more tailored towards increasing productivity per unit of time, instead of having long hours of unproductive time?

Perhaps my sentiments stem from the fact that I am still a hormonal 17-year-old, ignorant of the proper ways of life.

Still, my resentment remains. I would hate to be forced to work for eight hours.

I dread the idea of not using my time as effectively as possible.

. . .

Screw Self-Help Gurus

In my opinion, resting and clearing our heads from stimulation has its clear benefits.

Someone working in the creative industry certainly needs ample time to reflect and let the ideas arrive — hence the notion of divine intervention for artists back in the day.

Creative ideas are unpredictable and elusive, as if you have grasped a fairy in your palm, only to have it disappear out of nowhere, and sometimes emerge when least expected.

This fairy, however, does not appear when there is plenty of noise and distractions around.

I wonder whether I am the only one who is highly guarded with her time. There are some parts of the day meant to do work. The rest of the time are specifically for relaxation.

Looking at self-help advice and other people’s schedules makes me very insecure about my own. I feel like perhaps my stubbornness to defend my time is just self-denial — the failure to confront the possibility that I am a lazy twat.

Through numerous trial and error, I discover that I absolutely can’t live the lifestyle productivity gods recommend. The advice I heard so far from self-help gurus include but aren’t limited to:

• Make work the default. If you have spare time, the automatic thing to do is tackle productive activities.
• Force yourself to abide by a set schedule, regardless of how you feel at that moment.
• Refer to your to-do list as if it were your bible.

I disagree with a lot of the things they say, but for the purposes of this article I will be addressing the three most common suggestions above.

Firstly, if you have spare time, the first thing you should do is not work.

Instead, immerse in the free time. Do not distract yourself, regardless of how tempting it is to go on Instagram. Enjoy the silence and inaction as it is. You’d be surprised at how many creative ideas and insights you can derive out of patiently waiting in a line without your phone.

Secondly, sitting at a desk in a set schedule could only work with non-creative activities. It works for studying for school or doing purely analytical tasks.

With creative tasks, such as writing, I found that the words can only flow depending on the level of creative juices in your brain — for lack of a better analogy.

Once you have written a certain amount, and the creative juices run out, the words that come out are just fluff — dry, vanilla, overly straightforward, non-substantial.

Sure, first drafts are always awful. But we need to strike a balance between being content with writing terrible stuff in need of heavy editing and super horrible stuff in need of deleting — therefore should not be written.

Finally, referring to the to-do list as a bible worked for some time. The machine stopped, however, after I felt like its slave. I felt terribly awful when I failed to accomplish it.

But when I reduced the workload for the day, I am left with ruminations such as whether the bullet points were too little and whether other people fit in more in theirs.

I loathe this ever-looming pressure to work. It’s almost as if we were back in primary school with tiger parents hounding our backs, sending us to three hours of after-school tuition and smacking us with sandals if we don’t study.

Except I’ve never experienced that, and this self-flagellation is in compensation to that. Since no one is disciplining me, I had to discipline myself. That’s a pretty silly motivator!

. . .

Meaningless Work; Hopeless Situation

On the other hand, if we don’t work, that’s just passing off the labor to someone else.

The clothes I wear are made by workers who probably work for 12 hours a day. The same goes for the electronics I use and almost all the things I own in my house. What gives me the right to complain about an eight-hour workday?

People tell me I shouldn’t worry too much because I’m 17. Yet, teenagers and children younger than me are working their asses off not because they choose to but because they are forced to.

I guess hustle culture is also a reaction to the increased awareness of the shitty realities of life in other parts of the world.

People living under first-world conditions feel shitty about their privilege. So, they try to justify their success by working their asses off — while simultaneously knowing their work is non-essential.

Think about it. Whose work is more important? Some kid trying to maintain an Instagram business selling shit only their peers care about, or someone who didn’t attend secondary school in exchange to work in a sweatshop sewing clothes that almost everyone you know wears?

Rates of depression in teenagers living under first-world conditions are ironically higher than teenagers in the third world. This startling statistic is caused by, I suspect, the combination of the meaninglessness of their lives against the hopelessness of doing anything about it.

Starting a revolution still makes sense if you are the victim of the system. But promoting even just a reform feels fraudulent if you’re the beneficiary of the system. Where does that leave us?

Even blocking ourselves from the endless stream of news feels horrendously guilty — and it also doesn’t work. I don’t need to read about bombings or famine in recent times to know that those would always persist. News does not shock us anymore.

We intuitively know that climate change is accelerating and how terrible living conditions are for most people in the world, and how we benefit from it and are unsure what we can do to combat it.

As a defense mechanism, teenagers start organizations to increase awareness regarding these issues. But who is their target market? Their market consists of other teenagers who are doing the same thing!

. . .

Work Is Stupid

I guess the thing that pisses me off is that the pressure to do work is stupid for two reasons.

Firstly, just because you are working your ass off does not mean you’re doing anything.

Sorry, but who gives a fuck about your cause? Is your altruism effective, or is it just a pat in the back? Even worse, it’s most often an excuse to keep doing things that you know perpetuates the problem.

“It’s fine if I keep on buying clothes from H&M and throwing it away the next couple of months. I started this organization informing youths about climate change!”

Secondly, working for plenty of hours doesn’t mean you’re utilizing each hour to the best of your ability.

Lots of people always say they’re busy, but I find them on Instagram and Discord all the time. It’s perfectly fine to spend time socializing, but I’m willing to bet these distractions happen when they’re glazed out of their minds in dealing with their work.

They set long hours to work but end up being distracted. Instead of being distracted, what’s the harm in setting boundaries to rest for real? Because distractions during work do not refill your energy. They take away energy just the same.

A part of your brain still categorizes those activities to work or obstacles to overcome to get to work. Rest is not an obstacle if you don’t make it out to be. Yet, the eight-hour workday is essentially a whole dollop of spending the majority of time overcoming the barriers to work rather than working itself.

. . .

Conclusion

If you’re a pampered boy or girl, work is optional for you. The primary purpose of work genuinely is self-development, and there’s no shame in admitting that.

Following that acknowledgement, don’t beat yourself up when you fail to be productive in a day. Even if you are doing plenty — if you zoom outside yourself a little — you’d realize that you’d have as much of an impact in the world as a 4chan troll.

“But 4chan trolls make the world a worse place, and I make the world a better place!” you might say.

4chan trolls make the world a better place for a small number of people in their community, and they don’t do anything in the real world. Sounds familiar?

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s better to engage and acknowledge the crappiness and hopelessness of the world rather than deluding ourselves into thinking the world cares if we procrastinate for a day.

Nobody cares about what you do. I argue you’d have more of an impact on making the world a better place simply by being a more empathetic person. Make friends, not a network.

Work is stupid unless it’s work beyond yourself. But at this age, what can we do? The majority of work I see is purely self-indulgent. These people would have a better effect on the world simply by being nice to the people they talk to.

Which they don’t, because they’re too busy!

—

This post was previously published on Journal Kita.

***

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