What's Your Job IRL?

“A miss is as good as a mile.” My grandfather’s stern affirmation in answer to all protest he received while weaving his Oldsmobile between lanes of oncoming traffic.

Tough sentence, seriously.

 

Oops

 

A challenge, really. If you are privileged enough to derive a great deal of pleasure from your work then you are simply not taking on enough of it.

 

I'm a social worker. f**k off. Did about 20 years of retail as well, so been there did that.

 

I thought you were a Wilson.

 

You gotta do better than that, ain't you literati?

 

I’m a YEEEEGZ, silly. I shouldn’t have mused on a moral argument. Morality bores the shit out of me anyway. My bad, yo. I’ve only been working in retail a few years. I have had many, many jobs and none of them have defined me. Work has always been just work for me. Any time real feelings got involved it became a very dangerous enterprise.

20 years of retail, my god. You poor f**k.

 

Doesn't define you? Waking nightmare just end suddenly?

 

Do you ever write just so you can see colors?

 

Awkward redirect there. But shame on me for giving it away rent free.

 

Unexpected hubris. Honestly surprising. No offense intended, I enjoy writing despite how meaningless it is. Nihilism is boring too. f**k me, I’ll never be satisfied. Good to know you.

 

Peace

 

I believe our contradictions are the only things keeping us interesting. We can be dynamic and it’s okay. Keep doing pleasurable work out there, Wilson.

We may be moving through a waking nightmare but let us not let it define us. Most of us still get off when the sun goes down. Yeehaw.

 

I haven't dealt with intellectuals in a while. I am grateful. I love discourse. Most of my recent experience has been with working-class people.

I have made the definitive blunder of mistaking subjective experiences as objective, forgive me. Pleasure is not an objective experience, true. While some may garner a great deal of pleasure from having their genitals mutilated in a vice, that is presently not my bag. Unfortunately I am also living with the knowledge that time may very well reveal genital mutilation to be pleasurable to me in the future. It's all meaningless.

However, reflecting in the present moment, work for me has always been an arduous means to an end. In pondering of my past work which I believed at the time was pleasurable, deeper deliberation unveiled an odd and laborious psychosis. Nothing more. The thought of having to relive those experiences now does not seem pleasurable in the slightest though I am humbled to have lived them.

If you derive a great deal of pleasure from your work then you are simply not taking on enough of it. If you disagree with this I cannot help but think you are some perverse slack-jaw. Work never ends and there's always more of it to do. Presently, I do not find the idea of never-ending tasks pleasurable. This is a forum predominately dedicated to pleasure-seeking. Is Dionysus not alive and well here? It is confusing to me why a statement denouncing inherent pleasure in work would be lambasted. I can understand why it is not a popular perspective, for government work especially. But not for those in the dirt working hard to survive.

f**k work, man.

Work can big suck my butt.

 

In short: you need to relax and enjoy a good drink.

Do that, play some music and enjoy the weekend.

 

I have work in four hours.

 

Then make a good coffee and enjoy.

That is what I am doing now. Life is short, enjoy the smaller pleasures like a fresh ground coffee from a French press.

 

Coffee is love coffee is life. I recently discovered french brand of decaffeinated espressos that taste simply so f'ing good and permit me to love a cup of coffee also in the later evening

Off topic though. Personally still an IT wage slave, but I always think it could be much worse, right?

 

Recommendation: search instagram for customerservicewolf. Set in a book shop, this cartoon series describes how different retail life could be if the person behind the counter was an apex predator.

Working in a shop, as a school-holidays youngster, was actually my favourite job. Selling everything from tea and coffee to swimwear.

Fond of beautiful fabrics, and having adopted India as home, a sari shop would be my dream. But my wife says I wouldn't make any money because I'd give the stock away. Yes, I'd love the beautiful customers as well.

On the whole, though, I never really wanted to work, and I certainly did not want the 24-hour work of self-employment in any field. Happy to be retired. Lazy and loving it. Wish I'd invested more in the pension, but hey, I get by.

 

@YEEEEGZ ,You seem like an intelligent guy.

I should have not been posting last night - it had a been a long day. A client of mine had a heart attack and is attached to tubes and monitors with the prospect of meaningful recovery meager. I have worked closely with him for the past five years and he had entered a new stage of recovery, telling me three days ago how precious life is. A little older than me, he had spent about 30 years homeless, drifting from shelter to boarding room to group home probably dozens of times.


What I get from the work is too complicated to be described as ‘pleasure,’ but I work hard as hell and am always on the verge of being overwhelmed by the Kafkaesque bureaucratic demands typical of non-profit mental health. For example, one of the ways my “success” is measured is by the administration of a mandated questionnaire that includes items such as “I am able to do things as well as most other people” and “How much money do you have for fun.” My clients are ex-chronically homeless with severe cases of schizophrenia. Most of them get less than $800 a month and are forbidden by law to save more than a couple of grand. Still, the job is about as existentially meaningful as it gets and I pour myself into it.

You know, I had a lot of good times doing retail. I worked at a Borders for a few years and that was fun. Easy to stagnate there though and I made the mistake of overstaying. There’s a limit to what you can learn about yourself. But to even think in terms of growth and learning presumes an amount of privilege that seems increasingly out of reach especially this year. You gotta play the hand your dealt with as ferociously as possible.

SBAF is a great place, a neighborhood bar in the best way. I am lucky to be able to come here and be able to mostly forget the problems of the day. When I first joined, it was hubris that led me to think, “I use headphones and I have good taste in music. I will be able to contribute a lot.” Well, it turns out that listening to equipment, accurately identifying what is being heard, and then conveying that in an entertaining and useful way, is very difficult. I don't have the self-discipline for it. I also made the mistake of clumsily pontificating about politics. So nowadays, I got my HD650, a Valhalla 2 at work to ease the paperwork burden and Modi/ Magni at home. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for the Bukowski vibe, you know.

My client likes this song a lot, so I played him it yesterday. The idealistic part of me likes to think he heard it.