I wish I could totally accept that. I see, between the lines, that because it happens to all of us, we have no right to try to cope with it. The socially approved thing is to feel all the pain, and address only the greater situation (say by looking or bucking for a better job). Anything else is some vague failing of character. No?
BTW, I’ve also been told that “everybody” has ADD “sometimes” by people who don’t believe in it. Are we not allowed to account for degree?
Oddly it is exactly the same fact - that no-one will care if I succeed or fail (or indeed end up begging on the street) - that was a major motivator for me to develop the habit of taking responsibility for myself.
Thing is, my “people don’t care” came with a distinct lack of financial support to go along with it.
Dude, it would be nice if every minute I spent at work were personally fulfilling, and when my federally mandated break time came by a unicorn went down to the soda machine for me and brought me back a Coke. And some people are telling you their work lives are like that just as a reaction to your “People who work for a living are mindless automatons” kick. And maybe they are, I don’t know. I like most of my job, most of the time.
But not everybody gets to be an astronaut. A lot of people get to run the Fryolater. There are jobs that are repetitive, rule-driven, and mindless. There always have been, and they’re essential to the functioning of society most of the time. Just because you have one of those jobs doesn’t make you a soulless automaton either! You can find something satisfying in anything you do. You can smile at the people you serve at McDonald’s and try to make their day a little nicer, if that’s what you’re like. Maybe you like watching the fries cook in the oil - I think that’s kinda cool myself. Maybe you enjoy getting in early to open, because you like having the restaurant to yourself before dawn. And you know what you really like? What really emotionally fulfills you as a person? Coming home to your own house that you bought with your own money, cracking open a beer, scritching the dog, and knowing you did a good job today, whether people like Beware of Doug think your day had any value or not.
People are infuriated by you in this thread because you start off with “those damned personal responsibility people don’t liiiiike me or understaaaand me” and then you go to “why do they fear and loathe me because I ask queeeeestions?” and then “but why can’t work always be about the pure exchange of services? Why does work have to be haaaaard?” and “Saying ‘suck it up’ is so cruuuuuel! What about MY PAIN?”
Haven’t you noticed that we think your pain could be cured by a good dose of paycheck for services rendered? That’s why we bother telling you that.
It sounds like such a cliche, but my dad told me when I got my first job that “90% of life is just showing up.” It’s totally true. Sorry that isn’t very ennobling or personally fulfilling.
Well, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all. You cope with being unhappy the best you can. I don’t really know what you’re saying here. If you suffer from ADD or depression or whatever, you get help, if you can, through medication or therapy. If you’re unhappy, you try and do the things that make you happy.
I think what I’m trying to say is that because we all have things in our life that make us unhappy, we all have to learn to cope with it.
The point is, the payoff is a result of your own personal accomplishments. You can take pride in those accomplishments.
If you accomplish nothing, what can you take pride in? You take money that someone else earned, buy things that someone else made, and let still other people handle any issues that need to be taken care of.
It’s a life of consumption instead of creation, and there’s no pride to be had in being really good at consuming things.
On the contrary, because it happens to all of us, we have a RESPONSIBILITY to try and cope with it. And perhaps not “everyone” has ADD, but absolutely everyone ha issues in life they need to cope with - maybe headaches or backaches, maybe depression, maybe a bad temper, maybe bad breath, maybe a sick mother, maybe four kids at home and no spouse.
The socially approved thing, on the contrary, is not to feel all the pain - or if you feel all the pain, to - as monstro said - not really let the whole world know. You put on your happy face and move through your day, not shitting your issue on the rest of the world. Because, frankly, if everyone shit their issues on the world, we’d all walk through neck deep in shit and no one would ever get anything done.
I’m thinking graduate school was a bad idea on more than one level. Thinking analytically doesn’t mean shit unless you do it in peer-reviewed publications, with plenty of MLA-styled citations and paragraphs organized around topic sentences under a solid thesis.
Here you are, 7 out of 10 of you anyway, revisiting the same simple non-negotiable It’s-Called-Reality-Stupid precepts over and over again, and here I am asking questions you don’t even think need asking, never mind answering.
Is there a Shut-Up-And-Dumb-Down School someplace where they won’t fire you till you complete the course?
Okay, make it real dumb for us so that even this simpelton can understand it. In one sentence, what is your single most significant question?
Yeah…um…doesn’t that sound sort of like (oh just off the top of my head)…
YOU!
But the more people do it, the more okay it is?
Thinking analytically doesn’t mean shit if you can’t back it up. Then you’re just bullshitting. Pretty much all of modern science is based on this idea, and it’s working pretty well so far.
You are complaining that no one’s answering your questions, but you don’t seem to be asking questions in your last few posts. Ask a question! Not a statement with a “no?” attached to the end, an actual question. Dozens of people have posted to tell you the value they find in work, and you’re ignoring or dismissing them. What exactly do you want to know?
I agree with Malthus’s question. If you can explain, in simple questions, what exactly you want to know, there’s a better chance you’ll get it answered.
Well, your young children and aged parents probably aren’t contributing materially as much as you are to the family, community, and society as a whole at this point in their lives, are they?
But producing the next generation and cherishing the previous is a communal as well as personal responsibility.
And the children will and the parents have contributed materially.
And they both contribute non-materially.
And contributions are valued differently by different people or at different times; in the morning I might value the surly but highly efficient sales clerk more than the pleasant street musician, but I feel differently at the end of the day.
monstro is, I believe, using “special” primarily in the sense of “unique.”
And, as a sidebar, “special” doesn’t really mean “here’s someone who wants to do their own thing, or doesn’t want to do our thing, and that is an insult to us.” It means more “here’s someone who wants to be treated differently and better than everyone else, and expects the rest of us to accomodate him.” This is a tangential point, but I mention it because I sense that everyone’s perception of individualism v. egalitarianism is the fundamental disconnect between you and some of the other posters.
Of course and of course.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, so you make your best guess and go with it. There was a fad back in the 90s where high-power corporation lawyers dropped out of the law business and took up dairy farming and some such, because they hated their jobs. I imagine they regretted putting in all that time in law school, because the later payoff wasn’t, to them, worth it. It’s always easier to make that call after you’ve experienced something than before, but at some point everyone who has a career has to choose that career, and there’s always a leap of faith involved. (And, I should point out, some people choose not to have a career. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a choice that inherently involves a leap of faith.)
And a career is a package deal–for some people, the price of admission up front is too much to justify the rewards later. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you’ve calculated that the costs outweigh the benefits. As an example, at one time I wanted to be a university faculty member. I went as far as going on a couple interview visits and receiving one job offer (with a fair chance of getting the second), but I wound up turning it down because I felt the cost of going through the tenure process wasn’t worth the eventual benefit. I’m reasonably certain I could have accomplished it, but it sounded so not-fun that I moved on to other things.
You’re being too absolutist, which admittedly might be my fault for the way I phrased the post you’re replying to. It’s rare that early stages of a career are long and unrelievedly crappy, while later stages are all sunshine and smiles. I would hazard to say that most lawyers prefer practicing to law school, yet learning and understanding how the law is constructed and how it can be practiced can be enjoyable in and of themselves.
But let me simplify things for a second. An analogy: I like to make cookies (I do!). But, thing is, I don’t necessarily like making cookies. I like eating them warm out of the oven, and I like experimenting with the recipe, and mostly (here’s the point) I like thinking, “damn, this here’s a pretty good cookie I made.” I don’t particularly like mixing the dough or washing the dishes or occasionally burning myself on the oven, but doing it gets me cookies, and doing it often gets me good cookies that I’m proud of, and I learn things about cookie dough and baking temperatures and what kind of flour works best. So I guess making cookies builds character, because in a small way you’ve got to work up front to get the reward out back.
Have you ever made cookies?
Basically, dude, you have to find your niche. What ARE you good at? And what about volunteering, as I suggested? It will get you started, give you something to put on your resume, and you find a way to help others out.
Trust me, you’ll find SOMETHING you like in your job. I may not always have liked the all of the customers, or when it got busy, but I loved working at the Science Center because it was a cool place to work, I liked the people I worked with, and I got to do a lot of interesting tasks. (How many people get to read through customer comments at an exhibit and find phrases like, “fillet of penis?”)
Don’t think about a job in terms of, “Oh, this is going to SUCK.” Think of it more as, “Okay, I’m going to go to work today, and hey, I think so and so is there today – I love working with her. And I think I’ll pick up a sandwich from insert-favorite-restaurant on the way home for dinner, that sounds good.” Think of the things you DO like about it. No job is going to be all hunky-dory. Some parts will suck, and other parts will be interesting.
I’m not trying to do deny that work is HARD. But you shouldn’t view it as some horrid torture. It’ll be a give and take.
(Slightly off topic: does anyone know why some job listings on Monster.com have “Company Confidential”? I’d really prefer to know WHERE and WHO I’m applying for.)
Like a lot of folks have said, there are distasteful, irritating, un-fun elements to my job. On the whole though, it makes me very happy to work for a living.
I’m 24, I’ve held a job since I got my drivers license at 14. I didn’t work my first semester of college. I had a lot of fun screwing around but I found myself much happier when I got a job in the spring.
I think many of us are confounded by your questions because we’re happy. I don’t have an issue with the Capitalist system nor the American way of life because both have been good for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exceedingly successful but through hard work and determination I’m slowly achieving my goals and I’m happy.
I don’t think I fully understand your problem or your proposed solution. Are you trying to say that you don’t want anyone to work? You want everyone to be happy at their jobs? You advocate Socialism or Communism? You prefer subsistence living?
I don’t think you’re saying any of the aforementioned but I still feel like I haven’t grasped why you would want to pit the work ethic.
So you went to graduate school without a good understanding of what was required in academia? A common enough mistake. But that is the way academia works. Yeah, another “its called reality” answer. The thing is that you can ask the questions, but the answers are “that is the way that game has been played for over a hundred years, and you are going to be banging your head against the wall to change it.”
But if you want to change the way it works, stop asking the questions and work to change it - which can only be done from the inside. Which means you need to play the game and then you need to expose the game for the charade you believe it to be.
Unless you’ve played the game and won - all the “asking” is going to be seen as one of two things - sour grapes from someone who couldn’t cut it or comments from the uninvolved peanut gallery. And people who have made their life’s work playing the game are not going to respond well to criticism of the game.
(Actually, I suspect the reason the game is played that way is because there are very few positions out in the real world for academics. And the process of publishing is the process academia uses for determining who gets employed. Publishing shows dedication to your field. It shows the ability to withstand criticism. It shows you undertook a methodology of thought that is valued in academia. But since I decided not to play that game, I’m an outside observer to the process and may be completely wrong.)
They usually do that so people who are already working there won’t see the listing and think they’re about to be replaced.
Beware of Doug, the longer I read this thread the more I think that what you really are complaining about is that no matter what you do, others will have certain expectations of you. In school, you have to be peer-reviewed, at jobs, you have to show up and do certain things others want, even if you don’t want to do them, etc. And you seem to be asking why this is so. So let me ask you a question…how would institutions like schools and companies function if there weren’t expectations of how individuals are going to perform?
Yesterday at work we had to do this whole-day team building thing, where we did a fun thing as a team and then had to spend five minutes bullshitting about what the activity taught us that we can take back to work as librarians. I know, tax dollars at work, right? Anyway, at the end, we did that thing where you write your name on an envelope with as many pieces of paper in it as there are other people there, and you pass all the envelopes around and everybody writes something they admire about you, so you get back an envelope with 30 compliments in it. (Most of mine said something about “funny”, which makes me concerned that that might be a code word for “obnoxious” or “annoying”, but whatever.) The one I cared about the most, bar none, was “Helluva good cook!” I’m a librarian, remember - that has nothing to do with my job or anything. It meant a lot to me because it was about a specific thing I did. An accomplishment. I made food and somebody liked it. “Funny” and “original” and “smart” and “wry” are all well and good, but “helluva good cook!” is something I did that I didn’t have to do to survive that somebody thought was awesome. It really made my day.
Doug, I’m starting to detect a pattern here. (Actually, I detected it in your first few posts of the other thread.)
It’s not the work ethic you’re having a problem with. It’s not work you’re having a problem with. It’s not people’s bluntness that you’re having a problem with. Your problem seems to stem directly from your attitude about life. You insist on seeing the dark side of everything, of refusing to even consider the possibility of happiness. People have been giving you some truly awesome advice here, and you seem to want to twist everything everyone says into some form of doom and gloom. It’s to the point where you’re not even listening, you’re just imposing you pessimistic frame over the whole world, then using that as proof that life sucks.
Hey, that’s understandable. We all do that from time to time, and maybe you’re just going through a rough spot at the moment.
But you’re going to have to snap out of it. Whatever it takes, you need to change your frame of reference. I know that if you have a gloomy outlook for a long enough time, it’s tough to transform that onto a better one, but you need to have faith that it’s possible. When you have a more positive outlook, you start to see possibilities, and when you possibilities, you start to see actions that you can take right now.
What I’m not advocating is putting on rose-colored glasses and deluding yourself into thinking that life is all puppies and rainbows inspite of reality. What I’m suggesting is that having a gloomy outlook is not only delusional but extremely destructive. The reality about reality is that it’s pretty awesome sometimes. I invite you to share in it.