Am I doing the right thing? (1/7)
Are you? Often enough? Successfully? Too much?!
In this series of blog posts, I will discuss the complications of defining yourself, measuring your life progress in the age of technology and working out just how much you matter at all—reaching what I hope you’ll see as a number of positive, reassuring conclusions. Please join me over the coming weeks in feeling better about everything!!
(Okay, I don’t know that it ties together as neatly as that, but I hope you enjoy it anyway!)
Since I try to write fiction as often as possible, the blog posts get relegated to the bottom of my priorities. So, if I ever have anything blog-worthy to write, it tends to spill out of me with a sense of urgency. I had no idea, for one, that it would be seven parts?!
Oh well. It’s been clogging my creative pipe (so to speak ahaha), preventing any new fiction from coming out and simply must be expelled from my head before anything new will be made. My subconscious has used my hands to organise my current thoughts on life, and I’m the better for it. Now you’re reading it, and maybe it’ll help you too!
Well, that represents my best self using his abilities to do good in the way he knows how. Which is also why I want the best for you too. Because your best makes the world better!
In my fourth year of process engineering at university, we had a group project to design a plant that would extract the sugar from sugar beets—so, uh, you don’t have to.
We worked as a team of five or so folk, dividing up the tasks at the beginning.
I got done two weeks early. So I stayed home and played videogames.
This kind of behaviour seems sacrilege in today’s social media-facilitated global hyperproductive world. Yet, evidently I haven’t yet been found dead in a ditch. Did I do something terribly wrong?!
During my two weeks of Half Life 2, Trackmania and F.E.A.R. (the least—too scary!), many other people pulled all-nighters and worked up until the last minute of the deadline. They showered in the university gym, drank close-to-lethal quantities of Red Bull and passed out under their computers when the sun came up again. Maybe they had to, in which case, fair play to them and congrats for getting through it—but the more likely cause/epidemic was “work theatre.”
Many people—most, I’d argue—only seem to put loads of hours into something, while accomplishing very little. I know because they’d say to me, “I’ve been here since five a.m. this morning!” while I was nominated the person that they wanted to distract them from doing anything, then fifteen minutes later they’d rotate onto someone else, and it’s all they’d been doing since five a.m.
This is worse for all involved. The pretenders pointlessly steal themselves from friends, family and fun while making less lazy people feel lazier than them by lying about how much work they’re doing. Sending harder workers into a burnout cycle.
I’m grateful that I got to see this example. It was one of the few moments in life when this principle was transparent enough that I could make sense out of it, and learn from it. The lesson is one that I seem to forget when I take up new skills or enter different environments, but I’d bet it’s the same everywhere. Timeless, even.
Most people don’t have their shit together. They’re not doing half as much as they pretend to, and if they have any sense, they’re sure as hell not having fun pretending to do it. So shove that in your highly competitive industries!
Next time I’ll talk about what happens when you take this “work theatre” principle from my example and apply it to the real world.
Preview: it gets way more complicated!
