Life Is Easy. We Make It Hard.

Here I am writing my (almost) daily reflection. I feel like I have a weight on my shoulders. I have responsibilities that seem like burdens. Often this feeling is clustered around my job – or not having a job – or looking for a new job.

The weight sometimes feels unbearable, that the only option is to retire and take a new lower stress career. I fantasize about driving a delivery truck. I know there would be stress involved but I would at least be on my feet.

At various points in my life, I've felt like I was in the wrong career, the wrong company, or just unhappy with the work I had to do during the day. But these were always temporary feelings. I mostly enjoyed being a software developer, aside from the usual issues with management, restructurings, and so on that are always attendant to this kind of work.

Then in 2020, work became a high-stress 24/7 affair. Suddenly it was not good enough to just put in your 9-5 hours and go home to your friends, hobbies, family, and whatever else you want to do with your day.

Since 2020 I've had many on-call duties on projects, which often makes it feel like I'm always at work. Work never goes away, even on the weekends and holidays. To "catch up" I sometimes had to work on the weekend. My time-off was not protected or valued by the company.

Then because I was tired and worried about work responsibilities, I could not even enjoy the limited free time with friends or family. I was always cranky, worried, or distracted. I was not in any kind of mood to be a friend or family member. In short, I failed to create a boundary between my personal life and work responsibilities.

Over time, this leads to burnout, which is exactly what happened to me.

While I could blame my company and the executives who failed to fund the project and support their staff through competent planning and management policies, I think there is some responsibility for me to take as well.

Working hard is seen as a good thing. And it is. Work that is valued and rewarded is very important to human happiness. I don't think we are really meant to sit around playing video games every day.

But in the modern world, nobody's work is really that important. Most of our jobs are not critical to keep society running. They only feel important because there is someone else whose job depends on us doing our part. And that person's job is probably also not very important, except that there is someone they report to who is yelling at them to go faster.

In the modern world, most of us are not living in a desperate situation where our work is critical to our survival. Even if we are living paycheck to paycheck, we likely have some discretionary spending, or family we could live with in an emergency. Saving our job isn't literally going to save our life.

So almost nobody should ever take work so seriously. It is not a life-or-death situation.

The other reason that people take work so seriously – despite all evidence pointing to our jobs being almost 100% unimportant – is that in America there is a common belief that your job gives you a purpose.

On the one hand this seems reasonable. Of course, we want to be useful. It is important for society to put people to work doing useful things.

But most of our jobs are not useful in 2024. We know this now for certain because during the pandemic we designated workers who have an important job: essential workers.

If your job does not fall under the essential worker banner, by definition, your job is non-essential. Or in other words, your job does not matter.

Most jobs are non-essential. The majority of the important work has been automated or sent overseas to countries with lower labor costs. What cannot be automated is physical work such as driving a truck, responding to 911 calls, fighting fires, providing medical care, and so on.

So when your boss is demanding that you work on the weekend or take an on-call responsibility that will require you to wake up randomly at 2am, you can be sure that it is only because your boss (or his boss) is greedy and incompetent and doesn't want to hire more staff. Instead of paying for two workers to work on your project, each working at a normal 9-5 with a nice 45 minute lunch break, your boss has decided to instead have you do the work of two or more people, for the same pay. More than likely, someone along the chain of command is pocketing that money himself, and expecting you to pick up the slack.

I found myself in this situation and I quit. But it took me a few months to get to the point of quitting. I felt ashamed for being unable to keep up with the demands placed on me by a callous and unaccountable management structure. But I realize now that this shame was misdirected.

In reality, it was the management that let me down, not the other way around. Management's job is to support staff to ensure they have what they need to complete their work. I asked for support and was told to go suck an egg. So from what I can tell, I did everything right in this situation and was punished at random.

I realize, too, that it is possible to be a good worker – someone who is honest, earnest, and who tries to do what is right – and still be punished by the caprices of management.

We are the exact same people before and after losing our jobs. Whether we lose our jobs from a layoff, fired for performance, or being forced to resign due to unmanageable workloads (as I was), our employment status is not a reflection of our value as human beings or the quality of our character.

If we lose our jobs, we do not automatically become immoral, lazy, pathetic, stupid people who must hide in shame.

I am starting to feel that this attitude of taking work seriously, though overall a positive, makes it very easy for corporate management to exploit workers. If workers feel – as I did – that they must work to prove their moral fiber, then workers will be far less likely to demand a raise or leave to work for a competitor.

In short, the main source of stress in my life is completely voluntary. I did not need to take work seriously. It could be just a means to an end. But I have been conditioned – as many of us have – to feel that my career is the most important thing about me.

This is simply not true. Even when it comes to accomplishments, I think my deeds outside of my career are far more indicative of my character. I am more proud of these accomplishments than I am of any crappy software project I have done at work.

I am proud of the man I have become. I am proud of my health and fitness level, which took me about 10 years of hard work to achieve.

I'm proud of my intellect and glad for all the reading I have done in my life. I've given myself a well-rounded education in the world and a healthy curiosity for learning new things.

I like to think I am a good friend, partner, and pet care-taker.

Life is not so hard. We make life hard through the way we think about things.

At the end of the day, work is a tiny part of who I am – and it is not the most important part of me by a long shot!