What good is a bag of money?
If someone offered to give you a million dollars a day and tell you that you only had one hour a day to enjoy it, would you go for it? It seems ludicrous to me. What is the point in having all of that money if you have no time to enjoy it? What’s even crazier is that this is how 90% of our society works. People like me get up at 6:00 in the morning, commute for two hours, work 8 hours straight then spend another two hours commuting home. By the time we are done eating dinner we only have an hour or two before we have to (try) to go to sleep and get up again to repeat. And as in the case tonight, if we try for 3 hours unsuccessfully to sleep, we get even more pissed off because we realize that what little free time we had is now gone and will never return. And we will still be dead tired all day tomorrow.
As you all know I recently bought a 37” monitor/HDTV which I love. It might as well be a 10” or a 72”, it wouldn’t matter since I don’t actually have time to USE it anymore. I have a Wii sitting here next to me with a nice looking modchip on top of it just begging to be installed and reviewed and I just don’t have the time or the energy. I haven’t even played the system normally yet. What kind of a life is this? I don’t even have time to even THINK about finding a girlfriend, let alone actually spending time with her. How do people ever get married nowadays?
I can see why they call this the daily grind. Get up work, sleep, repeat. The seasons become nothing more than a measure of how much sweat forms on your back as you walk to work from the train station. Before you know it, your 50 and balding, have a giant house that you don’t get to spend any time in and you wonder “where the hell did my life go?”
It wouldn’t even be as bad if you didn’t have to put effort into keeping up the façade all day. “How do you feel?” “I’m great, how about you?” “How do you like working here?” “It’s really awesome, I love it.” Every time I give one of these replies, it makes me hurl inside. But people aren’t asking because they care about you. They ask because it’s the modern slightly more personal version of “Nice weather today huh?” Give the people what they expect to hear. It keeps things simple and friendly, and one will be liked more. And I can do it. Go all day pretending like nothing is wrong and I’m doing swell, but unfortunately my body cannot. It desires to sleep past 6:00, yet stubbornly won’t let me go to sleep earlier than 1:00. The result is that today my boss told me that if I fall asleep in a meeting again, I am fired. But I can’t control that. I can’t tell my body that everything is great like the façade. It knows better. Due to the nature of the meetings I can’t walk around to wake up and I’m developing an immunity to caffeine. I told him about my 4 hour commute. His answer “Welcome to the working world.” Fuck the working world.
So why don’t I just quit? Why don’t I just end the grind, take what I’ve earned and actually enjoy my summer. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Ever since I was little, I wanted to work for the corporations. I saw how many of them step on the consumer (not the one I work for though, I would never work for one of them), and figured that if you could join their ranks, it would be awesome. I saw the money that people make at them, and was entranced by it. As a result I worked my ass off since middle school. Get the good grades so you can get into the best college. Work your ass off in college so that you might get the notice of a corporation, then grind till your dying. Was this what all that effort was for? High school and college dropouts have more fun than this. Still, I can’t bring myself to just throw it all away. This internship is a very important stepping stone in a potential future. If I want to work for any corporation, I must complete this internship successfully. I now know that I don’t, but I may not have a choice. It sucks that people with a plethora of well developed, in-demand skills can’t just work 25 hours a so a week and make ends meet. I will find a way. I must.
Or maybe I just had a really, really bad day, that as of 1:01 AM, won’t end.
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