The Working Waste Case

It wasn’t that long ago I was putting in  60, 70, sometimes 80- hour workweeks and handling ten projects at once.  And this was before the economy dive-bombed and the labor force had less laborers from which to choose. 

I was miserable.  At the end of long day, I would look at my to-do list and see how many items had been checked off and consider how many items were still pending and realize that regardless of what I got accomplished, that list would not go away.  It would grow in inverse proportion to my efforts.  Like Sisyphus, I felt that no matter how much I pushed the boulder up the hill, I was condemned to watch it roll back down at the end of my day’s efforts, forcing me to start all over again.  Knowing that the next day, my sweat and misery would be rewarded the same way. 

Add to that the fact that I slaved for the Boss from Hell.   That’s a different category altogether.  But like Sisyphus again, the angry gods were constantly looking over my shoulder, berating and demeaning me, and making sure that I knew that my efforts would be entirely in vain. 

Many of us are screaming silently in our cubes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Normally, career coaching professionals would say that it doesn’t have to be this way.  I would ask instead:  does it have to be this way?   I think the real answer is problematic.  I think we all make choices, a series of choices – some logical, some not so logical – but all mistakenly predicated upon the idea that we can anticipate the future.  That destiny is within our grasp.

I would have liked to gaze into a crystal ball and seen the outcomes of the various choices that I have made in life.  Any given series would have led to, perhaps, a degree of happiness that I once experienced, long ago, when I was a child, without a care in the world.  Without the necessity of pushing the boulder up the hill, anticipating that sense of accomplishment that never comes…

But we don’t have the benefit of foresight.  We only have the universal prospect of our fallibility.  And that directs us to our life’s work, which can very well become enslavement. 

It’s necessary that we figure out, early on, how to change.  Not just in our careers, but in life.  We have to be our own life coaches, our own mentors.  And hope that our life’s trajectory takes us to a better place.

Jake desJardins

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under The Nature of Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.