Monday, September 14, 2009

A job is a job is a job

"It is not work when you enjoy it so much". "My work is my passion".
"I am lucky you know i am doing something that i love, so it doesnt even feel like work. " Often peope say it. I like my work, it is not a rocket scientist job but hey, i am not one either. it works for my pea-sized brains.

But it is work. As long as it comes along with strings called salary, deadlines, promotion, career it will always be work. It is work because if I dont do it, all these knifes hanging above my head will make my life miserable. I am perfectly capable of feeling miserable even otherwise, dont need an added misery.

8 comments:

  1. exactly

    I laugh internally when someone says those good things about work...

    They don't exist right!

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  2. Nanna potu odaichcha po, thengava! Well said. Work is work is work alright! I love writing. I've had a lot of writing-related jobs that have ALL sucked in their own way (thanks mostly to those swords you talk about).

    I'm only TRULY happy when I'm sitting at my desk (or on the bed or in the garden or at the library), alone with my laptop, and writing tangents all day...no strings attached; no one breathing down my back.

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  3. I agree...appo enna given a choice you'll do it all the time ah? The things that can be enjoyed are those that don't tire you.... :p

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  4. I also know a few people who really love their work and would do it without those strings attached...but they belong to the minority, but they do exist..

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  5. thank god.. atleast 3 of you nodded:)

    Kaushik: either they are lying or they belong to another planet. btw, phd is also work ella? :)

    TM: absolutely.

    GW: "The things that can be enjoyed are those that don't tire you" - i get tired little easily and need to constantly switch:)

    UL: Working with the strings is the question, UL:) That said i am sure there are people(minority) who love deadlines and all the pressure associated with the job.

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  6. Hey. I was picking up the DVD of "The Firm" from the library's hold shelf yesterday (I saw bits and pieces of it on TV last week and realized I'd all but forgotten the movie I'd watched a good 11 years back and wanted to catch it again, so) when my eyes wandered off to sneak li'l peeks at the items stacked next to mine, alpabetized by patron last names. Theere was a cook book, a children's sing-along book, and then..."The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" by Alain de Botton.

    It's a given that I would never have paid it conscious attention but for this rant of yours; so the next thing I know, I'm making a beeline for the nearest computer terminal and placing a reserve on it (will come to me a month later, and if I chomp thru it all, I'll certainly come back here and leave you a note on what I thought).

    Meantime, look it up on Amazon if interested. This is one of those books that let you "look inside" of 'em, so if you're anything like me, you'd be knocking yourself out typing up random keywords that serve up sample pages. At least I liked what I saw.

    And FWIW, here's what the author told Amazon about his work:

    "I wrote The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work to shine a spotlight on the working world. I wanted to write a book that would open our eyes to the beauty and occasional horror of the working world — and I did this by looking at 10 different industries, a deliberately eclectic range from accountancy to engineering, from biscuit manufacture to logistics.

    The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy. For thousands of years, work was viewed as something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religion. Aristotle was the first of many philosophers to state that no one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. A more optimistic assessment of work had to wait until the eighteenth century and men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin, who for the first time argued that one's working life could be at the centre of any desire for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed—at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape.

    In the pre-modern age, it was assumed that no one could try to be in love and married: marriage was something one did for purely commercial reasons. Things were going well if you maintained a tepid friendship with your spouse. Meanwhile, love was something you did with your mistress, with pleasure untied to the responsibilities of child-rearing. Yet the new philosophers of love argued that one might actually aim to marry the person one was in love with rather than just have an affair. To this unusual idea was added the even more peculiar notion that one might work both for money and to realise one's dreams, an idea that replaced the previous assumption that the day job took care of the rent and anything more ambitious had to happen in one's spare time.

    We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human. Thus is born The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work."

    Now look at the can of worms you've opened: started talking about work, and before we know it, off we wander into "forbidden" topics like love and marriage! :-)

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  7. TM,
    def. seems an interesting read. Two things, one that I keep repeating is my rant was more about the other headaches that come with work two, does no one want to account for the time factor, like the loving your work the first day and the last day is fine, the in between is a curve.

    ps: you could put a hold on DVD?, i know 'christmas' county one doesnt let us do that, may be the summer one lets ppl do tht?

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  8. Forget the "seasons" and head over to the "Mountain" pronto, for your free card! The latter lets you reserve all media (a lot less conservative than the conventional troglodytes that "santa" and "sunny" tend to be). It's at 585 Franklin (between Church and Mercy, off Castro).

    And oh, be sure to keep your Sherlock Holmes cloak on, so I can keep an eye out. ;-)

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