If I get laid off, which is highly likely, then from 2022, I will be able to test out what I had been yakking about forever in this blog: Why have we become so obsessed with work to the point of completely marginalizing everything else, especially if our work is non-essential?
Getting fired will be an unplanned way in which I will walk that talk!
When my daughter works, well, she is saving kids, some of whom are only a few months old. A farmer in India feeds people. Is my non-essential work important? Will getting laid off mean that there will one less bullshit job that is being done?
Seven years ago, I blogged that people spend so much time at work, and then want to do fun stuff during their days off, that they even don't care to spend some hours with people that matter--friends and relations, especially parents. Is working away that important?
Of course, because of the pandemic, many of us cannot visit with our people, within the country or far away. Which is why I am gladder that I did visit with the parents or the daughter when I could. Over the last 18 years, by my mental count, I have made 19 trips to India. Two of those trips coincided with my sabbaticals; I spent three months there during each of those sabbaticals, instead of the usual three weeks. I have no idea when the next trip might be, and who might or might not be around when I get there. Or if there will be another trip at all.
In the age of the coronavirus, we live in a Zoom world, with screen time of all kinds with friends, family, students, whoever. It is practically the world that E.M. Forster wrote about back in 1909. The following lines that Forster wrote are all the more chilling:
The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
A layoff would perhaps give me a lot more flexibility about visiting with the people who matter to me, without worrying about the constraints of the job.
More than anything else, what is the point of working when the busyness prevents people from even the barest minimum of simple pleasures?
I was frustrated that I had tied so much of my self-worth to my job, especially when I could lose it at any moment. Why didn’t I have something else that gave me the same feelings of satisfaction and purpose? Why did work seem to be the centerpiece of my life, rather than just one other thing in it? Why did I have to work?
I am not the only one wrestling with these questions. Like me, many are reassessing a part of their lives they had once accepted uncritically. Those who were not essential workers realized their work was just that: nonessential. Others discovered that, at the very least, they didn’t have to put in 10-hour days to get their work done, or even to be considered “good” at their jobs. This wasn’t a matter of addressing burnout or general malaise: The pandemic had dramatically altered their very conception of work and made them question the notion that their lives should be built around it.
I hope that this lesson from the pandemic will be remembered even well after the virus is eliminated, or at least effectively contained.
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