Beep! Beep! Beep!

Wait, it’s already 6:00am? Unacceptable! You run downstairs, throw together a quick sandwich (literally, peanut butter is traveling through the air) and dash to the car, almost tripping twice. Driving 20 mph in excess of the speed limit, you arrive breathless at a grey concrete edifice you call an “office”. You step in through the double doors at 7:30am and are accosted by bustling coworkers in the same rush as you are.

Upon arriving at your desk, you find a stack of papers taller than your coffee mug, which you notice is decidedly empty due to your hurried departure from your home. Mumbling under your breath about your lack of caffeine , you snag the top paper off of the Leaning Tower of Paper, which is leaning far more precariously than its famous namesake due to the sheer number of sheets stacked on top of each other. After furiously completing paper after paper of what you assume to be work, you sigh in weariness and glance at the clock. 8:01am, it reads. You blink twice, maybe three times to make sure, and you take another look. Still 8:01. Darn. Disheartened, you turn back to that pile still on your table and once more start ripping sheets off the stack and filling them out. You are reminded of the task of peeling the layers of an onion, albeit with more internal tears.

After HOURS of drudgery (maybe just 2 hours), you manage to reduce the paper monster on your desk to a manageable paper elephant, and you decide to turn on the time-saving computer. This technological marvel was created to save people time and effort and reduce the workload on the user. However, you are not fooled by the lofty ideals of the computer. After years of experience, you realize that these machines paradoxically increase your workload by providing a medium through which lazy bosses can assign work, when otherwise they would be content sitting in their comfy chairs and not having the will to walk 15 feet to hand you a piece of paper to complete. But there is no fighting the system. The Matrix is everywhere. Thus you commence a series of key-bashing maneuvers, which continues until the coveted “lunch time”.

At this time, you gleefully drop everything, perhaps knocking over the fortunately empty coffee mug, and lunge towards the cafeteria. You occasionally get the rare chance to drive out and eat a real meal, but even though you can’t do that today, you’ll take whatever you can get. After a relaxing 12 minute meal, which today thankfully does not include talking to a coworker about work, an upcoming project, family affairs or the falling-off-a-cliff looking graph of the present economy, you steel yourself to face Part 2 of the day.

With more wrestling with that obnoxious paper creature, more conversations with the boss (one sided of course; both you and your boss are clearly half-focused), more key-bashing which you are now so proficient in, more discussions with others which have a combined 32% chance of being taken note of and more silent grumbling, you pass the painfully slow second half of the day. As dinner time approaches, you are either allowed to head home or are given a further work commitment. You pick the short straw today, and are forced to partake in a dinner meeting which consists of talking, drinking, eating, talking, eating some more, talking, and more talking, with a couple of blanks in between where you zone out due to exhaustion.

Finally, you arrive home late at night, and there is a moment of peace where the work day seems to be over. That peace is violently shattered when you check your email and notice at least 14 new messages, which you then painstakingly respond to with various degrees of enthusiasm. When you notice that you have read “the LLP per unit margin is at 2.3%” for the past 10 minutes, you decide to give up and go to sleep.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

And it starts all over again.

While certainly a vast exaggeration, the main point hits home for countless people in the workplace today. Living a “good” life seems to not be about doing what one loves, but about doing anything that puts bread on the table. The economy surely is not helping the situation at all, and there is no doubt that it is better to be doing something one may not enjoy 100% but providing for one and one’s family than doing nothing and starving. However, people must come to the realization that a life dictated by nothing but work is not a life lived. The cycle must be paused on occasion to allow for personal happiness and time spent with the people who really matter. There is no point in working so hard and living a whole life without joy. Hard work is great, but it only makes a difference if that hard work is mixed with and contributes to happiness of the worker, the community and the world. Time must be taken to enjoy the little things in life, and to enjoy oneself. These few moments of enjoyment amidst the busy schedule can do wonders and make life that much more worthwhile.