Dear Work, it’s not you it’s me

Happy holidays. Liberty building, London.

The Christmas break can be quite an ordeal.

When you are in a serious monogamous relationship with your work, like I sometimes wish to believe, moments arise when you want a break from it. I look forward to sleeping in till noon, and watching endless TV shows. I look forward to not having to deal with uncomfortable conversation, or any conversation at all, not having to send emails (and survive the anxiety afterwards of an uncertain feeling in the gut that I surely must have written something inappropriate in it), and not having to shower and get dressed in the layers of clothing required in the cold weather.

Then the break arrives, and I am in heaven. For a couple of days at least, as I get to check all the boxes on the list of to-dos (or lack thereof) that I was holding off till the break arrived (like writing what I felt about it). But humans are slave to their habits, and I am human for sure, I think. It starts to go downhill as I realise that the things that were getting me through each day, are not there anymore. Those things that I do at work, nothing can replace, not even family, because I spend most of my waking hours at work, and as the year progresses I try out different strategies to make life at work more comfortable and efficient, eventually ending up in a nice, big rut. But I keep digging and digging till I can’t see the sunlight anymore, until I turn into the human equivalent of a naked mole rat.

But family comes first, some people say. But this is only true when we are spending enough time with our actual family, in order to be in sync with them. If you are spending most of your waking hours with your surrogate family at work, like I do, you lose touch with your actual family and end up having trouble reaching out to them, like I do too. Thus this whole charade surrounding Christmas really starts feeling like a charade. In fact, family members whom I am sure are going through similar motions, with spending too much time at work and all, also just appear for the sake of making an appearance, buried instead in their mobile phones and tablets peering into what their colleagues are up to, during a dull weekend in the countryside.

But we have all seen and heard stories about families. Like large families breaking up into smaller units, then smaller units breaking up into nuclear units, then the splitting of the atom (viola!) when couples start getting separated. How one wishes to be at work instead. In essence, as a civilisation we have figured out that work is the answer to everything. It reduces mental stress, by dissociating us from our family and also helps us earn a living so that we can independent of them. It’s a win-win scenario!

But is work really the answer? At least, the performance of work does not always require human interaction. Back in the day the family structure was important not because of the fun of it, but because it was required for survival. Families were better off together, because that’s how they made a living. Members of the family made compromises to make sure everyone lived happily.

But we don’t need to make compromises today. In an individualistic society where each one has to be responsible for their own livelihood, why should one have to put up with someone else? As traditional forms of society becomes more and more fragmented, the definition of what constitutes a ‘family’ is being altered very rapidly. Friends have become more relevant in our lives than our genetic family, and we are embracing the convenience of being able to choose our friends, as opposed to being stuck with a family. The most important family in today’s world, according to me, is the work family. We may not think that, but for most of us the work family plays a bigger role in our life and decisions than our actual family.

As the feeling of security is eroding in our genetic families, we are leaning more and more on our work family. So instead of figuring out how not to break up a family, people are happily going their own way. To be honest, it is working well mostly, because again, the primary purpose of having a family has always been economics, and if you take that out of the equation, emotional fulfilment has always been a promiscuous affair.

Yet with all these apparent benefits of choice and convenience of spending all our waking hours at work, sometimes spending too much time there and having a serious monogamous relationship with it can be detrimental to our sanity. That is when I want to break up with my work (for a little while at least), and go chase goats up a mountain. But then inside my head, that is when 'work' starts attacking me, like a drug I knew so well in a previous life. It gives me night sweats and cramps in odd places (not really), in short gives me feelings similar to withdrawal symptoms.

That’s when I have to tell myself the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ routine, to calm down. I feel a lost connection to work and I am filled with self-loathing that I am not being able to fulfil those to-dos I have on tiny post-it notes on my desk. I feel lost and realise how work keeps me engaged everyday, and distracts me endlessly. I can distract myself by not having to come to terms with the fact that I am a remnant of prolonged erosion of values that have broken down a once large mountain into a sandy pit of despair, filled with deep cracks and crevices where you can easily fall into and lose an appendage like in the film ‘127 hours’. As a result, maybe breaking up from work during Christmas might be a good thing to reinvigorate that serious monogamous relationship in the new year. But that’s such a lame thing to say. Sigh!