Tag Archives: moan

Banishing Self-Indulgence

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Earlier today I wrote one of those typical woe is me blog posts, alluding to how hard everything felt, how lacking I was in inspiration etc. But before I posted it I stopped, my finger hovering over the mouse key, and asked myself: What good will it do to share this with the world? It may well be cathartic to get things off your chest, but haven’t you done that just by writing it? Don’t you feel a little lighter as it is? And you know what? I did feel lighter just for having written it. Much like a letter to an ex that never actually gets sent, I had expunged the negative emotions without the need to inflict them upon the world. So that was one thing that happened today.

Another thing that happened was my reading of this article, which can, I believe, be best surmised by the following excerpt:

“The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

“We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.”

I don’t know about you, but reading those two paragraphs struck a chord so deep within me that the hairs on my arms stood up of their own volition. Why? Because that person with no time to be ambitious outside work, who feels constantly dissatisfied in a way they struggle to articulate and who spends money they don’t have on ways to make themselves feel better: That person is me. And most likely also many of you. Of course (trust fund children aside) we have to work for a living (and in this respect with a four day week I can complain less than many about my lot), but it’s so true that outside work it takes (what often feels like) a superhuman effort to cultivate the kind of extracurricular activities that leave you feeling wholly satisfied and fulfilled.

But, that aside, the fact is that those with true talent and passion DO manage to make the most of the time they have, no matter how little it is. They don’t sit around complaining about being oppressed and enslaved by the organisations they work for, but rather work out ways to escape their clutches and create opportunities for work – and living – on their terms. Whether incarcerated by consumerism or not, we all have choices. And our choices are the difference between a life of success and a life of failure. Which is a pretty sobering thought.

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What’s MY problem? My only problem is YOU!

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The older I get the more I come to realise the virtues of self-awareness. I should preface this post by acknowledging that I’m far from perfect myself, but I do – for the most part at least – have a fairly competent radar for detecting when I’m being a bore and/or getting on someone else’s nerves. Some people, however, seem to have been born without such radar capabilities and are therefore able to spend vast swathes of their daily lives in a state of blithe obliviousness as to just how many of their fellow human beings they are driving to the brink of insanity with their behaviour.

The most maddening type of un-self-aware person is the person who gets constantly upset by other peoples’ behaviour without making any connection whatsoever between others’ behaviour and their own. In other words, the cause and effect principle is so completely lost on them that even if you held up flash cards to highlight that they, in fact, were the root cause of your irritation they would merely tell you that you were being ridiculous and heap insult upon your character (or, more likely still, accuse you of heaping insult upon their character, as a sneaky means of deflection from the true problem – which is, ostensibly to everyone but themselves, actually them).

As such people are prone to having delicate sensibilities, it’s often hard to know whether to grin and bear the extreme irritation their mere presence evokes or to attempt in some way to address the issue and tell them their behaviour is unacceptable. Whichever option you choose will have consequences, and possibly far-reaching ones at that. Remember the rule of cause and effect? Well, that. Ultimately this is a battle of your sanity against theirs, and only a brave man (or woman) will risk toppling the house of cards that is a fragile person’s entire personality. You have been warned.