Alas, my poor, poor ego.

So, I had lunch with a friend today and we caught up on each others lives and the happenings in the lives of people we mutually know. There are times I feel I and my peers are all playing this awful game of musical chairs (in terms of employment) and everyone is desperate to make sure they have their ass securely embedded before the music stops playing.

Everyone is worried about money and about work so in some ways this is understandable. Over the last few years, there have been times I’ve lost clients, some by choice, others not. There are times (quite often actually) where peers wind up at clients I’ve been at. We all know the same people so it’s not surprising. What bothers me is how jealously the information can be guarded - when I do find out, it always has me at a loss to explain why that is.

Then, there’s the resultant questioning I go through: Gee, why didn’t they call me? Why aren’t I there? Is it money (sometimes)? Personality (sometimes)? What did I do wrong, how could I have changed, been better, fit in more? Maybe I could’ve kissed some more ass, done something, anything, to get them to like me more. I don’t mind working hard. What I do mind is getting the crappiest, mess dropped into my lap at the very end of the process where it’s some kind of overblown crisis. The last couple of gigs I’ve had have been like this. This is graphic arts not emergency room surgery and I have to say, I can’t even remember half of these stupid things a year or two later - things that are so f**king important (or so people would have you believe). Does this mean I don’t care about my work? No. Does this mean I don’t want to do a good job? No. Does this mean I want to live a job to the exclusion of everything else in my life? No. Anyway, I always try to bring people in on stuff if I can and I’ve always tried to do the right thing by people I work with no matter what (it’s called scruples).

—12.01.03 (or thereabouts)

Work is so important in how it impacts on our own views of self. A lot more important than it should be I think. I had been talking to someone earlier in the week about this very subject - how we identify ourselves by our jobs. It’s so entirely ludicrous but it’s something adults do to children from a very early age. The age old question adults ask children contains many more minefields than it appears to...

So, here’s another draft about work. One that I came back to and tried to finish too. If we, all of us, sat down and really looked closely I believe we would discover that work winds up occupying far too much headspace in our lives.

As life gets shorter and shorter since we have a limited life span the one thing that becomes ever more precious is time. Occupying ourselves with thoughts about work or even work itself are things that just don’t deserve even one second more than they require.

I’ve often heard people say if they hit the lottery, they would continue working. Simply put... YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND!