Adventures in Underemployment: Misrepresented Jobs

I’ve always been a physical weakling. My only athletic skill is balance; yes I can do the “tree pose” in yoga with my eyes closed. While I have aspirations of backpacking, I start to panic when I have to carry more than one shopping bag (I’m not coordinated enough for that isht!). I can pull a muscle while sitting down. So how did I end up lifting heavy furniture for work? The misrepresented job, which I’m realizing applies to most jobs I’ve had.

Exaggerations, withholding information and outright lies; I’ve experienced all of these from employers. I don’t understand it. Why would you get me on board with stuff I’m qualified for, just to throw me into something different that I’m not even good at?  I usually tailor my resume for each job application, but it seems like many companies don’t take a second look at their job descriptions, or the information they’re giving people at interviews.

With severely misrepresented jobs, like the one I’m in now, the question becomes: should I try to make it work, or not? Especially with the risk of injury being so high. Starting a job is annoying enough– I freaked out about a drug test being sprung on me, and did all this research about strategies to pass.  I went through an orientation involving a video about how to pack every different type of household item in a box, which was paused every two minutes by a manager telling us how he would do it differently. I filled out paperwork. I may or may not have lost my unemployment benefits.  And I felt relieved that I could stop searching for a while. That’s probably the most potent thing.

Maybe what’s important to me (feeling like I’m good at my job) isn’t the same as what’s important to employers. I wasn’t very good at my last job either, working at about half the speed as my colleagues. However, my boss seemed to like me and never had anything negative to say about my performance. My boss was a good dude, but to that company (which I should probably give a name– how about “Sufficient Insurance”?) I was just a body. All that really mattered was that I showed up, kept the work moving, and didn’t make any major errors. The same holds true at this moving company. I’m a body. It doesn’t really matter that I’m an inefficient mover or that I could be better used elsewhere, because I show up when I say I will, do what I can within my limited physical abilities, don’t break any vases or offend clients.

I thought physical labor would be better than a desk job, and I guess it is– they do pay the same. But I catch myself just wanting to hear a client’s stories about their artwork or find out how they feel about their dad dying. After my job at Sufficient Insurance, I found that I could get an interview here and there, but mostly for similar jobs where the main skill needed is the ability to endure extreme boredom (which I don’t even have).  My heart sank to go backwards, ever further from a job where I would develop what many of us crave– that feeling of mastery.

I used to hold out hope for proving myself and getting promoted out of a misrepresented job and into one where I could really shine, but another thing about these jobs– they also misrepresent any ability to move into a position that might be a better fit. I know my current job is a dead end, although I’ve been thinking about using whatever industry knowledge I gain to start my own moving company– staffed by buff women, because how cool would that be?

I guess I’ll drive the truck.

Smell You Later: Hobbies and “Free Time”

Oh, and the siren song of Netflix and alcohol, of course.

So I’ve been working at my current job for about nine months now.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: this is my first time, at age 32, consistently working 40-hour weeks.  This is also my first time working for a large corporation.  Between those two factors, it feels like I’ve been dropped on another planet, or maybe a very desolate moon.  Before this job, I worked 30-hour weeks and had a shorter commute.  I learned that those ten hours make a big difference.  When I started this job, I thought I could get used to the schedule.  Maybe the exhaustion would subside, and I’d learn to manage my time better outside of work.  Turns out, I haven’t “gotten used to it” yet, and don’t maintain much hope that I will.

This post, which I originally found on the Basic Income subreddit, covers some of the same ideas that I wrote about in Adventures in Unemployment 2.  One of those is the degradation of “free time” when you’re working 40+ hours a week.  The author of that post, David Frayne, writes:

Slivers of free-time offer limited scope for engagement in more substantial self-defined activities – activities which would demand steady investments of time and energy in the form of concentration, dedication, the building of communities, or the learning of new skills. The extreme casualty of this situation is today’s archetypal rushed worker, who commutes home in the dark hours with emails still to answer, feels too drained to engage emotionally with the family, and is disinclined to do very much other than drink wine and watch TV before bed. The point here is not that drinking wine or watching TV are ‘low’ activities, but that the worker has been deprived of the time and energy to choose otherwise.

I have always been the person of a thousand hobbies and activities.  You know about drawing, blogging, and making zines.  At various times in my adult life, there has also been sewing, repairing bicycles, skateboarding, rollerskating, gardening, audio production (which was also supposed to be my career at one point), Geocaching, cooking, tattooing, meditation, community organizing, playing ukulele, watching weird foreign films, trying to be a minimalist, singing, songwriting, modern dance, bird-watching, learning Spanish, and probably more things that I’m forgetting (I’m using the term “hobbies” really broadly here).  I didn’t stick with every single one of these things, but I always seemed to pick up more hobbies than I ever discarded.  Frayne’s post/essay/excerpt made me realize that as depressing as it was to be unemployed and underemployed for so long, the fact that I had more free time, and more control over my time, enabled me to develop this huge number of hobbies and interests, some of which were very involved and intensive.  They gave me an identity and sense of purpose when work failed to do so.

My hobbies also may have helped to mitigate, to some extent, the despair of unemployment.  Now, my resources to mitigate the despair of the 40 hour workweek are very limited.  I still need hobbies to give me an identity and sense of purpose, because my job doesn’t provide this.  But all I can typically accomplish are tiny, disjointed pieces of my interests.  I feel stuck with the hobbies that I can pick up quickly in random spare moments.  The things that involve larger blocks of time, more mental focus, or long-range planning (like my perennial dream of recording an album) get pushed aside.  I think this is why Michael Lerner, who I will apparently reference everywhere, forever, claimed that many of us expect romantic love to save us from the alienation of work.  Unlike, say, learning Spanish, romantic love isn’t usually seen as something you have to “do”, and it produces a much more powerful emotional “bang for your buck”.

A few days ago, I went into a bike shop, and the smell triggered memories of when I used to ride my bike every day and was learning to repair bikes myself.  “I used to love this stuff”, I thought sadly to myself, touching a blinky light.  I had barely been on my bike since my job started, and I definitely didn’t have time anymore to work on fixing bikes.  Some of this probably has to do with the anhedonia of depression, and I legitimately do have poor time management skills.  But, I think some of it is also endemic to the 40-hour week.  I had a similar experience when the smell of photo chemicals in a camera store brought me back to another thing I used to love, analog photography.  Maybe it would be rewarding to get back into it again, but I can’t imagine resurrecting any inactive hobbies right now, especially ones that involve a major time commitment.  Bearing out the point that Frayne makes, I don’t feel like I have “free time”, just recovery from work time.  This is distressing. I can’t help thinking that some of my hobbies, especially if developed further, would be a lot more useful to society than the paid employment I do.

Frayne also makes some great points about “employability”, which I might come back and explore in a future post.

Why Good Ballers Stay in Bad Jobs Part 2

I have no affection for professional sports, but since other episodes of Embedded were interesting (really bad podcast name, by the way), I also listened to the one about basketball.  The episode followed two players in the “D League”, a minor league of the NBA that fields teams in places like Canton, Ohio and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  (“D” stands for “development”, there are no B and C leagues.)  The hope for the guys in the D League is that they’ll attract the attention of an NBA team and get drafted.  It’s a long shot for most of them.  Not necessarily because they’re not good enough, but because there are more qualified players than spots in the NBA.

I have heard of the New York Knicks.  The Westchester Knicks…not so much.

Quinn Cook, one of the players, is asked about his reaction when a teammate got drafted instead of him.  Quinn was named the D-League Rookie of the Year and his NBA chances seemed promising.  Quinn’s response:

“You don’t want him to be in the D League his whole career, you want him to get his dream…there was no animosity or nothing from me.”

The reporter/podcast host tells us: “This might sound really hard to believe.  But you have to understand, these athletes are different than we are.  They’ve built this muscle to deal with disappointment.  It’s how they get where they are.  They have to put aside negative things and keep going.  As they say, they learn how to just flush it.  Whether it’s a loss or an NBA call-up that wasn’t you, flush it and move on.”

Like I said, I have practically no knowledge of athletes, so I had never thought about how they might be “different” aside from being really good at a sport.  But the NBA hopefuls of Canton, their impressive levels of equanimity, and failure were on my mind last night.  For what felt like the millionth time, I was rejected from a new job that I really thought I had a chance at.  To me, that job was like “the NBA” in that I thought it would have changed my life for the better and been a great outlet for my own talents.  I had gotten through three out of four interviews before being told I didn’t have enough experience.  My thought was, “I allowed myself to hope again,” but the basketball players don’t disallow hope.  They dream, but somehow, are able to integrate both hope and setbacks.

This is a continuation of this post, in which I talk about some reasons why people can become entrenched in jobs they hate.  To update a little more on my own situation, I’ve applied for 7 or 8 jobs at my own company and been rejected from all of them.  That this is a place where I already work, where I do a good job and my boss likes me, makes this all the more disappointing because of the upheaval of my expectations– I didn’t know it would be this hard to get a new job at a company that has a history of hiring me.  But since I don’t find the work at my current company interesting at all, it hurt more to lose the other job, which was in the field I want to work in.  I cried for a couple of hours and felt like everything in my life was going wrong.  While I’m not going to say this is an unusual occurrence for me, I really don’t want it to happen any more than it already does.  When you stick with the discomfort you know, you may feel like you’re failing, but at least you’re not experiencing both failure and rejection.

 

I used to play sports…this was when I was in college, more than 10 years ago.  We didn’t have any prominent college sports teams (aside from maybe cycling) but IM (intramural) sports were very popular.  I played a lot of different sports, most of which I was totally ill-suited for, like being the smallest shot-putter at every meet and being the smallest footballer on the defensive line.  (I always thought I was a “bigger” girl but once I was on the football field, suddenly all these really big girls came out of nowhere.)   Most of my teams lost every game, unless the other team didn’t show up.  I felt like a liability, but no one blamed me.  People just seemed glad I showed up, or in the case of co-ed soccer, showed up and was female.

Since playing with the Angry Fire Ants soccer team in my last year of college, I haven’t played team sports.  Everyone thinks I play roller derby, because I wear knee socks, am kind of “alternative”-looking, and have my own roller skates, but I don’t do that, or anything else competitive.  I’m not a “competitive person” and I feel like as an adult, sports leagues get more hardcore and you actually have to be “good”, not someone whose legs have totally atrophied from sitting all day.  But I’m now wondering if sports could teach me, again, how to fail.  For some reason, I still have my soccer cleats in my closet, and I remember how fast I felt like I could run across those muddy Washington fields.  If I could “flush it and move on”, that might be as valuable to me (okay, maybe not monetarily) as getting that call from the NBA.

Honestly?

Recently, I was at a staff meeting where a topic of conversation was “advancement opportunities”.  The dude who was presenting was talking about how he had a job at this company that was such a bad fit, he felt miserable and trapped all the time.  But he wanted to impress upon us that we did have options, and that there were opportunities to move into jobs that were a better match with our skills.  Have you ever felt that someone speaking to a room full of people was specifically talking to you?  That’s how I felt at that moment.  As we were told about efforts to improve the process for advancing or changing jobs within the company, I felt a nervous excitement, and hope for the first time in months.

My strategy at work had been to have a positive, cheerful demeanor, make the best of everything, and say it was all fine.  But now, I thought it would be a great idea, at my next meeting with my boss, to tell him that my job is a terrible fit for me, and that I’d like his support in moving elsewhere in the company, where I wanted to stay and really use my abilities.

But I didn’t want other people to become husks of their former selves like me.  So then I thought about telling my boss, “I’d like to lead a working group to redesign this position, to improve retention and allow people to make more meaningful contributions.”

Good lord, it was surprising I didn’t leave the meeting on a white horse of my own imagining.  Anyway, it all sounded like a great plan (okay, maybe not the working group), until later that night, when I was innocently sitting on the couch, watching a movie and eating chocolate pudding, and I said to myself,

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?”

If I tell the person who hired me that the job is a bad fit, isn’t that just like telling him that he sucks at hiring people?  Wouldn’t it be better to just quietly wait out the six months that I need to stay in order to transfer to a different position?  Where did honesty in the workplace ever get me?  From disclosing my learning disability to admitting that I hated the Enneagram, it never got me anywhere.  After being laid off last year, I no longer fear being fired, but I still have this deep embodied fear of making people mad, having them not like me, and of trying to communicate something and failing.

Much like Jekyll and Hyde, inside of me two natures are at war, but instead of good and evil, they’re the desire to be genuine and the desire to please people.  These two things rarely go together.  So will I uproot in doubt what I planted in (possibly deluded) faith, or will I go ahead and try honesty again?  It would definitely support the kind of world I want to live in, but will be one of the hardest workplace conversations I’ve ever tried to have.

 

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Crap Jobs & The Stockdale Paradox

Trigger Warning: Suicide

Recently I watched a video called “The South Koreans Who Attend Their Own Funerals“.  This led me, as Youtube does, to other videos about the epidemic of suicide in South Korea, and some of their prevention efforts.  Job-related pressure was named again and again as a significant factor in this crisis.  It might feel a little extreme that I’m about to compare crap jobs to being a prisoner of war, but the mental torture, fear, and possibility of death can be very real for some people at their jobs.  I don’t think this is unique to South Korea although it’s definitely less subtle there.  At any rate, Marcus Aurelius would probably be proud that I’m using military metaphors, and I think the ideas in this post can apply to any traumatic situation that we might find ourselves stuck in.

So, this Stockdale paradox.  I first read about it here.  Basically, a naval officer named Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  During this time, he identified two types of prisoners.  The first type were prisoners who would hold out hope for their release by a specific deadline:”I really think we’ll be out of here by Christmas!”  And then when Christmas came and went, and they still were imprisoned, they would become extremely demoralized and unlikely to survive.  The second type of prisoner had a more general faith that somehow, they would get out alive.  They held a greater acceptance of their current circumstances, and, like Stockdale, were more likely to survive their ordeal.  Stockdale was quoted as saying:

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

I tend to be more like the first prisoners, who put a lot of hope in specific outcomes.  Telling myself “don’t get your hopes up” doesn’t work, because the delusional hope isn’t replaced by anything better.  For instance, I interviewed for a job that would have paid more than I ever made, and it was hard to stop dreaming about things like buying a new mattress, getting new clothes and maybe even fulfilling my lifelong dream to buy a house.  When I didn’t get the job, even though I thought I’d aced the interview, my suicidal thoughts got turned way up.  I could anticipate this, which helped me cope, but didn’t stop the thoughts from happening.  So I was definitely willing to give Stockdale’s strategy a try instead.  At my current job, I tend to oscillate between abandoning all hope like I’m entering the gates of hell, or taking refuge in the idea that “in three more months I can transfer to a different department!” I tried walking the lonely halls of my office with the thought, “I have faith I’m not going to die here.”  Because really, who knows if I’ll get that transfer, and if it will be any better than where I am now?  This might only work if you have genuine doubts about your survival, but as someone who deals with suicidal thoughts, these doubts come up often for me.

And you know, the result wasn’t sudden enlightenment, but it wasn’t nothing.  I felt a little lighter, and a little more connected to my resolve to change my circumstances.  I’m going to keep working with it and see what happens.  It’s true that I have more options in my situation that Stockdale did, but it’s easy to feel paralyzed anyway.  While I’m trying to have faith that I’ll survive this job, the truth is that no matter how hard I work at finding a new job, I don’t know what it will be, or when it will come.  I think “confronting the facts of your current reality” is very helpful.  Another quote comes to mind, this one from Carl Rogers:

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

And from John Trudell:

What we can’t face looks for us anyway.

I just love that one.  This paradox also brings some insight into how to interact with unemployed people or those who hate their jobs.  Pretty much anyone in crisis.  There’s always this urge (I have it myself) to say to our loved ones, “You’re so great!  I know you’ll find something soon!” but this is replicating the same mindset of the prisoners with delusional hope.  (You’re probably great, but the truth is, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll find something soon.)  You need to know your audience; telling people, “Well, you will live through this” may not go over well with everyone.  But to acknowledge the “brutal reality”that someone is facing, while expressing your faith in them, is powerful.

 

Living for the Weekend!

“People wait all week for Friday, all year for summer, and all life for happiness.”

I can’t remember where this quote comes from, but it always stuck with me.  It’s pretty accurate, isn’t it?  Even though I’m a summer hater, my desire to find happiness here and now has generally only made me more unhappy, as I get the sense of how difficult it really is.  This will become more relevant later in the story…

WAITING FOR CATURDAY!!!

Today, I went out to buy a cup of coffee on one of my breaks from work.  As I handed him two dollar bills, the barista asked how my Tuesday had been going so far.

“Uneventful,” I said.  His eye contact was so intense, it was like looking into a small sun.  I had to look away.

“How’s the rest of your week looking?” the barista went on.

I shrugged.  “More of the same.”  (As you can tell, small talk isn’t really my thing.)

“Well, what will your weekend be like?”
“Fun?” I said, more hopeful than anything else.

“Yeah!” the barista exclaimed.  “Living for the weekend!”  I couldn’t tell whether he saw this as a positive thing, or my sorry lot in life.  Either way, I just wanted to get over to the milk and sugar kiosk.  This exchange brought a lot of different things to my mind.  I couldn’t imagine a more stereotypical experience of corporate life, with the barista pointing me out, intentionally or not, as just another unhappy cog in the machine.  I wanted to stab myself in the face, while I couldn’t remember a time that I had wished to see the end of capitalism more.  As these desires moved through me, I also realized that I didn’t want to give up on meditation.  Leaving my old meditation center was a huge loss and obstacle to my practice, and I haven’t been consistently meditating since I moved.  But, I still believe that meditation might be the only escape from the “living for the weekend” mentality.  Whatever the Buddha was selling, I bought it.  I think it’s time for me to recommit and get back on the path, even if it’s a lot less clear than before.

Car Crashes, Arrests & Insanity

It’s been a little over two months now that I’ve been working full-time at my insurance job.  And what a short, strange, but extremely long-feeling trip it’s been.  I was hoping to learn a lot about the insurance industry, but that hasn’t been the case, and my manager referred to me as “very curious” like he wasn’t convinced that was a good thing.  I have learned how some people develop drug and alcohol problems, seek out dangerous situations, look for romantic love as a solution to dehumanization, eat way too many coffee cakes (okay, I knew that) and kill themselves (okay, I knew that too).  I also learned why people (well, at least some of the ones with jobs) get arrested at protests.  These are simplifications, which is why I kept saying “some people”, but if your job is as tedious as mine is, I’m not sure how you can get away totally unscathed.  I’ve had other repetitive jobs, but at least my body was somewhat active.  Here, I’m not engaging my body or my mind, and I feel like a shell of a person–an anxious shell filled with vegan coffee cake.

As an activist, I usually stick to relatively safe activities, like making signs or writing press releases.  It’s not often that I think about “risking arrest”, but I was recently asked to consider if I would.  Although I’m sure that in reality, nothing would terrify me more, all I felt was excitement, even relief.  The truth was, I would rather be arrested, spend the night in jail, and bail myself out with my own money than go to my job.  The thought could not be un-thought, but what should I do with this information?

Since I use Reddit to collect stories of people whose work situations cause or worsen depression, I knew that I wasn’t alone in thinking the way I did, that I would rather be arrested than go to work.  I remember one thread where people shared their fantasies of getting in car accidents on the way to work.  It was not an unpopular thread, either.  I used to fantasize about getting injured or having a mental breakdown so severe that I needed to be hospitalized.  I didn’t really think about the injury of course, just the time off work.  Why do so many people have these kinds of fantasies?  I think part of it has to do with the fact that we’re so bored at work, we will welcome any type of excitement, even if it’s negative.  When I worked at an office with a lot of unnecessary drama, I think boredom was the reason people got into it.

Quitting my job is not my fantasy, because that would just emphasize how trapped I am, choosing between this job and more unemployment.  And if I did quit,then I would have to consider the shame: for giving up, being “bad at coping” with work, being immature and impulsive.  If I got arrested for a cause, maybe my activist friends would think I was a hero, instead of just someone who is late to protests because I had to be at my job.  If you or I were injured in a car accident, maybe friends and family would rally around us, instead of wondering why we quit when we have to pay our rent and bills.  There’s also something appealing about a choice being made for us, when we feel unable to follow our intuition because of said rent and bills.  It’s the same reason people procrastinate until they don’t have any choices left.

Come to think of it, I did have one fleeting fantasy about quitting: and it was about quitting the job with no one finding out, like a laid-off 1950s dad who puts on a suit, gets in the car, and makes a show of going to work, but then sits on a park bench all day.

 

Unemployment Movie Club: The Shawshank Redemption

*Possible spoilers, but come on, this movie is 20 years old and I’m probably the last person to see it.*

I’d heard about The Shawshank Redemption, but never saw it until fairly recently, before I got my current job.  All I knew about the movie was that it’s a lot of people’s favorite, it takes place in a prison, it’s very long, and it has Morgan Freeman.  Finally seeing it, I had a strong feeling of justice restored, but not for the reason intended by the filmmakers.  Earlier that week, I was rejected from a job because I had “very low energy”.  This really messed with my head, as I know I have low energy and was trying hard to be more energetic than usual.  I always think that faking it is supposed to get you somewhere, but it never gets me anywhere.  Watching The Shawshank Redemption, it occurred to me that Andy Dufresne was exactly the character I needed, when I needed him:

ANDY DUFRESNE IS A LOW-ENERGY MOTHERFUCKER.  TOOK HIM 20 YEARS TO DIG A HOLE.

And he’s the person you cheer for in this story, who shows us all how to hope and find freedom despite our limited circumstances.  At the job I got, I’m not expected to have an energetic personality, which is good.  Less good is the expectation to work at an unrealistic and quite punishing rate of speed.  There’s not a lot of respect out in the workplace for 20-year holes.

Overall, I am definitely struggling with my new job, and feel that I should have never been hired for it.  I’m always waiting for my next break in the day, and then counting the days until the six-month mark, when I can apply for other jobs at the company.  (Will I last six months?  I’ll let you know!)  In this environment of unpleasant and stressful waiting, The Shawshank Redemption crosses my mind often.  At the risk of sounding…like someone who calls everyone “comrade”, I think the prison of that film could be taken to represent capitalism, and Andy’s escape as a metaphor for how difficult it is to escape capitalism as an individual.  For my last Unemployment zine, I was going to write about “Is it possible to escape from capitalism?”  (Like, can we escape capitalism by living in the woods, a yurt, a Tinyhouse, an anarchist squat, etc.)?  I’m glad I didn’t write that piece, because The Shawshank Redemption answers that question better than I would have.  Andy gets free, at great cost and difficulty, but what about everyone else in the prison?  Are any of us really free when others are oppressed, and all that?

…and Morgan Freeman was there…

The idea of “the prisons we build in our minds” seems important to the film.  This idea of being free in your mind, while your body develops, say, crippling carpal tunnel syndrome, is of an urgent importance to me as well.  Unfortunately, I have a feeling that this mindset takes a lot more training that I have.  It’s like expecting a sudden spiritual awakening just because you’ve gotten one more terrible job.  You know, like the one Buddhism says is possible but ain’t going to be easy?  My deep yearning for mental freedom, which goes back to my early days of unemployment, is probably the main thing that interested me in Buddhist practice.  They even have a term for this desire, samvega.

Like Andy Dufresne, I try to make meaning from the meaningless, but I lack his patience. (Slow and lacking patience is a miserable combo.)  I can’t be accused of having a bad attitude towards this job, or to paid employment in general, because I’m constantly putting forth this huge effort to have a positive mindset.  To put the experience in some kind of meaningful context.  Isn’t that a basic human trait, the ability to tell a story, no matter how fractured?  It’s not easy to do at my job, and maybe not at yours, either.

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Coping

Coping, it’s not just a Blur song.

Often I get stuck with intrusive questions that I keep asking myself over and over until they lose their meaning.  This is the case with “How do other people cope with this?,” “this” being working a job they dislike for 40 hours a week.

I’m embarrassed to admit, at my age, that this is my first time consistently working 40-hour weeks.  It hasn’t been for lack of trying, but underemployment has followed me persistently.  This is extremely unscientific, but I see the r/depression subreddit as a sort of metric of the depressed hivemind.  Sporadic perusal of the site over a period of months showed me: A lot of people want to kill themselves because they’re horrified at having to work 40 hours a week, for their whole lives, at a job they either hate or don’t care about.  I don’t think they’re lazy; I think they’re intuitive.  Even before I started working 40 hour weeks, I thought it was excessive, but now I really know, even deep in my muscles.  My job is 100% sedentary (aside from the one time a day when I get to carry a folder to someone at another desk).  I’m looking at a computer screen 100% of the time.  My eyes, head, neck, shoulders, legs, wrists, and arms hurt.  Although I get up to stretch as much as I can, walking has become less comfortable.  Reading, watching TV, or emailing friends after work–anything that involves screens or looking at small text–is a lot more difficult, too.  Even though I got an ergonomics assessment, my entire 8 hours at work is spent trying to stave off and/or manage physical pain, and this carries into the rest of my life as well.

This is just one complaint among many.  At past jobs that I’ve hated, I constantly fantasized about being injured so that I could get a break from the job.  During one job, I  enjoyed having to get surgery because I didn’t have to go to work the next day.  (I quit that one, at least.)  I feel like my definition of “coping” is “not constantly thinking of harming myself”, or “the ability to appear happy and content”.  But that’s a pretty low bar, isn’t it?  Even the most unhappy people might be able to fake happiness, but that doesn’t say much for their quality of life.  I guess I AM coping–I’m not writing this from a mental hospital, after all–but merely coping causes me to wonder if life is worth living.  Again, I wonder how common it is to get so stuck in this existential gloom.

That I realize my definition of “coping” is so idiosyncratic…it might be the one thing that allows me to let go of the question.  It’s good to be able to cope with tragedies or setbacks, but we shouldn’t have to cope with our entire lives.  I want to live in a world where we don’t need drugs, coffee, alcohol, sugar, denial, social media, shopping, or [insert your addiction here] to get by on a day-to-day basis.  I want a reality I don’t feel the need to escape from.  You know that scene in Beauty and the Beast (the Disney movie) where Belle is running up a hillside, singing “I want much more than this provincial life”?  That’s literally what comes to mind when I think that another world might be possible…that I’m just a dreamer stuck on my hill.  It’s painful to dream, but then again, so is drinking too much at happy hour.  I guess my coping strategy, as pessimistic as I often feel, is hope.