If you enjoy any percentage of your job, you are in the minority.
– Jonah Hill
What’s the first thing you say when someone asks, “What do you do?”
For most of us it pertains to work: “Well, I am an engineer” or “I work in finance” or whatever, but how many of us say “I love to dance” or “Recently, I’ve been playing piano”.
In a first world environment, the automatic response to what we do is what we do for work, because, frankly, it’s all we seem to do. Eight plus hours a day. Five plus days a week. Four plus weeks a month. Twelve plus months a year.
What if we changed that? What if work became even 50% of our day instead of 80%? What if we had the financial freedom to choose so much more than work. Or, even better, what if we turned a passion into a living and then used the time in between to travel the world or train for a marathon or go camp in the forest for a weekend.
Recognizing our time is precious means that work should compliment our lives, not criticize it by making us so tired on our days off that we just oversleep or sink into the couch.
How do we escape a job that we know does not fulfill us or can even be toxic? It starts with a well designed escape plan aka the amount of money needed to live on while pursuing what comes after quitting.
Ideally, the passion project is built while working that dredging job, but we all know the difficulty of work after work. With all the time we did spend at a job now freed up, it’s a lot easier to build that passion project.
There has to be a clear objective though. I tried just quitting a job once and figuring out how to support myself with a passion project and ended up living in Hawaii and California burning through my savings until I was forced to go back into the traditional workforce.
I think what Jonah was getting at was that not only finding a job you really enjoy is rare, but it takes a lot of conscious effort.
Use mindfulness in asking the question, “What in my life right now aligns with what I value in my life right now?”
To both find our values and to align to them requires attention and intention. It is not enough just to be aware, we must take action when required too.
Work can be more than a place that provides a means of paying the bills – it can be a feeling of progress and improvement both on ourselves and others, while also paying the bills.
Getting out of a debt cycle comes to mind here too. If living paycheck to paycheck traps us in a debt cycle, what are the very things that put us in a debt cycle in the first place?
And then, with that answer, we can avoid the constant temptations to waste our money on things we will end up forgetting about in less than a month, and thus free up the time from working to pay off those things to go enjoy our lives.
For me it was simply walking into a walmart, getting on shopping apps, tapping on instagram ads, and responding to email ads that pulled me into the debt cycle.
It was incredible how just going to the local grocery store, deleting the shopping and social media apps, and unsubscribing from marketing emails changed my whole life.
I stopped caring about the newest gadget, the nicest car, the downtown highrise apartment, and even the people that do care about all those things.
I did start caring about the people that care more about me than their stuff, enriching experiences, community, conversations, getting into nature, and working on things I truly enjoy (like writing).
It was mindfulness in practice – being aware of what has created bad habits in my life and then taking the small actions to avoid them.
If a monk meditates in quicksand, he will still sink and become trapped. No amount of meditation will get him out of his situation.
Work takes on a whole new meaning when our direction on spending takes on a whole new meaning.
The less we spend, the more we have leftover.
The more we have leftover, the less we have to work a job that sucks.
The less we work a job that sucks, the more time we have to do what matters to us.
Three more things:
