Actually, I don't want to work

I don’t want to be at work.

I want to be outside in the sun.

I want my feet in the water.

I want deep breaths.

I want my hair down instead of tucked in a hard hat that squeezes my head.

I want to choose exactly who I spend my time with, who has access to me, whose energy ricochets around mine.

I want to be the one walking my dog in the park, watching him run and play rather than paying someone else to.

I want a life I don’t need to take breaks from.

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I want time to do projects. I want time to make things. I want time to create. I want ample time, decades even, to experience what other people have created. I want time to see what everyone does when their time is their own.

I want to get bored of my hobbies because I have so much time for them. I want to try things I haven’t even thought to try.

Maybe gardening. Or growing my own food. Growing enough to share.

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I want to be constantly learning and exploring new things.

I want to spend days on research. I want to make spreadsheets that I don’t hand in. I want to ponder and brainstorm and study for no test.

I want to help people. I want to help solve the loneliness epidemic.

I want to offer free coaching or advice or just listening.

I want to go back to school and learn enough to provide free therapy to anyone who wants it.

I want to make the world a better place.

I want to build solutions to the problems that feel too big to solve in my free time.

I want to build a revolution of community.

I want to operate out of curiosity, not fear.

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I want to take good care of my body. I want to stretch multiple times a day, do yoga, meditate, lift weights, and go to the gym without having to sacrifice something else. I want to stop calling abusing my body at work into my thirties my gym.

I want to be gentle with myself when I'm sick or tired or bleeding. I want to be able to take time to myself. I want to be able to rest.

I want time to cook food that is good for my body. I want to eat it slowly and sometimes surrounded by my friends and family. I want to sit around the table too long.

I want to be fed by people who want to feed people. I want to feed my people.

I want to laugh around tables and bonfires, no concept of Sunday Scaries.

I want to climb.

I want to ride my bike and roller skate.

I want to go where I want when I want. I don't want to know what “have to” feels like.

I want to go visit my family often. I want to go see my dog when she has to be put down.

I want to stay up late reading with a flashlight under the covers or scribbling in a notebook with late night inspiration, or talking in circles while twirling the cord on the phone.

I want to wake up with the sun because I am just another animal, not because an alarm is making me.

I want to spend days hearing what my friends are thinking and feeling. I want to go on adventures with each of them.

I want to take my dog to the beach.

I want to have total control over my own sensory experience.

I want to nap.

I want to play.

I want to feel the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair.

I want to fill notebooks.

I want to play music.

I want to pick flowers

I want to browse the grocery store without a list or agenda.

I want to experiment in the kitchen, on a canvas, with my body.

I want to summit mountains and backpack and live in a van.

I want to know people. I want to take time to get to know the core of each person and then tenderly explore their limbs.

I want time to listen. Deeply.

I want to give of my time freely and without consequences. I want to accept others’ time without guilt.

I want to see everywhere.

I want to wander.

I want to bury my toes in the sand.

I want to do the things I love without having to do them to survive, to make money, to pay rent, to eat.

I don't want to do these things on weekends or vacations, I want to fill my life with them. I want beauty to fill my pages not the margins.

I want any rush to be inspired, not frantic. Propelled, not pushed or pulled.

I don't want to try to cram everything into a short short life. I don’t want to be running late. I want to feel like my life is long, like I have so much time. I want to languish in my life. I want to soak in it like a bath. I want to romance it. I want a slow burn. I want to indulge.

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It feels a little indulgent writing it all down. I feel a resistance. A little voice is in there telling me I’m lazy and people are going to see it. A little voice is telling me I am worth less if I don’t want to work, that I am entitled because I want these things. That it’s important to like your work and it’s even more important to do it even if you don’t like it. That work is just part of life and suck it up buttercup.

And maybe if work was just a part of life, I could suck it up, I could tune it out when I didn’t like it, I could keep calm and carry on, but work is not just a small part of my life. It’s so much. It’s even more than the excessive hours per week I work, it’s the hours of commuting, the hours of finding work or networking, the applying, the resume building, the training.

It’s those four years of college. I didn’t go to school because I was curious, it’s too expensive. I went to school because that’s the next step to getting a job. Even before the school I paid to go to, there were the thirteen years of public school. I love learning, but it rarely feels like school is a place to explore curiosities, and mostly feels like it’s a place to pass tests so you can get into college and “get a good job”. And before that was the daycare, which sure, wasn’t preparing me to work, but was a holding cell so my parents could.

Even now when I think about what I’m going to do with my life, my whole big beautiful life, I always end up thinking about how it will make money. Capitalism’s got me.

And I’m “one of the lucky ones”. I like what I do for the most part - I would even probably choose to do it SOME OF THE TIME if I didn't have to. But that’s not why I do it right now. I do it to make money. I make choices about which jobs to take or not take because of money. And I work more than I would like to because I need money to eat and go to the doctor when I’m sick and not sleep on the street and even to afford transportation to get to the job I don’t want to go to.

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During the pandemic when my job was completely stripped away and I was surviving on weekly unemployment payments that my rent laughed at, people told me, told our whole industry, told the 30 million of us that lost our jobs that we were lazy and just didn't want to work and didn't deserve support.

I was so offended. I rallied hard against that message. (Like really hard, there’s a whole website: ExtendPUA.org) We did want to work!

And it was true. We were passionate about our work. We weren’t lazy - there was no work to be had. We were losing our healthcare and savings and hope and purpose and even struggling with our entire identities because our work was gone.

But four years later, now that my feet are fully back under me and I'm knees deep in my seventy hour work weeks again, it turns out, I actually really don't want to work anymore. I really fucking don't. The pandemic turned things on their head and my job stopped being my whole life and I’m glad, but also with a life so full of other things, work is a chore that is taking up too much oxygen in my life.

I’m a whiner who doesn’t want to do her chores. Who wants to be free.

And that doesn’t make me lazy. Or maybe it does. But I think we’ve over glorified work. Someone wrote a bunch of fantasy romance novels where a man with long flowing hair and bootstraps was on the cover and we all gobbled it up. And then we weaponized it against each other. Fellow middle and lower class capitalismized prisoners persecute each other for not working hard enough, with bags under both eyes while nepotism parades as bootstraps that no one can actually afford.

What tricky bastard convinced us all that we’re supposed to want to work?

How much of this hard work stuff is just conditioning and values handed down to us instead of things that really top of our own lists?

Perhaps we should take "hard work" off of the pedestal and reexamine what it means, who first said it, and whether it really belongs way up there.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.” Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”

Have we taken that opportunity?

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I want to know what this society looks like when it’s not driven by competition and fear.

I want to see what the world looks like if everyone does exactly what they want to do with their life.

What happens when our needs are met without struggle?

What will people do? What will they invent? What will they create? How will they treat each other?

What happens when we are given enough time to be bored? What will happen when we don't need to escape our lives anymore? Will we spend less time on our phones if we there’s less doom to scroll away from?

Would we hate less given more time to listen and be together? Given more time to regulate ourselves? Given more time to spend in community with each other on purpose?

Would everyone know themselves better if they had to spend more time with themselves, if they had more agency over how their time was spent?

What will kids want to grow up to be if their answer doesn’t have to be a job?

I don’t know, but I really would like to find out.

I think I’m entitled to it. I think you are too. I want it for you.

What would you do if you didn’t have to work?

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A couple days ago I had worked too many hours. I had become livid and it had poisoned my body. My head hurts. My stomach was so tender I had to step off the train and sit down on the way in. I hated everyone around me.

I called out sick. I drank some water, tucked my dog under the comforter next to me, and went back to sleep until my head didn’t hurt anymore. I woke up to a rumble of thunder and rolled out of bed, opened up all of the windows and smiled at the rain. When the rain stopped, I walked my dog and let him run as fast as he could off of his leash. I laughed while he rolled in the grass. I surprised a friend with a visit. I wrote a piece on Motherhood that touched a few people’s hearts and made them feel seen, a friend came to visit and we went out to dinner, I went to bed feeling calm and like I had agency and freedom instead of fear and obligation.

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Work sucks

I know, Blink, I know.