Keep Working!

I get many of the ideas for posts from conversations with the people. Most of the time these conversations can lead to people wanting to karate chop me because I can confuse people and have them misunderstand me, that's when I have to break down everything I said at length. This usually ends in them nodding a bit, and then things move forward more smoothly. Recently I was told that I should probably work on the way I argue, and they're probably right, but the idea came with a phrase that caused an involuntary twitch in the left side of my face. That phrase was "I think if you work hard on something, it's so much more rewarding."

That phrase is pure malarkey (I like the word malarkey). You can work extremely hard at something, and feel completely terrible about it at the end. How many times have you heard of someone in a relationship where they gave everything they could to it, and it ended in misery? Isn't that a common story? Am I just dealing with people who lead terrible lives? Either way, I've heard it countless numbers of times. I've also heard of people who felt amazing after doing the most mundane things. In all honesty, it's a matter of perspective.

People constantly try and instill others with motivation to work hard and give it there all to accomplish something. They praise hard work, and talk about how much effort they put into something. They also expect praise for their hard work, and they expect recognition. Actually, there are people who work hard simply for the recognition of having worked hard, and in all honesty, there are a lot of people like that out there. They will be the subject of this post.

The phrase my friend had spoken to me made me remember another conversation I had. It was a conversation that ended in me wanting to build a small shrine in honor of this person to see if it would finally satisfy them. This person was someone who defined themselves by the amount of things they did and also belittled themselves because they were not "successful" yet.  She went to school, worked, and worked on personal projects, she didn't watch TV, "stayed up aaaaall night working on this project," and "stayed on her grind." I admit that I sort of felt bad for her because in doing all of this, she created so many layers of stress for herself that when she stopped doing things you could see the creature known as misery dancing in the bags under her eyes. This was the type of person who couldn't feel comfortable doing nothing...relaxing cut into all the hard work she did. Her escape from her stress was staying up late with friends, going to bars and drinking. I wonder how her health is...

She had a certain concept of success, and had to achieve it, but she couldn't simply achieve it, she had to work hard the whole time to achieve it. I guess that way she could tell the story about how hard she had to work to get where she was, because apart from that reason, I don't see the point in adding extra stress to yourself to achieve some strange concept of success handed down from generations of people with such low self-esteem they had to find ways to make themselves feel better than other people.

Most of the time I would tell her to relax, calm down, and how she had a long time to accomplish things. I also asked her that if she was in an accident, would she really want to look back on her life as a bunch of work? Does someone really want to die stressed? I understand some stress is unavoidable, and sometimes you can't escape hard work, but tacking on hard work just for the sake of it seems ridiculous. This goes double for people with the very common concept of socioeconomic success. That stuff was made up by someone!

This is the type of post I make when I stay up late at night and should probably be sleeping. Make up your own idea of success, don't kill yourself working, you don't take any of that stuff to the grave with you.

- Dennis