So, from a very young age you get asked: ‘what do you want to do when you grow up? What kind of job would you like?’, which to me always felt like my job should be my number one priority. You focus your entire school period on getting the right education and all in order to land the job you want.
The problem is, some people don’t know what they want. Some people change interests over the years. Some people don’t feel the need to have one type of job for the rest of their lives.
Lately I’m stuck in a debate with myself. All my life I wanted to help people and to build a better society. Naturally, with the kind of indoctrination I had, I started looking for this in a job. But now with my party and volunteer work, I get to help a lot of people and oftentimes in really effective ways. I’m taking on a hard study right now and I don’t know if I want to continue. I could also just work and keep doing what I do with the party and volunteering. It would also allow me to have more free time in the next couple of years, which I wouldn’t mind at all.
This brought me to an internal question: why do I see a job as the only way to have a meaningful life? Why not find a job I could do, get money and have a more meaningful life outside of my job? But I haven’t yet found an answer to my question unfortunately.
How do you guys see my problem? Do you think a job is really important in having a meaningful life?
I think having work of some sort, especially bigger projects, is part of how we as humans find meaning in our lives. That’s not to say that coerced wage labour needs to be that work, far from it. Community organizing is work, helping people is work, improving the world around you is work. Those are the sort of things we find meaning in. Wage labour, especially as a means to pay the bills we are forced to pay, is often just a distraction from the truly meaningful parts of life.
I have quite the constant internal struggle myself about the same thing. I work because I must, but I also haven’t quite learned how to leave work at work and find the time and more importantly energy to do the things I really want to do, nor have I learned to not resent the job and the employer so much. I have a job because I have to, yet I also work at doing other things because I want to.