This is a subject I have been thinking about for a while, and today is as good a day as any to try to bring my thoughts about it into focus.

From the time we first enter the school system, we are unintentionally taught a particular point of view : school is bad, play is good.

This has a lot to do with the limits of how our education works. Children are born curious and wanting to learn. It’s a miracle diablu how efficiently we kill that in our kids.

And this is how we teach them to hate work as well. At a too-early age, we force them to sit down and shut up while a teacher talks to them. They come to associate school with being boring and stifling, and this teaches them to resent having to do it and to treasure every moment away from it.

Thus a sharp and unnecessary wall is erected separating the two worlds of work and play. You endure work because you have to, and then the moment you are allowed to go, you revert to being just a kid and try to get out of having to do anything else that you don’t want to do.

That’s why kids resist their chores so much. It’s not the task itself, it’s that it takes them away from our rich tapestry of entertainment options and languid self-indulgence, and they have absorbed the idea that they need all of that undemanding leisure time they can get just to cope with the other part of life where their personhood and will are suppressed in the name of education.

This was an inevitable result of the rise of individualism. The more we strengthen the individual, the more outrageous it seems to be forced to do things against out will. It goes against the grain of a highly individualist society which reinforces individuality, will, and autonomy at every corner for any individual’s personal freedom to do as they please at any time.

Eventually, you leave school and join the work force. But the exact same attitude prevails there, too. There is the massive unspoken assumption that work is bad and everyone hates it and everyone would rather be doing something else.

It is school all over again. Nothing has changed. You do the work that your job requires and take what little pleasures you can while doing so, and every waking moment when you are free from your responsibilities is spent indulging in all the manifold avenues of entertainment and leisure activities you can.

And the one thing we do not do, under any circumstances, is anything that seems like work. We treat work as a necessary evil at best and a crime against our personhood at worst, and the idea of working when you don’t have to is absurd.

And woe betide anyone who confesses to liking their job, because unless you have the sort of job others wish they could have, saying that you enjoy your work will be interpreted as meaning that you are either a brown-nosing apple polisher looking for a pat on the head for having an extra correct attitude, or a person so appallingly boring that for them, boring things are the only things boring enough for said boring person to enjoy.

So unless you are a race car driver or a rock star, you cannot claim to enjoy the thing you are paid to do for a living without social penalty. (And if you DO have that kind of job, you will also be socially penalized via jealously. Oh, you love your job, must be NICE.)

This creates the rather perverse situation in which essentially nobody is allowed to admit they like their work. To do so is a subversive act because it contradicts the dominant narrative that work is bad and not-work is good.

But what is the real difference? It’s certainly not effort. People expend enormous effort on things nobody is forcing them to do all the time. Hiking, writing articles for Wikipedia, devoting hours of sweat and toil to a video game… practically everything we do for fun and enjoy requires an investment of effort. We are clearly not merely lazy creatures who prefer to do as little as possible.

We want to expend effort. So the difference between work and play cannot be merely a matter of energy expended. Nor can it be the nature of the work, because one person’s mind numbing tedium is another person’s bread and butter.

It has to be a matter of choice. What we choose to do is fun and play, and what we do without wanting to do it is work.

Then what is wrong with choosing to work? And enjoy it? Are we not better off learning to enjoy the thing we have already chosen to do (our jobs) instead of wasting time and energy resenting our chosen jobs?

Sure, most of us are not doing our dream jobs, that is to say, we are not doing that magical job that so suits our talents that it defeats the entire concept of work by being exactly the sort of thing that we would choose to do and hence is like being paid to play all day.

But those jobs, by and large, do not exist. All jobs inevitably demand that we do something we do not feel like doing at the time and would not choose to do, and hence all jobs are work.

All life is work. No one leads an effortless life, except perhaps for the people who have learned not to resist their own choices and adapt to their circumstances.

The ultimate example of this schoolyard mentality is the concept of retirement. We absorb this “work bad leisure good” mentality so deeply that we imagine that the best thing in the world must be unlimited leisure time.

But people are not built to do nothing. Sooner or later, you will want to fulfill your human need for meaningful effort. A mountain of candy might seem like the ultimate goodness to a child, but sooner or later they are going to eat themselves sick and want some real food.

Would it really be so bad if we learned to love our work? If we made a space for people to admit that sometimes their jobs are not entirely awful? Would it really be such a threat to our sense of autonomy and individuality to just give in, adapt to our circumstances, and be a happier and healthier organism?

I think that if we just admitted that work is something we all need in order to lend purpose to our lives and satisfy our feeling of having contributed to the collective, then we would all be a lot better off, and we could go forward into our lives rid of a corrosive delusion that only interferes with true happiness.

That’s all from me for today folks! Talk to you again tomorrow.

The nice lady with the Chinese accent at Wing Kee said it will be about an hour before I get my food, so I figured I would use that time to blopg, and that way when the food arrives I can just settle down with my Chinese food and My Little Ponies and chill for the evening.

Before I ordered from Wing Kee, I decided to do a little research. See, their flyer says they offer free delivery within 5 km, and I have been getting dinged $5 for delivery whenever I order, so I decided to boot up Google Maps and find out just how far away Wing Kee is.

Turns out that, as the car drives, they are 5.4 km away. So they got me there. I am 400 meters away from free delivery, damn it! I tried to research another Chinese place closer to me, because frankly five bucks for delivery is outrageous, but hunger was making me impatient so I decided to just go with good ol Wing Kee.

However, when I am less hungry (and not on my tablet… slow freaking thing), I will look for a more reasonably priced alternative.

I decided I would treat myself tonight because I have been feeling somewhat depressed lately. Having my main PC die on me really threw me for a loop, and what with the ID business looming over my head, I have been feeling a little down.

It’s not helped by the fact that I have been undereating again. I have been skipping meals because I wasn’t hungry at the time and so I am rocking a near constant hypoglycemic state. Not smart!

It got so bad that this morning at around 6 am, I woke up with a full bladder, and while emptying it into the appropriate receptacle, got this intense head rush… that didn’t stop.

That is a very bad sensation. I was also trembling and my legs were wobbly and I felt cold in a very scary way.

So I marched my buttocks out to the kitchen and forced myself to eat. I probably should have eaten more, but the minute my blood sugar started climbing, the effects of my sleeping pills kicked back in with a vengeance, and so I pretty much had to go back to bed.

I really have to stop doing this to myself. I have let my eating discipline go slack and I can’t afford to do that. For me, it is potentially lethal for me to skip a meal. For a long time, I had a very good record when it came to eating when I am supposed to eat regardless of whether or not I felt hungry.

And I need to get back to that. When it is meal time, I will eat. I might only eat a piece of fruit and a PB&J, but I will eat.

I swear sometimes that self-discipline is (or tries to be, in a slacker like me) a zero sum game where if you become more disciplined in one area, you slack off in another area. That, plus the tendency to slack off in the summer anyhow, plus the new stressors in my life equals a higher potential for doing stupid things like skipping meals. So I had best be on my guard.

I am trying very hard to be the caring, engaged, lovingly disciplining parent that I never had to myself. It’s not easy to undo a lifetime of self-neglect and stop doing to myself what my parents did to me (namely ignore me) and so it will be no easy task to get myself ship-shape again.

But I feel that I am on the right path. Certainly, the fact that I will be going to school soon (fingers crossed) will do me a great deal of good by providing lots of structure and an environment in which my considerable creative assets can be both recognized and honed.

I think I will really bloom and shine at VFS. It is the perfect place for me to be, and I am proud of myself that I am finally reaching out to get what I want out of life instead of being trapped on the sidelines be my fears.

I wonder how old people will think I am at VFS. People are always surprised when they learn my true age online because I have a very youthful attitude and you don’t see a lot of people in their forties who are all perky and cuddly and whatnot.

Then again, I have a fursona online. That kind of makes a difference. Still, I bet the people at VFS who have NOT read my application will be surprised to find out that I am old enough to have seen Star Wars in the theater the first time around.

Turns out that living the cloistered life I have led has kept me well-preserved on a strictly psychological level, and I plan on using that to my advantage

(two hours later)

Chinese food arrived and was eaten. Ponies were watched. I am at the end of Season Two, and they are using the “suspicious of the loved one’s new mate” standard plotline. You know, where the main character meets the new mate and doesn’t like them, and accuses them of being awful, and everyone thinks they are just being jealous and possessive and paranoid, but it turns out they were right all along.

I’ve seen it a million times. But loving the Ponies is not about originality of plot. Plot originality is overrated.

Like a good sitcom, it’s all about the characters, the dialogue, and the laughs. The best shows are always the ones with the characters you love and want to spend time with. If you don’t have that, you have nothing.

Well that’s all from me tonight in this unusual blog entry. I don’t usually let anything interrupt me when I am blogging, but this time it was FOOD.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.