Or should that be “think”?

Yeah, I am going to go on about people needing to work in order to be happy again. Blame it on the last episode of Bones that I watched. It got me back on the subject.

As you know, I think that we need to seriously reevaluate the way we think about work in our lives. School does not prepare us for the realities of working life, and one of the ways it fails the student is that it teaches them that there is this natural separation between the working part of the day and the total leisure part of the day.

This leads to an “I hate work/I hate school” mentality that is, of course, perfectly understandable, but ultimately counterproductive. This split down the middle of our lives prevents us from truly adapting to circumstances and, in a sense, keeps our inner child from growing up.

I think the truly healthy and happy people are the ones who learn to simply accept the realities of life and adapt to them. It is pointless to continue to resist something you have already decided to do.

Worse than pointless, it’s childish, and it causes a destructive bifurcation in people’s lives. Spending your day hating your job and your nights in the million distractions our culture offers in order to recover from said job is not a route to happiness. It is a spiritual dead end, a wound that does not heal, and it is that stubborn inner child who refuses to let go and just accept that this is what life is like now that is keeping it from healing.

That’s why people are happier when they are older. It is not simply that with age comes more money and status. It’s that with maturity comes the ability to stop fighting circumstance, accept that to live is to work, and look around your environment for ways to better adapt.

I know this isn’t easy, especially if you have a low-status job. The urge for status advancement is in us all, and it is a rare person who can fully accept a low-status job. No matter how much of a rugged individualist you think you are, being low status will get to you, and that will inform your work experience on every level.

But I am not asking you to accept that you will never be more than a McDonald’s french fry chef. That would be too difficult for any but the most dedicated urban hermit.

All you have to accept is that this is how things are now. It is this inner resistance that keeps you from making the best of your situation. On some level, a part of you refuses to accept that your Golden Arches life is really happening and that therefore its status attaches to you. You even preserve your prejudicial judgment of low status people by telling yourself that maybe you are a McDonald’s chef du pomme frites, but you aren’t like the other people here. You’re different.

And you are different. Different just like the rest of us.

You will only find inner peace if you accept what you cannot (or don’t really want to) change. That is why I keep asking people if they would rather be right or happy. So much unnecessary suffering is caused by sheer stubbornness over some position you took a long time ago and that you are still maintaining because it would damn near kill you to admit to the person in your head that you came into conflict with that they were right.

Imagine it now. Imagine telling your worst enemy they were right about something. You would have trouble doing it, wouldn’t you? Even if you knew you would be way happier afterward?

But what is more important, an argument, or your future happiness?

Casting the asides…. aside, what can we do to help fix this useless dichotomy between work life and the rest of life? I think we start with the schools.

There are so many things wrong with our current outdated industrial model of education, and so much hard scientific evidence to back that claim up, that to get into it would be a whole series of articles unto itself.

Suffice it to say that the current educational system is unnecessarily unfun. Children naturally want to learn. That’s why they like to explore and what a lot of their independent play is all about. We have a very strong instinct to increase our knowledge of the world.

And yet, kids hate school, because we ignore what they want and what they enjoy just cram the knowledge funnel down their throats and force-feed them while making them sit still and be quiet, which they hate doing because nature is telling them to move, explore, talk, and figure things out about their world that way.

So if we just opened our minds to organizing school around what children actually enjoy and want to do, and stop forcing them all through the same cookie cutter mold over and over again so they learn they have to protect their own identity at all costs, the dichotomy would crumble. It would be far easier for children to learn that school is not the enemy, and they would carry that lesson into thinking that work is not the enemy.

And the same goes for our work environments. The same sort of reforms will work there as well.

Human beings need to work. We need meaningful labour, and no matter how much you hate your job, that is what it is giving you. It gives you a place where you can apply your energy to something with tangible results (even if those results are in the form of french fries) and where your labours are part of a larger group endeavor.

All human beings need this kind of place in society, and once you realize that, then you realize that it is only by recognizing that work is a necessity, not a luxury, can you accept that you too need work (and not just a paycheck) and tear down that wall that school built down the middle of your day.

It’s all just life. Learn to live it.

I will talk to all of your nice people again tomorrow.