There has to be a (legal) way of earning a living that doesn't involve going through this utter dread and agony every Sunday night.
It is the end of a particularly fabulous weekend, so the contrast with what's to come tomorrow could not be greater. It was my birthday last Friday and I've three days of celebrations. The festivities kicked off with an outing to Hickstead with a friend and just kept going uphill from there, rounding things off with afternoon tea somewhere divine today with lots of lovely friends, and then a quiet hack with the mare in the evening. In between, there have been cocktails and dinner somewhere low-key but quirky with another crowd of friends, and open-air picnic opera with yet another lot. I am blessed with a motley and loyal bunch of friends and acquaintances, a really rather good husband, an interesting social life, an adorable and adoring if not entirely sound mare (on which sore subject there will be more later on, no doubt). I have a degree, a top notch one if I may say so, and from a decent university. I am presentable and throughly clubbable and can make a seamless transition from hunting field to ballroom in two hours flat (without the aid of hair and beauty professionals). I can read in five languages and communicate more or less fluently in three. And yet, and yet... I am a drudge in a badly paid and mind-numbingly tedious job that I hate with a passion, and I am seemingly unable to generate a viable alternative.
This, in a nutshell, is What Is Wrong With My Life, the reason I am awake blogging at 2am when I should be asleep in my high-thread-count bedlinen, tangled up with my toned and loving husband, and Counting My Blessings. I have given this pesky issue some thought over the years, and have come to the tentative conclusion that it is, perhaps, not entirely Something Wrong With Me after all. For one thing, there are too many articulate, intelligent and educated people in a similar predicament, as I found recently at one of the School of Life's seminars, entitled How to Find a Job You Love. (The clue, by via negativa, is in the title: a roomful of mostly bright, university educated-chaps and chappesses, from a whole range of age brackets and walks of life, who clearly were not feeling the love in their jobs, and felt this was enough of a problem to attend a course about it). Could there be something about our career-obsessed, linear-progression-fixated culture that is making so many of us feel inadequate? I'd go further to say that this culture, this way of thinking about careers and work and what constitutes success, is making people sick. Some of us look at it, this model, the very language of it, "a step up", "ceilings", "ladders", "getting to the top" - and we just get vertigo.
For a long time, something in me has been rebelling against this not entirely helpful model. Looking back, I have probably been kicking against it since childhood. And it has taken me a while to figure out what this rebellion is about, that it is not as simple as being a loser. It is about integrity, about refusing to spend one-third of one's time in a sort of tedium-induced coma for the sake of paying a few bills and conforming with what is expected. A nagging sense that there has to be more to life, that a person's worth must come from a more genuine place, surely. I am blessed and cursed in equal measures with a vivid imagination, which means I will not easily settle for what's put in front of me, being able to conjure up a million more attractive alternatives. (This is a source of constant worry for my husband, but that is another story.) And it is also about honesty, calling a spade a spade: except for those with a private income and land, we are all the modern equivalent of medieval indentured labourers, tied as we are to our mortgages and salaries. However large the figures involved, it is only a case of wearing a more or less elaborate harness, and some of us do not do well in harness. I, for example, am not built (physically or temperamentally) like a cart-horse or plough-ox, and cannot see why I should be expected to perform like one.
The bore of course, and the "challenge" also (euphemism for pain in the behind that must be somehow overcome without moaning), is that one must earn a living somehow. When I read articles on the subject by people who clearly do not need to earn a living, it fills me with rage. Not because I am jealous, but because it is unsporting: you can't complain about the drudgery of work and the bravery of chucking it all in to follow your dreams, when you are sitting in your Marylebone flat paid for by daddy/investment banker husband/inherited. Likewise, you can't hold up your cupcake business/lifestyle consultancy/online chakra realignment service as a practical example of an answer to the livelihood vs fulfillment conundrum, when your successful creative venture either does not really pay your bills or was funded by said daddy/invstment banker husband in the first place. Don't get me wrong: I don't disapprove at all. Given half a chance I'd take the investment banker husband option, but rather foolishly I married for love when I was too young and naive to give these things proper thought. I say, if you are lucky enough to have an independent income, enjoy it to the full, be grateful and be graceful enough to acknowledge your luck, do not pretend you have to struggle with the tiresome business of earning a living.
When I read about hugely "successful" people's lives (perma-busy, constantly chained to i-phones or blackberries, no time for this or that, five am starts at the gym, how much their careers mean to them, how much money they are making, how they can produce a baby and go to a meeting in the same morning, etc.) my first reaction is: I want to lie down. My second thought is "what a bore they must be, always going on about work". (My third thought is "when do they paint their nails?", but that is daft, obviously they have a minion doing their manicures while they clench a deal on the speakerphone.) It used to be considered vulgar, going on about work and being busy money like that. I don't know about vulgar, but it seems dreadfully tedious and uninspiring, and to me that is a far worse sin.
I hate getting stuck next to one of these overachievers at a dinner party, the one small consolation being that they are usually too busy tapping into their i-phones or looking out for someone more important to bore me with their tales of boardroom and budget sheets. Luckily for me, I don't tend to meet that many. Or perhaps they don't reveal themselves to me, since I advertise myself as an entrenched underachiever and conscientious objector to the busy career culture, a consumate idler with no easy job title or career label attached. That tends to do the trick.
I would discourage anyone from thinking this is an attack on hard work per se. On the contrary, I thoroughly approve of devoting long hours and disproportionate amounts of effort, sweat and tears to whatever activity you find meaningful and fulfilling, no matter how hopeless the cause. My budding attempts at eventing this year are good evidence of this, as is my ongoing saga with the permanently infirm mare-on-loan. When I was a student I would stay up all night deconstructing Chaucer, with or without the aid of a glass of wine and a willing interlocutor. What I rail against is busy-ness for its own sake, dull drudgery, particularly that of an office-based variety, and most especially when indulged in by people who put on airs of it being a worthy sacrifice, when they are quite clearly not saving lives. On the subject of which, I would never dream of addressing any of these musings to those whose jobs do, in one way or another, involve saving lives. They have a point, in a way that I don't, and therefore I have no point to make to them. When my surgeon friend comes out to see me after a 12-hour shift in theatre, I buy her a drink. I don't talk about work, and funnily enough neither does she.
All of which may seem a rather convoluted way of saying "arrrgh, I don't want to go to work tomorrow", which is what zillions of people are thinking right now on a Sunday night. But that, precisely, is my point. Some of those zillions will carry on for decades, muffling the voice of discontent on Sundays and then sleep-walking to the same job on Monday mornings. I won't. Others will answer the siren call in an unfortunate way and just go bankrupt, or end up on the streets, etc. I hope I won't, either. There has to be another way. Hopefully a legal one.
