I Pray for 4 p.m.

I pray for 4 p.m. Five days a week, eight hours a day, most of the year. You spend a majority of your life with your coworkers. I spend a majority of my life with my coworkers. Think about that. Because I wake up and don’t want to be awake, then I’m at work, and when I’m home I want to work on my own projects and then I’m in bed. But I communicate, potentially, with my coworkers more than my family.

No sane person should want to go to a job they’re only at because they need to survive in this world. You should be pining for the second you get out to go and live your life. Sure, some people “love” their job. But what would they say if they had the chance to never work again? You can enjoy a job all you want, but you have to do it, all of it.

Too many are obsessed with this, “I love my job” mantra. Do they really? What is their home life like? I’d venture to guess anyone who “loves” their job might be a miserable person outside of work. Work enables me to do what I want outside of work, it’s an age-old means to an end. If you aren’t looking forward to the end of the day when you can do whatever you want, you’re just wasting your life away sitting around doing nothing while you twit your thumbs around waiting for the next work day to begin. I hate little more than looking at the clock at night and realizing I need to sleep. I do not love my job, I never particularly want to love my job. I tolerate my job. Some jobs I tolerate less than others.

If you fall in love with your job you’ve lost. You’ve perished to the machine. You will get engulfed in something that you will eventually leave by some means or another and no one will care. More times than note you are expendable, you will be replaced, time marches on and so will the place you worked for. This of course with the exception of an invaluable skill or ideal you offered if you hold a high place or run a business. If you’re gone, it goes down. If it doesn’t? Perhaps you could’ve been anybody, you just got there first.

I guess it comes down to quality of life. Yes, one can argue if you love your job and your life outside of your job, that’s pretty good. Well, what if those people didn’t have to work? Would they still want to do it? I’d venture to guess they’d spend that time now free on other endeavors. You might like making pizza, you might like managing others in an administrative setting, or enjoy building or fixing or making belts or overseeing a manufacturing company or what have you. But if you were free, truly free, you wouldn’t be doing that, sure, if a cook wants a restaurant, then they’ll do that. Or a copywriter or editor wants to write books, then they’ll do that. Still up the same alley, but not the same thing.

I pray for 4 p.m. because I refuse to be lumped into a culture that tells you that you should “be the best at what you do.” Not all of us can do what we want. Actually, I’ll retract and replace that statement. We can all do what we want, but not all of us can sustain the life we want by doing whatever we want. It’s can’t be statistically possible. We all can’t be working musicians, actors and actresses, directors, business owners, authors, entrepreneurs. No, we don’t all have the capability, nor the resources to do what we all want. So we get other jobs. We make sacrifices. It’s just how it is. All this love of work nonsense is just that, nonsense.

I pray for 4 p.m.