Today, I took a temp job. I don’t like the fact that it took time away from my self-improvement activities, but I’m getting paid a smitten for my trouble, and they fed me —although, neither are always a guarantee with these types of jobs, plus we were outside, kept to wait for most of the day, while it was cold, windy, and raining at a certain point. No guarantee of pay or food (or at least a pay that’s high enough to buy food), plus it takes time away from me doing activities I love and that invigorate me.
I kept asking myself this question throughout the whole day. If not,
what should my next move towards something else be?
I hope I can answer that question towards the end of this post…
Meanwhile, the area we were at had lots of homeless people sleeping on benches near us (who hated our presence and flashed red lasers into our eyes), and littered with human feces. This, in contrast to one of the guys with us, who was told to pretend to be a homeless person, who was mistaken by a fellow temp worker as really being homeless, saying how a person “such as himself should be lucky to have a job like this” come up to him and ask, “So, do you think America is a great country?” Why anyone would ask a question like that out of the blue would be hard to understand. Possibly, because seeing this man was a minority, he wanted to connect on the basis of suffering through racial injustices and how that has created a ceiling towards opportunities to progress. Or maybe it was because that guy was from a country that educated everyone to hate the US for decades, while also using nationalism to control their thoughts, because the political ideology that used to do that has crumbled in everyone’s face? I don’t know, regardless, that out-of-left-field question made this man really defensive, saying he didn’t stand for anything, and didn’t have political views. Then, somehow, the Great Recession came into discussion. So that’s when I chimed in, because apparently, I find this sort of topic to be fun, and said, “Hey when the recession hit off, everyone fell down, but the US was still on top of the pile.” He didn’t see it that way, and asked “WHO?! WHO’S on top?! YOU PEOPLE?!” Actually no. The country as a whole, as evidenced by the fact that we’re all here with a job that apparently we share a mutual disdain for. Facts aside, because I don’t know when to shut up and walk away, I have now been lumped into a group of people who have helped keep this person down, and lumped in with an idiot who didn’t know that person was only pretending to be a hobo. Time to create some distance.
On the one hand, you have actual homeless people who really need money, but can’t cash a check, don’t have a home, or even adequate mental care to heal them enough to stop scaring people from hiring them. Then, you have someone who concentrates on all their personal grievances, despite being in the global 1%. So should the latter person be grateful for what they have? FUCK NO! I mean, it helps to appreciate everything around you, but it shouldn’t be a thing to stop you from being a more optimal form of you. So…
What things are you trying to optimize in your life?
If you can’t figure out those things, or even if you’ve identified them, but can’t figure out what’s preventing you from optimizing these things,
What are you trying to resist?
I’m resisting jumping on a job simply for the money. Have I won this battle? Not yet. In fact, I’ve been jumping from one lower-paying job, to another. A job, is something you do to trade your time for money. However, with the down-time that is the only consistent feature of this job, I have time to let my mind wander, and work its way around to finding that a way on
How to trade money for time
.
I’ve seen the sinkhole of most jobs, and the attitude it carries. “I hate my job”, but because of XYZ, I am forced to keep it. I heard that all throughout today from every single person. So what’s preventing us from changing to a job where people actually treat us like human beings? Either we are destined to do this, because we are skilled at this job, that people would recognize immediately, and you’d get treated much better. Or, you lack a skill somewhere else, which you should improve OPTIMIZE upon anyways.
I’ll figure out the answer to these questions on a later date. I need to get my OPTIMAL amount of sleep. In the meantime, let me pile this thing to ponder on you…
Two hobos: One real, one fake. The only thing that sets them apart, is one barely has a roof over their head and a bit more money. Let’s say in a hypothetical world, these things were guaranteed to you. How would you take full advantage of this? If your answer is to do nothing but rest, or to passively intake some form of entertainment as a leisure drug, then you’re not really taking advantage of this time to solve your problems.