work – skepticlysm

Supposed to.
Not suppose to.
The d is important.
…
Yesterday, driving back from my uncle’s 70^th birthday party, I thought about the term “supposed to” a lot.
Specifically, I thought about it through the lens of how we’re “supposed to” operate in society.
You’re supposed to want things.
To want the same things.
Big houses.
New cars.
Fancy clothes.
You’re supposed to want to get ahead in a career.
To aspire to wealth.
And power, I guess.
You’re supposed to agree with everyone.
To follow the flock.
Giggle with the gaggle.
Goddamn, I have never been good at it.
I have tried.
I have tried so hard.
All my life.
Most of my interactions with everything professional has been me pretending, trying to fit in, trying to be liked and seen.
Because I don’t fit in naturally.
And some part of me knows that, and is desperate to not be alone because he can’t understand what’s wrong with him.
But trying to be what you’re supposed to be is hard.
…
Hell, I wonder if burnout is this.
We’re “supposed to” be more and more productive, and all the fucking media I see in my threads tries to make me feel awful if I’m not striving to be more productive.
(insert Peter’s rant from Office Space)
I wonder if this is why I react the way I do about AI.
I can see AI as a tool to help me refine some of my thinking and creative ideas.
Kinda.
But the flip side of that is it’s refining ideas toward the Great Average.
Which won’t be making me more productive, it’ll be making me more intellectually and creatively lazy in the long-term.
(The science on creativity says it’s a muscle, btw, and one everyone has.)
If you’re using AI as a tool to augment your productivity, to have it replace some of your more rote work output, why the hell are you doing that “work” in the first place?
Which lands us back in Supposed To-land.
All this shit we’re supposed to be doing is leeching our humanity and our lives.
Sucking all the joy and meaning away.
When I think about this stuff driving the car, it’s because I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.
Why can I not just do what is expected?
Why do I not get satisfaction from the expected?
(I’m aware this isn’t just me and I’m not trying to be a precious little flower, but I can’t speak for anyone else, so here we are.)
For three weeks after college graduation, I got to hang out with my cousins, Brandi and Josh, in the outskirts of Chicago (and also Las Vegas).
I bought two CDs on that trip.
1) Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine
2) When I Woke by Rusted Root
While Rusted Root played, Brandi and I talked about something, though I can’t remember exactly what, but she paused mid-sentence while flipping through the CD-book, and said, “I’d like to hang out with these guys.”
At the time, I thought, Brandi, you crazy.
Now?
She was right this whole fucking time.
We were at Mumford & Sons last night and while I listened to the lyrics, I kept imagining them sitting around a studio strumming their guitars and chatting about life and music and how they must feel so goddamn fulfilled by what they’re doing.
Yes, yes, I can do those things in my “spare” time.
No time is spare.
Creation is not less than, and it sure as hell has immense value.
I’m not opposed to working, mind you.
Creating anything is work.
But doing something someone else has determined the organization needs is not what I’m … supposed to … be doing.
It isn’t.
I’m not wired for that.
I do it anyway.
Because I’m scared of being destitute.
Full stop.
That’s the whole reason I have worked for something else my entire life.
Something.
Because businesses are not fucking people.
The same as AI aren’t.
Think about this.
You have a job, your career.
How often do you determine what you do on any given day?
Are you far enough up the food chain you get to decide how to spend your day?
Do YOU set your tasks?
Sure, there are days where you’re given a task and allowed to complete it how you see fit.
But how much agency do you have in choosing that thing?
Food for thought.
Food for myself and my family, a roof over their heads.
When I look around, there’s not a lot of things I want anymore.
Stuff.
There are some. I am a consumerist, after all, but things.
Physical things.
Not a lot of those.
There are plenty of things I want to DO though.
I want to see Ghent in Belgium, and to go to European holiday markets, not to buy stuff, but to live moments.
Yes, many of those moments have people in them.
Most.
I’d rather trade something I wanted to make for those moments.
I want to make art, to sell stories built from my imagination and words.
I want to talk to other people in my craft about what we’re creating, and then I want to talk to the people who hopefully have enjoyed what I’ve created about how it affected them.
I want to learn to make and play music.
I want to paint.
And build shit.
I want to live doing the things that bring me solace.
But … living the here and now is surviving by doing assignments other people give me until I’m used up and reach that government mandated retirement age, a number chosen by those who already have enough funds to buy their freedom and agency.
Life’s being suppressed by “supposed to,” squashed by the consumer economy and all the tasks we’ve been assigned to survive in it.
I’m not making a political statement.
I’m talking about our entire modern way of life.
This is not how it is supposed to be.
There is plenty.
Your value and worth are not your assigned hourly-wage.
Which brings us back to that other album I bought in Chicago, Evil Empire.
(And I’m sitting here wondering if an examination of Zack’s lyrics is a detour from today’s theme. Maybe yes, maybe no.)
So … I won’t.
I highly recommend going to read his words on that album, or hell, stick your headphones on and listen to it audio book-style.
Zack’s a goddamn prophet.
And he’s rebelling against “supposed to” in every way.
I have struggled with it my whole life, wrestled with the fear of being poor, of being a failure.
More internally than externally.
I’ll go do what I need to do, but inside, it’s a maelstrom.
That scene of Agent Smith talking to Morpheus while the latter is chained to the chair.
That. That moment.
And before you go, “Well, why don’t you just do what you want?”
Goddamn what a dismissal that kind of thing is.
What an uninformed, unempathetic take to have on someone else’s situation.
We have to stop trying to make other people fit in the boxes we build in our heads.
We alike, but we are not the same.
You’re supposed to have empathy.
You’re supposed to have the opportunity to be fulfilled.
To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Not to provide value for stakeholders.
TL;DR: fuck “supposed to.”
Thanks for stopping by.

Tag: work

TL;DR