It’s Wednesday, so I go to work.
The doldrums are upon us – the hot, sticky center of the summer when work becomes not just difficult, but impossible. We are becalmed. So I look up from my laptop, gaze through the window towards Manhattan’s hazy edges, and send my thoughts outwards. They surf the humid air for a moment, then rush back inside to my climate controlled office and me, at my desk, doing my job.
I spend a lot of time thinking about work because I spend a lot of time at work. Everyone I know does. This is New York. You push to the front of the line or get trampled under the feet of those who want it more than you. The companies that employ us love this attitude. They feed it, pitting us against one another in the belief that it will make us better. And they’re right – it does. But it also makes us strangely incomplete. We are all angles, no center.
I find an old union slogan on a blog: “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” My cubicle-mate snorts. “You know what I’d do with eight hours recreation? Finally catch up on my work.”
We fill our lives with work because we have to fill them with something, and work is plentiful and cheap. It expands to fill the space like caulk. But in our rush to vanquish the emptiness, we often miss the fact that the emptiness is itself the point. There is no meaning of life, at least not in the sense people usually mean. Life is a vessel to be filled with our own meaning.
Ultimately, it is our responsibility to figure out a way to be happy. That is the true work of our lives.
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About the author: Ben Hughes is a writer, creative director, photographer and filmmaker. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and experiments with the limits of human communication at @benhughestv .
