New Years Resolutions 2013

It's that time of year again! I must say my 2012 resolutions worked out quite okay, for the most part. Except for the one regarding career of course - but that one also "worked out" in its own way - even though it wasn't quite what I was expecting.

December has been a bit of a slow month - sort of a hangover of a rather weird and disjointed year - 2012 has seen plenty of strange epiphanies, both professional and personal.

The best part of 2012 has been that I think I'm finally grasping impermanence and flow. Seeing the good in the moment rather than stressing about what's coming next. The shambles that is my career saga of the past two years really helped put some of this into perspective. But feh, no need to get too profound here - let's just get some concrete points out of the way:

Lazy Evening Routine

This is something that has become awfully lazy and unproductive, towards the end of 2012 especially. Most of the time I just eat dinner and then watch a couple of movies on DVD until bed time. I thought that not playing WoW any more would mean that I'd have more productive time, but alas, it just got eaten up by finding another lazy comfort zone relaxation routine.

Not sure exactly what to do here, in terms of a solid resolution. It's too trite to say something like "just go out more", or "do something productive instead". So what I will do is ban myself from watching TV and DVDs on weeknights. Only Friday-Sunday, unless it's part of a social plan with someone else. So now, anything else I come up with is bound to be more "productive".

Stop Snacking

To be fair, this is mostly connected to the above. I've gotten in the habit of snacking in front of the TV after dinner. Not necessarily horribly unhealthy stuff - but still not great.

No more snack food except fruit and nuts. Except on weekends.

Career

Ahh, the big one. And this is one that's hard to fully control, because after all, who knows what opportunities might knock (or not). But here's the general plan: 

• I'm getting a truck license as soon as I can find a training session with a driving school during January.
• Look for any kind of transport/trucking work I can find.
• Re-evaluate where to go after that (probably later in the year if not even later).

This all comes back to where I left things hanging in this post. Something in transport is a nice combination of being practical as well as semi-skilled (if not more than semi, depending on further specialisation). My current dream is to see what it's like being a long distance truck driver, and perhaps to get FIFO/location work driving dump trucks in the mines. I know that I have something close to superhuman levels of tolerance for boredom and loneliness, so I know that this aspect won't get to me.

In the meantime, will see how the hours go in my current casual hospitality job. But from the looks of it, there isn't much hope that it'll be a major source of hours and income again. Maybe just for a couple more months through summer. But at any rate, this isn't a huge "occupational" consideration any more.

"Dating"

I wasn't sure if this one is even worth mentioning, since there is nothing I explicitly want on that front anyway. I tried dating fairly explicitly in 2012, and it was mostly a waste of time, though there've been a few "interesting" incidents and I'd met some nice people.

But alas, when you're not looking to "settle down" in any traditional sense, and you have no real interest in sex for its own sake - it's probably best to just go with the flow on this front. I've brought back my OkCupid profile, blanked it out, and changed it to only looking for friends and pen pals. I might fill it out again (in the context of meeting new friends) if I get the inspiration. Otherwise, that part of my life is getting shelved again, for the moment at least. 

Avoid "End Of Year Procrastination"

Lastly, this is something I want to avoid from now on. This year I got into a bit of a lazy mood towards the end of the year. It's not too bad in context I suppose - after all, it really has been an unusually disjointed and weird year - but from now on I want to avoid this. Stay productive and seize the day so to speak.

Meaningless Work

This is mostly a followup to the last post "Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work". I wanted to get it out sooner, but I haven't been feeling too well for the last couple of weeks...

Anyway, in the last post I mentioned how it pays to think about what we can put up with on the job, rather than totally concentrating on finding work that will be meaningful to us. The idea there is that virtually all paid work (anything that isn't truly nearly 100% aligned with one's personal passions) will eventually become a bit of a grind to us - so it's important to be able to "put up" with the particular kind of grind, rather than solely concentrating on finding positives in a potential occupation.

This is nothing radical I suppose. It's just one of the aspects of looking at strengths and weaknesses (and "putting up with an aspect that's generally seen as a negative" is essentially a strength), but I think this often gets glossed over in favour of looking for fulfilment from a job. It seems more positive to think "what will I enjoy?" rather than "what won't drive me nuts?", but I think a balance of the two questions is a good approach.

Meaningless Jobs

My own journey with "meaningless jobs" has been reasonably varied. I've been everything from a paper boy, pizza delivery boy, cleaner (janitor), warehouse hand, kitchen assistant and door-to-door charity collector. All of these jobs had their moments, but of course none were real careers or particularly exciting. However, they did offer a big variety of experiences which - in hindsight - really tested the above theory: the types of boredoms and frustrations in them were radically different.

eg. As a pretty extreme introvert, I have to say that the frustration of dealing with "negative human contact" is particularly draining to me. This is why I couldn't handle face-to-face charity collection, or anything which involved a "hard sell" or dealing with difficult customers. Pizza delivery was actually okay in that regard, because the human contact there is almost always totally positive - you're not trying to sell people something - you're brining them something they're eagerly anticipating.

But to get right to the point - my introversion also means that one of my key strengths in putting up with "meaningless jobs" is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Tasks which many people find extremely lonely and mind-numbing (such as standing in front of an industrial dishwasher and loading dishes into it all evening) are fine for me. I can essentially switch off, go into a kind of meditative stance, and just kill time and go through the motions. It's certainly not always "fun", or something I'd want to do forever, but it's far less taxing than jobs which require constantly being switched on to unpredictable human contact, or needing to sustain focus on something which I'm not really entirely "into".

Conclusion

The conclusion I've come to is that a good approach for me would be to look for work where the main challenge - as far as most people's perception is concerned anyway - is simply tolerance for boredom and loneliness. Finding basic "meaning" is relatively easy. All work is "meaningful", by definition. People wouldn't want it done and wouldn't pay you for it if it didn't mean something to them. But of course this is quite abstract, and can't sustain my motivation if I'm pushing against the grain of my personality (and strengths and weaknesses) with a job long term.

I actually enjoy practical work - as in directly seeing physical objects being created, modified, or moved around. It somehow feels more tangible and meaningful to me than sitting in an office pushing buttons (even though I rationally know that knowledge work is just as "real"). But looking at it from the other side - I find it much easier to put up with the grind of relatively repetitive and lesser skilled practical work than professional knowledge work. 

I have some clearer ideas now regarding what I'll go for in 2013 anyway. I'll leave the specifics out for now, but I'll write more when I actually sign up for it.

Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that causes boredom and frustration at work.

I think there is a lot to be said for Marx's theory of alienation. My own brief description - and interpretation of it for the purposes of this post - is this: "It sucks to work for someone else on something you don't really truly care about, for some external reward which has nothing directly to do with the work (such as money)."

In a twisted way though, I think it's actually quite possible to shoot yourself in the foot by trying to find "meaningful work". My burnout in software development was a classic illustration of this: I loved programming as a hobby and a pure craft, but working for other people on random boring business systems for money slowly ground me down until I simply couldn't take it any more. Essentially, the work was still "alienated labour", despite in theory doing something that I might otherwise enjoy, in a more personally-inspired or hobby context.

Artists report this feeling when doing commissioned works where they are told in detail what to do, as opposed to doing their own thing, or generally being allowed near-complete creative freedom in commissioned work. Obviously, in business this is almost impossible to escape, because the chances of your personal creative passion aligning with business objectives 100% at all times is extremely low in most types of work.

So how to fix this?

I think there is a lot to be said for the idea of treating a job as just a job. This basically acknowledges that it's just some alienated labour that you're doing for money, and you don't get too caught up with any deeper meaning behind it. Boredom, frustration, and eventual burnout are still possible of course - but they can be mitigated by the act of simply finding a comfortable flow without expecting any kind of existential fulfilment from the whole thing.

After a decade in a "meaningful career", versus years of odd casual jobs (including my current gig as a KP), what I've found is that 1) It's actually much easier for me to treat menial work as "just a job" and tolerate it on that level, and 2) Everybody has strengths and weaknesses which make certain "menial jobs" vastly more tolerable than others, even if they're not very "meaningful" to us.

For me, the key to occupational sanity seems to be almost the exact opposite of "finding meaningful work". That is: finding work which is so meaningless that I can tolerate it simply by not expecting anything at all from it other than going in, grinding out the time, and being paid for it. The less "engagement", the better. Well, that's the theory anyway!

In practice, it's more of a balance of course. Focusing on the "positives" of jobs can sometimes lead us astray. Often it's just as important to ask - "Which types of 'negatives' would I be good at tolerating?", which, granted, is really just another "strength" and a positive - but many people don't like to talk like that. And every job interview advice source tells you to speak in positives and avoid drawing attention to negatives, which I think in this case tends to feed back into people's evaluation of occupation choice and glosses over something that's actually quite important.

I'll write a follow-up to this soon, but for now, this describes the general abstract idea of how I'm looking to tackle this issue.