Don’t Just Work Hard, Work Smart Too!
The creative exploit as a lazy alternative to the rat race, means instigating the fight between irregularity and normality. And while you’re out fighting normal:
Test yourself, test nature, test the faith. That’s what living is all about!
The Rat Race And The Creative Alternative
There is work, and then there is work.
Someone looking from the outside in can be so quick to pass judgment. It is socially common, at least here in the west, to be defined instantly by what we do for a living.
Quite usually, this is implied through what we do for work. Your working life is everything that your everyday life stands for. It is everything people use to work you down into a nutshell. After all, we are what we are consumed by.
The Three Types
The way in which you spend your time for compensation is what makes or breaks you, socially speaking.
In this, I like to separate people into 3 different working classes:
1. Employers
Employers, or people who found obvious success on their own terms. These are people who are praised, and glorified. These people are excused from such terms as real job, or real work because it is automatically assumed considering that the money earned here, speaks for itself.
2. Employees
Employees, or people who are directly working as an employee/trading their time for someone else’s dream in some manner. These people are deemed admirable, respectable, and honest. These people exemplify the typical hard-working stereotype. This is also the classic definition for what work really is. The intense effort sustained in the longevity of a career, exchanging compensation for one’s time. This is work, because people work hard for their money. Most people live here.
3. Transitioning Workforce
Transitioning workforce, this is what I call everyone else who doesn’t fit into either of the above two categories. Quite typically, they are on the cusp of falling into one, or the other. While transitioning, these people can be scrutinized as lazy, or lost. The hassle here is that they aren’t engaging with real jobs. The reason being, a) They haven’t made a lot of money yet, or b) They aren’t choosing to exchange their time for compensation, in committing their life to another’s strange dream.
Pipe Dreams
In pursuit of my own creative exploits, I feel I fall into this transitioning workforce. Categorically speaking, I am usually on the verge of breaking even or going broke, a true starving artist.
Regardless of the situation, people on the outside looking in always cultivate such scrutiny towards those who find themselves in similar situations.
But before I go any further, I want to note on how I am cultivating a very biased opinion in these experiences here.
Nevertheless, here are some of the personal examples to touch up on to showcase what fighting normal really means in our effort to escape the rat race:
The Rat Race: “Get a real job.”
No.
I had a real job, a very lucrative one at that for my standards, but I gave it up.
I left for several reasons, predominantly because of the endless existential crises that kept surfacing for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the experience and what it did do for me. But I had to leave, to respect my personal callings.
But Let me ask you: what is a real job, and what are the standards that make it so.
Everything we do on this plane of existence has been fabricated by the men and women here.
A real job is a fallacy, it’s what we made it out to be.
Technically, A real job is something people do in place of what we were going to do anyways, which is…
To fill time.
Regardless of what we strive for, the clock continues to tick away steadily. In that fact, time is also just another conceptualization of moveable moments.
“Well you should seek it out, to get a good job, to work for a good source of income.”
And I’ll admit it is true, as we can’t escape our self-created society. But in riches, and in wealth we will still suffer in other ways.
If it’s not a financial suffering, it will be something else; It always is.
Fighting normal is a choice to make away from the rat race. So, ill take my chances by choosing to opt out of the 35 year status quo to chase those cushy pensions, or some other emotional security blanket.
Not to take away from the typical working lifestyle, or to make it out as a “wrong choice”, But what sticks me most, is when people project that path as the only path, or that I am delusional in trying to find a pleasurable alternative.
Fighting Normal: “You Lazy bastard.”
“You’re lazy, you don’t want to work like everybody else. You have terrible work ethic, you Quitter!”
I grew up a grunt, and I put A LOT of hard work into a lot of things. Contrary to that fact, I also put VERY LITTLE effort into a lot of other things.
This is what sacrifice is all about, and it doesn’t mean there is a lack of work ethic solely on the fact that an individual is not holding onto a “real job”, let alone has nothing to show for themselves.
It’s not a lack of work ethic, it’s simply a sacrifice to apply a strong work ethic elsewhere.
This is sacrifice, and we all do it day in and day out, on many different levels.
Escape the Rat Race: “Chase Your Passion.”
Calling someone lazy, or knocking their work ethic right off the bat is sheer ignorance. Furthermore, a ‘bad’ work ethic is usually the symptom of one thing, a lack of passion.
Go ahead, it’s easy to call someone lazy for opting out of the typical 40-hour, 9 to-5 lifestyle. But chances are, that a person who is projecting this laziness to another person who is seeking alternative paths, is usually well immersed within that typical 40-hour grind themselves.
If you’re miserable, it’s not our fault that you’re miserable. And honestly, anyone can play this ignorant game.
I can harp on you for any number of reasons, for a lack of commitment somewhere else along the lines of your life. Though it may not be for your working life, perhaps I can harp on your failed relationships as a lazy spouse. Or potentially on your physical health, as a lazy glutton, or dig on other irrelevant facts about your life.
I could very simply project the MY OWN life importance onto yours and find lack there:
“You’re wasting your time. You could have been doing some real work, YOU could be the one writing this 5000+character rant! Instead, you were too busy with your childish 40-hour work week… YOU LAZY F**KER!”
Perspective is a funny thing.
I wouldn’t say that to you, but I could if I believed it strongly enough.
People fail to see it, and they fail to see it often. Or maybe they do, and just don’t give a damn; Both equally viable concepts.
Regardless, it’s a petty, and childish game that we can play here. And realistically, I would never question anyone’s work ethic, or argue with anyone’s life choices/circumstances under these ridiculous circumstances.
The point I am trying to make, is that a person’s argument relative to another’s work ethic can quickly fall short if you take into consideration that this scrutiny is simply a comparison of priority.
My own priorities, aren't your priorities... they could very well be, but priorities can differ greatly from person to person. Your priority may very well be committing to a 40 hour work week, and my 40 hours goes to however the hell I want to spend it.
Secondly, a person’s work ethic should never be questioned over their choice to participate.
There are plenty of people out there that make for terrible workers, and this is simply because they lack passion in whatever it is they are doing. Which is all the more reason to seek an alternative path in the first place.
I can’t fathom it, how most people can be so miserable, but constantly suppress it… “Oh, but it pays the bills”, how excusable.
Regarding the latter, sometimes an alternative to the rat race is simply seeking opportunities of fulfillment to stray away from such lethargic circumstances.
Give up the dream: “Embrace the rat race.”
A dream is anything other than the grind, where chasing an alternative to the rat race is fantastical. Likewise, where we invest a lot of time without any immediate reward, we are easily instructed to give it up.
Chasing your dream is such a funny concept.
Most people will support it when it’s just a thought out there in space. But as soon as you start to put it to practice, there are very few and very specific people left to urge you through it.
And, if it isn’t rewarding you quick enough, well guess what, it’s time to quit, to get a real job.
You hear it time in, and time out as the most successful people develop that trait.
It is tempting to give into their failures, but their success was found in their opposition to it. No matter how arguable it was to give up on their dreams, successful people found their way through a persistent rebellion.
You only have a lifetime to make your dreams a reality. If you don’t focus on your dreams, what else is left to pursue, outside of an underactive imagination.
Rat Race: “You Must think about your future.”
I totally agree, which is why I made these choices, and why I continue to make them.
I am not sitting here impulsively living my life, I’m purposefully fighting normal over here. And just because I am not collecting steady paychecks, doesn’t warrant that I am not pursuing some purpose, or intention.
In fact, I am constantly thinking about my future, and I intend to find my real purpose.
Our perspectives just differ:
“Get and keep a good job. Save money, retire, live off what I made over the past 35 year routine, and don’t forget to collect that pension.”
VERSUS:
Well, a lot can happen in 35 years. And, I would rather feed my questions for experiences in this world now, than to purposely chase a career down only to go back on my original feelings down the road.
Maybe my expectations are skewed, but I want to do it now, and I want to do it later too. If I have no money from my exploits then either, well at least I did something right in making it that far.
On Potential’s Death Bed
People fear suffering, loss, and death. In avoidance, we absorb ourselves in such realities to live such comfortable lives.
All the more reason to escape the rat race, to start fighting normal, because comfort comes with its own set of problems. It brings complacency, apathy, and guess what else… Death; Both physically, and symbolically.
We become so comfortable in our own comforts, that we lose touch with our personal growth.
It then becomes harder to let go of everything we worked for, because we spent so much time working for the things we think we wanted. As we near our own physical demise, which was taking place all along since our birth –duh, we begin to question the very thing we tried to avoid in the first place when we sold our soul for that shitty career; for that real job.
I’d like to think that I am trying to face up to those questions now. And if I’m the one that’s wrong, ill gladly admit to be the asshole here. Either way, I will never have any regrets as to how I spent my life because the risk of failure is something to accept every single day.
So be it in abundance as a result of my creative endeavors, or penniless, which is also a result of my creative endeavors, the truth here lies in the fact that I have complete responsibility in the way my life plays out.
I am responsible for both the choices I made, and the choices I didn’t.
“Fight On.”, Forget The Rat Race
Go on, start fighting normal for yourself. Shun The rat race.
We are resilient beings living in a clusterf**ked world.
We have lost ourselves through the industrialization, as we have added more layers of complexity to simplest things. Deep down, we are still agrarian beings who overcomplicated our basic needs by adding more prerequisites to achieve them.
It’s the nature of the beast I guess, but still, we must seek to test ourselves as OUR OWN SELVES, and not as the product of a social whole that is misguided and lost.
Don’t Just Work Hard, Work Smart Too!
Life is work, and fighting normal is a gamble.
I find that playing into the grind of the rat race is hard work, but it’s not necessarily smart work. With that in mind, I’ll take my chances by intelligently investing my hard work ethic into smarter work.
In any case, I’ll either find success, or starve myself trying to find it.
Or maybe, I’ll find satiety in swallowing my pride down the road for sustenance.
Test nature, Test the faith, Test yourself– F**K– THAT’S LIVING!
With Love And Rant,
Littermature.
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