Ask anyone these days how life is and chances are her answer will begin with a recap of how her job is going. Life sucking can generally be attributed to work not going as smoothly as she would hope, and life being great can often be linked to a hard earned promotion she was recently given. Rarely does the low down on life start with anything other than a career update.
And for most this seems normal, myself included, but when I began to notice this trend with others, I started to monitor my own behavior more closely. Time after time I found that whenever I was asked how my life was going I would give a quick rundown of how work was going (“super busy” have been the key words lately) before launching into anything more personal. I was consistently responding to the question of “how is life?” with an answer more suitable to “how is work?” By the process of deduction the shocking revelation becomes that to me and most others I know life = work.
How utterly sad.
At university I don’t recall ever defining the status of my life by how well my classes were going. Rarely did I respond to “how are you?” with “crap. My classes are absolutely horrible this semester.” Instead, half a dozen other topics of conversation would come to mind before classes were mentioned as an afterthought. My life did not solely consist of my academic career.
My actual career seems to be a different story.
After graduation, I chose to not take a break before jumping into the deep end of the real world. Excited at the prospect of becoming a real adult with real responsibilities, I tossed aside anything non-work related and focused completely on building a foundation for my career. With each brick laid to build this career, however, I was actually removing bricks from the house of my former self. I approached my new job not as what I did but as who I was to become.
I stopped playing volleyball. I stopped reading. I stopped writing. Essentially, I stopped everything that did not have to do with work and purely had to do with my own personal interests. Instead, my life became an endless cycle of long hours in the office followed by socializing. Not surprisingly at all, the socializing did not stray far from work, as the main topic of conversation among my friends was so often our jobs.
Where was the me time?
As 2010 approached four months ago, I thought about my resolutions of 2009 and realized I hadn’t made any. I hadn’t made any agreements with myself about the betterment of my life because I was too busy thinking about the betterment of my career. Instead of focusing on nurturing my soul, I was throwing myself further and further down a corporate hole and sucking any semblance of personal aspirations down with me.
So the question became, was I even a person anymore? In my quest to become a real adult, had I weakened my status as a real person? Instead of being a multifaceted individual I had become a single minded corporate suit. I was no longer Maya, I was employee 264.
And so I promised myself that 2010 would be the year of change, the year I would reinstate the things that used to inspire me outside of the four walls of my cubicle. I joined a volleyball league, began my blog, and bought stacks of books of actual value instead of the beach reading material I had been passing off as literature over the past two years. I began to seek new experiences that would form the memories I would recall years from now. I was learning about myself again, and about all the things that made me tick outside of my billable hours.
But, despite all this, I still find myself answering “how are you” with a quick overview of life at the office and not life in general. Maybe that’s something I’ll never be able to shake, which I guess is normal considering I spend over 70% of the time I am awake at the office. For now, as long as I’m consciously dedicating the remaining 30% to the advancement of myself as a person, and not to the advancement of my career I’ll be happy.
Oddly enough, that task seems a lot more difficult than anything I've ever been given at work.
