The Void in Our Lives

I think living paycheck to paycheck is not safe. I do think however that working 9–5 is fine. If you love your job that’s fine. One, because it’s not who you are from 9–5, but who you are from 5–9. Two, just like in school, it eats up our time for us. If we don’t know what to do with our time, we default to work. We can use excuses such as ‘I’m working extra hard for my family’ or ‘I want that promotion’ but that just masks that we don’t really know who we are without our work.

It’s good in a sense that we have something to fill in the void, but bad because what’s filling it may not be meaningful to us in the long term. The problem lies deep in our inner selves, that we don’t really know what’s meaningful to us, that we don’t really know what we want, and we don’t really know why we do what we do. It can happen to anyone. And even I don’t know what’s really meaningful to me either. The person we don’t know the most is ourselves.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman