My sister asked in her blog yesterday if it’s better to have a job one likes but aren’t busy at and therefore bored or one that is not as likable but keeps you very busy.
I would say one that you like but aren’t busy at. This is because I believe that we put too much value in being busy. I’m very bad at not being busy; I get very little enjoyment in doing nothing. I do not have the attention span for chilling out. But my kind of being busy just means I am not good at sitting in the sun with nothing to do, I prefer to bring a book or plank to put nails in. I’m not very good at watching TV without at least doing something with my hands, eating, embroidering or just filling away at my nails. So that I guess is keeping busy.
At the same time I hate it when other people are continually stressing how busy they are. If I meet up with a friend and they tell me how busy they are, what is my reaction suppose to be. Am I supposed to be grateful that they took 15 minutes out of their schedule to have a coffee with me? I do not want to have friendships or relationships with people to whom I am suppose to be grateful for deigning to spend time with me.
Our culture is so based on keeping busy, our value as individuals is so linked to how busy we. I guess this is because it’s a metric of our popularity, a faulty metric but a metric all the same and humans like to quantify things. Hence the measuring of your worth as person in how many people wants to hang out with you.
The main failure of this metric is that it’s fully possible to spend most of your time with people who you don’t like and that do not like you. I reckon that is common if your jobs is being an account manager or in a high level sales role.
It’s a little like having 700 friends on Facebook and 690 of them are people who bullied you in high school. Why would you do that? Well people do that so that they have a high number of friends on Facebook and therefore look popular.
To summarize. It’s better to like your job but not be busy at it, because being busy is not a measure in how important you are, or how important your work is. If you get bored cause you do not have so much to do, go on an online language course in Mandarin. That will keep you occupied.
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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I agree on the part where you say that being busy is not a measure for how important you are. But being bored is the worst thing I know, at least when I have something to do at work I don't have to sit here and play occupied. I like working, I think it's fun, but I hate waiting for things to happen! And if I have to be at work 8,5 h a day, if I had something to do, it wouldn't be so f*cking boring:) I think that if I don't have anything to do at work, I should be able to go home, but I'm not, so I'm just sitting here, waiting for the day to pass. And that's not living! slafs!
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