Work is life. Just as your lungs expand and contract for
every breath of sustenance on this earth, you can either consciously decide to
place effort into the things you do, transforming what was once a stack of
cardboard you bought for a measly five dollars into a model which represents a
tactic to ease the plaguing social problems in this world. Five dollars to
change the world. True, your project might never come into existence, but the
idea has been hatched through months of rigorous intellectual and aesthetic
review, and you have discovered or invented information that can only be useful
in the future. Beyond such obvious, pain-inducing work, you might not have even
recognized some of the more subtle work that you do almost automatically, which
is work for survival. In order to sustain our position in school or the job
force, we have to cleverly consider every relationship that we have. Even the
simple task of breaking the ice with someone you think has the greenest eyes
you’ve ever seen requires the passage of air through your vocal cords and the
movement of hundreds of muscles in your face, a phenomenon that you do not
recognize. These relationships,
both human to human and human to concept, are the only things that define our
humanity. We are the only beings alive have such an extended capability of
self-reflection. Some use this ability to judge others, but are completely
blind to their own faults. So many of us in our late teens/early 20’s,
wholeheartedly wish to “just do nothing all day.” But even without the hindering
expectations that society has placed on you to produce, people feel the need to
create social order for the sake of production. A dialogue between a math
teacher, Ishigami, and a physicist, Yukawa, in the Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, reveals:
“The gray-haired man with the ponytail was hanging up the
laundry. Beyond him, the Can Man was well into his daily routine.
‘It’s
the same thing every day,’ Ishigami said. ‘This entire past month, nothing’s
changed a bit. You could set your watch by these people.’
‘That’s
what happens when you free people from the restraints of time. They make their
own rigid schedule.’ (92)
Because we are, we do.
How many days have you spent lusting after a dream man or
woman, yet the frowning alien that glares back at you in your bathroom mirror
is as far from your dreams a pimple-faced cynic whose color has completely
drained from her skin? You live by your voracious craving for these objects outside of yourself, yet what
dies with you are not these objects but only that which you can call yourself.
The existence that you are can hardly be extended outside of your body through
possession. It soothes but a momentary lapse in the consciousness of your
mortal being. Furthermore, why is it that you assume that others are not
looking at you the same way you evaluate your classmates through your
judgmental eyes? What makes you desirable when the only thing you do is lust, unable
to tame the feelings that have consumed you and unable to recognize that your
obsession is a manifestation of your fear of yourself? Are you happy being
alone? If the answer is not yes, then why do you suppose someone else has to
shoulder twice the responsibility of making two happy? You have willfully let
go of your own desire to maintain yourself, and instead look to others as
examples of success, never wishing to put effort into the things that we fear
and desire the most. Self-transformation, defiance, revolution. Have you not
learned, in the early years of your innocence, that you only receive what you
give, that love is the last thing to come to those who haven’t a sense to love
themselves?
You may think, how can I love myself? I am so ugly and
wretched, my youth waning with every gray hair I find in my fading locks, and I
approach death with every step I take. The truth is, you’re already on a
conveyer belt, and lest you have the courage to walk towards what you want, even
if that means pushing past a crowd of the irritable and the fearful, and using
extra force to go against the momentum of laziness, you will forever be swept
in a direction of which you dread. If you still have the strength in you, why
not use it? That strength too, has been fading with time, a concept that the
human body is not yet familiar with at the ripe decade of your 20’s. More than
fearing to reach out, you should be absolutely horrified at the person you may
become in your 30’s, unfounded and graying, undesirable and unloving, full of
hatred for the world and kicking at the air for not sustaining you without
automatic inhalation, tossing money as a cheap tactic to make the world echo
back only your misery. You believe that you deserve more, as do those that are
better than you. What makes you think that they will halt in their step to
piggy back someone who has not a shred of usefulness, as you? You look to your
back and realize that there are still some people behind you. But how long will
that temporary relief last, or will you continue to look backwards as they
surpass you?
You are standing still, complaining that nobody is willing
to put you on his shoulders and work for twice that they have earned, and once
more for your ungrateful attitude. By the time you have reached a point where
you understand this, wholeheartedly, when the signs of decay have begun to
physically manifest themselves, would you rather be taught the hard way? If you
want people to notice you, work for it. If you want to be good at school, work
for it. If you want anything, work for it. Somebody labored to place the food
on your table every day. Your existence is by no means free, but work can be
freeing. Work frees you from fear, and dread, and anxiety, because you know
that there is nothing else in this world as self-satisfying and concrete than
the things you build with your own two hands. So please, be a good person to yourself,
take true care of yourself, for if you wish to experience more than the tip of
the iceberg of the dessert that is life, then you must be prepared to endure
the worst. Only after you’ve found yourself miserable, slaving away hours of
your life on a photoshop document or leaving the windowless library to find
that the sun has risen, will you find, a day or a year or a decade later, that
you’ve become better than you were before. Soothe your fears and take
responsibility for the brilliant person that you are entirely capable of
becoming.
