It’s Monday morning and I hate my life.
I’ve finally hit the snooze button enough times that now my leisurely walk into the office will be a dead sprint and my hair may or may not get washed.
Breakfast will be the stale coffee I get while exchanging forced pleasantries with the morning person from marketing.
Collapsing into the chair in my cube with three walls, I grit my teeth as the stack of paper already on my desk flips me the bird. It’s 8:03 a.m., and I hate my life.
And I will spend the next eight hours hating my life.
Finally, I make it home after sitting in traffic inching my way along for 45 minutes. I’ll make dinner and have a glass of wine and maybe watch some TV. But then what—go to bed just so I can wake up at the butt crack of dawn to do it all over again?
How many of us feel this way? Spending our days wishing that they would be over just to go home and wait to do it all over again. We suffer through the mundane, day in and day out, for what? A house, a car, food, clothes and drinks at happy hour? But surely that’s not what we are living for; we are not all here on this earth to simply exist.
What is it that makes your eyes sparkle like the ocean you visit maybe once a year? What is it that makes you feel like you are you and that is enough? What is it that makes you feel alive? Got it? Ok good, do more of THAT.
I have such a problem with the way our society puts so much stress on what someone’s paycheck is. We don’t care so much that you can make the best chicken Parmesan on the face of the earth or that you love to play badminton or that you love trashy romance novels; we care about what kind of car you drive or where you buy your clothes. In case you haven’t noticed, “money can’t buy happiness” is pretty true. Then why do we continually try to reverse that rhetoric, thinking maybe, just maybe, another dollar an hour will do it? I think that the world would be a completely different place if each and every one of us simply said, “hell with it” and worked a little bit less. Maybe you’d start a rock band or become a poet; maybe you would even spend hours making Lego statues. Regardless, I would be willing to bet that most of us, given the opportunity, would turn from the computer screen for a life of meaning and adventure.
Maybe I’m a radical, overly optimistic thinker, but I truly believe that we are all so different that, if each of us pursued the passions we were born with, our world would not only survive, it would thrive. I am suggesting that ours is not simply an “I hate my job” problem; it’s an “I hate my life” problem. So, my message to you is: love your life. Love those around you deeply and openly, smile at strangers, take your time throughout the day to see the beauty in our world and, most importantly, find what makes you love being here, alive in this moment, and just freaking do THAT.
Heidi Hornemann is a sociology major at Penn State Harrisburg.
