Dear Diary,
There is no end to seeking a better job. However there are far too many fundamental questions that I need to ask before asking or looking for a better job. The most fundamental being, what do I even want from a job? Is it supposed to give my life a meaning or is it just supposed to be interesting and a means to earn a livelihood. Should it make me rich? Is it a good thing to be rich? How much comfort is enough comfort? Will I not waste my whole life if my job is just an endeavor to satisfy my personal needs and doesn’t at all contribute. Wait, let’s be systematic about it.
I am not getting any younger. Eventually I will be an old person and it will even become difficult physically and in the worst case even mentally. I might suffer from some serious diseases and all of those things. I will also die and it will be the end of everything that is “me”. It’s foolish to worry about legacy and all those things. This much I understand. What significance has a job in this regard? Overall, I don’t see that job has much of a significance or depth however I can’t deny that it is unavoidable. It is necessary but not necessarily important.
Where lies the problem? The problem lies in the fact that I am unhappy. Had I not been unhappy I wouldn’t even be thinking about all these things or asking all these questions. That brings me to another question. Is it necessary to have a meaningful life to be happy? Can’t people be happy by just being. I have seen it. I had some insight into it, which I am not using anymore because of my dullness or some other reason. There was a time when I had a clear understanding of how one can live, as it is, and still be fulfilled and happy. The answer is so simple, now that I have understood the question, it is to live in the moment. This gives another shape to the initial problem.
The problem now is not that of happiness. One can be very happy by living in the moment. By giving oneself to it, whatever it is. Whether you want to see this in some Zen proverb or in the movie “Life is beautiful”, it’s the same thing. The problem is now something else. What it is, is yet to be found.
Is it the problem of the significance of the life that we lived? Though each moment of it was happy, overall it was a meaningless life. That there were a lot of things that one wanted to do or needed to be done and yet the opportunity was not used. But one must be careful while thinking like this. Most of the problems of the world are created by people who have a strong will to change things. As far as the world needs, the only thing that needs to be done is the transformation of humans into something that is not violent or stupid.
I have this responsibility as an individual to transform myself. I know I have several issues which are part of being human, the selfish nature, the violent tendencies and much more and that will require quite some work on my end and as a human that’s my first priority. And it’s different from changing the world. It is changing oneself so that the future generations can be free of the sorrow that human tendencies inevitably breed.
To think of it again, a job would be such a simple thing if we humans were different. If we were not always striving for more and more comfort at the cost of being insensitive towards nature, other species and other humans. If we were not always trying to have more than what we have and more than what others have. If we had a lifestyle that didn’t demand so much energy, human and otherwise to sustain. Then probably we could live with the jobs being far less demanding and yet no one would have to face absurd poverty. I have read that it shouldn’t be impossible to eradicate poverty if all the best minds of the world seriously wanted to eradicate it and we seriously wanted to do it. But that’s not what attracts us. We have our job to do and the job doesn’t work like that.
What kind of job should I have? I don’t think the world needs more of anything, be it science or finance or medicine or anything more than sanity. And seeing this is a curse, because once you have seen it, you can’t go back and do any job that is promoting this madness and that would be most of the jobs that I can think of.
It’s not an easy problem but it is so important that I won’t mind pondering over it for a very long time or since it is so important and because my life depends on it, I will solve it with utmost urgency.