Whether you enjoy your work or not, a workplace almost inexorably feels like prison. You would rather be doing a thousand other things, or simply be lulled into sleep by a soft breeze on a tropical island, yet you find yourself drafting emails and perpetually staring at your laptop screen. A part of your brain has been all but frozen by what seems like the witchcraft of brutal capitalism. You were hopeful once. Now you’re just some person who numbs his or her brain during the weekend by taking an escapist path.
While your workplace enables you to buy food and pay bills in exchange for 40 to 50 hour weeks of neo-slavery, there is no equivalence for the insignificant moron it reduces you to, tearing away at every shred of your individuality, all for you to secure that temporarily calming ping of a salary credit every month. Work changes you into an apolitical, desensitised, easily irritable, grinding-on-the-weekends and single-minded version of yourself.
Some people hate those who take off on voting days, treating it as a vacation. I don’t. As I see it, participating in the democratic process and changing governments has achieved nothing to bring about any significant change in the lives of working people. High taxes, long hours, very little regulation and the dreaded Monday continue to pervade their life. They are absolutely within their moral right to get away, if they wish to, for another day and not vote. I reserve my hatred for this exploitative system. Every day, you lose yourself further in the system. You fall into the deepest recesses of passivity or wear your work on your sleeve, somewhat like a rabid animal without a leash.
Or you think of your life as a television series universe where you are the protagonist, and every single day is an episode with a stifling intersection of the thrills and pangs that accompany work and social life, subsumed into the greatest television series ever known to mankind, as seen with your eyes. Except that it isn’t. The work life, albeit necessary for survival, slowly becomes like a video game with only one storyline. You are player one and your mission is to smother every hobby and aspiration you ever had, kill your natural instinct to relax and shake up a cocktail of ambition and stress. At retirement though, this changes. Armed with your provident fund money and about 13 different chronic diseases, the world is now at your feet. As is death.