The northlondonhippy

My easy month is fin­ished now, it was really around 4 and 1/2 weeks of min­i­mal work and max­i­mum hip­py­time. So how’d I fare?

About as expected, I got most of the things I need to do com­pleted, but there a a hand­ful of sig­nif­i­cant goals yet to be accom­plished. As we all know, there’s no such thing as “enough time”.

From tomor­row, I’m back on the tread­mill; that ham­ster wheel that wage slaves every­where under­stand. You gotta keep it spin­ning, no mat­ter what.

For the next six weeks or so, I am bloody busy, then I have a gap to catch my breath. After that, its anybody’s guess, and I mean that quite literally.

No mat­ter how much I try to get a bit ahead, it never works. With my erratic and unpre­dictable life, find­ing time to do sim­ple things can be impossible.

You can only do, what you can do, and there’s no point wor­ry­ing about it either way. Words to live by.

When I work lots, I fall into a rut, a rou­tine exis­tence of work, sleep and more work with pre­cious lit­tle else in between. I become a robot; an automa­ton; I trans­form into a shift-machine. For me, that’s nor­mal, but I’ve always been a closet work-aholic.

OK, there have been no clos­ets involved. My hunger for work has never been a secret, I’ve always been keen.

My prob­lem is I crave struc­ture and para­me­ters, I am sus­tained by being part of an organ­i­sa­tion. When left to my own devices, while capa­ble of sus­tained effort on a project, I strug­gle with moti­vat­ing myself. I work bet­ter with clearly defined goals, dead­lines and rewards, much like a lab rat learn­ing a maze, know­ing there’s a bit cheese await­ing me when I com­plete it.

I’m not get­ting enough cheese.

What’s worse, is I enjoy work­ing on my own stuff, very much, but the dis­trac­tions of daily life seem to be the main thing get­ting in the way. I should make an effort to work less, so I can work more on my own things.

Eas­ier said than done.

Most things are.

Hey ho.

We all pre­tend we’re in con­trol of our own lives and des­tinies, but its an illu­sion. Our pro­gram­ming and sub­con­scious hold more sway over our behav­iour than fate or free will. Free will is another one of those illu­sory ideas that we all sub­scribe to.

The Amer­i­can come­dian, George Car­lin once said some­thing along the lines of “that today, free­dom means being able to choose between Coke and Pepsi”.

Gosh, I’m sud­denly thirsty!

Comments are closed.