Monday: The start of the working week, for which people in employment (30.1 million of us- 75.5% of the UK population) spend the majority of their waking hours partaking in what can be likened to ‘slave labour…’
With the average working week being Monday to Friday, most people only have weekends off work, thus meaning that Saturday and Sunday is the only time they have to do what they genuinely want to do with their life, not what they have to do (as is the case from Monday when they are back in the role of employer as opposed to human)…
The problem with this is that the traditional Monday to Friday, 9–5 job (40 hour working week), when added up over the course of one’s lifetime, equates to 90,000 hours (just over 10 years). That’s a decade spent at work.
Where the average life expectancy (in the UK) is 80, 10 years might not seem excessive, but consider the hours that the average person works (9am to 5pm)- daytime hours. When the average person sleeps for 8 hours per night, with this equating, over a lifetime, to 26 years of being asleep, it’s easy to see just how little time we have left…
Finishing work at 5pm, by the time we get through the rush hour traffic back home, it’s nearly 6pm.
Cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed, getting a shower, by the time we properly sit down, it’s 9pm,
thus leaving us with one hour (if we’re lucky) ‘free’ time before we go to bed
(and, I say ‘free’ time, but we’re limited by what we can do at that time, especially when we’re up early for work the next day. It’s hardly the ideal time to dust off your old roller-skates to honour your new years resolution of taking up a ‘new hobby’, is it?)…
And so, the only time that we *actually* have ‘free’ is on the days when we’re not at work which, for most people, is Saturday and Sunday- this being just two days out of seven
(quick maths).
After a stressful week at work though, people might not feel like doing anything on their days off, or they might have to catch up on chores/all the boring things that they didn’t have time to do during the week.
Is ‘free’ time ever really free when the weight of ‘just’ living comes with so much responsibility?
As is evident by the statistics highlighted above- where 8 hours a day at work turns into 40 hours a week at work turns into 10 years a lifetime at work, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
And, for most of us? Our days, our lives, are spent at work…
Where the average age of retirement in the UK is 66, and where there is an average of 52 weekends per year, the average person who starts work at 18 will have 2496 weekends (4992 days) in their lifetime. That equates to 13 years of ‘free’ time.
And, when the average life expectancy is 80 years, suddenly 13 years seems very very short… Yet, for people who work full-time, 13 years is all they end up having. Such a short amount of time for which we’re still not truly ‘free.’ Why? Because, unfortunately for us, as humans, ‘creatures of habit’, we tend to lean towards familiarity, meaning that how we spent yesterday and how we’re spending today will largely mirror how we spend tomorrow…
It can be so easy to keep doing the same things, telling yourself that you’ll ‘take up that new hobby next week’ [when you’re less tired]… But, the issue is that saying that you will do something VS actually doing it are two very different things… Residing yourself to the fact that ‘next week?’ It will probably never come…
What greater (/sadder) juxtaposition is there than this ( ^ ) …
The fact that we spend our whole lives working in order to afford to stay alive, meanwhile, in the process, we sacrifice doing the things that make us feel alive, that make us want to be alive, therefore leaving us questioning;
‘What’s the point?’
Underappreciated, far too many of us work tirelessly for someone else, lining THEIR pockets with the profits that WE make (but, of course, never see), just so that we can get by/so that we can afford to stay alive…
Surely this provides all possible reasoning as to why Monday is such a dreaded day- back to the grind whereby our lives aren’t really ‘our’ lives at all… No freedom, no choice, dependent on a wage in order to stay alive, we have no choice BUT to work.
The reality of capitalism = the need to earn…
Where passion and purpose is what makes life worthwhile, without doing the things that make me feel alive, why would I work to stay alive? It makes no sense, hence why the two — work and ‘play’ — must go hand-in-hand…
‘Work hard play harder’ n all that, we should work to live, not live to work, finding the time to do the things that make us feel alive/the things that light us up inside.
Like living in a mansion on your own- no family or friends to call your own, no connection other than that of your mobile phone, no purpose, when you’re at home but simultaneously wanting to go home (‘this place doesn’t fall like home’), what use is money?…
What’s the point in spending your whole life working, generating money for which you run out of life to spend it?…Unable to take it with you, what a waste of a life.
I’d rather have no money and have a life that I don’t have to ‘endure’, but that I love, than loads of money in the bank with nothing to do,
nowhere to go,
no one to see
to spend it on.
For, where money does not equal happiness, in my happiness, I am far wealthier than the person living in the mansion on their own.
Find Your Purpose
When we spend so much of our lives working, we must prioritise finding a job that gives us a sense of purpose in life,
that doesn’t make us dread Mondays,
that doesn’t make us question the meaning (/futility) of life…
For, the fact is that time passes us by
so SO quickly,
sometimes, quite literally (or, so it seems) in the blink of an eye
and, before we know it, we’re on our deathbed saying goodbye,
questioning why we didn’t do all that we wanted to do when we still had the time.
There is so much more to life-
your one, precious life.
Don’t let it pass you by
amidst the mundanity of the daily grind-
don’t.
Don’t let it be you.
You’re not a machine, you’re alive for a greater reason than to make profit for someone else.
FIND THAT REASON.
Portfolio of Hope 