We Are Drowning, How Should We Kill Our Time?

9

 My life always divided between work and non work and everything outside of work a respite to reinforce more work like how I used to stay up all night and feel guilty about sleep but now employers say sleep increases productivity in the long term so now you're allowed to sleep guilt free but still it is all a bigger circle around the main goal which is productivity, mechanality, and even in my vacation hours I am told it is good to have rest to prevent burn out but what if life was my goal (the unmarked, the unstated, the un "purpose"ful moments) and work something I did of necessity, in addition to but not composing the core of, life - not to have work as my goal and life as happenstance; life as a prevention against the mental and physical (and spiritual if we really knew it) blockages that get in the way of goals; but really I do not want to live a life I need preventative measures from I don't want to live a life weighed in minutes and hours and go for runs with people who do so early in the morning so they can have a clearer and more efficient headspace for work so they can work and build careers but what does it build to? And I read a book wherein someone wanted to work during the first few years of their child's life because it wouldn't remember it anyways so why not do something more useful as if every moment in life is scraped to its instrumentality, thinking we are streamlining it but really just cutting off every part that matters except for hollow bone but even the bones crumble without the soul to bring them to life and animate them and they call it burn out and wear it like a badge of honour like I used to wear "no time to sleep" like one. And it continues and continues to somewhere I don't understand the finish line of and I know it might seem like common sense but in my life I wanted to climb to the top of a mountain where the spotlight would shine on me and I wanted to breathe in and look at myself in the mirror and feel my life and all its hours were finally validated; but they never were and they never are because under the spotlight you don't feel it either you only feel a nipping at your ankles to run to a taller mountain but there are always taller mountains and your life is a race you can't win or even leave because even the rest stops and detours along the way lead you back into that road that keeps going and going, an endless highway, until it parks too soon too soon before you've done all you've wanted to do and retirement hit you too fast while they polish off your old desk and you see how replaceable what you killed yourself over day in and day out was because you were always a machine never a person; but my goal was to be the best machine and to scrape life to its bone quicker and sooner so I'd waste none of it and I wanted to clean out all that wasn't life but in doing so found the marrow of that bone was messy ness and chaos and this tangled grass I spend my afternoon in trying to forget the clock while it pounds in the insides of my head but that is not life that is not real life that is our designs and we have lost what it means to work, to engage with the world; to be a productive member of a society does not mean to contribute to this faceless system; thinking I am working to engage with the world when I hardly look at it in the eye on my way to get morning coffee because I cannot hold the pace of my life without one two three four five six cups of it; all the while my vision clouded by notifications I cannot miss and my own stupid selfish worries tying my mind in their knots so clouded I cannot see that to work is to engage with the world and that I am always doing that; now the trick is to choose what the best way to do so is and I don't think it is this; how could it be this. The only person I engage with is the future me I am disappointing or pleasing with every wrong or right usage of minutes, so many falling through my fingertips, hoping she will someday be okay with me there is no love here - none for myself and none for those around me there is only fear here and this fear is vital to keep us moving faster - so fast you cannot sleep until they say it's good for productivity - keep us moving faster into digging deeper internal holes we need to buy so many things to fill