Where Are You Spending Your Life On? Part II

Continued from previous entry...

Of course, this is probably the typical breakdown for the average yuppie. And the direct result of this 40% is mainly financial value. You spend the time, earn money, you get the money, you spend the money happily at the end of each month, .. without even realizing that that salary is 40% of your life's worth. How better to put that ... its almost akin to selling 40% of your life to the devil - of course, I'm not saying your company's a high level demon chewing on your life force and eating away your soul - its just a "similarity". You might as well see it however you like, but whether devil, demon, imp, saint, angel, god/goddess or universal benevolent creator, its a helluva lot of time to devote yourself on.

I suppose my consternation and aghast comes from the very fact that I may have been living my life a little too "freely" for my taste. I got my current job without any clear cut idea what I wanted to do in the IT field. Originally I wanted to be a Java Programmer and build applications, but seeing that I had no exact working experience in java during my resume sending process, I opted for the DBA position since I had previous experience with SQLServer7.0. One thing lead to another, and I've adopted the preference for Oracle. I've been steadily increasing my background and experience, but nevertheless, I realized I haven't been pushing forward as much as I'd expect myself to. Ecstatic fulfillment isn't really what I would use to describe my current job, although it is somewhere between a-ok to fulfilling, but more edging toward the "fulfilling" spectrum.

I suppose if I were working in a job that would be described specifically as fulfilling, I would not have as much problems with my 40% life contribution to a company I have no direct relation with. But that's the thing, isn't it? Its not just about fulfillment in the day to day motions you do for your job. A string of successful projects would not exactly be up par in exchange for 40% of your life. Would you settle giving 40% of your life to the devil just for salary pay? Would you be willing to just settle telling yourself: "I'm good at what I do here, they pay me more than enough financially, and I deliver results with astounding success." Being good at what you do isn't good enough; It seems that what's more important, aside from the little details of math calculation that I've just done, is where exactly is the substance that you're spending your life on.

What did that wildly successful project you handled recently do for you? Gotten pats on your back? Better connections? A salary raise? More benefits? promotions? more job perks? Have your name and picture pasted on the latest New York Times/Forbes publication? Or did it just build up your ego?

Maybe, did you realize, that just by being successful in what you do, you've just caused an industry to engage in increasing the gap between third world and industrialized nations, promote tobacco use for the minority or enabled easier access to nuclear warheads for terrorists?

These are very far fetched implications, of course. I'm just trying to drive a point here, and exaggeration makes for a clearer picture than an obscure, vague one. 40% of your life (and mine) is a huge chunk. If you're thinking that devoting 40% of your life to earn money (or any other thing I've just mentioned in the previous pararaphs) is enough, it might as well be for you, but aren't there more important things that DO matter? When are you going to allocate the time for the things that DO matter when there's only 60% of your life left (aside from work)? Like I mentioned in the previous entry, I'm left with 15.5 hours to do whatever it is that I'd want to/love doing.

"40% of your life" sounds more disastrous than "40% of your time", doesn't it? Besides, if its time we're talking about, us tweens have all the time in the world. But if its 40% of your life... its sounds a bit scarier, no?

Assuming that work is purely for earning bread... in my case, that leaves me with 15.5 hours within the week to do the stuff that REALLY matters. 15.5 Hours sounds like a lot? That's a mere 2.5 hours per day. That seems like a short time to allocate to achieve any life long achievements. And 40% of my life seems such a long time just to be earning money...

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Maybe its not just the autumn season changing nowadays.