9 to 5

I always felt lucky to be a school psychologist at Reynoldsburg. I was doing something I generally liked. The work gave me a sense of fulfillment. I felt respected and well treated. I was paid well and the benefits were great. I only worked 186 days a year and had all kinds of breaks for holidays, snow days and teacher work days. By all accounts, I led a privileged life.

I felt that way until I moved here.

When I moved down to BA, I almost immediately found 4 or so jobs and was plenty busy. But as the year progressed, I dropped more and more of the jobs and have now only work to meet my basic needs. Before, I felt a need to work for the sake of working, because I didn't know what to do or how to fill the days without work. I just felt like I should be working because I used to work all the time and not working made me feel nervous, anxious, jumpy, like I should be doing something. Waking up at 9am and not being at work and not needing to do anything was scary. I'm still not completely over it.

Losing work I suppose is like losing anything else. It's a huge part of your life. It makes decisions for you. It structures your life. It decides what you're going to from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. It dictates when you can vacation (it makes the concept of vacation necessary), when you eat lunch, when you wake up, when you go to sleep, what stresses you will encounter, what type of healthcare you will receive, the environment you'll spend your day in. The typical 9-5 job is both a blanket of comfort, schedule, routine, and certainty but also something that controls, constrains, and takes away our freedom.

But that's ok because as the sociologist Erich Fromm pointed out, most of us want to Escape From Freedom anyway. Freedom is not as cool as it sounds. When you constantly have to make decisions, when you assume total responsibility for your actions and behavior, when you're freed from many of the bonds and boundaries of life, you don't all of a sudden feel a huge relief or happiness or sense of a fulfillment. I think you instead feel like you've just been shoved outside of a warm cozy cabin on a subzero day in your underwear.

As much as 'patriots' in the United States say that we should put Freedom first or vote for Freedom (which somehow is supposed to mean vote for the dude who wants to go fight every war we can get ourselves into), I don't think the average person wants freedom at all. I think the average person wants certainty. Why else is Christianity or intense religion so comforting to people? It's easy. If you accept the Bible, everything suddenly makes sense. You no longer have to struggle with the existential battle of existence. You know why you're here, how you got here, and how it will all end. Pack this up in a big box community church with well respected mainstream churgoers and why not take the plunge of faith? As astronomer and philosopher Karl Sagan observed, 'If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize'?

Getting back to the point.... I think true freedom means pulling off the cloaks of structure, culture, norms, religion, society, subtextual and other messages that we are constantly absorbing from our environment so that we are making decisions based on our knowledge of ourselves and our individual needs and desires, as opposed to what we've been told we ought to do. I don't think this is 100% possible. But I think that most of us have a ton of room for improvement toward freedom. But I don't think most are interested.

Many choose paths that structure life almost as soon as they're able to make our their own decisions apart from their parents. The lucky ones choose college after high school. At least 4 years of what's supposed to be rigorous academics and higher learning that usually results in making the decision to imprison our lives even more by taking 9-5 jobs that allow 2 week vacations.

And if we don't choose college, we might get married quickly out of high school. Combine that with a full time job or career and we compound even further our loss of freedom or cloak of structure and comfort, whatever you want to call it. Other ways of escaping freedom are joining a religion that purports to have all the answers, submitting to the path that society and the dominant culture lays out for us, or doing what our parents and other family members tell us that we ought to be doing.

And maybe these escapes from freedom aren't so bad. Maybe they're not bad at all. If we don't know what the heck life is all about, why not put ourselves in a position of constantly reacting to a structuring mechanism that we have chosen. For example, if you choose to have a family, you are more or less constantly reacting. You live to take care of your children and your family and you do everything you can to ensure that they are ok now and in the future. You're constantly responding to their needs and the #1 goal and focus is crystal clear. You work, manage money, wake up in the middle of the night to change diapers, shuttle kids to events, support them as they grow older, and eventually become a grandparent to their kids. The structure is there for life.

And why not choose one of these structuring mechanisms. Is it really better to be stuck in your own head trying to figure out what it's all about when you could enjoy a sense of fulfilment or at least forget the existential void? So I'm not judging, I'm just saying.... I think most of us want to escape freedom. And as much as many don't want to admit it, we make choices to do so. We make choices to start families and therefore not be able to spend as much time ruminating on what it's all about. How can you when your baby is screaming and needs his bottle? Or we make choices to lose ourselves in work. Or religion. Or consumerism. Or food. Or anything that fills us up or structures our lives or gives us the illusion of direction, purpose, comfort, or certainty.

But if we truly want freedom, we must start getting rid of all of the messages from outside that tell us what we should be doing or how we should be living our lives. And we should look inside to find out more about ourselves and what We really want and need.

So more than any other lesson I've learned here, I've learned that it's ok for me not to work most of the time, especially if I don't feel a sense of fulfillment from it. Right now, I'm teaching a 5, 9, and 11 year old and I love it. I only do it about 10 or so hours a week but it's enough. The time we spend together is intense learning, serious critical thinking. Ok, not with the 5 year old, but the older kids. And my other job is teaching English to the former Columbian Ambassador to the United Nations. Which for me is just totally cool.

And that's all I do. It pays the bills and I live well. I don't save a thing. But I feel really healthy. I swim, cook, read, research, enjoy long meals, visit museums, talk with friends, think, go out to movies, eat out with friends, travel on the cheap, and write. If it were not for the stress of the big city and the fact that my family is so far away and that I have issues with the Porteno culture, I'd be set.

There came a point at which I realized that working for the sake of working is a little bit ridiculous. What does it say about me if I can't find a way to occupy my time without work?
So I feel like now I am living. When I work 9-5, I don't get that sense nearly as much. I am instead working to live.

And so this is my concern about going back to the States. Will I be able to handle returning to the 9-5 situation that I've set myself up with in Denver? Granted, I've handpicked my job out of 8 or so choices in 8 or so different cities so that I will in theory very much like what I'm doing. And I feel totally privileged to have been able to do so. Especially in a time when so many people are out of work. But then again, I don't need the job, despite the financial crisis or the fears of US society at the moment. My job in Denver is more than enough to support me. It's easily too much.

So I'm worried that I will find myself in the 9-5 position of working as a means of getting away again to maybe Spain or Costa Rica or some other adventure. I wonder if I will always work most of the year to live part of the year. Which doesn't make sense. We ought to be living full time and working to support life instead of the opposite. My hope is that my job is less like work and more of something that I'd be doing if I weren't being paid. And seeing as how I've chosen a position in which I'll be speaking Spanish all day and working with Hispanic families, I think that might be the case.

But if it's not, if I find out that I'm stuck in a windowless office most of the day writing drudgerous reports and administering mindless tests and dreaming of being somewhere else...., I hope I come to the conclusion that I should find a way to work in a position that is less like work and more something I want to be doing or work less so that I can at least be living more each day than I work.

From this point out, my goals is to be more deliberate about the way that I choose to lose my freedom. I think I'll always to some extent feel pushed and pulled in directions by messages from the outside that tell me that I should have a family, a high paying job, a published novel, accomplishments, religion, a nice car, a big house...All that stuff that previous generations claim was just something that they were supposed to do, expected to to, Had to do. Because we really don't Have to do nearly as much as we're told. We give in to these messages. And yes, we make the decision to capitulate, to give up our freedom.

So for whatever reason, I've wound up at age 30 without too much structure. I've got no family, no debt, no serious financial obligations. Ostensibly, I'm fairly free. But I've chosen to go back to 9-5. I'm hoping it's not an escape from freedom, but rather intensified and deliberate living. But only the next year will tell.