I would imagine that having a day job is a lot like being a drug addict.
It’s the simile I’m imagining, by the way, not what having a day job is like in the first place. I know all too well what having a day job is like, and my guess is that it’s about as productive, useful, and advantageous to one’s life as being a drug addict. For most people.
Having no experience with drugs, I can only go off other people’s various accounts of them in literature, popular media, and personal discourse. From what I can tell, both drug addiction and day jobs are extremely time-consuming and debilitating experiences that promote a sense of true hopelessness and despair, often overridden by a soft exterior of feelings of familiar comfort. Both instill a demanding routine that will soon leave no room for anything besides the drug/job in one’s life. Both require very little commitment of time and energy up-front, but will eventually enervate one’s soul with unpayable sky-high demands on time and energy. Both thus alienate people from those who are important in their life (replacing them with other, less important characters) as well as from the expenditures of time in their life that would actually provide value or meaning.
Instead, the only pursuit that can be accepted by the drug/job is cyclical self-promotion of the drug/job itself. The day-to-day physical and emotional demands of the drug/job increase exponentially with use, while the payoff of each declines proportionally. More and more energy and exhaustion is required to simply maintain a level of equilibrium, and the days of getting excited about something tied into a drug/job are quickly left behind. While the initial pull was the high/money, the apparent felt value of these declines substantially despite outside thought appearances that they are more and more necessary for existence. The more one has a high or money, the more one thinks one needs it, but the less actually utility one gains by it.
It’s no wonder, then, that we have a society that’s so hooked on day jobs. The same marketing techniques that have kept generations jailed or on the street are keeping vastly more equally enslaved and desperate behind desks or in cubicles. By carefully constructing societal perceptions to present day jobs as a positive and beneficial element of society, there is an additional reinforcement that drugs can never live up to: namely, that one is more likely to be accepted and touted by one’s peers if one does day jobs. While there may be particularly intense communities where drug use achieves the same effect, there is nowhere where this impact is as strong as possession and maintenance of a day job in earning respect from young and old, family and friends, confidants and strangers.
And yet what good does the average day job actually do? Most all jobs in America have been designed around a service and/or consumer economy. Basically the job that most everyone has is to feed things back into the machine that guarantees jobs to others. It’s all founded on the willing (or drug-induced) suspension of disbelief into the fundamental premise that it’s somehow good and/or necessary to have a day job in the first place. Even non-profits seem laden with this innate perspective that people are better off employed than unemployed. And while I can make concessions to the concept that a standard of living beats poverty, I’m having a hard time these days really accepting that employment does anything but devastate quality of life to roughly the tune of a deep-seeded heroin obsession.
But like drugs, day jobs are notoriously hard to escape. Even for people prone to write posts like this, there are numerous insidious factors of socialization, societal structure, and cost of living that make it incredibly difficult to break the cycle of employment. No matter the strength of the desire to walk away, it often takes cataclysmic events (see: May 2005) to get someone to actually break their bonds with a day job. And just like drugs, it is exceedingly hard to stay off day jobs once one has actually managed to break the habit the first time. One is easily coaxed back in by memories of the more positive aspects. The highs stand out, while the lows fade in the grass-is-greener recollections of a turbulent past. One is often drawn back into the same drug/job, but more often a new drug/job that offers new excitements and slight distinctions that color one’s experience and provide the illusion that it won’t be as bad this time.
It will be. It is.
I need rehab.
