Time Traveling

So today is Monday. I spent the weekend traveling to a city I lived in 5 years ago, and I had one of the best times of my life in just those 3 days alone.

So maybe this is just the post-vacation blues talking here, but once I got back home last night, a deep regret washed over me. All of my friends in that city are having a blast, while also suffering under the evils of an increasing cost of living, but the point is, compared to everyone I know in the city I live in now, those friends are actually legitimately happy which is something I haven’t seen in 5 years.

The regret began when I started thinking about the circumstances of why and how I left the city 5 years ago. I was seriously injured, requiring surgery, my job at the time was very difficult and toxic, and I was generally in a deeply depressed and financially poor state. I was barely affording my rent and food, every paycheck was filled with fear about whether I could continue supporting myself, etc.

These were all very valid reasons to leave. I needed a major surgery, I needed physical support to move around from family and others, I needed to find a new job, and I could no longer afford the costs of living in the city.

Revisiting now after having solved all of these problems makes me wonder if I should try to move back to the city. Yes, it’s a very naïve and impulsive thought. I have not done any research on how things have changed. All I know is that the city has gotten much more expensive and the auto traffic is far worse than it was when I left.

In that vein of thought, I put together a few points on what it would take for me to basically press the Yes button on this initiative and actually move back:

• I must have a job lined up
• The salary of the new job MUST be above market rate and MUST be enough for me to comfortably live and have good amount of money leftover to put into savings every month
• The new work environment MUST be a friendly, collaborative workplace where I feel good about contributing my thoughts and ideas to others without fear of retaliation from above or below
• The new living accommodations must be very close to the new workplace. I refuse to sit in traffic for 45 minutes just to get to and from work, leading to the next point which is…
• The new job must have remote WFH options as a capability. I should be able to work from home as often as needed
• From point #2, I need to be out and about more socially, and not get stuck in a routine where all I do is go from home to office to gym and repeat ad nauseum

So if all of the above criteria are met, I could very realistically see myself back in that city within the next year or so, depending on how my current job goes. I will need to save a decent amount of money to have some buffer to move, find a new place, settle in, and relax for a few weeks before the next job starts.

One additional regret I had over this past weekend was not having enough time to see more friends and eat at my favourite places. I think what this means is another trip is in order, bigger and bolder than before. I think I will plan the next trip to coincide with a holiday that falls on a Friday or Monday. This way I can string together 4-5 days of time off consecutively and actually have more time to hang out and have fun on a relaxed schedule.

On Nothingness

I was going to write something during the holidays, possibly a return to my “Holidaze” series, but it just didn’t feel right at the time. It was not a good time for me, being sick, and having a miserable, measly ten days off for the end of the year. I felt cheated out of happiness in a big way last year. I felt like I’d missed out on many things, events, lives of people I know, etc. just due to work.

That said, it’s a new year. A time for new resolutions, goals, etc. In that vein I’ve mapped out a goal of working on my diet a bit more and being more mindful about what I’m putting into my body. It’s not really a lofty goal I would say, it’s one borne by experience and personal knowledge of my own capabilities. A big part of this includes regularly tracking my daily calories and macros on MyFitnessPal, which I’ve found useful in the past.

I’ve found myself becoming bitter and a general fatigue has sort of set in for the past six months. Work has stripped away much of my personal satisfaction and happiness.

My friends can read it in my demeanour pretty much immediately and the cracks of burnout are starting to show here. There’s like 3 days a week where I’m genuinely psyched about life, and those are Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday. The rest of the week is a straight meat grinder.

I used to joke with friends last year repeatedly dropping the line “Guys, I need a spa day” but never actually having time to spend to do such a thing. Honestly at this point, I think this is the most important thing I need right now. I’ve never even been to a spa before, despite claims to the contrary, and the thought of having to plan and set up the damn thing just makes me sick inside. Not because I don’t want to go, but because my mental capacity for doing anything outside of work has eroded to near-dust.

In the big box knowledge industry, what happens to us pawns is we get ground down hard by the mechanisms at play without having much of a say or any real agency in the nature of the work. It is a system designed to break the human spirit in the most insidious and Sisyphean of ways: death by a thousand cuts. It’s not a truckload of work being dumped on you all at once. No, no that would be too easy! No, the reality is actually much worse. Think of the work itself as the bloated corpse of a whale, gradually leaking bodily fluids and gases out everyday and slowly filling your pristine little beach with a stink you don’t recognise. Sure, at first you raise the alarms and spread the word that something is not quite right. But the people you’re telling are too busy digging a tunnel so far underground that it takes days, weeks to relay a message from the surface. And guess what? When you finally get a message from the tunnelers down below, it’s a used diaper filled with the shit of a thousand pigs that has, scrawled on the outside with a sharpie: “Too busy, we’ll get to it later”. They might as well just drag me all the way down to the gates of hell where, as Dante famously describes written on them, the words “Abandon hope, all ye who enter this place”.

So there you have it. It’s the Winchester mystery house problem scaled to infinity. If you’ve been a long-time reader, you’ll recall the Winchester mystery house problem in one of my posts from like 2017-2018ish or so. I’m honestly too tired to link it, but if anyone can find it, please drop it in the comments. It’s a great read and gives a cursory introduction to the sometimes hellish world I subject myself to 5-6 days a week. Yes, you heard that right. Occasionally I have to work on Saturdays too. It’s one more cut in the death by a thousand cuts that has just ground me down over the past year. The weekends are my recharge time. Why the hell am I spending them at work? This is the epitome of nonsense incarnate. I am running on a hamster wheel, deep in the rat race without much of an end in sight. My old calculus professor was absolutely right. If you see light at the end of the tunnel, don’t run towards it. It’s a lorry.

I don’t know, really. The misery of work, plus the misery of being on a diet are getting to me. I just want a steak and a week of sleep. And more and more, those are becoming distant dreams. Or memories of a time when everything wasn’t so batshit insane and hectic. Either way, I’ll try to get some rest this weekend unless I get pinged/buzzed to work tomorrow. In which case, I will play the entirety of Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” and slowly devolve into madness, ending in a small cup of lavender tea and a good cry on the floor of my shower Sunday evening as I slowly muster the courage to do this bullshit all over again.

As I said earlier it’s a meat grinder. Or as Dickens would say in the Tale of Two Cities, it is “a face hardened by fires in the furnace of suffering”.