2024 Week 6: Talk Therapy

Mon, Tue, and Wed were my last 3 days of work at the bookstore. It was bittersweet, but at the same time, I couldn't wait to move on. People kept asking me where I was heading, and I kept saying: "nowhere". For now, I plan to focus on reading my doorstoppers and maybe do a little travelling, at least until I run out of money. 

For money, I'll be doing food delivery again, which was what I did in 2022 to fill up my time. This time I'll try and see if I can make about $1K a month. I'm not sure if it's possible, but if it is, this would certainly solve my income issues. Anyway, I plan to cycle only in the mornings when I'm fresh and traffic is light.  In the afternoons and evenings I will do deliveries by bus or on foot. I don't want to get into another traffic accident.

Should I be more worried? I'll admit it is a strange feeling to not worry about money. I sometimes get anxiety about not having anxiety. I suppose my income from working in retail was so low that it can pretty much only go up.

Money aside, there's also the question of whether I shouldn't look for a proper job. Well, I don't know. Some cursory browsing on MyCareersFuture and LinkedIn suggests that my former industry (writing & editing) is pretty much kaput at the moment. So it's either wait for companies to hire writers again (which I wouldn't count on) or do something else. Whatever that "something else" is, the pay is almost guaranteed to be quite low and the work probably more boring than writing. So... is there a point? 

The other day Joel asked me if my ambivalence towards work is a reaction to getting burned (being made redundant) in the past, akin to someone swearing off bitches after getting dumped. I've been thinking about that a lot.

I don't think I'm all that anti-work. I'm probably pro-work provided that the work is meaningful, valuable, and fun. Unfortunately most jobs I come across do not meet those criteria - therefore (to me) they are a waste of time. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I choose not to commit until one that meets my high standards comes along. (It might not, because technology and society have changed so much.)

Another thing is that my original plan to find my identity outside of my career worked too well. Now I am so immersed in my hobbies and lifestyle that I don't think I have time left over for a job.

I guess I've been in the mood for taking stock lately. Yesterday I went for a counselling session and it made me realise that I have made progress in the past few years. Ever since I got retrenched in 2019, I've been trying to confront the fact that the niche I occupied is no longer needed. Makes sense, logically speaking, yet it's such a hard pill to swallow. I existed in harmony with the universe; I had a place in the world... and then it was gone, just like that!

I used to feel self-conscious about taking so long to recover from a puny setback like losing my job. We value "resilience", i.e. people who pick themselves up and pivot to another career right away. I got frustrated that my projects (to write a book, to become a successful freelancer) seemed to keep failing.

But when I consider the magnitude of my... dislocation, I'm kinder to myself about it. Who's to say how long it would take to feel whole again, and to find a place in the world after it was lost? The existentialists did not create their philosophy overnight.

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Speaking of harmony...

Goodbye Haybeon! But we might be getting her again later in the month.

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This week we made 2 things from Sabrina Fauda Role's One-Pot Healthy cookbook... chicken liver and mushrooms w/ balsamic vinegar sauce, and steamed salmon w/ frozen veg and cream (subbed yogurt). Both turned out very nicely. Another cooking win was sucessfully making brown rice in our cheap rice cooker (and it actually tasted good).

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I also finished Kafka's The Trial, seemingly a grotesque tragicomedy about legal bureaucracy. It is a privilege to be able to laugh at it, though. One must remember that Kafka worked in law and insurance ALL his short life, so he wasn't simply "gently poking fun" but more likely desperately trying to stay sane in spite of the gross mismatch between his job and his artistic temperament.

[...] it's far from being the lawyers' job to introduce any improvements in the court system, or even to want to. Even the most junior lawyer can understand the relationship there to some extent, but one significant point is that almost every defendant, even very simple people, begins to think of suggestions for improving the court as soon as his proceedings have begun, many of them often even spend time and energy on the matter that could be spent far better elsewhere. The only right thing to do is to learn how to deal with the situation as it is. Even if it were possible to improve any detail of it—which is anyway no more than superstitious nonsense—the best that they could achieve, although doing themselves incalculable harm in the process, is that they will have attracted the special attention of the officials for any case that comes up in the future, and the officials are always ready to seek revenge. Never attract attention to yourself! Stay calm, however much it goes against your character! Try to gain some insight into the size of the court organism and how, to some extent, it remains in a state of suspension, and that even if you alter something in one place you'll draw the ground out from under your feet and might fall, whereas if an enormous organism like the court is disrupted in any one place it finds it easy to provide a substitute for itself somewhere else. Everything is connected with everything else and will continue without any change or else, which is quite probable, even more closed, more attentive, more strict, more malevolent.