8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [07] Poise & Purpose

Burnout, boredom, and the hunger for meaning in the work you do.

Chapter List

  • Hard Change Branch · Part Three

    Change is hard.

    I left my government job over three years ago and I still sputter out excuses when I cross paths with someone who questions the narrative. No one can understand why. No one can make sense of decoupling from a career out of free will.

    An interaction usually goes something like this:

    Oh, hey—how are you? What are you up to these days—still with… We worked together or we knew each other professionally and the only thing we had in common was our ties to that job.

    No. I’ve been gone for years now. You?

    No. I’m with… they say some name of some company I’m unlikely to remember later… what are you doing then?

    Here, I should interject and say—Woohoo! I’ve realized a dream. I spend my days writing and making and exploring. I wrote a novel and I’m writing short stories nearly every day and I’m posting prolifically on a couple of websites. I get involved in the community. I spend time with my family. The ladies who sell me tea the cafe know me by name. I’m splendidly happy with my lot—how is corporate life going?

    I don’t.

    Oh, you know—I do some contract work here and there. It’s not a lie. I do. Trying to start my own little business and it’s slow going.

    That sounds amazing. Does it really?

    I make a bit more small talk and it never goes back to anything of substance. No one cares—in the best ways and the worst, no one cares that you leapt from the moving train of your career and are wandering in the wilderness trying to find meaning. And that’s fine. No one needs to care.

    But then that’s the problem: Change is hard, and too often I find myself making excuses for why my change has been so fuzzy rather than just admitting that change is amazing, too.

  • Charred Black

    Winter is coming. Literally.

    I just passed the two hundred post milestone on this writing project, and it has come a long way since I started with a big idea and a handful of introductory posts back in the deeps of last winter. And here we come again.

    Summer was a time of rejuvenation and new ideas, and I spent a lot of the time behind the scenes expanding out the scope of what I was trying to do here, adding features to the website, creating offline “book” versions of my content, and injecting a ton of metadata into the posts that interlink, expand, and clarify the things that I am sharing as nuggets of personal insight.

    It is my personal search for purpose. It feels that way sometimes.

    I came from a realm of professional burnout. I gave the legendary one hundred and ten percent to my various jobs for about twenty-five years, which by my math puts me about two hundred and fifty percent in the black.

    But that black isn’t an asset. It was char. And about a month or so after writing this I’ll be turning fifty—five-oh—and while that certainly isn’t my personal winter, it definitely feels a lot like autumn.

    I take comfort in knowing that I’ve been a bit of an autumn person my whole life, tho, so perhaps this work, this project, this writing, and whatever clarity has tumbled from the effort to over-philosophize and hyper-analyze my own creative soul has marked a seasonal transition.

    I can’t necessarily tell you how to find your own meaning, but wrapping your head around where you’ve been through introspection, writing and refocus has definitely started working some magic on me.

    Hunker down, the weather is about to shift.

  • Self Employed

    Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.

    Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.

    Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.

    I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.

    It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.

    Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.

    For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot. 

    I would say I was working.

    The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.

    The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.

    As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way. 

    Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?

  • Significance Gap

    I am as bad as anyone when it comes to looking for meaning in what I do.

    I spend my days working towards significance.

    Oh sure, I write for the sake of writing, make art without care for anyone ever seeing it, and play music with my headphones on so that no one ever hears the sounds but me—but nearly all of it is in service to some future significance, I wager.

    We practice to improve.

    We groom our skills towards a purpose.

    We reach out for significance—which is something that cannot reliably be measured.

    What is significance? What is purpose? What is meaning?

    In a way it might be something parallel to the idea of wealth. Wealth is the acquisition of money in search of a tipping point from insufficient to more than enough. Wealth is relative. It’s a marketing term for banks. It’s an ineffable concept. For some wealth might simply be financial stability. For others wealth is riches beyond imagination. Wealth comes in a variety as diverse as there are people on Earth.

    Purpose is similar, I think. Meaning and significance are intangible and indefinable, and likely they mean something different for everyone who utters the syllables. There is a gap in communicating what my definition of significance is to you and vice versa. For some it might mean something personal or linked to a small community, while for others nothing short of worldwide fame and history shifting effort would suffice.

    My only advice then: define it for yourself.

  • Success Blindness

    Do you remember why you started chasing your art?

    Do you remember why you started taking photos, painting landscapes, composing music, or scratching out short stories in a dimly lit cafe?

    I’m sure a few people have stumbled across this website and consider it a bit of navel gazing, culture-vibing, self-help sludge from a procrastinating wannabe, and maybe they’re right.

    I spend a small chunk of my day, nearly every day, doing some reflective writing on my hobbies and interests, and I do it for a very specific reason: I want to rekindle the memory of why.

    I want to keep the fire lit under the reasons I do any of this at all.

    I’ve felt burnout. I’ve encountered the darkness upon a long and lonely path and I know what it feels like to forget why you bother doing interesting things. Burnout cares not for strength of spirit or power of will. It only knows of despair and indifference. It wants you to forget the why. It wants you to overlook the origins of your passion and limit your recollection of the reasons you started out on the adventure in the first place.

    I stave of the darkness by writing these little short essays, often to remind even just myself of the answers to all those questions. I recall the beauty of a sketch gallery I wandered into in Dublin. I remember the vibe of yearning to play the violin whilst watching the symphony one winter evening. I recall listening to a beloved children’s author speak of the transcendent joy of the written word. 

    All of it lights against the darkness. All of it reminds me of successes lost to my own blindness.