This is an interesting question, which may tie in with another important question taken from the movie, The Shawshank Redemption; are you busy living or are you busy dying? I know this may sound a little dramatic, but it needs to be taken seriously. Based upon personal experience, and if you are relatively normal like me, the chances are that you are living to work, and therefore busy dying. That was my unconscious reality until I got my wake-up call – prostate cancer and clinical depression both challenged me to reassess my life and question whether I was truly happy. The answer was no, as I faced the painful truth that I was lost along the way. But as I wrote in a previous blog, the wonderful thing about being human is that we can change our minds, and our lives.
So back to the question, are you living to work or working to live, I encourage you to take a long hard look at things. It’s not an easy reflection because living to work immediately sounds wrong as most people believe they are working to live; pay the bills, educate the kids, save for a holiday. But consider how you would be if you couldn’t work? Covid gave us a glimpse of that world, where we were forced to down tools and just be, instead of business as usual. Yes, I know the financial pressure we experienced made the situation worse, but it also highlighted how poor we are at being, being still and being at peace in our own lives.
The sad reality is that most people are living to work, whilst a fortunate few have evolved enough to work to live. Why we all tend to live to work is due to our socialization and conditioning under a patriarchal and essentially material system. Through nuclear family pressure, formal education competition, and organized religion conformity, we have been programmed to do in order to have. And without the benefit of extended family support, informal education collaboration, and personal religion creativity, we don’t know how to be, and so a massive part of living is missing.
Unfortunately, if what you do (as opposed to who you are) defines you, being busy (as opposed to resting and digesting) is glorified, and success is measured in material gain (as opposed to having time to just be), you will struggle to break free from the rat race, and death will come quickly. But if you realize how subtly the prison bars have been constructed in your own mind and take time to understand that there is a better way, then the possibility of living with real freedom, peace and joy arises. To find out more about working to live instead living to work please contact me, psychologist in Fourways.