Hard Work

Are you good at this?

How'd you get good at it? What drives you to it?

What % of the time does it feel like wasted effort or like a mug?

How do you beat that feeling, or is it something you have or not?

Balls to hard work

used to be no good at it. think I'm a little better after spending the last year in a shitty food-service job. it feels like wasted effort 100% of the time, because it is—every table I bus in this impossibly-busy restaurant will be dirty again within half an hour; every plate of food I deliver will be either greedily scarfed down or unhappily poked at as it goes cold. I have developed several defense mechanisms, among which:

- increased faith in irrational/religious phenomena
- imagining that this restaurant is actually purgatory
- quietly singing cheery tunes with morbid lyrics (Belle & Sebastian a favorite)
- coming to work stoned

I am still not very good at "(self-)motivation" tho, if that's what you're asking about... I have trouble setting the grindstone in motion, but once it gets going I'll stick my nose in and be happy as a pig in shit

can't even do that! or maybe i can start anything but get distracted/bored after (often literally) thirty or forty seconds

Purgatory otm, but idk how that helps?

ya, I don's suppose it does, really... but I find some kind of 'grand narrative' necessary to pull me through present difficulties, and thinking about actual practical stuff (is there any food at home? when's the electric bill due?) doesn't really cut it

I quite like hard work, but it's a lot easier if it's all-absorbing either physically or mentally. Being somewhere in between on both of those scales is a recipe for fractured thinking and frustration--never able to either let your mind escape into the physical rhythm, or to devote your thoughts to something substantial.

Frenzied activity with inconsistent periods of delay/rest is probably the most maddening thing to me.

'flow'

Great concept, only ever experience it during video games or partic intense 'i love football' posts

St. Augustine: "Is not the life of man upon earth all trial? Who wishes for troubles and difficulties? Thou commandest them to be endured, not to be loved. No man loves what he endures, though he love to endure. For though he rejoices that he endures, he had rather there were nothing for him to endure."

kinda the opposite of this, because I am a prideful sinner & self-loathing american—I wear my pointless sufferings as a badge of honor, and like nothing better than flinging them in the faces of evil corporate shills and lazy bourgeois fucks. especially the ones I went to high school with.

in orbit OTM about rhythm tho

(NB I used to be a lazy bourgeois fuck too, then I burned a lot of bridges)

st augustine's another fucker can go blow goats imo

i got rich cousins they're v uninteresting, idk has ireland bourgies

(... ah who am I kidding, if someone wanted to pay me $12 an hour to sit in an office wearing a little hat that said "lazy bourgeois fuck", I would jump at the opportunity)

I should point out that when I had a job that was essentially menial labor, though, the idea of a desk job where you get to check your email was like an impossible heaven, so it's probably just the last 10 years of office life speaking for me when I say that physical labor isn't so bad.

i sit in an office and do nothing for €14+ an hour (and a pension) am i bourgie? I haven't read marx obv

no but you're right about the rhythmic aspect of it—when you're running around with the endorphins flowing and the elevated heartrate, it's easy to feel like some kind of inhumanly productive machine; but when it slows down again and you still have 3 hours until yr shift ends, that's when you need some kinda spiritual/motivational voodoo

(that was to in orbit)

L otm, but given the option of going back fishing for 1200 a week i'd be willing to work like a demon and purify my soul again i spose

I should point out that when I had a job that was essentially menial labor, though, the idea of a desk job where you get to check your email was like an impossible heaven, so it's probably just the last 10 years of office life speaking for me when I say that physical labor isn't so bad.

― grossly incorrect register (in orbit), Tuesday, November 27, 2012 5:07 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am in sort of the opposite situation, where I imagine some dude sitting at a desk freaking out about this report he has to type up or w/e, and I'm just like, "how was I ever like that"

deems have you ever had a job where you had to be doing something at every second of the working day? i wouldn't want one all the time, or forever, personally, but the first time i got a job like this it gave me a real buzz, and i think has made me generally more focussed in other jobs. obviously it prob needs to be something fun or something you like too.

xp (obviously office work comes with its own set of stresses, deadlines & communication problems & all of that; but in my present situation, that all strikes me as kinda... unreal? idk)

ha yeah LG i've worked in kitchens, on trawlers, busy callcentres, done checkouts on christmas eve, dare i say it even different parts of the public sector in my six or seven years have demanded full effort from the first minute of the day to the last, and i recognise the busybee adrenaline rush of that short-term goal type of achievement. Maybe i'm more talking about steady unchecked effort towards longer term gains, i never seemed to pick up a feel for it. Or maybe i just pick or get picked for shitty jobs idk