Instructions for getting a good job and a bad life

To climb a mountain you have to believe that there is a mountain to climb. To look under your pillow when a tooth falls out, you have to believe that a mouse will leave gifts at night. And to go to work and burst our lives in it, you have to think that nature raised the mountain that we are trying to climb, that its existence does not depend on human will and that the labor market is not anyone’s fault or responsibility, but rather one more part of the splendid landscape. It is true that the work environment is as risky and slippery as a high mountain route, but it is easier to adapt with proper training. So, in case it could help, I share a personal guide capable of making fast-paced life stop squeezing like a girdle and fit the professional development of any worker like a glove.

In the first place, before signing any contract, the worker should belittle the word and knowledge -because they will not be of much help in the journey that he is going to undertake- and assume that wherever he goes, profitability and efficiency are more important than the sense. This regardless of the profession chosen, the work to be done and even the type of contract. Thus, for example, giving up meaning is essential if you are going to study oppositions. It is one thing to aspire to a stable job and another to yearn to understand it or change the way of doing things with your ideas or qualities. What must be understood before dedicating most of the day and life to work is that time is an arrow that only moves forward. The first thing is to see that date and the second thing is to believe that life is the line that it draws in its path. You have to eliminate any spherical idea about the world or your own biography, because work is what will allow you to dispense with the cyclical time of the seasons and the old rhythm of the harvests. The worker is that subject who does not need to wait, since his only mission is to advance.

But before running the first thing is to get to the starting line. Once there, at work, the most important thing is to set a purpose, an achievable goal. You don’t have to be very smart to understand that the only safe goal is the exit door, because one day you will leave (or get kicked out) from the position that you maintain with so much effort. Furthermore, one day you will be thrown from the very life that sustains you today. But it’s not that kind of outings that lurk on LinkedIn, on the contrary. Fortunately, death does not exist in the labor market, so we can run and sweat as if there was no tomorrow. Because tomorrow does not exist for those who speed up their days with the logic of the god of work, just as death does not exist. Thus, the people who deify work and worship it are lucky enough to believe that they are eternal: the price is the sacrifice that their religion demands of them, but the reward is that thanks to work they will stop counting the days. And it is really consoling that time becomes uncountable because in this way the days and days fly by. And when it flies, life doesn’t hurt.

In this sense, whoever wants time to become univocal and linear should move away from all sorts of poetry and remain faithful to the rhythm of the clock, as if no other music were possible. It would be good to defend, at a family gathering, that philosophy is a waste of time in the curriculum and that it is not worth thinking about what science cannot explain. You have to believe that black holes are true if described by physics, but that they can never exist in the heart of a human being. Furthermore, one must be convinced that no matter how many people we see emigrating with their whole lives in a suitcase, there is some kind of justice in all of this, because these people have hands with which to work. And work can still turn arbitrariness into justice. You don’t have to be praying all the time, but it is important to never stop believing, because work is religion that rewards its faithful.

You have to understand before dedicating most of your life to work that time is an arrow that only moves forward

An important nuance that I must mention is that it is preferable not to be a woman to get a good position. If you were, it is very likely that you will find serious obstacles and deterrents. It is due, among other things, to the fact that your time is cyclical by nature, which is why you bleed every month, it hurts every month and you become fertile a few days of each month. In this sense, a working woman is a threat to the clock that tries to order productive time. Being a woman is therefore not desirable, but when there is no other choice, it is convenient to accept that the top of this mountain has always been a privilege of men, also their ordeal since the origins, strong hunters who risked their lives for women who lived peacefully in a cave or a farm. (Or so we’ve been told.) It is necessary to understand that what is properly masculine is action, conquest, expansion and power. And women have to be respectful of their privileges because we must remember that men have given their lives to achieve them. It seems reasonable to give up one’s life if one is going to ask for a privilege as great as being a man in a patriarchal world, but it is convenient not to judge this kind of thing in the workplace. As has already been said, it is not a place where the world is going to be understood or thought. The good news is that the less you think, the clearer the worker’s ideas will emerge.

And so, with clear ideas and orderly life, you have to look at the horizon one blue August afternoon, understand that the planet burns with hunger and flames, and then think that all humanity needs is to launch a great digital transformation. We will have to ask Europe for help to assist us in this fundamental transition and publish in the newspapers and in the BOE any progress in this direction until many intelligent people think at the same time that it makes sense. That our next destination will be virtual, that in the metaverse we will live better and that the new is always good, just as nature is always wise. Whatever it is that we call “new” or identify as “the natural”.

Whoever strictly complies with these instructions will get a good job… and a bad life. Whoever is not satisfied will have to start imagining work in another way. Because, no matter how overwhelmed we are, the truth is that we are the only owners of our time. Living slower will not change things: the real revolution happens to break the clock that we carry inside. And wish, above all, a good life.

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