Today, like basically every weekday, I am going to sit at my desk in front of screens for hours. My risk of bodily injury at work is pretty much limited to eye strain, a sore neck, or, I guess carpal tunnel? The value of the flexibility can’t be overstated; if I need to work from home for the day, I can. I get to work with great people from all over the world. Most days, I am even lucky enough to share office space with other real, live people, believe it or not.
But there is an emptiness in it.
For the vast majority of the day, I will sit and fidget in my chair while my eyes dart around the same ~4’x2′ stretch of monitors, clicking and tapping and taking calls. At the end of the day I will close the lid of my computer, take a look around, and I will see no evidence that I’d accomplished anything at all. I’ll be tired, but not in the way that I think tired is supposed to feel. It’ll be closer to the type of tired you feel when you are sick rather than the type of tired that I used to feel as a kid after school and back-to-back track and basketball practices.
All that, and then when I get paid (I do actually get paid to do this somehow), I’ll only know because my screens will tell me with an email and a direct deposit.
This is hardly a unique experience nowadays, and aside from the fact that his work has always generated a great deal more paper, it really isn’t even that different from the working experience of my father over the last couple decades. Much has been written and sensationalized on this topic, but when I say that I want to see the fruits of my labor, I do not find it necessary or even desirable to leave my career and enter the trades to do so. This want may only be a small want. The cure may be as simple as taking up a house project, or changing the oil on my lawnmower. I know that I didn’t used to feel this way when I did very similar work in a factory, surrounded by visual cues of my computer work, well, working. So maybe what I actually want is as simple as a change of environment.
This morning, though, this want feels important enough to capture.