All Vanity

I was discussing with someone the other day. From one conversation to the other, I came to this conclusion; the life most of us lead is vain and empty. This notion isn’t one that is particularly novel to me. It’s a thought that has occurred to and troubled me before, but the last time it did, I somehow managed to push it to the rear of my mind so I could focus on the fast moving and hence blurry details of my life. But I seem to have made a round trip ‘cos I’m face-to-face with the idea again.

The young lad still in school is itchy to graduate and break into the labour market. The graduate, who is still scavenging for a job, loses sleep ‘cos he’s yet to find that place where he can purposefully rush off to every morning. The gainfully employed can’t seem to understand why the bosses are staling on the promotion. Higher and higher our career ambitions pile and I asked my friend “to what end is all of this?” When eventually our desires fall in our laps, the implication is usually a monotonous life; you wake up each morning, push off to work, go home to catch a few winks before the next morning so you can run off again to be at the beck and call of our employers… on and on in a loop our lives coil.

We probably tell ourselves from time to time that we wouldn’t sacrifice ourselves to the rat race, that we will somehow find a way to live above it, but how many of us actually achieve that? How many of us won’t wake up twenty years down the line to find that we’ve giving the past twenty-three or twenty-five years to the monotony of going to and fro the work place? How many of us won’t find ourselves slaves to our careers (a fancy name for the life pilfering rat-race)?

It’s not the rat race in itself that annoys me and causes me to worry, it’s the way we all strive towards it; the way we all pine and whine when we’re not in the thick of it…that’s what bothers me!

The first time thoughts on this matter crept up on me was earlier in the year. At the time I was unemployed and stuck at home, looking longingly through my window at the people in the rat race. I would think about how only months ago, I was busying about town like them and wonder when I would be able to step back in the game. But on one of those days, I stopped and asked myself “What then?” “What happens when I get another job?” All that came to mind were the days in my past when I used to have to wake up at an hour uncomfortably close to the witching hour and how I used to get so little sleep, I sometimes thought that I wouldn’t mind being suspended for something or another so I could catch up on my beauties.

So I wondered why I was so sad to be away from the stressful monotony and so eager to return it. Like I said, I forgot about it back then, but this past weekend, the matter has come back to mind so I’m throwing the question open; Why do we, as humans, have such a strong tendency towards this thing (work) that doesn't fill the emptiness on our insides?

Picture source here