This is a response to an email from a friend in which he argued the virtues of the 40 hour work week. I had a hangover when I wrote this response, so go easy on me.
I have come to recognize that my 40-hour workweek is a product of my having failed to live my life the way I should have lived it. So I serve as an ant in an anthill, running around with all the other ants back and forth on the highway, to the grocery store, the gas station, to work. I feed the queen fat bugs, but I only get a taste of the carcass. Work does suck when the benefit of your labor isn't yours but ends up in someone else's belly. That's why I most envy the artist (sans compromising with an editor). Your entire work product is yours. I don't think there is anything innately good about being a drone working the 40-hour workweek, as if the gods have put the necessity of it in our sinews. The 40-hour workweek is punishment. It is something idle slaves are forced into by the whip master because if they weren't made to work, they wouldn't work. I'm saying that the only people needing a 40-hour workweek are the ones that couldn't get off their feet and live life differently (or should I rather say work toward their self-defined purpose with passion from an early age?) than all the other ants, or slaves.
If I were to do it all over again, I'd live by 4 rules, and as a result, this day I'd be unshackled of the curse the 40-hour workweek, and of women, both of which devour the benefit of a man's labor:
1. Never marry or share finances with anyone.
2. At 18, enlist in a government job that pays retirement after 20 years service, and get as many college degrees as you can during this 20-year service.
3. Never borrow money, not one penny.
4. Save 1/2 of everything you earn, and put it in dividend-paying stock portfolio, and never sell what you buy, unless the payout is insane.
If I'd done these 4 things, I'd be traveling the world on a vacation that never ended, and writing my stuff every evening at my hotel in France, or Rome, or Moscow. Yeah, there is still a period of servitude and perhaps risk of death in battle, but at least you have a time-certain payout on your investment of the very years of your life, your flesh and blood, and your soul.
If only my friend Bud had instructed me on women when I was in high school. His words won’t leave me and it is a tragedy my ears first took them in at age 38, 20 years too late:
"People are always trying to set me up with these women looking for relationships. I tell them I don't need a relationship because I feel whole as I am. I don't need another person to complete me. I'm not that insecure. Of course they respond with 'you're gay, aren't you?' because they have one-dimensional thinking. I reply by saying, 'I'm not gay. I love vaginas. I just don't want to own one.'"
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