loving idiocy

"Triple your income and enjoy life!" promised the business card I discovered on top of a urinal in a restaurant. Network sharketing at its best. I did not touch that card. Hell no! Somehow I had a problem computing my idea of enjoyment as a direct function of literally inviting others to piss on my name. Besides, it's kinda sexist and discriminating to exclude women as potential business associates even if your business is of such crappy nature.

Understandably, armies of job-hating employees prefer to suffer through the decades until retirement puts them out of misery. Or a heart attack. Or a quasi retirement, diversified by having fun as a friendly greeter at Walmart, part time.

Employees are bright people in general! Choosing despicable jobs for a lifetime does not mean an individual is too blockheaded to leave appalling work situations behind in exchange for freedom, riches, and the joy of doing what she loves to do. Not necessarily. At least subconsciously, most employees are aware that hating a job may not be the worst of all available alternatives.

We aren't fighting anymore for survival in an environment of sabertoothed tigers, poisonous snakes, and war parties of belligerent tribes. Well, in a transferred sense we are, and it continues to be a desperate act of survival for many of us. You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize dynamics that were typical for stone age societies beautifully preserved in any bureaucracy. Groups of people, for that matter, tend to re-enact reprehensible forms of "togetherness" we thought we had overcome by now.

We haven't. Laziness is not as bad as its reputation and as we see, even evolution is not exactly forging ahead with a type "A" personality. Hostile work environments--infested with backstabbers, freeloaders, and other lowlife entities--benefit us. Imminent danger to get screwed keeps our senses and pencils sharp. Imagine that: everything you hate about your job is actually good for you!

The fact that we won't look too pretty after a week alone in the jungle often obscures the truth that our reptilian brain is still fully functional. We do know how to suspend judgment, bypass the neocortex, and knock on the old lizard's bedroom door. SNAP! And this hundred million year trained fight-or-flight machine rips a chunk out of anything and is ready for a second helping ... unless you start thinking first and fast. You may not believe in dragons anymore, the guardians of your sixth sense. I do: I have seen them fly.

Hating your job feeds the dragon, sharpens its claws, and keeps the old freak loyal to you and to your purposes.

Yet dragons love to take long naps and interruptions displease them. You know what that means, don't you? Eh? C'mon. You guessed it: our instincts are sufficiently developed to know that hating miserable jobs for forty years is BETTER and infinitely safer than unpredictable environments of entrepreneurship. Employees know that hating a job, as awful as it may be, still allows them to go home at a certain time, play with their kids on the weekend and pick up a paycheck in predictable intervals.

Employees know that self-employment can mean years of hell, physical and emotional hardship, sleep deprivation, having to see their family under constant existential threat, and worse: living with the pain and the guilt of not spending enough time with their loved ones.

It is utterly irresponsible to promise employees a better world when they enter self-employment. If you have a job today, heed my advice and keep your damn job! Each of the alternatives may not only be significantly worse than what you are hating today. Anything besides the things you hate doing today could easily be classified as torture by you and by independent judges.

Yes, you got that right. What you hate doing is rather foreplay than torture. The things you say you'd love to be doing may turn into brutal and violent (self)-destruction once you realize there is no way back and you will be forced to do it to the very end, until you die. I am not kidding!

My father--a farmer--ridiculed employees who made twice the money he did and who could afford to go on three-week vacations year after year. He mocked government employees who could not get fired, were basically exempt from paying income taxes, and had generous pensions waiting for them at retirement age (no, of course he didn't make fun of employees to their face).

My dad didn't have a safe paycheck nor a secured pension. He did not expect to retire, ever. When the weather demanded it, he would work every day for months. Sometimes he had a bad year, financially. I saw him--and us--going through several meager years in a row. Vacations? Yep, he enjoyed about half a dozen vacations, 3 - 5 days long in his late sixties, totaling a month of goofing off during his lifetime perhaps.

My old man worked for more than fifty years on a "job" he did not initially choose. He felt he had to take over this 800-year-old family business when his older brother got killed in WWI. Most individuals in our society would easily label my father's life as 50 years of "Labor Camp." Yet, I never heard him complain. He whistled at work. He was a happy man. He never said it explicitly, but I do know he absolutely LOVED his life and his vocation. He CHOSE to work every day.

I have met hundreds and hundreds of self-employed men and women, entrepreneurs, selfmade individuals in all sorts of industries, in different countries on several continents. My father's story does NOT stick out as special. On the contrary, as far as self-employment goes, he was quite normal. It matters not that my dad lived in Germany all his life. What I have learned and what I continue to admire is that America and the greatness of the U.S. have been build by such "normal" individuals.

Ingenious tinkerers willing to go through hell for the people and for the work they love. Reckless idiots in the eyes of outsiders, like the Wright brothers. No, those who hate what they do won't risk braking limbs and necks without a reflection of that risk in a pay raise. Only people who love what they do are willing to destroy marriage, friendships, and their own health over their "love."

Do you really love what you want to do? Enough to die for it? Oh, that is just my negative programming? Yeah sure, you new age dork! Agreed, there is an off-chance that you are lucky. Maybe you will coast through self-employment with ease, wade through truck loads of cash, and all that's good will only get better throughout eternity. And boy, I wish that's true for you. But if you expect that to happen, oh baby, I'm afraid you are a doomed freaking wretch.

Choice can turn one man's (and woman's, naturally) torture into another man's paradise. It is pure idiocy to assume doing what you love will make you happy. You are the one who has to modify everything you do, the stuff you hate doing and the things you say you love. You have to breathe happiness into every single one of your endeavors. If you don't, the stuff you love today will taste like yesterday's stale beer tomorrow and turn into a heavy burden.

It is dumb to believe doing what you love will get you anywhere. "It" won't. YOU may and you may not ... if and when you are ready for it. Asking you to quit employment and to do "what you love" is the equivalent of asking you to jump into a volcano and to fight with dragons to your last breath. If you happen to love THAT, then by all means do it! If you don't, I don't want to be held responsible for talking you into it. Nope.

And yeah, if you are aware of the risks--in addition to the risks you will never be aware of in advance--you will probably enjoy it. At any rate, I beg you (on my knees): start a business but do it parallel to your sleeping-dragon employment. You'll thank me soon.

In short, job-hating is an insurance policy against possibly traumatizing and maybe fatal self-employment. I urge you to love the job-hating if you lack the balls to subject yourself to the fate of going down or up in flames by doing what you "love." Whether it'll be "up" or "down" is not for you to decide: whether you like it or not, the market always has the last word.

Love thy dragon as thyself,

Egbert Sukop