Do you:
• Feel guilty for resting.
• Base your self-worth on doing well in your career.
• If you become ill, do you panic about work first, placing productivity before health.
• Believe that hard work and material gain = happiness.
• Feel lazy, even when you're resting due to experiencing pain, trauma or adversity.
• Use busyness as a way to avoid your needs.
As a society we have spent many generations placing much status and importance on our work, work does indeed offer a great deal of opportunity and financial gain.
“What do you do?” is one of the first questions asked upon meeting someone for the first time, as if their job is a good reflection of who they are as a person. How successful they are. We only feel successful if we have the job, the house, the car, and don’t feel good or successful enough we don’t.
Surely if we are “successful” and doing well with our work we must be happy?
We see so many celebrities who “have it all” and are struggling, successful business people who give it all up, they are successful, but still desperately unhappy.
Many of us feel that gap.
This “gap” could also be called “Internalised Capitalism” fundamentally suggesting that we as individuals are equating our productivity with our self-worth.”
Put more simply, if we are not constantly producing or have material gain, we have led ourselves to believe we are not valuable.
Sound familiar? It certainly struck a chord with me, Does it help us to understand a little more as to why so many of us have this mania for productivity and an aversion for rest?
I’m not sure it’s the whole answer but it certainly goes some way to help us understand why we are reacting with symptoms of stress and depression in our 24/7 fast-paced consumer world we are living in.
Knowledge is power as they say - having an awareness helps us untangle our valuable selves from our work, making redundancy less about us and more about them, making our possessions our possessions not reflect how we feel about ourselves. Reducing the stress we might feel about “not being good enough” if we still have work to do at the end of the day or if we must leave to tend to a family or health matter.
We are human “beings” not human “doings”, work is but a segment of who we are.
We are not robots, rest is important, perhaps we need to keep reminding ourselves of this and take small steps to refocus our goals beyond daily achievements and material gain, perhaps then we may be able to regain inner peace and a sense of true achievement and happiness? Would love to hear your thoughts!
Image courtesy of Jem Sahagun on Unsplash
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