Daily Musing: Happy Friday

Good Morning.

Firstly, happy Friday. For many people, this is the end of a working week, and the beginning of what life should be for us as human beings. Fortunately, for me, for the time being at least, I get to enjoy today for other reasons.

Callie is coming home this weekend, and I have been missing her dearly. That being said, a good chunk of my day is going to be cleaning up around the apartment and making sure things are in order as they should be.

It may also be the beginning of the end of my retaining control over the time I spend alive. I might have to get a “job” again, which means I might have to start hearing “Happy Friday” much much more, and as a sign of the end of something people weren’t happy to do, but did because they had to. Otherwise, why would someone be happy about something ending that they enjoyed? Hint: They wouldn’t.

Friday has nothing to do with it. Time is a concept invented so that we, as humans, can track history, and communicate things to one another with a hair more ease, but at what cost? What of poor Monday?

I found a terrific quote sometime near the beginning of the summer that read, “You don’t hate Monday’s, you hate capitalism.” and I couldn’t agree more. We’ve created a system that makes us dislike time. Time! The only real resource that human lives have. We’ve been convinced that time is the enemy, and the solution is money. That’s backwards of course but I’ve written about money before so I’m not going to let that bog me down today. Not right now at least.

This may be the last Friday that I get for a while, where my focus isn’t on, “how best do I fix how my 5-day week messed me up in 2-days”, and I can liberally (sounds like Liberty right? That thing we’re all supposed to have a right to) decide how to spend my time.

I’ve got a little more time in November, and I’m struggling to pick a name for an LLC to be the holding company for my creative efforts. Scott Johnson, one of my favorite content creators uses the name Frogpants, to umbrella all that he does, and his Patreon reflects that. If you want to support Scott for something he’s doing, there is a single, easy way to do that. I’m sure it’s also much easier on his side of things.

Red Hoodie Creative, LLC? Skoda Creative, LLC? Mapleflange Creative, LLC? I don’t know. Names have always been something that has taken me awhile. I once made a World of Warcraft character, played them to level 10, deleted them and remade them with a slightly different name, I think four or five times before I was satisfied. I tend to spend lots of time naming things, and the name of a business is important.

I’ve also been delaying hosting ads on my blog, because I think ads are a disgusting and blatant disregard for human life. If you go to YouTube to watch a five minute video, with a 15 second ad, those are 15 seconds of your life you never get back. After watching 100 videos, that’s 25 minutes of your life, gone because someone somewhere wanted a paycheck, more than they wanted you to have a happy, meaningful life. That’s my stance, and I really don’t want to be a hypocrite. I also don’t want to starve to death.

Each day feels closer and closer to needing a traditional “job”, and it makes me increasingly uncomfortable about losing control over my life. People say, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. First of all, “never”? That’s just statistically unlikely. Secondly, what if what I love doesn’t make me any money? (As is currently the case).

I’m not opposed to work, mind you, but I don’t want to be making thousands of dollars for someone else and only seeing a pittance of that for myself. I want my work to be meaningful, and valued at the rate that I deem my life is worth, not someone else. It’s pretty fucked up that we’re all expected to accept a dollar value that our lives are worth, but that’s for a post about the plummeting state of mental health and not Fridays.

How are you today? How much decompression do you use your weekend for to cope with your week? I know I’m not alone in feeling like traditional work expectations are no longer reasonable, there are plenty of companies who are “trying out the idea of” a four day, 32-hour work week but I can’t find them in central Vermont. I see numerous posts weekly, like the woman who felt guilty about wanting to be home (not working) more so she could be with her kids. Like people being afraid to take a sick day, for fear of needing the time off elsewhere, being fired or missing promotions, or (the worst) those in service jobs because they need the money. Someone needs money more than they need to not risk infecting hundreds, if not thousands of other people? Come on, something is wrong here.

I’m trying to figure out what to do next, so that I can keep my Fridays, and my weekends, as time to actually enjoy life, and not need it all to decompress, but like I said, each day that slips by gets me closer and closer to having to re-enter the “workforce”, along with the fears and issues noted above, and hundreds more.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in control of your Friday, then enjoy it. Be really grateful you’re not one of the 2,160 people who will commit suicide today (Source from WHO), 648 of which worked “just a job to get them by” (Source from Pew Research Center), and spent nearly a third of their week somewhere they probably didn’t really want to be, doing things they didn’t really want to do. I’m not saying work is the only factor (it’s clearly not), but it counts for something when looking at whether or not people are spending their limited time alive doing things they want to do and find meaningful or important to them.

I’m really fortunate to be someone who does own my life today, but I’m becoming fearful that I won’t be able to for much longer. I’m afraid of losing my truly happy Friday (well, I’m less miserable today that I have been recently), and replacing it with the mechanical “happy Friday” that worker drones utter to one another, as a final speck of hope in their week-to-week existence.

I’m not trying to bring anyone down, but this is the world we live in. If you own your time alive, be grateful, and have a terrific day and weekend. If you don’t, then I truly hope your decompression goes well, and that you can find some speck of happiness in your week in the coming weekend days.