After finishing university I took my first job (it took a while to find it, but that’s another story) and started working as a corporate drone at a big company. It was one of the most boring and frustrating jobs that a person could do.
Waking up in the morning, forcing yourself out of bed, quickly brushing your teeth, fumbling through a pile of clothes to pick out something to wear that morning… That’s the beginning of your daily routine.
You then take a deep breath, open the door of your apartment and take a step outside. You rush quickly to the bus stop, wait for the bus and arrive at work. Once there, you wait with dread as your computer boots up, hoping that no new emails will pop up. Emails mean useless work that you will have to do. In the worst case scenario, it’s someone cussing you out for making some sort of a mistake.
Once the computer is up and running, the only thing to do is “work”, doing a number of mind numbing activities and actually pretending that you care that they are done. This is often interspaced with team meetings discussing stuff nobody cares about and using big words to sound knowledgeable.
After an excrutiatingly long day, you finally switch off your computer and go home, to sit on your ass and ponder for several hours on what you should watch on tv or whether you should already go to sleep. Once it is already pretty late, you force yourself to go to your bed and if lucky fall asleep. During the night, you wake up several times, worried about the approaching deadline or trying to remember whether you filed that report like you were supposed to.
Then you wake up and do the same things you did the previous day. It becomes a boring routine. Go. Sleep. Repeat.
Welcome to the real world. This is unfortunately the everyday reality for many of us.
After I graduated university, I had to find work. I searched and searched, started going to interviews and did all that stuff. I have never been able to sell myself properly and plus I never really could get myself to act enthusiastic enough to pretend that this was the job of my dreams. So all this was a long, drawn-out process.
Finally I did land a job. That’s when the routine started. The work was basically all about copy and pasting and doing other retarded stuff. It was in fact so retarded, that even a better trained monkey could probably do it.
I kept on thinking to myself. This is what my life is going to look like for the rest of my life? This is what I studied so hard for?
The work was shit, the pay was shit, the life was boring.
One thing keeping me motivated was that I started using the work for self-improvement and learning new things. This meant trying to do as little of the work you were “supposed to do” as possible, but instead creating your own tasks. I read up on finance, on IT, I learned to work with Excel and taught myself how to program.
Yet I still saw that this was a dead-end job. No chance of promotion, no chance of doing anything creative, no chance of getting a decent pay. My frustration was growing. I needed out and I needed out as soon as I could.
I started planning what I want to do. I mentally decided that I was going to quit and do something meaningful, something fun, at least for a bit.
I wanted to have an enjoyable summer, live it up a bit, learn a new language. I decided I was going to quit my job and move to Spain for three months.
I had all this in my mind, but was reluctant to pull the trigger. Summer was approaching fast, and if I didn’t do anything now, I would miss the cycle.
One day, I just said “fuck it” and filled out my resignation papers. At first I was hesitating a bit, but then I walked up to the manager and handed it in. I was scared and relieved at the same time.
I did it.
