I like the people I work with. We do laugh a lot, mostly at each other’s expense, because most of us are at a point in our lives where we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We can handle a little ribbing.

I find the work pointless.

Last summer, I went camping with my son and my brother. We went to northern Maine, minutes away from the Canadian border. We were surrounded by mostly potato farms. We had a tent, camp stove, cooler, not much access to wifi, books,and some games. We literally had a yahtzee tournament throughout the whole week. The extent of time we spent away from the campsite was an afternoon at a local museum. The local farms had donated historical tools farmers had used over the last century.

It was on this camping trip, or after it really, that I concluded that I don’t want to participate in the workforce anymore. I can’t outright quit because I have some financial obligations. I have taken some steps to break away from the credit system that is intended to trap us into perpetual debt. I canceled all my credit cards. I believe the credit score system does not benefit me. It never made sense to me that I needed to accrue debt, hold 30% of the total debt available to me month to month, to prove I can handle more debt. In addition, I have rejected consumerism.

Sorry, I got sidetracked.

I got to thinking about my job. I work for a print and mail company. We generate marketing mail for our clients. This is commonly known as junk mail. About 90% of our clients are companies trying to get people to buy something. We have a few financial clients, for retirement accounts, that is generally indirect junk mail, because it is based on mutual funds of companies that try to sell stuff. To sum it up, we produce marketing mail for clients that want people to spend money they do not have on their products. The more I thought about what I do, the more I concluded that it is pointless.

The company takes this work seriously. They treat this work as if this is the most important thing in the world. It needs to be done, on time, and so on and so forth, because we cannot fail the client. I must care at all times and be concerned about it at all times. I wake up concerned about what work has to be done that day. On Sundays, I dread going into work the next day. I recently had a vacation and I didn’t want to go back. I don’t see the societal benefit of what I do because what I do is meant to prey on a person’s nature to covet, to want something they don’t have so they can show to other people that they have it.

As Gordon Gekko said, greed is good, at least to the companies who are trying to sell it to the public.

What I understand now is that we were meant to rely on God for everything. Instead, we have supermarkets and shopping malls and online shopping, for convenience sake. We do not need to rely on God for our food, or work the land to grow our own food, or raise some animals. We rely on corporatized mass food production that takes chemical shortcuts to prolong shelf life but is actually slowly killing us. I am guilty of liking the convenience, I won’t deny it. The most difficult thing for me would be to break the habit, or addiction, to convenience. I can pick up my phone, open an app and buy something. I hate that I like it but it is up to me to break that addiction.

I would say that almost most of the jobs I had in my life were pointless. Pointless in that it did not truly benefit society in a healthy way. By healthy I mean I did not help people get away from the trap of consumerism. I was hyperfocused on what I needed to do to get by in life because I was trapped in the endless cycle of consumerism.

Am I too late to change course? I don’t know. Considering what is going on in the world right now, maybe. I don’t believe I am but I now have to focus on what I can change to do what I can to benefit other people. I guess this blog that I haven’t been consistent with is a start. I’m not looking to make a living to do this so I will make an effort not to ask for money. I will make an effort to escape the trap and do what’s best for me.