(pre)Occupation

I've done several things recently to make life easier. Well one was passive, Misaki sent me a pile of t-shirts that have served to update my wardrobe, something I wouldn't have done myself. Also after ridicule from Morley, and realising April is half a year from my birthday I needed to hurry up my stupid haircut schedule and ditch the mohawk, so now I have a relatively tame shaved head until such a time as it grows out to be cut into another stupid haircut.

I have alas also started applying for jobs, as yet I'm not so desperate to get work that I won't pcick jobs I won't like. Just looking basically for income suplementation. But I was reading... uh... something... that's it I was reading Female Eunuch and listening to radio national, who were talking about kids being taught 'political science' or 'critical thinking' vs 'religious studies' which is another argument in itself.

And I thought, from reading Female Eunuch that if memory serves me correctly, my major preoccupation and energy in high school was in the opposite sex. It seems to me that education might do a disservice by virtually ignoring this preoccupation in the educational syllabus entirely.

Fact is that whilst having the ability to mathematically model in the natural environment has its advantages, the ability to relate and socialise with fellow human beings is probably going to serve everyone better.

Further more, some of the best 'students' have the worst social skills. I know that whilst not being the violent type myself, I often scratched my head at the attitude of smarmy smarmbag nerds that didn't seem to realise that outside our private school gates were people that would beat them up just for their haircuts.

Like watching a lamb that has been trained to ignore lions or some shit.

So yeah, it would be great if kids were taught in school about 'opinion leaders' vs 'opinion seekers'. high context vs low context cultures. Behavioral analysis, emotional and social intelligence, projecting vs empathising, social disorders, nature of attraction and all that shit which can then be put to use in the imediate environment.

I mean imagine if a teacher had taken me aside and said 'Tohm if you like a girl, don't sit around for a year trying to interpret "signs" she may be interested, just ask her out. If you get rejected you'll get over it quickly, nobody cares about you as much as you do, and you'll stop wasting your fucking time on her. Now when you ask her out, don't tell her you love her etc...' and then I could go and do that shit.

Or when they take aside those kids destined to grow into computer programmers and say 'Okay Steven, your choice of white crosstrainers as shoes is highly utilitatarian, hiking boots would also have been an appropriate choice, unfortunately people who aren't as logical and literal as you can't comprehend why you'd combine cross trainers with jeans. This is the aesthetics of fashion, form over function which is why you are being ridiculed. Arguably there is something wrong with their brains not yours, but infact its just a reflection of different personality preferences. They ridicule your clothing choices much like you ridicule their inability to comprehend latin grammar.'

But yeah, really school curriculum served as 'spacers' to the only thing(s) I really cared about during my teenage years, and that was getting a girlfriend. If I denote my love interest with the ambiguous letter S, (most girls in my year were called 'Sarah' seriously) then my timetable looked like this:

1st period - English
2nd period - S
3rd Period - Economics
4th period - Art
5th Period - S
6th period - S

I mean I didn't study the girl 'S' it would be maths or something, but if S was in the class then my attention would pretty much be focused on looking for any opportunity for interaction.

One of the S's was directly infront of me for my whole final year of Maths, which was specialist maths which resentably actually demanded attention. But fortunately that S was the kind of girl I assumed would be impressed by my intelligence so the two kind of dovetailed there.

Not that I ever succeeded, but man, I would have been a runaway freight train if a subject could have aligned my energies to building these relationships.

As it was though, lets be blunt, we only go to high school to get into University these days, it has next to nothing to do with education. Learning is literally 'learning how to ace exams' not understanding or whatever.

So my thoughts would all be geared towards the 75 minutes of opportunities to advance my relationship a day which was both important and frightening to me. The 4-5 hours I spent doing anything else simply kept me from it.

Ironically school brought me an opportunity to meet women, then infuriatingly denied me from doing anything with it by filling it up with classes.

Hence school is one of those preoccupations.

Work is the other obvious preoccupation. This is the clincher for me, I don't really associate with office types, but when I was one I met many. Also from associating with fellow Business students you meet these people.

Beyond shaving my head into a 'normal' haircut and dressing like somebody who actually has money, for the past year I could have made life a lot easier for myself, by just getting a full time job. I probably could have slotted somewhere into Honda and been back on that old familiar track by now.

But living with my brother is driving me the opposite way. He has a job, full time shift work, is paid well and is otherwise respectable. But I wouldn't say he does anything. He just works, and when he isn't working he comes home plays World of Warcraft, sleeps or watches TV shows he streams online from the US.

And tellingly he is one of many people who while away there lives in this style, because I'm sure you know one of them, they just watch too much fucking TV. They watch the shows you never used to bother watching, because now when they aren't at work they need to unwind with the little time left them in a trancelike state. So they try out all these shows, including every single program on HBO - True Blood, Deadwood, United States of Tara, Eastbound and Down, Curb Your Enthusiasm etc. Then they Watch shitty dramas/dromedies Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Boston Legal, House. Then they watch sitcoms - Southpark, Family Guy, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Psyche. Then they check out 'The Mentalist' because they want to know what Psyche would be like if it wasn't a comedy. They watch Lost, and they watch Fringe even though Fringe is shit. They love 'Big Love' and bored yet? because I am.

See with all my freetime, the curious thing is, that of the 30 shows that my brother downloads, I end up watching about 3 of them.

But I've been there. My brother is someone that now if we both went to a bar, and a girl was asking us what we do, I would be the one struggling to explain I'm not a loser. In fact my brother has started to come around, with plans to release his own zine, and he has a new 'girlfriend' he isn't sure he should be calling a 'girlfriend' yet. Arguably because nobody taught him how to have that conversation in highschool.

I am sure for my brother though, whilst work provides money it is the big blank space in his life, between going out to drink (thus like a highschooler, facilitating meeting a romantic partner) or to do the work he is passionate about (writing stories). Much like for me, working at Honda, it was just the thing that consumed most of my time between playing basketball, and tutoring Zamin, which made me feel good. Although I'll be honest, getting drained of all my energy at work made it really fucking hard to tutor Zamin. Basketball I at least got some sleep before. But it would have been much easier to get pick up games mid-week than it is on a saturday or sunday. On a thursday you can play all day until you collapse exhausted.

Thus, whilst having an occupation makes it easier to explain to people what you do, its really just a preoccupation, that often interferes and detracts from our most meaningful relationships and serves only as an excuse to not actually pursue our dreams.

I don't buy it that most people have no dreams beyond marriage, mortgage and kids. They are important and admirable aims, but marriage is either going to be a deeply meaningful supportive relationship, or a blind amble into a social institution with much youthful optimism/insecurity. A mortgage is kind of like dreaming of being a serf for most of your life, and kids just don't want to live for the sole purpose of making their parents proud. They need 10-16 years input from you MAX and then they will definietly be just focused on establishing their own identity, dreams and ambitions.

So what do you do with all the life you have left? Many jobs, I am going to suggest serve more as an excuse to do nothing with that time. To waste the opportunity.

Here's what I propose and am going to try to live by:

Concentrate on creating value, then see if someone will recognise it (by paying you).

Here's what I think goes on mostly now:

See if someone will pay you to do something/anything, then see if you like doing it (or don't and just do it anyway).

I suspect this arse about status quo career path - finding an employer to pay you, rather than creating work someone will pay you for, is why our society has so many entrenched jobs that create little to no value.

And I support that ascertion by just pointing out. Over the past 6 months millions of jobs have been destroyed worldwide, and they aren't the jobs of billions of people that lead subsistance lives, but the jobs of the priveledged few that live in the 'developed nations' people with luxury of worrying about retirement and sailing trips around the world.

These jobs aren't being axed because people are evil. It costs money to make people redundant, it isn't like selling off assets. They are being made redundant because nobody demands the products of their labors. People have stopped buying cars because they don't value them as much as they thought they did when their attitudes to money were flippant. In that case the money had little value, it was easy to come by and easy to let go of. Now the tables have turned.

You don't fire anybody you actually turn a profit on. You fire people that cost you money to employ. Governments have been giving the big car manufacturers handouts for years sighting 'job creation' it's really 'mandatory valuation' which is a roundabout way of pretending to actually value the work they are doing, because they are unable to get customers to pay the prices they need to make a profit.

And of course its broader than the car industry. It's almost everything, but people getting made redundant have to face the fact that redundancy is arguably worse than getting fired, it is saying 'nobody really values the work you do' - it has no meaning there is not a customer out there.

I would argue the people that are safest are going to be the entrepreneurs the ironic 'risk takers' that have ended up being safe. They created their businesses in the way I'm proposing everyone approach their careers - the started creating value, then they found people willing to pay them for it.

Why do they take the risks? Because they want to do work that they enjoy, they want to dovetail their careers with where their energy is heading.

So yeah, fuck yeah, teachers need to listen to where their students energies are being directed, and employers need to focus on where employees (and potential) energy is headed. Otherwise you create friction/drag. That's physics baby, and don't argue with physics (its a real science, unlike economics)