Since I was a child, I've been afflicted with the Sunday Blues. Maybe you get them, too.
As Alain de Botton describes it, this is when “hopes diverge into reality.” Even if reality is pretty sweet, you're likely to have mixed feelings about it.
Maybe you don't have a “week end.” Maybe reality pokes through most of the time. Maybe you have very mixed feelings about it.
Mixed feelings are good. Mixed feelings are a place to start.
If you want to follow the current trend, you can start by compartmentalizing, or trying to. Let your bosses, your clients, and or your cofounders know that your own time is your own, and take steps to keep work from intruding, such as "unplugging," whatever that means to you.
This might work for you, in the short run or the long. I wouldn't put money on it. I wouldn't put your money on it.
If you're a plumber, which I'm going to assume you are, maybe "unplugging" is work. Okay. I'm going to put on the conical hat of shame now.
The longer answer might start with questioning your entire value system relating to work.
Our work is often the only way that we can define who we are to others. Our man de Botton calls these others "job snobs," and they're everywhere.
Quantification is a lousy paradigm in a lot of ways, but it's the main one we've got right now, and "what you do" is how you quantify yourself to the world. So if you're a plumber taking a day off, you're still a plumber, especially if you're at a cocktail party, which is going to cause problems no matter what if you hate plumbing.
If time spent at work is meaningless drudgery, and it's intruding on meaningful time at home, with family, or in other, more meaningful pursuits, then maybe the problem is that false dichotomy of meaningless v. meaningful time.
“It's not what you do,” as Ethan Nichtern writes in the mindfulness and interdependence manifesto One City, “but how you do it.”
Is there a way to approach plumbing so that it's an acceptable part of the whole, so that it can pass through your mind on your day off as part of your stream of consciousness without hitting a dam of bitterness and resentment? Find that and you're really getting somewhere.
The meaning of your work may be lurking in the shadows. No one's hands are clean enough to eat processed finger food without washing first, and most of us aren't really “saving the world,” but whatever it is you do, it's how you do it.
Are you doing as little harm as possible? Are you benefitting others, including the long-suffering friends and family who may not understand how deeply invested you are? Maybe those business thoughts are to be welcomed, not repelled.
Plus, plumbers make beaucoup bank the day after Thanksgiving.
