Mentalechoes

I found a definition of a workaholic today that scared me.

A workaholic works or keeps busy with activity compulsively and leaves little or no time to be alone and quiet. Therefore, we usually don’t know who we are and what we really feel and want. Work and activity are the primary focuses in our lives, often excluding others.

We workaholics usually don’t respect time, underestimating how much time it will take to do something, or trying to do several things at once. Because we have an overwhelming need to be active and productive, we enjoy seeing how much we can do in the least amount of time. It makes us feel worthwhile and alive. Work is our drug of choice.

Not realizing how powerless we really are, we seek to control all phases of our lives. We take responsibility for the outcome of our work and worry about how it will make us look. We try to control people, and if we could, the outcome of everything. We usually have little faith in the ability of others, of Higher Power, or of universal wisdom.

After years of this, naturally, our health begins to fail from stress, exhaustion, and related problems. We may find ourselves alone and isolated, having not bothered to form meaningful relationships. Our love was for work, activity, and perhaps money, which we believed would solve our problems.

Taken from this site.

It scared me because it’s sounds like me right now. The funny thing is I never really thought of myself as the workaholic type because really I’m more the bone lazy type, who you definitely wouldn’t describe with the words “work” and “hard” together in the same sentence. But somewhere along the line on this project I am on - which at this point seems like it has been going for the last hundred years - I actually became a workaholic. I’ve got all the telltale signs; ostracised friends, shitty sleeping patterns, some red rash over my body because of stress, and I work on company work seven days a week. I’m pretty sure the rash is from stress, which is to say it better be from stress, otherwise I’m a bit fucked. It’s a bit hard to tell though because I can’t find a good rash site on the internet anywhere. I never used to obsess about money that much either until a few months ago, when I realised that if I was working this hard, I better by paid for it. So far I haven’t been, which only makes me think more about the money I don’t have, that I should have, which could all be put towards buying more useless crap for my flat, and some decent narcotics for the weekends I don’t have off.

I look at the workaholics glamourised on American teevee, like all the lawyers on the lawyer shows now saturating the english speaking dutch channels, and there seems to be a big difference between them and me. For starters they all live in really flashy posh houses and own flash cars, and slick suits, and go to all the best parties with famous other workaholic lawyers. I don’t seem to have those same perks in my life though. In fact, my life now as a workaholic is pretty much the same as when I was unemployed, except I work longer hours, and have a lot less free time. Apart from that, it’s more or less the same life I’ve always had. Something seems a bit off with this.

I’m going to make a promise to myself that this is the last time I trade in my life to work for some company and their “this is the most important project in the whole world and if it doesn’t get completed on time then the world will be consumed by fire before exploding into annihilation and noone will ever pay for this hugely expensive thing we have invested bazillions of rubles on” project. Somehow, just because you don’t have a wife and kids, they seem to think that you’ll always be there to do thy bidding, and slave away. Well if I keep doing that, then I’ll just end up keeping on doing that, and yeah, I’ll wake up and wonder if I still know anybody outside of my office.

Time to organise some time off I think.

Padwanna!