Sick of being isolated

@MDTHams are you on medication for depression?

@MDT reason that I am asking is that this has been going on so long for you ..... your low moods. If you are on meds maybe they need to be looked at?

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@MDT wrote:

I feel I am making the right choice by starting with what I do for a living.

I can only hope it leads to better social

outcomes

But I feel really isolated. Too many low quality people around.

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This is one of the many things that has always stymied me when it comes to career. Because I don't want a career for money, I want it for the workplace family I'll inherit.

But the rest of the world just wants to be told what general career path you want. IMHO, that's a highly trivial aspect to fixate on. I could answer "filmmaking", which would be my first choice, all else being equal. But then, what's to say I won't be assigned to work alongside a bunch of assholes I can't stand, and/or under a company culture that makes the job deeply unsatisfying?

Conversely, I have no interest in sailing whatsoever, but potentially, I could be assigned to work on an aircraft carrier, and find myself woven into a family that I click with perfectly.

The traits I admire in people don't gravitate towards any specific industry or job. Name a profession, and if you could just as easily find "my kind of people" in one of it's offices, as you could anywhere else in the workforce.

So how do you use the world's obsession with your employment status to your advantage? How do you fix it so that the only places they can possibly assign you to work is a place where your family is already employed?

I've been wound up about life recently, and I've come back to one of the age-old questions that's always haunted me: how come I never got a job? I did everything right. I did my best to rig the game to insure that the only places I could possibly end up were the sort of places where my people all end up together. But then nothing happened.

And one of the things that I'm starting to realize is that the powers that govern employment in this country don't want my kind. Hence, the reason why I never ended up in a great worksite, working alongside my brothers and sisters is because no such place exists. Nobody wants us. Nobody collects us. The only place we are aloud to congregate is on statistic sheets about the unemployed. And that's not nearly as cozy as it might sound. We don't get to see each other's smiling faces first thing in the mornings. No office romances. No sharing of watercooler jokes. It's like that line from Piano Man:

"We're all sharing a drink they call loneliness,

But it's better then drinking alone..."

I don't know. I think that this obsession the rest of the world wants to cultivate within us about our employment is more about them exploiting our desparation then giving us actual assistance. There's no reliable mechanism for insuring that a worker will be assigned to a workplace that satisfies their deep personal needs, yet so many talking heads out there routinely market it as "the be-all, end-all solution" to whatever ails a person? And what happens to the worker when that doesn't pan out?

It's why I had such a queasy feeling about the 2nd-last major inquiry into Mental Health being run by the Productivity Commission (of all government branches!). I can't help but wonder what they were really investigating as a priority: the emptiness in Australians' lives? Or the emptiness in the budget caused by so-called "mentally ill" people not pulling their weight?

If and when I finally get my job, and discover whether or not my family's there waiting for me, I'll have my answer.

@MDT Those are concerns I've long harbored myself. I know tonnes of people who have incomes via jobs, but their lives have no value. So it's always been on my mind to avoid ending up like them at all costs.

They are certainly very compelling contradictions to the myth that "a job is better then no job", as you say, which is why I never bought into that one. A good job is better then no job, I'm not denying that. But I'll gladly take the dirt nap over being trapped in a bad job any day of the week.

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@MDT wrote:
If I'm just a cog in a machine then what's the point right? My worth is only valued in what I give. There's nothing else.

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TBH, I don't have a problem with this, so long as the contribution I make is something that I would personally appreciate recieving. If I can relate to the boss's, or the community's pleasure at recieving my service, then I can feel good about the good I am doing.

It's when you are tasked with doing something you can't see the point of; or even worse, when your job makes you "part of the problem", that I start to find it undesirable to be a "cog in the machine".

I guess it all depends on what the machine is for. 🤔