Arbitrariness

Being a nihilistic thinker, I firmly believe that every decision ever made will prove to be arbitrary, but can also appreciate why we rush around trying to get things right in an attempt to make our short lives as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. I'll stop there with the existentialism, because this post is not intended as a pseudo-intellectual ramble but instead my simple observations on the differing levels of arbitrariness in the society I live in.

My earliest thoughts on this developed a few years ago in an office when I began to notice that everyone was using the word 'need' in regards to even the most pointless tasks. "We need to tweet that" or "we need to send this to X". It shouldn't annoy me because of course this is just a short cut from saying "we need to tweet that because." However at times it leaves me wondering if the people so freely throwing the word around do actually think "we need to do it". What starts as something they've just come up with to fill some time gradually inflates to become something they consider to be important because they do things like attach arbitrary 'deadlines' to it.

The worst kind of arbitrariness in an office occurs when there is not enough income-generating work to go around. Instead of just putting an office employee on some kind of standby mode, they will be assigned 'busy work' - pointless tasks that will have no benefit to the business. This will keep a lot of people from getting bored, sure, but it's crushing for morale when you realise how futile whatever-it-is-you're-wasting-your-time-with is.

Are you wasting your time being stuck in a job that's crushing your morale anyway? Not if it's paying the bills, you might argue. 'Wasting time' is another term that's commonly mistaken as being objective when in fact it couldn't be more subjective. People have said to me I am "wasting time by playing computer games", but how can that be if I enjoy them and my life goal is simply to have as much as fun as possible?

Another form of arbitrariness we can't escape from is the concept of time versus activity. It is only by chance that it takes our world 24 hours to complete a rotation, however we have decided to make the working day so long that we only get a few hours of daylight each day. If Earth took, say, 28 hours to complete a rotation I have no doubt we'd be in the office for a few more hours a day, with the same workload. Just because. The majority of us seem to have a natural tendency towards self-imposed boredom so this is how we set up our lives.

So yes, I'm the kind of guy who'd correct someone who said "we need to eat" to "we need to eat to survive". And I think like that because it annoys me that people seem to forget (or never realised) that humans were not put here for any purpose, we are not important and there is no meaning behind anything we do. We're here because as we evolved we did what we needed to do to survive. Sorry, I drifted back into pseudo-intellectual existentialism.

Apathy

I contemplated recently whether an employee should take the full blame for a lack of motivation at work or if the employer has some responsibility to motivate staff beyond a pay packet. I pretty much made up my mind that as long as the employer is paying on time and treating staff fairly, it is down to the employee to get the job done without moaning about a lack of motivation or inspiration from the top.

The problem with this is that after some time in a desperately dull and repetitive job it becomes practically impossible to stay motivated and keep productivity at a maximum. So is it the employer's obligation to accept this and adapt to it? I think so. It is not 'laziness' - that word is often used lazily in itself. It is instead a natural occurrence that if you despise a job so much, every atom in your body will tell you not to even turn up, never mind be productive.

If I feel like this as a spoilt, privileged westerner, I can't imagine what sweatshop workers must feel like when they wake up in the morning. Of course, not everyone can have a job they enjoy and that inspires them, otherwise nothing would get done and society would collapse. However there is a massive demand for the jobs that people don't even want, so we have to pretend we are 'excited' and 'motivated' by tedious jobs in order to keep bosses happy and stay in employment.

Surely it would be better if we could all admit our apathy towards a potential job in interviews and instead be hired for standing out purely by way of superior skill and suitability for the job. The problem with this is that there are so many candidates who are impossible to differentiate in terms of their educational and vocational experience on paper.

I believe there is a subtle difference between apathy and laziness that can be easily mistaken. If someone appears to be lazy but is still getting the work done to an acceptable standard, they probably just hate their job. If someone appears to be lazy and is not getting the job done, they are lazy. If someone appears to be hard-working and enthusiastic but is not getting the job done, they are incompetent, but they've no doubt got a lot of people fooled.