WHY Did I Want To Avoid Them (Co-workers)

I was just re-reading my post about co-worker avoidance, which caused me to pose an interesting question to myself: exactly why did I want to avoid these people? Also, I asked myself if the avoidance involved all people, or just some people.

I'll answer the second question first: The truth is that I only want to avoid some people, not all people. I think that was true ten years ago, or twenty years ago, as well as today. It's not based on shyness alone, although I am somewhat shy.

OK, then which people do I want to avoid, and why?

I want to avoid people who are trying to impress others with displays of social status or materialism. For example, when I worked in corporations, I frequently was around people who made a big deal out of shopping at expensive stores, eating at trendy high-priced restaurants, fancy overseas travel, and this sort of thing. Furthermore, I didn't get the sense that they deeply ENJOYED any of this on any real level, rather, they wanted to impress others with the prestige or status they felt was associated with these activities.

I am uncomfortable around the sort of women who perform stereotypical femininity to an extreme degree and assume that all female people aspire to the same. Likewise, I am uncomfortable around their macho-man counterparts.

I get completely lost and confused in the company of people who are immersed in mainstream pop culture. Usually I have NO idea about the TV shows, movies, and pop stars they are talking about.

I was never a particularly good corporate team player, and I didn't understand people who were. They reminded me of the people called "Soshes" in high school. I think they call them "Preps" now. While I cared about the work I performed, I didn't care for trying to promote my image in the workplace, competing with others, or networking for the sake of networking. I strongly dislike office politics.

Maybe it goes without saying (or maybe it doesn't), but I definitely don't want to be around sexists, racists, homophobes, or people who want to force their religion on everyone else. Nor do I seek the company of rude people, obnoxious people, arrogant jerks, and the like.

I actually enjoy being around people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and just plain nice!

I Liked Rehab Better Than My Job

Which would you prefer:

Going to your job every day for a month?
                or
Going to a locked ward for alcohol/drug rehab for a month?

When I was in my 20's, I preferred the drug/alcohol treatment center to my daily working life. Not just once, but twice. I was working in a call center back then. At the time, I believed that being stoned or high made me better at my job, or at least happier.

I remember how sad and worried I felt when it was time to graduate from treatment and return to my real life. I liked rehab. We got to get up every morning and have a great breakfast together. Then we'd have classes about drugs and alcohol and their effects, therapy groups where everyone told fascinating stories and said all kinds of insightful things about life, and individual counseling sessions. My counselor was this big biker guy from San Francisco who really understood how I felt about things.

We also got to play pool (I was a pretty good pool player at the time, since I spent a lot of time in bars that had pool tables), gin rummy, and poker. I found most of my treatment center buddies to be very entertaining, interesting people. In the evenings we'd make popcorn, and we'd make little hors d'oeuvres out of the individually wrapped bologna and processed cheese slices that were provided in the hallway pantry refrigerators. We had movies to watch, too, like "Rocky" and "Grease".

It was nice of (name of major telecommunications company) to send me there twice. I'm not so sure most companies would be that understanding today.

I had this dawning awareness that your life shouldn't be something you want to escape. If you feel you need to be drunk or high to get through your day, then there's a problem.

I'm still clean and sober today, which is a good thing for me and everyone around me. Ironically enough, I still don't have the job thing figured out yet. It's a puzzle I want to solve. It's a scary challenge I want to overcome.

Mean Bosses

I just ran across an article from "Fast Company" suggesting that "Being A Meaner Boss Will Help Your Company--And Make Your Employees Happy". What kind of weirdo would think that?

Here's the link to this depressing article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1830539/why-being-a-meaner-boss-will-help-your-company-and-make-employees-happy?partner=gnews&google_editors_picks=true

There was part of it that rang true, and that was the research concluding that disagreeable people attained greater success in the workplace (success meaning mainly that they make more money- not my definition of success, but many people in our society equate money and material things with success.)

I Want to be Happy in the Morning

Sometimes I am, shall we say, less than perceptive about the manifestations of my anxiety and depression. Like, after I left my last real job eight years ago, my life got much better. I started volunteering at the Emergency Food Program. I turned their weedy yard into a highly productive vegetable garden full of lettuce, cilantro, collard greens, kale, tomatoes, beans, corns, and squash. I was having the time of my life.
My relationship was great, my home life was good, I felt excited about what I was doing.

But I would still have constant bad dreams about the workplaces where I had been so miserable. And I would still wake up every morning with a sense of dread and impending doom.

I kind of shrugged it off, saying I'm just not a morning person. True enough. I like to stay up till about midnight every night, and I pretty much always have.

It has finally dawned on me that I shouldn't be waking up every morning with a sense of imminent disaster. And I have just now realized that perhaps the reason I feel this way every single morning is that maybe somewhere in my subconscious mind I think I'm getting up to get ready to go to Work (capital W "Work", as in Job, as in Office, as in Corporation), not work in the garden, or work around the house, or work on an art project, or volunteering. Work, that bad place where I used to have to go. Even though I haven't been there in eight years now!

So this could be the reason that I am more likely to be deeply depressed first thing in the morning than at any other time of the day. It's because my conscious mind takes a while to catch up to the fact that I'm not going anywhere bad that day, not if I can help it anyway.

Early Retirement

I worked for a major telecommunications company for 20 years, was offered an early retirement buyout and took it. So there I was, officially retired at 41. Yippee!

My goal was to never, ever take another soul-sucking corporate job for as long as I lived. Whether I could actually make that work was another question.