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Theres a reason that accountants of old are characterised as sullen and miserable people, and its not because they were poor. Happiness for the most part is resiliant to physical hardship - happiness indexes among countries are almost completely unrelated to GDP. Working this kind of mental & menial work clearly is missing something important that I'm confident we will one day understand a lot better. Perhaps its simply relative position (keeping up with the Joneses), or maybe its a need for much more movement (it's well understood that zoo animals need to be given very large areas in order to be happy and yet we often sit in spaces that would be illegal to keep animals our size in for the majority of our days) Maybe it's access to nature itself - I often feel a lot better after taking some time to walk alone in nature, but perhaps this is because of something else than just simply nature itself. On the days where I remember to take a moment to step outside of the office, or just take a break from routine and do something slow-paced for the sake of it, such as taking a detour on the way to somewhere just for the sake of seeing what that way looks like, I find that I feel much happier for the rest of the day. However, this lacks an explanation for why I don't do this often and feel good all the time. My concious brain knows it is a good thing, but my concious brain is rarely in charge. Maybe it's just that people need tasks on a different scale to those we work on nowadays. This I think hits a lot of people. I used to work at a campsite for a while, where I would spend the day cutting down a tree, or moving a pile of gravel. Whatever I was doing, it would take at most a couple days, and it was usually either just me or me and a couple guys around me. This diversity of tasks and short time to completion really made me feel much better. I also often think that removing tasks such as washing the dishes or repairing clothes meant that we overspecialise, which is removing even more of these such short and easy wins. Perhaps its also the need to feel useful in a profound way. I often think about how before the internet it was possible to gain a reputation locally for being good at someting. How had the guy who fixed clothes, another who was good at tying ropes, etc. Often these skills would be unrelated to work, and I believe would have an important role in having a self-identity. Nowadays we naturally get fit into a single stereotype by our family and friends based on our line of work, but at work everybody is that way, and so a conflict with our idea of self arises that makes us feel worthless even if we know the work we are doing is useful. Perhaps somehow, we need to feel that we aren't replaceable. I also think that there is an aspect of physical work just being less tiring, or at least in a different way. When I used to work a manual job, I would feel exhausted after the day, but in a way that meant that the next day I would wake up without feeling drained. I had no trouble getting out of bed or finding the energy to cook, clean etc. The tiredness was in my aching muscles, but it didn't affect my decision making nearly as profoundly. It's nothing like the brain fog that causes me now to come home and need the sensation of something forgettable and mindless like youtube or video games. |
It's amazingly adept at this, to the point where usually you don't notice that you didn't actually decide to do that thing. The only time you might notice is in the case of strong addictions, where people try to go cold turkey and describe literally watching themselves in horror as they go back to the think they are actively trying to avoid.
What this leads do is an idea that successful people have which is that less well off people could sort themselves out by doing a particular thing, say, managing their money better. Or maybe its just the people who know many languages and look down on those who know few. Or maybe yourself, trying to stick to a diet plan and not being able to understand how you yourself can want one thing but do another.
Turns out, we are pretty much a function of our environment. We have a concept of something called "willpower" which is something where we can carry on despite our body needing respite, but only a little bit. This I think happens when we are using our conscious mind to complete tasks instead of our autopilot mode. This works, but is quickly draining and really doesn't last that long.
I think this kind of thing is where some of the stigma around mental health comes from. We have this idea that people are at all times acting according to what they simply want to be doing, whereas they are usually acting on autopilot , which is sometimes sort of close to what we want to be doing, but has a tendency in modern times to get stuck in loops of stuff like eat>sleep>work that make us feel worse which causes us to have less energy which causes us to just want more sleeping and eating rather than fixing the problem by breaking out of the cycle.
If we as a society aknowledged better how 99% of our actions are essentially done unconsciously, and then later sort of added together by our self aware part of the brain, I think people would be much more understanding of mental health issues - if someone behaves in a way counter to their own interests, its not because they are stupid, they are literally just unfortunate vitims of a sort of cyclical pattern of their bodies in their local environment.
We are kind of along for the ride in our own bodies a lot more than we might like to think, with only a small ability to push buttons to nudge ourselves in the directions we want
So you literally can't decide to just stop being in the kind of glitches in the autopilot that cause something as big as depression or as small as getting up early when you're tired. You only have a small amount of influence, and you have to spend it in ways that end up multiplying themselves by your autopilot thingy like deciding to give yourself good sleep, or food if you focus your willpower on those kinds of things, you end up with more willpower but sometimes even things as small as this require a lot more energy than you might be able to muster all at once, so you have to do even smaller things to build that up for example in the modern day deciding to interrupt yourself in the middle of a task is incredibly hard you could be working and know that you should be in bed but you just keep going because it takes more mental energy to interrupt yourself than you have and so you end up tired, and have that same low amount of energy the next day