Everyone say work gives life meaning, but perhaps that’s only because life, by itself, doesn’t. Im sure almost everyone heard of their friends, relatives or parents to say that you need to find your destiny. From the moment we are born, the clock starts ticking, clock of your time to chose who are you in your own life. We don’t live to work, in reality we just work to live; we simply are caught between survival and exhaustion.
Every morning we wake up in a cycle of necessity, coffee every morning for our organism to get stressed and not fall asleep in the middle of work. We work to afford rest, only to spend our rest preparing to work again.
The irony of it all: we are made to understand that society is glorifying labor. We’re told to «find purpose» to love our jobs, to be grateful for the opportunity to give away our time. But purpose fades when the paycheck becomes the only proof of existence. Gratitude turns hollow when one realizes the reward for doing a good job is the chance to keep doing it until you have no strenght anymore.
People like to believe they work to live-that the job funds experiences, dreams, and freedom. But when the job consumes five out of seven days, when exhaustion swallows weekends whole, what’s left to call «life». The small dinners with family, a walk at sunset, a quiet night become the crumbs dropped by a system that feeds on our hours. We are taught to call these crumbs enough.
And yet, even as we see this, we keep walking back into it: to stop working is to fall, to lose the ability to afford food and shelter and the illusion of stability that comes with them. In this world, freedom without money is just an another kind of prison in our world
So, do we live to work or work to live? Most of us are already too deep into the machinery to even just tell the difference. Life becomes a brief intermission between shifts, a pause before the next alarm clock. In the end, perhaps we neither live nor work. We just pass through, the slow erosion of days, watching the clock, hoping that somewhere beyond the noise of hope that something that could be called living still exists.
Հասմիկ Մելքոնյանի ուսումնական բլոգ 