Post-Mortem

I can see how spending even just 5 days away from the noise of the city has helped me recharge my batteries, the only problem is that I feel even more reluctant at the thought of going back to the daily grind… I feel much like a wild animal being forced back inside a cage. But like my mother always says these days: what will you do without money? As we were walking around the lakes over the weekend, she also said: “This is why I work so hard… to be able to enjoy this.”

She has a point, of course. The same as the older woman I met on my solo hiking trip to the top of a fell on Tuesday when she said that ‘we work most of our lives and then we get to finally enjoy ourselves.”

We need to work or do things that aren’t all that pleasant just so we can appreciate the times when we are ‘free’… but it seems that we should at least be able to choose the settings in which we must practice the unpleasant.

I also noticed how much more energy I suddenly regained by just getting away from the city for a few days. Having spent most of the last year working in the city, I ended up feeling so drained that I could barely get out of bed. That’s city life for you. Working for some career, the whole 9 to 5 routine stuck indoors inside some office under artificial lights… It almost makes me wish I was a farmer, or something. I’d rather be doing physical work exhausting my body than work involving draining my brain. That’s my painful conclusion, here.

When I learned that I was being paid exactly the same as the new girl - who had no experience whatsoever - it hit a nerve. I mean, really. It’s my own fault, in a way, because I didn’t ‘learn’ to sell myself and when you’re not obsessed with money like most people are out there, they will take advantage of you any chance they get. It’s a shame they don’t notice how I’m always wearing the exact same clothes and shoes - because I don’t have the luxury to buy more stuff, never had that luxury, and so I grew into someone who simply doesn’t feel the need to buy more than exactly what suffices for now. I realised more recently how people were actually seeing my lack of interest in money as meaning I 'obviously' didn’t need it.

They get it all wrong, of course. I need it just like anybody else, but I don’t let it obsess me. Since most people’s lives are regimented mostly by wanting or thinking they need more money, they perceive someone who isn’t obsessed by that craving as someone who must be ‘rich’. I am rich, for sure, but where they get it wrong is when they assume my wealth is stuffed inside a wallet or a bank account. My wealth is internal. But try and explain that to most people out there. You’ll be greeted with puzzled looks at best in a world increasingly obsessed with the material.

My boss is my biggest ‘teacher’ in those matters at the moment, in a way. He represents most middle aged people living a conventional middle class lifestyle. When I say conventional, I mean that he represents the type of people that married young, bought a house, had children, and searched for a stable job or career to maintain his lifestyle. Is there anything wrong with that picture? No, there shouldn’t be, but there is.

I look at him and he actually makes me appreciate my own condition. I’m not snowed under with endless commitments, responsibilities and bills to pay that include needing to pay for some overpriced mortgage and my kids' education, because our world today has created this new setting that people are just accepting without even blinking - the fact that so-called free education today is really an amalgam of deathly standards and if you want your kids to have a foot on the career ladder later in life, you now have to send them to the best possible schools, which are usually ones you have to pay for - and it’s a lot of money.

And what about the housing market and how the mere idea of owning a home has now become such a lucrative and overpriced business that the most basic thing in life - shelter - has become one of the biggest luxuries most of us will never be able to afford because society wants us to get into debt? What better way to enslave people into debt and artificial commitments than by making one of Man’s most basic needs - again, the need for shelter - a luxury he can no longer afford with the fruit of his labours?

See, there it is, the wrong in the picture. Everything is part of a distorted version of what life should be like. It shouldn’t be about having to send your kids to private school, thus getting stuck in a dead-end career that pays enough, or having to embrace a life of debt just to meet your basic needs. What’s worse is that we are made to get into debt while actually working more than ever before and for longer - so where is the value of that constant labour? Where is it, because I sure can’t see it.

So I look at my boss, who is a representation of all these things, and I wonder often how we got there as a society. He looks at me and probably finds me weird in the way he could so easily exploit me, how he was able to get away with offering me the lowest salary, and how I do the most work and don’t seem to rip any rewards. He wonders how come I don’t complain about lack of money or why I don’t chitchat about random, personal things. I look at him and I wonder how people like him get sucked into this artificial way of life that imprison you in a lifetime of social slavery, and I find him just as weird for different reasons.

Maybe if my life had turned out differently I would have been just like him by now. I had a different type of upbringing, though.

Growing up, if someone had said to me that some day I’d moved countries I’d have laughed in their faces, for my life started out on the very same path as many struggling, first generation immigrant families. We were more working class than anything in terms of ‘purchasing power’, the place we lived in and the school I went to. My primary school friends were from various origins - Chinese, African, Portuguese, from Mauritius, you name it. We all had one thing in common: we were all mostly first generations born in the country our parents had moved to. The bullying that kicked off when I was 8 set events in motion that changed my world upside down like a steam train gathering speed momentum.

It pushed my mother to try and get me out of the school I was in, and it was solely because she was trying to protect me that I ended up in private school throughout most of my teens. The price to pay was her having to work day and night, almost non-stop, just to be able to pay all the bills, including the hefty school fee. And so, overnight, I ended up having to mingle with some of the richest kids around.

There I was taught manners I never liked to learn. They told me I had to go to church, but it served only to awaken a rebellious streak.

I became a ‘bad’ influence - the poor kid that somehow managed to get into that school but who was giving other kids ‘bad’ ideas, like questioning manners, rules and even God. I remember making friend with a girl once - I think we bonded over our common interest in the X Files TV series - and one day, as we were walking out of school at the end of the day and chatting, she said at some point: “I don’t know why my mum hates you, Aliska, but I like you a lot.”

That came as a shock to me, or ice cold water dropped over my head. I had met her mother several times and I’d always made the best efforts to be polite and friendly, and she’d always come across to me as smiling and kind. There had certainly been no hints of her disliking me. I understood much later on how it all worked. I was a nobody, and her daughter was wasting time with a nobody instead of making connections with kids from more ‘interesting’ families. It was that ‘simple’.

Funny how I was too busy rebelling against the norm back then and how it’s only as an adult that I can make sense of how school grounds really are like a microcosm of adult life, its dynamics as well as social rules. I didn’t or refused to learn the rules then - I probably failed to acknowledge their importance in surviving society - and I’m having to slowly learn them now, crash course style.

That’s what happens to (rebellious) idealists, I guess. We reach a stage where even the dreamers have to find a way to adapt their nature to their surroundings in a way that will never change them - ever - but that will allow them to rise above the challenges of a world that goes against everything their nature is. The mistake some of us make is to lose our ways and nature during that process, turning dreamers into late bloomers in terms of becoming just like the rest - blindly accepting. I can only hope that being acutely aware of this will be enough to help me avoid that fate.