My World View: My attitude to work

• I worked hard at my job for about 30 years but I never identified myself by the job I did unless asked. For 16 years (1985..2001) I had a contracting consultancy business, basically working as a developer and/or technical documentation specialist, through a one-man company that I ran. During those years I sometimes worked three or five years in one place, but mostly after a shorter period, sometimes as little as four or six weeks, sometimes for three or six or twelve months, I would reach the end of a contract; and often I would have a break. I never saw what I did as my main purpose in life; it was to make me enough money to pay the bills, pay for my home, and allow me to do my own thing in the breaks. I cannot identify in the slightest with millionaires who still go on working, unless they are musicians who just love to play. But even for them, what I see of their lives is the stress of performance, rehearsals, touring, business; I would just retire and vanish if I were them.
• In the period from end of 2001 to end of 2006 I came to realize two things: first, that the need for someone with my skills had nearly vanished as the IT industry came to be one supplying a commodity just like television sets and hi-fi; in fact, as information tech and consumer electronics merged into one, what I had done became largely obsolete. Second, that having saved carefully while I was working, I did not need to work. Having paid off my mortgage and not needing to take foreign holidays or spend a lot of money to enjoy life, I could afford to retire and just be a freelance abstract artist.
• Having produced a certain amount of work in 2003..2006, I stopped painting for a while partly because of certain family events (deaths of elderly relatives) and other things. I have never felt I had to do work the way some people seem to. I am content if I have enough things to do to ensure that I am not bored. In my own home, with my things around me, I can ensure that I am never bored. If I get bored doing a job I can do two things: one is to change the conditions, such as putting recorded music on to listen to while I am painting, or watching TV or a recorded movie while I eat. The other thing I can do is to adjust how much of the boring work I do, and when. The problem with this is (of course) that I rarely feel like doing the washing up. But with the right show on the radio, unless the TV can be put in there, I can get the dishes done often enough for my simple life. There is no point heating a tank full of hot water in order to wash one plate. For ecological as well as economic reasons, one only does housework when it is necessary.
• Work being now optional for me, I find the greatest potential source of stress throughout my previous adult life has gone: that of boredom. I rarely found actually doing the job too difficult; I was sometimes tired when I had to work long hours to meet deadlines. But the beauty of working on contract was that one was generally paid by the hour; this meant that if the client wanted one to work more hours than the usual in order to hit deadlines for any given piece of work, the client had to pay for it. That is a great protection against stress, provided that
  • There is no danger of not being paid enough to live for any of these reasons:
    • there is enough work needing to be done
    • one is competent at the job, and not in danger of failing to deliver what one has cntracted t do one is in good health and not in danger of having to be off work sick and unpaid
  • There is no danger of the work becoming so boring that it is difficult to keep doing it long enough to meet requirements.
  This last was often the greatest concern to me whenever I began a new job: would it be interesting enough so that I would not get bored doing it? Having retired, being able to choose to do exactly what I desire to do all day every day is the greatest boon. For even in the best job, having to travel to the workplace and back, usually daily, was the worst aspect of it, and only the car radio or a good book to read every day on the train used to save me from the boredom of commuting. Even so, the travelling always became a burden in the end. In my last London job, even though I live within the normal commuter belt, I refused to commute and instad stayed overnight Monday to Thursday in a small central london hotel, the idea of four hours in trains and car being so ghastly to me. That whole period of my life being past, and not having any other stresses placed upon me since, I have found contentment for which I know I am very lucky.
  
  Note: I do not say that I am thankful, for there is no-one and no thing to thank. Fortune is an abstraction, and any personification of it merely an apostrophic conceit.