Working Hard is the Lazy Option
October 14, 2008 by gbrown
“Life moves pretty fast. If you dont stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it”
Not the words of Nietszche, Plato or even Tony Robbins but high school drop out Ferris Bueller in the 80s teen flick “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off“.
Despite his lack of academic prowess, Bueller embodies many of the positive attributes a man should aspire to be - charming, curious, gregarious, subversive, loyal, witty, daring and ultimately free.
Ferris’s aphorism is one of happiness through a journey of self-discovery. The symbolism isn’t lost on Ferris’ wanton joy-ride through life courtesy of his buddy Cameron’s rich dad’s 1961 Ferrari GT California - the car so precious is was kept constantly under lock and key in the garage.
While very few of us could claim to owning the Ferrari GT California, we all democratically own time and happiness and the vast majoirty have, like Cameron’s father, kept it locked in the garage for that “some day” - that elusive future day when the toiling is over, we’ll put up our work-weary feet and declaire “I have arrived”.
Often it’s difficult to value that which we take for granted until it’s taken away from us. My father, in many respects was like most males of his generation. Born a farmer’s son on the Yorkshire Dales in 1940, he only knew hard work as the route to escape poverty. Left school aged 15 to join the marines, get an education, see the world. On return to civvy street they told “get a safe job, one with benefits, one that will look after you when you retire” and so he found himself an assistant role at the University in Portsmouth where he worked the rest of his life in the comfort that there waited an annuity that would take care of himself and my mother through their “golden years”. Dad’s generation was one driven on the one hand by the spectre of poverty in old age and on the other a general economic inability to enjoy life until the yoke of a life’s work was finally dismissed.
Yet, the irony was Dad was never to enjoy those golden years he had been promised. Diagnosed with cancer and forced into an early retirement ahead of plan aged 59 he spent his last few years bravely fighting an uphill battle against a menace that took hold of his life and reduced a once fit, proud man into a skeletal bag of hair, tubes and bones.
He wasn’t the only one. Male mortality doubles in the 5 years following retirement. A generation of human doings with nothing to do. I wonder what Dad would have made of Soren Kirkegaard’s quote “Life must be lived forward but understood backwards”. Probably not very much as it offered little solace on his deathbed aged 63 and even less when he had me aged 33. He was too busy building a family, building a life.
I wonder though, if he had known there were to be no “golden years” how we would have played it differently. Would he, like the rest of us, realize that Ferris Bueller’s instruction to “look around once in a while” could signal a greater need amongst us all to enjoy living in the moment rather than deferring everything until that “some day”.
I recall the poignant graffiti scrawled on a derelict wall in downtown Mission, San Francisco during a business trip to Silicon Valley in the 90s. “The best things in life aren’t things”. Yet, by the time my father had passed, I had spent the best years of my youth chasing “things” - the cars, the titles, the houses.
To say that his death would have evoked my own epiphany would be a lie. I became obsessed with the “things” because I had become obsessed with other people’s agendas - the notion that I wouldn’t find peace or respect until I had “achieved”, I had “arrived”.
What happened next would for many have seemed to be a step in the wrong directions - a step backwards, a retirement, a loss of drive, a settling for less. Einstein once remarked that common sense was no more than a collection of other people’s prejudices. Common sense was the key theme of our candelight discussion in the Himalayas during a visit to the remote mountain kingdom of Bhutan. Alongside a group of backpackers and guides we shared ideas and opinions over a bottle of the local tipple into the early hours each offering their 2 cents to answering the question “what’s it all about”. It, for the purpose of our discussion, was simply “life”.
It was 1972, the year I was born. Concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan’s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness. The year I visited for the first time, Bhutan was preparing itself to legalize TV.
The common sense view held that TV meant progress. It’s all very well to wax lyrical about remote shangri-las preserved in theme park tourism but progress, the argued, meant playstations, BMWs, health care, TVs and American Idol.
“I opened this country. I made this town what it is. I bought jobs and industry. I built an empire with my own hands, and I’ve never asked help from anyone. Those squatters, Reverend, are standing in the way of progress.” screached Lahood to Preacher played by Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider referring to the local Mexican villagers who were “in the way” of the progress of expanding his mining empire. To which Eastwood replies “who’s - theirs or yours?”
As Ferris Bueller helps us discover through the journey without destination, there are no absolutes in defining how you measure your success in life. From driving a top of the range 5 litre, V8 S class Mercedes to a relatively humble family Toyota, from managing 35 people in 3 countries to none, from working 60 hour weeks to less than 15 - one could argue that many of the life changes I had made were counter intuitive.
To the voices and the common sense, I’d reply - you know what? you’re right. I opted for less, to simplify and like, Ferris Bueller to “stop and look around once in a while”.
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