The Wongery

I've made a point of not being too specific about what I do for a living, as part of my continued, completely pointless effort to avoid revealing my identity, but I have discussed my job occupain general terms in several previous blog posts. And one thing I've said more than once is that—to quote a post I made this past February:

I... don't hate my job; it's a reasonably interesting job, and if I had to have a job that didn't involve... creative work, this is probably as good a job as any for me to have.

I'm kind of beginning to hate my job.

For the last few weeks—the last few months, really, if not longer—my job has kept me so busy that I've barely been able to get any work done on any of my creative pursuits. Okay, I did manage to meet the 50,000-word goal for the November writing challenge—but only by taking advantage of a rare day off to devote basically the entire day to a frantic rush to finish. This month has been even busier; I haven't had any days off so far through all of December so far, and I've had a lot of very long days—with a not insignificant amount of that time spent driving to and from relatively far-flung locations. (And yesterday I ended up working two jobs in one day, so I've actually averaged more "workdays" than actual days.) I've said before that I can sometimes work on my own projects while I'm at work, and while that's often true, it's been less so than usual the last few weeks; more than half my workdays this month have been on a job that required more of my attention than is generally the case. (It also hasn't helped that I haven't always been working at locations where I have access to wifi or a strong enough cell signal to use my phone as a hotspot—although I do have some projects and parts of projects I can work on offline.)

The upshot of this is that during the past few weeks I've gotten very little done on the Wongery or any of my other creative projects. Heck, I haven't even made any headway yet whatsoever on the "WorldEmber" challenge I wanted to participate in^[1], and there's a writeup I'm supposed to do for that Discord worldbuilding game I've mentioned that I should have finished and submitted weeks ago and... didn't. I mean, I've never gotten as much done as I've wanted to, but I feel like these last few weeks have been spectacularly unproductive—and mostly because of my job. Again, I have been able to get things done in the past when I've had days off. I just... haven't had many days off recently. The last day off I had was November 30, and, as previously mentioned, I basically spent all of that day frantically rushing to finish the 50,000 words for the November novel challenge. (The day of this blog post, Sunday December 15, is not an exception; I did not have today off, and wrote this blog post while I was at work.)

Okay, well, maybe it's not my job I hate, per se; what I hate is the time it takes up and the fact that it's preventing me from making more progress on my creative pursuits. There are aspects of the job I kind of hate; I don't like all the driving I have to do for the job, and I don't like the unpredictable schedule and how hard it makes it to... have any sort of a social life. But the job itself... eh, it's fine. There are some aspects of it I'd even say are fun. But it's not what I really want to be doing. Heck, I might even enjoy my job if... if I didn't have all these things I wanted to create, and if I didn't feel like the time I spent on the job was getting in the way of my creating them. I'd say right now it feels like my life is all work and no play, but... it's not even that. Play doesn't really enter into it. It's all work on my day job and no work on my creative projects, the things I really want to do and that I really find fulfilling.

I get that this what people like to call a "First World problem"; self-actualization is pretty high on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But then again, like a lot of psychological structures that have become prominent in pop culture, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has received its share of criticism... and even Maslow himself eventually admitted that the pyramid is not the same for every individual and different people might have different prioritizations of their needs. And I kind of feel like for me... being able to create, to produce and disseminate all the various opera I have ideated, feels like a pretty pressing need. I mean, yeah, I'm fortunate in that I'm able to pay my bills and have a place to live and enough to eat and that my life isn't in danger from war or starvation, and were I not so fortunate I'd be too concerned with survival to worry about trying to get people to read about my imaginary worlds. But I feel if we're going to put things in terms of Maslow's shierarchy, to me, personally, self-actualization, at least as it pertains to making and sharing my creative projects, is much lower down in the pyramid than the conventional ordering—though I'll refrain from trying to pin down exactly where it is, and anyway I don't think the hierarchy should be taken too seriously in the first place and actually okay maybe this whole paragraph was kind of pointless.

Now, one thing about my job is that, since I work as a freelancer, I can set my own availability. I'm free to just say I'm not available to work on a given day, so if I really wanted to have more days off, I could just... take days off. And I have taken days off for certain special occasions—for Gen Con, for instance, and for 24-Hour Comics Day. But I've taken very few of them, and I've never taken any days off just to have a day off—even though this is something I totally could do. So I guess you could say I am the architect of my own misery.

The thing is, though... I can't afford to take days off. I've brought up my financial struggles before in my blog posts, but one thing I don't think I mentioned is that before I had my current job I... took on a lot of debt, which I'm still paying off, and without which I'd be in a much better financial situation than I am now. I haven't taken more days off because I need all the workdays I can get, because I need the money. So, okay, I guess that still makes me the architect of my own misery, just in a slightly different sense^[2].

Now, this won't always be the case; I am gradually paying down that debt. (Okay, last month I had to take on more debt to cover some expensive car repairs, but that was relatively low-interest debt; I've got to prioritize paying off my credit cards and other higher-interest debt.) And I am getting those paid down; my finances are heading in the right direction; there is hope that I'll get this burden off my back. So once I get the worst of my debt paid off, does that mean I'll be able to afford to take more days off and make more progress on my creative projects?

Well... mmmmaybe. But taking an extra day off every once in a while would be... an improvement, but still not really fully satisfying. Sure, if, rather than working seven days a week on my day job as I have most weeks lately, I were working five days a week and had two full days to devote to the Wongery and my other creative projects, that would be a better situation than what I'm in now. But I'd rather be spending most of my time on my creative pursuits... and even if I do get my debt paid off, that's not going to be possible unless something else changes.

Besides, yes, I'm getting my debt paid down, but slowly; it'll be years before I get my higher-interest debts completely paid off. And... I don't want to wait years. Not just due to impatience—okay, there's probably some of that; I don't know that I'm a particularly patient person. But there's also the fact that, at the risk of morbidity, I don't know how much longer I have left. And I don't mean just in the cliché sense that I could be hit by a bus tomorrow—though of course that's true too—; I mean that I am old. I mean, okay, I may not qualify as a senior citizen just yet, but I'm uncomfortably close. One of my oldest friends recently died of cancer (his funeral was another thing I did take a day or two off work for), and he was younger than I am; that could just as easily have been me. (Yes, I know that young people, including children, can and do get cancer, but it becomes substantially more common with age.) Even in the best case scenario, barring dramatic advancements in human longevity, I have a few decades left at most. And there's so much I want to do; so many projects I want to... to create, and to share with the world. Honestly, even if I somehow became indepedently wealthy tomorrow and were able to devote all my time to my creative projects, I probably still wouldn't be able to get them all done before I die. And of course the longer it takes for me to be able to really get started on them, the less time I have to get them done... and the less I'll get done.

Okay, I'm sorry; I think this post is coming across as unusually gloomy. (Or is it? Are all my posts this atrabilious? I hope not.) But... I guess maybe it mirrors the way I've been feeling. Because, to be honest, I've been feeling really depressed lately. I don't mean I suffer from clinical depression (at least, I don't think I do, though I guess I can't completely rule it out, especially since there is some relevant family history). I think it's mostly that I'm just... burned out. I'm tired of having so little time to work on my creative projects. I'm tired of spending so much time driving. I'm tired of spending every day on the job. (I'm also literally tired from not getting enough sleep. So, so tired. (I got home a little before 11 p.m. last night and had to leave for work around 6 a.m. this morning—and I was already tired yesterday from not having gotten enough sleep the night before.)

And in turn, in a vicious circle, my depression due to the fact that I haven't been getting anything done has made it harder to get anything done. Even in the little time I've had at work or at home that I could have been working on my projects, I've had a hard time making myself do so^[3]. I've just had... no energy, no motivation, just a whole lot of dreary dejection. Heck, this very blog post I'd been meaning to write for several days until finally today I managed to get myself to do it. And of course the fact that I've had such a hard time making myself work on my projects even when I could have been doing so has deepened my depression, which has made it harder to work on my progress, and the vicious circle continues to turn, because I guess it's a wheel now, whatever.

But! There is at least a temporary reprieve in sight. While so far I've been working every day this month, that isn't likely to continue; it is, after all, December, and the industry I work in generally more or less shuts down at the end of December. In the very near future, I'm almost certain to have a week or two off—as I did last year, when I used that time to do some long-overdue work on the Wongery in preparation for its (flop of a) "hard launch" in January. So what am I going to use that time off work for this time? Well, yes, I do plan to get some things done on the Wongery: finally laying the groundwork to get content up in the RPG space, among other things. But I hope to make some progress on certain other projects as well. Projects that could potentially bring in some income, and that could potentially help me take some steps toward being less dependent on my current "day job", and able to spend more time on the Wongery and my other creative projects.

Anyway, though... I really, really need a break. Fortunately, I should be getting one soon. I hope to make good use of it^[4].