Don’t Delay Living Your Life
We live in a culture and a time that repeatedly gives people bad advice and delays people from starting families or finding a spouse. I know this myself because I live in this culture and realise at the ripe old age of 26 that I have made a mistake in how I live my life.
We are constantly told to go to university, get a job and date for five years before finding a wife or a long-term spouse; if you are a woman or a man reading this, you may have had and lived by similar advice.
I have been to university and worked for over four years in digital marketing and writing work. I felt hollow and empty because I chose my career and money over pursuing a long-term family.
Now I’ve realised that life is about relationships and family and that my employer, at the end of the day, I’m just replaceable. They care only about profits and using my creativity to generate wealth.
There’s nothing wrong with this; this is the nature of capitalism.
What is wrong is that young people, especially young women, pay a very high price by focusing on a career path that ultimately is soles and that people are being told wrongly that you will find happiness in work and a career when the truth is quite the opposite.
We are constantly being told in the hustle culture and the productivity development space that we continuously work hard and make sacrifices that are not worth it and delay starting a proper relationship, or we are in relationships that are going well.
Still, we jettison those relationships because we are told you must sleep with 5 to 8 people before finally settling down in the early 30s. The truth I have come to believe is that it cannot be done. We cannot have it all, but we can have everything simultaneously, just not simultaneously.
Don’t Buy a Dog
From my experiences, particularly with women, my advice is don’t buy a dog.
Buying a dog is a misplaced attempt at a female’s natural mothering instincts; being misplaced, they should be placed into having a child and not into buying a dog.
I cannot imagine how often I, and you, the reader, may have seen women who don’t have children and treat their doggies like they are their children find them pretty dresses and different dog shoes; this is a drastic misplacement of the natural female mothering instinct.
I would even say this instinct for motherhood is being misplaced in the workplace, where everything needs to be safe and where there needs to be safe spaces. I remember applying to be a Neighbourhood Police Officer in my local community.
What I remember most about the recruitment process is the discussion regarding safe spaces; everybody must feel safe communicating with each other via Zoom over the Internet.
From this experience, I remember thinking about what is happening; we are applying for a dangerous job, and this mothering seems incredibly harmful to the environment we will be stepping into.
We cannot tell a criminal to stop using foul language because it’s triggering me emotionally.
A lot of this language is also, from my understanding, related to people on the autistic spectrum who have substantial difficulties with communication and social cues.
It may also apply to the generation born between 1995 and 2010 with difficulties communicating due to social media.
Social media strongly impacts people’s ability to understand social communication and the capabilities to understand when somebody’s been serious, when somebody’s joking and when somebody’s been flirtatious, which can cause them emotional distress.
They don’t understand how to socialise due to social media, the breakdown of families, smaller family units and other mechanisms created socially that are supposed to help socialise children and for those children to be socialised into adulthood.
The consequences of the failure of socialisation are what I mentioned above: a society with overgrown children suffering because they don’t know how to interact with people face-to-face, according to the geopolitical analyst and author Peter Zilhen.
The Working World
In my experience in the workforce and as a freelancer, the growing mothering environment in the workplace, where there are trigger warnings in their way, can be highly toxic and detrimental to people’s mental health.
Being in the sales environment can be very tough. Environment: if you fail, you will fail because the data of your success can be viewed in the analytics and the sale conversions.
But with the constant coddling, there’s no opportunity to grow without experiencing negative and constructive feedback because of the over-emotionalism about people’s feelings, which is counter-productive in my experience, to have a successful workplace focusing upon workplace objectives.
These emotions and feelings belong in the private lives of individuals who are part of organisations, and it’s this mothering instinct that is not being appropriately directed towards motherhood, according to the author, writer and feminist Louise Perry.
Work-Life Balance
The opportunities to work at home, which I hope will be available to office workers, are incredibly beneficial for people with families, people wanting to start families and people wishing to focus on developing other opportunities for themselves, such as creating a business or a family.
Certain professions can be highly toxic and harmful for the pursuit of a family; for instance, being a lawyer or a doctor, you are often required to work long hours, especially when starting.
Unless we have a partner who works in a flexible position and can be there for the children, the wife is busy in law, the financial sector or medicine and the possibility of having children becomes even more remote.
If you go to work a job, depending on the salary or region you come from, you could be working anything from 35 to 55 hours a week, especially in expensive states like Montana, where normal blue-collar workers must work 2 to 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Economics and the nature of our work often interfere with living our lives and can even delay living our lives, and society is not geared toward the workforce for women.
The traditional career path and the goals of educational attainment work best for a male reproductive lifestyle for women; they can be in education, especially higher education, from the ages of 18 until the early 30s; this leaves a very narrow window to have children.
Also, if women choose to have children after university, this can leave a 12-month to 10-year gap in employment. Professionally, this means what they got their degree in the knowledge itself would have faded from their minds, and employers will wonder about the gap in employment.
Unfortunately, policymakers are not making child-friendly and family-friendly policies.
Also, we need to change social policies and societal culture to change our attitude toward family and children. A great example is South Korea, where achieving a degree is a social status-raising endeavour, and women would rather have degrees than have children.
Final Thoughts
I’ll be very interested in hearing people’s different takes on what I have written; this has been aimed at a reading audience on Medium, where the platform specifically marketers towards people who are writers and readers who are highly conscientious.
Also, my current following seems to be people interested in different thoughts and ideas ranging from the geopolitical to the social issues affecting society and, I’m sure, have fast experiences and knowledge to draw upon.
As I was writing this, I originally planned to do something different.
I just felt the need to get my thoughts down onto paper, and in no way, shape, or form am I trying to convert the masses.
What I hope for in this article is that different people reading this make life choices and decisions for their happiness and well-being, not for the well-being and happiness they are told to believe.
We all have a limited number of hours on this earth and a limited number of hours we can spend at work, with loved ones and in the pursuit of personal and private objectives, and it is in this hope that I wish for us all to use our time wisely in an endeavour benefits who you are.
