Love your work

You might not have picked this up, but my foolery extends to the workplace.  I have been through an escalating series of difficult conversations about my non-compliance, non-performance and general devil-may-care attitude to achievement.

This results from an accumulation of disappointment.  I thought I was going to be amazing the world with discoveries and inventions, but so far the only thing I've invented has been generally regarded as silly or incomplete.  Those who judge these things use criteria pretty far from those I would apply, and if I judge their performance I find leadership almost totally lacking except in the domain of domination, performance measurement - very rarely are we stopped from addressing clients' non-problems.  Someone once asked "could the leaders give us an overview of their understanding of the field we're in, just once a year?" and the answer was a round rejection of the very idea.  So my demotivation is not coming from nowhere.

Still, I was being pretty ridiculous.  So I went into a long weekend seething with resentment that I was being held accountable for my timesheets, a very weak tool measuring in painful accuracy, my attendance. My performance is also measured, but less frequently and with better-designed paperwork.

Then, I watched a lecture on Oedipus from Peter Sruck's Coursera.com course on Myths from Greece and Rome.  Oedipus' story is amazing. Peter brought out the question of Oedipus' responsibility.  Here was Oedipus meeting a man of his fathers age on the road and, over the issue of who should step aside, killing Lais (his true father) and his whole retinue. I had been thinking about the Oedipus complex of irresponsibility and wondering why I was so much closer to Oedipus than Oddyseus.  This moment crystallised it.  Even if I am in the right about the uninspiring leaders, the naff prescription of measures and mechanisms that are not applicable to my type of work (I am not manning a desk for a shift, I am solving problems), I still believe I should get out of the way of the silly old king when he asks.  And that gave me the key.

I have to love work charitably, not Libidinally.I am not going, ever, to get a glandular charge from doing what these guys ask.  It will always be disappointing. But I shouldn't make these guys die in a ditch defending their stupid practices and total lack of vision. There are times to represent that, but stepping aside, just going along a bit more, out of charity for their feeble age might be the answer I can live with.