Rachel Gertz // August 19, 2011

Doing That Thing We Do

Out of curiosity, and because I’m a sucker for a story, I harassed every nGeneer this week to spill their guts. I wanted to push an exploratory pin through the thorax of each bee buzzing in their creative bonnets. I wanted to decipher why it is we all wake up day after day and plunk ourselves back down into our world of work. I’m looking forward to stringing their answers together and posting them next week.

It got me thinking.

World of Work

Every day, we the working class are pummelled by mental pests that try to push the, “Thank God it’s Friday” mantra. We forge forward through our week, teased with boredom, making friends with distraction, sneaking an extra twelve minutes at the water cooler, another seven planting thumb tacks on our boss’s Herman Miller. Things like getting paid, vacation time, and fish eyed afternoon naps become the pins that poke us into believing that we love doing our jobs. Even when we don’t.

But these empty distractions are not our ‘job’. Our job in its simplest form is our commitment to the thing that moves us. Of course, job flexibility (practically nGen’s mantra) does help, but the tasks we do every day to gain orbital momentum are up to us. So it only makes sense that when we disconnect from that thing—our passion—we go cold at our desks. We become robots, unplugged and ignorant of our world and our effect upon it. The insidious pests of dissatisfaction begin to wrap themselves around our impatient ankles and snake their way into our brains. They get good at convincing us that our discomfort has everything to do with our carpal tunnel and email chaos and nothing whatever to do with our fundamental disconnect.

So let’s swing this around.

How Do You Keep Your Buzz?

It’s funny what happens when you start talking about passion. People automatically assume you’ve unwrapped a Hallmark greeting card and are reciting an incandescent apology to your wife for opening beer bottles with your forehead again. I tend to shy away from that kind of sappy, apologetic passion. Instead, I like to think of it as simply your reason for hitching your ass out of bed every day.

When we strip away the patterns that leave us disjointed and unhappy at work, and look under the wings of that beast we call 9-5, we start to see that our creative buzz runs deeper than we expected. It is seeking out a love affair with an innate element of ourselves, not simply a love affair with our job that keeps us aloft. It is the thing that ultimately gives us permission to change our work situation and live our lives more flexibly, too.

So, speak up. Why do you do what you do? What things make you kick off the blankets, scratch your nethers, and sit happily in front your screens as you dive in elbow deep, day after day?

And if you hate what you do, when did you last see your darn bonnet filled with fiery bees? Your secret’s safe with me.