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personal worth Saturdays at work have to be the least stressful of the week and I love it. For me it is the perfect way to end the week. With the lull in activity I have time to plan my weekend, read or just let my mind wander. I suppose that in an ideal world, I would take this time to update documentation at work or do some research on various pieces of hardware that we use in our jobs, but I don't. Even though I like my job, I just can't get into it to that extent. I guess that if I had to choose a percentage, I would say that I put about twenty-five percent of myself into my job. I'm not saying that I don't care about my job. When I am there I do the best that I can, but it certainly isn't what drives my life. I guess that I could sum it up by saying that I don't get my sense of worth as a person from my job. To put it another way, what I do for a living does not define me as a person. Actually there are times when I see what my company does as being silly. The company that I work for moves money for banks and I see this as an abstract. Now the abstract that we deal with is an important one, but it is still just an abstract. Moving sums of money that exceed more than I could possibly hope to make in a dozen lifetimes makes it an abstract for me. It all seems so beyond me. We aren't even dealing with paper money, but electronic money, which is even more unreal. I also believe that what I do for a living would sound horribly silly to someone a century ago. My job today would have no place in society a hundred years ago. The closest parallel that I can think of would be someone who counted money for a bank. What is considered a valuable skill today would be useless in age without electronics and telecommunication. The idea of moving money through wires would have been unthinkable then with the telephone just coming into existence ahundred years ago or so. Back then people saw the telephone as a novelty or a nuisance and didn't think that it would last. Now people can't seem to live without their phones and have them almost everywhere. Businesses couldn't operate without them. Maybe I have things backward, but those people that put so much of their lives into their jobs seem to be missing out on life. One might argue that if I tried harder at work I might get promoted and make more money. Then with my promotion I could afford to take more vacations. The way that I see it is that the people who put so much of themselves into their jobs very seldom take time off from them. I want to enjoy life rather than spending all of my time trying to climb the corporate ladder. Besides it isn't as though I were supporting a family and need an ever growing income. I know that I think differently than most people and I doubt that I will ever completely be in step with everyone else, but none of this really bothers me. I like where my life is at the moment and I have no desire to make any drastic changes like getting married or becoming a father. Those just aren't options for me right now. There is so much that I want to see in the world and I don't want it to shrink down to raising a family even though I am sure that there are rewards there as well. If I took a moment to review the past six months of this year, I would have to say that it has been a success. Somewhere months back I had said that I wanted it to be the year that I traveled and I have stuck with that promise. So far I have taken two major vacations and I might be able to squeeze one more in before the end of the year.
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