I Rolled out of bed after laying awake for hours, before any sleepy dreams called my mind home.
Something was picking at my brain, mixing together with my anxiety over Cambrian’s soccer camp opening tomorrow afternoon. I retraced my night to pin-point the issue. I hadn’t felt quite right after hanging out with the boys this evening.
This weekend saw one of my all-time-favourite trips take place, a short stop-over in the little town of Blind River. The traveling team I assembled was flawless, if only because all of their flaws countered another member’s flaws perfectly. It was well-balanced, to put it simply.
I tried to explain the trip to a group of my other friends this evening, and failed. We spoke about the funny stories, and drunken memories, but never seemed to hit the core of the experience at all. We barely made contact with the head of the nail.
What was it that made that trip such a success, and this night out so different?
Maybe it was the people invited. The trip to Blind River boasted Andre, Kyle, Jason, aside from Ed and myself who were at both outings. All three are well-rounded individuals, while Andre brings an unexplainable aura of fun when he is around. The difference couldn’t be that simple however.
Tonight’s cast was comprised of the Justins, and John, a group of people that can be quite fun no doubt. I’ve shared many great memories with all of these gentlemen, so what was different? It would be easy to say that the element of going on a trip, and attending a party while on said trip, would be the deciding factors. This would be a grave mistake, despite stereotypes about how 20-somethings have fun. I realized tonight that the most enjoyable part of the entire trip was the conversation on the way up, and on the way home, which is not to say the rest of the trip was poor, because it wasn’t in the least.
In both cases, the success of the event pended on the conversation. It is worth noting that I’ve had solid conversations with every person who attended the events. Conversation was an overwhelming success on the Blind River trip, why did it feel so forced and poor tonight?
The main focuses of the Blind River conversation were sex, relationships, party stories, each individual’s hoped-for future (including school, which city to live in, and which profession to work in), and films. The conversation at the Buddha centered around careers (journalism, credit-managing mainly), what-we’ve-been-up-to-lately, films, which cities would be interesting to live in, and whether or not Sudbury is a good place to live. Neither conversation was particularly deep or thoughtful, but a sense of fulfillment was gained from the BR conversation.
Both atmospheres were conducive to conversation, so why did the conversation at the Buddha stagnate? I believe it was the conversations about work. Granted, the topic of work came up on the BR drive, but the tone was mightily different. The Buddha conversation included in-depth conversations about the processes involved in one’s work, the sacrifices one had to make at work, and whether or not one’s job was enjoyable. The BR conversation involved none of these work-related topics, because work was covered in a brief fashion. Is the long, drawn-out conversation about work them reason the Buddha conversation died? Not fully.
The main reason I can grasp why the conversation at the Buddha failed was simple: it represented a giving-away of the freedom that comes with working and living as separate entities, rather than living to work.
It would be far too easy to declare that being in a career automatically involves sacrifices your freedom to live your life, and enjoy your life. The soul-draining explanations of careers was enough to make me second guess the whole careers thing, like those drunk driving commercials where mangled brains are hanging from the windshield. How could anything beat down someone’s soul so much, especially without them noticing? Whereas one of my corporate friends had told me ‘he hated his job, but it was a pay-cheque,’ a few short months ago, tonight he declared ‘he actually likes his job,” just after explaining how it has a tendency to gauge the ordinary man in order to turn a profit.
My friend was quite content to tell us he hit his sales quota last month, for the first time, just before dropping that bomb, which brings me to a related story. It was also mentioned tonight that Vale Inco will be using ‘scab’ labour during the strike, which we all agreed was a bad thing. I recently had a conversation with a Vale executive and his wife. His wife was asking him about what he was going to do when he had to cross the picket line, and he replied, with a grin on his face, ‘I’m just going to smile and walk through.’
The journalist who brought up the Vale news was content with his job, but lamented that he had to work 40 hours a week anywhere, which is an understandable complaint. When you think about it, 40 hours a week is a long time to sacrifice out of one week. You figure you should sleep 8 hours a night, which automatically takes away 40 hours out of your week for sleep. Tack on another 45 for work and travel time to and from work, and you’ve already removed 85 hours from your week. You are left with a mere 35 hours a week for enjoyment. That’s a staggering statistic, especially if you consider most people aren’t as happy about their jobs as some of the people mentioned in this article.
I’m not trying to lecture anybody about how to life their lives, or what to make of themselves. I’m not trying to tell everybody to read the Situationalists and their ‘never work’ themed works, or to drop out of life and become a hippie. I just want to draw attention to the reality of wage slavery, as it’s been called. With that settled, I have an important question to ask: is it necessary for us to march on a road of human bones, in order for us to enjoy our careers?

High-schoolers face many difficult decisions on their way to becoming graduates. Whether to enter the work force, attend university or college, or even travel, are among the most significant of these decisions. The guidance counselors and teachers at my high school, Sudbury Secondary School, pounded one fact inside of our heads; UNiversity was the place to go if you wanted to be successful. We were too young to notice their bias at the time, but it is fairly easy to guess they would give that advice considering every single one of them had attended university themselves. Granted, not everyone has a positive opinion of university education, but these individuals were all working fairly nice jobs after graduation, which naturally creates a bias.
I have a vastly different view of university education, when compared with that of the teachers and guidance counselors. I learned more from my own personal reading, than I did from my university courses over the span of the four years I roamed the campus in search of knowledge. When I say roamed, I mean it. I took a wide variety of courses in search of something special. My topics of studied ranged from my major, in history, to philosophy, religious studies, human geography, psychology, physical geography, and even six credits of biology.
In my first year philosophy course, which I took during my second year of university, I learned more philosophy from the books I read on my own time that were unassigned in class, such as Mill’s On Liberty, Camus’ The Fall, and Sartre’s Human Emotions and Existentialism, then I did from the lectures and assigned readings. The course was subtitled “The Study of Human Nature,” but there was very little about it that seemed human, or natural for that matter. My professor would stand up in front of us, and speak for well over an hour. He would occasionally try to ramp up participation by asking “what do you think of that?” as if that were a stimulating way to draw us out of our half-awake, half-asleep states, which he induced with his yawn-inspiring lectures.
Dry lectures are not the place to learn about human nature.
It would be unfair for me to claim this course was the perfect model to explain my in-class university experience. It was the norm however. I do recall fonder moments, such as delivering a seminar to my fellow students of Kuhlberg’s History of Northern Ontario in the pub. I sipped on beer in between pauses, rather than the more-oft used water, and some of my class-mates did more than just sip on their beverages. I also recall Hobb, his beard swinging as he shouted with his Crime and Punishment class, “hard economic times!!” in the middle of one of his lectures. He explained how he was sick of hearing about the recession in the news, and in his dealings with higher-ups at Laurentian.
These fun, and human stories, were few and far between. Their courses represented about 10% of my entire university degree. These two professors showcased what a solid university education could have been, but wasn’t.