Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 161: Zach

Prompt: "A song with a formal title in its, um, title"

Selected by Zach

"Working Is the Most Honorable (Laodong Zui Guangrong)"

China Broadcast Children's Choir

Four Seasons of Children’s Songs: Winter (Si Ji Tong Yao: Zhong Wai Zhu Ming Er Tong Ge Qu Yi Bai Shou Dong), 2002

One of the beauties of a prompt like this is not knowing if you're doing it right and also knowing you're not going to ask the "teacher" if you're doing it right or not.

They say it's a blessing to have good problems. And that's true. As I write this sentence, I'm weighing a job offer that is, objectively, very attractive. It probably pays better than my current job if I negotiate it right. It allows one day remote per week and sometimes two. It is located significantly closer to my house than my current job. I can ride my bike to work if I want to; it's still like seven miles, but that's doable. Once the offices move in a couple years, I'll only have to come in twice a week. They offer an annual bonus. It's a slight promotion from what I'm doing right now. 

The catch? It's essentially the same job that I'm doing now.

The one where I come into the office and feel like I rarely know what's going on. The one where I feel like my soul is dying, bit by bit. Where I feel disempowered. Where I feel strongly that I'm not living my life's purpose.

I'm not meant to be an engineer in this world. I'm just not. I don't like building things. I don't like tinkering with drains and faucets and spackle and Legos. 

BUT. The externals give me everything I want in a job. What I've been looking for. Other than the fact I'll have to be banging away for nine hours a day at an office doing things I don't like, it's great.

This is a wonderful problem to have. So they say.

But I couldn't sleep last night. When I woke up, the reality of needing to decide—quickly—crushed my reality. I have an interview for a job at a coffee shop this week, just because I kind of can't bear the thought of continuing down this path that feels not right for me. I'm supposed to get a call from an urban planning firm for jobs they're hiring for, a more desirable kind of job for me, but they've had my resume for ten days now and I'm not holding my breath. 

If I had more than one mouth to feed I'd probably take the job offer quickly. But it's just me now, and I'm not desperate to take this, especially since I already have a job, and EVEN THOUGH my current job is destroying me and I can't continue like this.

Decision making is so hard for me. Always has been. And yet, once the decision is made, it's as if you didn't make it at all. Everyone knows it was made for you, all along.

It would be easier to live in Shenzhen as a newly minted employee of a electronics company. Having grown up under the one-child policy in a place like Chongqing, having listened to propaganda songs like this for my whole life. 

Or maybe this isn't a propaganda song at all. And the songs we don't think of as propaganda are the real propaganda. Guster is propaganda, First Aid Kit is propaganda when they cover Simon & Garfunkel. 

The thought of saying no to this job fills me with great joy. The thought of saying no to this job fills me with great fear. And I'm sitting here cringing as emails from their HR float into my inbox, asking if I want to move forward. 

I asked for a raise over what I make now, and I asked for a start date of February 9, which would allow me to have like a month and a half of no working. We'll see what they say.

Maybe I just want a break. But I also want to spend my entire life writing and exercising and coaching people and what sparks joy in me, as Marie Kondo might say, eye roll please, I know, I know, but still. I see more than a few people on this blog write about how they love their jobs even through their challenges and I get so jealous. How am I not there? Am I just another entitled millennial who wants it all and more?