Working overnight is a fucking drag, I tell ya. I get home at 7am, usually fall asleep around 8:30am or so, and then end up sleeping until 8:30pm. Obviously this doesn't leave me much time for me time and since I'm sleeping so much, I actually feel WORSE than I do when I get my normal amount of sleep (about 5 hours a night). Weekends are even deadlier. Since this shitty sleep schedule is hard enough to keep up as it is, I can't disrupt it on the weekend so I end up staying up all night, cooped up inside, in my room, by myself and sleeping during the day. At least on the weekends I can get stuff done (although recently that time was spent leveling my new Death Knight to level 80). So yes, fucking drag.
This terrible job has got me thinking though (mostly because when I'm alone for 8 hours at a time, I don't have much else to think about). What am I going to do with my life? I had a conversation with a co-worker today, a young man of 17 years old. We were jabbering about what we were going to do after overnights were done, and that led to the general "what are you going to do with your life" topic. He asked me if I had a girlfriend, I said no. "Really?", he replies, "I hope to be married by the time I'm your age".
This kind of shocked me. When I told him I was of the opinion that that was a bit young to be married, he said that there wasn't anything else to experience in life, so why not settle down and have a family? This got me thinking about all the things that I want to accomplish, all the dreams and aspirations that I have, and why I was wasting my time working a shitty retail job instead of being bold and doing what I want to do. It flabbergasted me that this 17 year old kid could think of nothing in the world that he wanted to do, apparently has no plans for the future other than a family. Now, I could understand if getting married and settling down WAS his big dream in life, but if that is your last resort, the LAST THING you want to accomplish in life... how can you even call that a life?
Working in such a field as I do right now, I see people all the time who hate their jobs. It goes along with the retail business. I look at all these people who have been working here for 4, 5, 6 years and wonder what happened, what it was that led them on to this track, seemingly coasting through with no future plans. Sure, I've met some people who genuinely wanted to be in this business, but what about all the others? The managers who hate their job, but have no where else to go. The supervisors who are chomping at the bit for a promotion despite the fact that they loathe the company they work for. "Lifers", if you will. Some really do have no skill sets or anything to do anything else, and are content with where they are in life. What really breaks my heart are the people I can see have so much potential to do other things, but are stuck in the box for one reason or another. And sometimes I wonder... am I becoming a lifer?
I have to break out of this rut I've been carving for myself the past 2 years. Get out, get on with my life, learn, see, live. Travel the world, make music, movies, games. Go out and party with some friends, stay in and run heroics with others. God knows if I don't do it soon, the next thing I write will be an application for promotion. I'll be a lifer.
