Why So Serious?

The transition from college student life into a formal adult working life can be rather disorienting at times, as I soon found out. The most important difference between student life and adult life is the transformation of the meaning of goals.

During the student setting, the goals that needed to be met are easily quantified and even more easily discovered---grades and assignment deadlines (with grading rubrics) are the most useful in determining what needs to be done by when to what degree. A quick look at the working life demonstrates that to a large degree, these concepts of quantifiable goals are no longer as straightforward, since much of the outcome is not just from one's efforts but also from the situation and environment that binds one. For a while, I had been rather disoriented within the system, even reaching levels of mood that one might even term to be depressive, but as time goes on, I start to understand one fundamental fact.

Why so serious?

Lest anyone misconstrues that as a call for an overall disinterested outlook towards work, let me clarify more. Yes, we need committed people to work, we need people to do more work, increase productivity and the like. But we don't need workaholics who sacrifice everything to get the job done. At first, this sounds counter-intuitive: why would anyone claim that it is more productive not to work as hard as possible? But reflect a little on the matter: a person is more than just his/her working life. A person is the sum total of a lot of parts that mayn't overlap---the work life, the personal life, the leisure life, the love life. All these aspects of life combine to make a person who he/she is.

Working too much is detrimental to many of the other aspects of life, which in turn can negate the productivity of a person. We want people who are happy to work, since their happiness allows them to work with more enthusiasm and to have an overall positive benefit, at the supposed expense that their ``peak'' effectiveness is significantly lower than the workaholic. If work done is the function of time spent and effort expended, then one will note that a person who works consistently over time is a much more productive person than one who has one burst of productivity and then slumps down from exhaustion, or even in the worse case where the burst of productivity is sustained over a few days only to crash down when the said person falls ill from fatigue.

Humans are creatures of habit, and they are also creatures of equilibria. Too much of anything is not good for the average person, and in the realm of work and play, that is true also. It is with this philosophy that I am looking at things these days. Yes, I'm a self-proclaimed workaholic, but I think it is time for me to work out a balance so that I can remain as productive as possible, instead of being that shiny star that has one fell-swoop brilliance only to whimper away quietly as time goes on.